Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor.

Nothing tells you more about a columnist than what he chooses to oversimplify.

Consider a few rules:

1. Don’'t divide the world into "them" and "us."
2. Keep your sense of humor.
3. If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
4. For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.
5. Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn'’t necessarily follow that there is a solution.

Or these:

6. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
7. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
8. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

Or these:

9. Get mad, then get over it.
10. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

It's worth noting what "political message" films he chose to ignore, perhaps because they didn't necessarily confirm his thesis: "Good Night, and Good Luck.", "The Constant Gardener", and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."

About "Syriana", Decius wrote:

I didn't really think that any of the people in the movie were heroes. I thought that was the point.

This is where Krauthammer exposes his assumptions about the director's approach to filmmaking. In his view, the message of a film is communicated by what it says. Of course, sometimes a film's power derives from what is left unsaid, or by its "negative space."

Krauthammer continues:

On the very night the Oscars will be honoring "Syriana," American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that "Syriana" shows America slaughtering.

Maybe Krauthammer really understands the "no heroes" thesis, because with this statement he has demonstrated it quite effectively.

Oscars for Osama

On the Champs-Élysées last week, the Publicis Groupe, the advertising heavyweight, opened Denuo (Latin for "anew"), with about 15 marketing futurists to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients, investors and, not least, Publicis itself.

Leading the futurists is Rishad Tobaccowala, a top executive in the media-buying division of Publicis who has led several of its digital advertising ventures and who will be based in Chicago. Among Denuo's other futurists are specialists on advertising through mobile phones and video games, as well as through viral marketing — spreading buzz by word of mouth and the Internet.

"Human beings can never be captured in an algorithm, and Google only understands algorithms," he said.

Deep inside the bowels of Publicis headquarters, a conversation is overheard:

Det. Thorn: It's people. MemeStreams is made out of people. They're making commercials out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like sitcoms for prime time. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

Hatcher: I promise, Tiger. I promise. I'll tell the exchange.

Det. Thorn: You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! MemeStreams is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!

I think this may be the best slogan yet.

MemeStreams to be purchased by French ad giant

Business schools are like pathologists: we do our best work with dead patients.

The amount of money you spend on research and development has little to no correlation with the quality of any kind of innovation that you do. The idea that more time or more money equals a better result is delusional.

So stop griping about VC funding!

You know, you're in real trouble as an organization when you won't conduct a cheap experiment to learn something important about your business, your profitability, and your customers.

[In order to innovate,] you have to have an internal economy where there are appropriate rewards and incentives for collaborating, and appropriate disincentives for not collaborating.

This is an interesting perspective I haven't seen before:

Google isn't a search company, it's an instant search company. What Google has done is like what McDonald's has done. The speed is built in. It's implicit to the value, and we're kidding ourselves if we try to focus on the search aspects of Google and downplay the immediacy and speed aspects of Google.

This last part is primarily of personal interest:

... The other book I'm interested in doing is about innovation as an act of persuasion: it's not just act of creation, it's an act of persuasion, and I'm very interested in the role of demos as a medium of persuasion in getting individuals and institutions to explore or commit to innovation.

Interview with Michael Schrage

Keyboard shortcuts help you save time since you never have to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.

How hard can this be?

MemeStreams needs keyboard shortcuts, a la Gmail

A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency's periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.

On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.

So if Acidus is seemingly innocuous, and Decius is unrelated to Acidus ... then the NSA must be interested in both of them -- and their technology!

You see: they are related ... Acidus recommended 10 memes from Decius in 2005, and Decius recommended 13 memes from Acidus during the same period.

Question: Is there a market for a monthly magazine that is a cross between Vogue and Foreign Affairs?

NSA Spies MemeStreams Technology

This is more exploitative than meditative, but it is about the speed limit -- specifically, the 55 mph posted limit on the I-285 loop around metropolitan Atlanta, GA.

If the authorities were inclined, the students who executed this "meditation" could probably have been tried for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, or some such thing.

Fortunately for the students, the police were too busy ticketing the drivers going 75 mph in the other direction.

That, and worrying about all the foreigners at the ports. (Pay no attention to the abundantly obvious fact that the containers are foreign, too, and most of them are not being inspected by anyone, regardless of citizenship.)

A Meditation On the Speed Limit

"I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not just reminding yourself that they exist."

A quote from Getting Things Done

Harvard Business Review endorses MemeStreams:

Eliminating cross-functional bottlenecks actually has less to do with shifting decision-making responsibilities between departments and more to do with ensuring that the people with relevant information are allowed to share it. The decision maker is important, of course, but more important is designing a system that aligns decision making and makes it routine.

Who has the D? | HBR, January 2006

From his web site:

William Orbit's new forthcoming album "Hello Waveforms" will be released February 21 on Sanctuary records.

His first solo release since 2000’s critically acclaimed ‘Pieces in a Modern Style’, the new album was performed and produced by William. ‘Hello Waveforms’ is ethereal, ambient, subtle and distinctive in style, fusing strong melodies with electronic synths to produce his definitive signature sound.

Recorded in London and America, the new album features a collection of collaborations and influences - the track ‘Humming Chorus’ is taken from Madame Butterfly, ‘Spiral’ features the Sugababes and Kenna on vocals, while Finley Quaye plays acoustic guitar on the dreamlike ‘Who Owns The Octopus’.

William has also reunited with his former Strange Cargo band member Laurie Mayer, who plays piano and synthesizer on ‘Surfin’ and provides vocals on the tracks ‘Bubble Universe’ and ‘Who Owns the Octopus?’.

The music streams directly from his web site. The album is on iTMS, Rhapsody, etc.

PopMatters doesn't care for it, though:

There’s no denying that Hello Waveforms is nice. It is nice. It’s like musical Zoloft, actually. It’s white fluffy clouds, kittens and ponies, rainbows and pots o’ gold.

William Orbit - Hello Waveforms

A warm welcome to new MemeStreams user Ben, who pointed me to these:

Two full-length tracks from Neko Case's album releasing in early March.

Star Witness

Hold On, Hold On

Samples of all the tracks are already online at Amazon.

Two Tracks From Neko Case's New Album