Blog: Microsoft

This is really cool. It's a tabletop computer where you can manipulate objects with your fingers, like drawing or resizing photos and maps. Best of all, if you place a device on it, like a camera with wireless capability, it can automatically get the pictures out, or let you drag them into a phone.

Manipulating digital images is a complex task, and difficult for many people. Maybe this kind of interface can finally make it intuitive and accessible.

1. My friend P. started going to Howard Dean Meetups not because he was passionate about Howard Dean (though he is a fervent Democrat), but because he thought there might be attractive women there he could meet. Once there, the number of women was lower than he had hoped, but high enough to keep him coming back. Eventually he became sufficiently dedicated to the Dean campaign itself to volunteer for them despite disappointing numbers of women.

2. When E. was an intern at Microsoft, he started organizing a series of informal dinner gatherings where interested interns would all go out to the same restaurant some night. People signed up for this using a Web page which allowed everyone to see who else had signed up. However, he encountered an obstacle: The intern population is about 90% male, and women were reluctant to sign up at first because there weren't any other women and they didn't want to be too outnumbered, while men didn't sign up because there weren't any women.

   E. therefore devised a simple solution: shortly after posting each dinner invite, he added the name of a fictitious woman to the attendee list. People of both sexes would then start signing up in great numbers. At some point, he could simply remove the imaginary woman's name as if she had changed her mind, but there were enough real women to keep a healthy rate of sign-ups.

3. At a cocktail hour last night, Jess attempted to reveal the true source of modern Republican power. Back in the seventies, it is well known that prominent conservatives began to deliberately create institutions to spawn a whole generation of true believers. For many right-leaning young people, attending youth events, getting mentorship, and building contacts was a major formative experience. But most of all, many of them had their first sexual experiences at Republican camp, cementing their loyalty to the Party forever.
   

The moral for budding social capitalists: don't forget the hierarchy of needs. After physiological needs (food and water) and safety, sex and love come before everything else in life.