People are not browsing in bookstores like they used to, according to booksellers just winding up their annual New York convention. More customers phone in orders or double-park while they dash in to make a purchase. [1]

"People are spending less time in the back of the store, looking through the philosophy section, and more time at the tables for recommended books in front," said a California bookseller.

So what's the moral of the story? People love recommendations!

The old-fashioned bookstore browser who picks and pokes and doesn't care about the critics or Oprah or the bestseller charts may wind up on the endangered species list.

"I'll have what she's having!"

[1] Po Bronson wrote recently:

Starbucks put a quote of mine on 500,000 of their tall cups, as part of their "The Way I See It" program, meant to bring provocative discourse back to coffee shops. The quote on the cup reads: "Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever."

Bookworms Book It

Do you see any parallels here?

Were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry.

The industry does care; the people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do.

Some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. "It’s not so much that movies are dead, as that history has already passed them by."

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars.

The primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.

Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?

Even the Gray Lady gets it.

Today new albums from Coldplay, the Black Eyed Peas and the White Stripes hit the stores. If you needed to be told that, then you are probably not part of the target audiences for these very popular bands.

Even blowout sales for all three would really do nothing to change the feeling that something is terribly wrong in the music business.

The real problem in the music industry is an addiction to blockbusters, and that is what today is all about -- feeding the monster this industry has become.

The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few titles, and the result is all too predictable -- music that matters more for how it sells [1] than how it sounds.

[1] I have always been fond of this little rant by the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park:

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Cold White Peas

Click through the thumbnails for higher-resolution (but still only ~1 MP) bitmaps of the images.

IBM will create a model of the circuitry in the human neocortex, which is believed to be the center for higher cognitive functions. It is also the portion of the brain that evolved most recently and that is unique to mammals.

Over the next two years scientists from both organizations will work together using the huge computational capacity of IBM’s eServer Blue Gene supercomputer to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex – the largest and most complex part of the human brain. By expanding the project to model other areas of the brain, scientists hope to eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain.

"What really matters is not the power itself, but how it is applied to accelerate innovation and discovery in science, engineering and business."

Researchers can learn more about the morphology of the neocortex by inserting blue dye into each neuron. This image shows a fraction of the cells and connections within the neocortex's microcircuitry. (Partial summary from CNET)

Mapping the human brain

Decius wrote:

I think this decision is a lot less important than most people are making it out to be. From a consumer perspective, nothing has changed.

I think this matters a lot more to Intel than it does to Apple. But Jobs is flashy and fashionable and Intel is just a chip company, so they let him do the talking. For now, anyway.

The collective spin on this story is interesting; Apple steps out loud and proud with a "Death to the Power PC!" message, while Intel sits in the back of the room, silently taking in the reactions.

According to standard practice in the semiconductor business, this was Intel's deal to announce to the world. In industry jargon, it's called a design win. Precedents abound: Transmeta, AMD, and many others.

Here's an excerpt from a pre-Jobs-announcement interview that Macworld is running today. (The Computex exhibition in Taipei, where the interview was conducted, ended on June 4.)

Chandrasekher: We always talk to Apple. Apple is a design win that we’ve coveted for 20 years and we continue to covet them as a design win. We will never give up on Apple.

IDGNS: What would you be willing to do in order to win Apple’s business?

Chandrasekher: Well, nothing unnatural that we wouldn’t do for other design wins. It’s got to make sense from a business standpoint. We would do what makes economic sense. If we can do that and still get the design win, we’d do it.

Translating the Intel-Apple Deal

On Friday, June 3, Charlie Rose interviewed Eric Schmidt for the hour.

You can download the show from audible.com for $4.95.

Through Google Video Search, you can also search for keywords in the transcript and get a sense of the discussion.

Eric does a good job of selling Google, and not just to the public. He makes it sound like a really great company to want to work for. He knows how to sell it to engineers who've worked at small companies, who've worked at old-line behemoths, who've learned what they hate about big companies and are concerned that Google is rapidly becoming one.

What's he hiding?

The appearance has drawn some commentary:

Google CEO vows one right answer for every search and universal reach "we'll get them all, even the ones in the trees"

In the next couple of decades, Ray Kurzweil predicts, life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years. Most diseases will be prevented or reversed. Drugs will be individually tailored to a person's DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells -- nanobots, as they are called -- will be routinely injected by the millions into people's bloodstreams.

Inventing Our Evolution

While promoting that film over the last several weeks, Mr. Cruise engaged in an increasingly public discussion of his religion, Scientology. Then he set tongues wagging in Hollywood and elsewhere with an hourlong appearance on the May 23 "Oprah" show, during which he jumped around the set, hopped onto a couch, fell rapturously to one knee and repeatedly professed his love for his new girlfriend, the actress Katie Holmes.

Many Hollywood stars are involved with the Church of Scientology, and there is nothing particularly unusual about trumpeting a new love. But some executives at Paramount and DreamWorks have voiced concern that fans were becoming distracted from the movie, which cost some $130 million to produce.

"You can have so much attention on a particular issue that maybe the movie doesn't get as much attention as it might," Marvin Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Spielberg, a partner in DreamWorks, said of the show.

In an interview with Der Spiegel in April, Mr. Spielberg found himself defending Mr. Cruise's dedication to Scientology by comparing it to his work for his Shoah Foundation, which promotes education about the Holocaust. A DreamWorks executive called the exchange unfortunate.

How Personal Is Too Personal?

Useful for research and trend analysis ...

The National Data Book contains a collection of statistics on social and economic conditions in the United States. Selected international data are also included. The Abstract is also your Guide to Sources of other data from the Census Bureau, other Federal agencies, and private organizations.

Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2004-2005

The answers are technical realities that must be considered in any policy analysis of space weapons and anti-satellite weapons. Unless debate about these issues is grounded in an accurate understanding of the technical facts underlying space operations, the discussion and policy prescriptions will be irrelevant or, worse, counterproductive.

The Physics of Space Security