Call the Nestle Hotline at 1-800 295-0051.
When asked if you want to continue in English or Spanish, wait quietly for about 10 seconds and you will smile.
Keep going and press 4. I personally loved option 7. What’s your favorite?
Don’t think it’s legit? It is: http://www.nestlecrunch.com/
Tolkien was a master of words with sounds that connote meaning. But I often find that a lot of his work was not produced from thin air. Case in point: I was looking today at the word “ogre.” Check out this etymology from the OED.
French ogre (late 12th cent. in Old French in sense ‘fierce pagan’, c1300 in sense ‘man-eating giant’, attested again from 1613; also hogre (1704 in the passage translated in quot. 1713 at main sense)), further etymology uncertain and disputed.
French ogre is perh. < classical Latin Orcus, the name of the god of the infernal regions, Hades, Pluto (further etymology uncertain), with metathesis of r (perh. influenced by words such as bougre BOUGRE n.), or perh. < post-classical Latin Ugri, Ungri, Ongri, applied by early writers to the Hungarians or Magyars (see UGRIAN n.). Cf. (< classical Latin Orcus) Middle French orque hell (16th cent.; prob. a later reborrowing), and also Italian orco demon, monster (13th cent.), Spanish huerco devil, personification of death or hell (1330-1900), Sardinian orcu demon, and early modern Dutch orck unruly person (Dutch regional ork). Spanish ogro (1787-1900) is a borrowing from French ogre.
In folklore and mythology: a man-eating monster, usually represented as a hideous giant. In extended use: a person resembling or suggestive of an ogre; a cruel, irascible, or fearsome-looking person.
But Tolkien’s not the only one using his brains. Here’s one from Robert Jordan.
sangrayle, -grayll(e, seynt graal, 7-9 sangreal, 9 sangreall. [a. OF. Saint Graal ‘Holy Grail’: see SAINT a. and GRAIL.
The pseudo-etymological form sang roial (confusing the word with SANG-ROYAL 2) appears in AF. of the 15th c.: see Godefr. Compl. s.v. SANC. Another spurious etymology formerly common appears in the following quot.:
1685 STILLINGFL. Orig. Brit. i. 13 Others think that the word was Sangreal, being some of Christ’s real blood..said to be somewhere found by King Arthur.]1. = GRAIL.
a1450 Le Morte Arth. 10 The knights of the table Round, The sangrayle when they had sought. c1450 Merlin ii. 32 Thi boke shalbe cleped the boke of the seynt Graal. 1470-85 MALORY Arthur II. xi. 88 Soone after the aduentures of the Sangrayll shalle come among yow and be encheued. 1808 SCOTT Marm. I. Introd. Epist. 268 He took the Sangreal’s holy quest. 1871 G. MEREDITH H. Richmond II. 145 They bear the veiled sun like a sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.
Zing!
I know that discussing genetic factors of intelligence is something many do not want to do because such notions have been used horribly in the past. And because there are groups who would like to continue such horrible abuses today.
However, it makes no sense to me to avoid such discussions. There are so many things, from mental illness to physical strength, that have genetic factors that it’s just stupid to ignore data that suggest intelligence also has such factors.
And so I offer you this paper from three folks at the University of Utah which “elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe [Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland in the west of Germany] selected for intelligence.”
It may turn out the hypothesis of these researchers is wrong. But you’ll never know even what they’re proposing without giving it a gander.
http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
I got my masters degree in accounting and information systems. While going to school I started an investment club and learned about a man named Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett is humble, full of folksy humor, and trades places with Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, depending on the year you’re counting. His annual letters to his shareholders are a delight to read. This year’s is full of wisdom about the current financial crisis. Moreover, within a few minutes of reading you will be able to get some key insights that can help as you evaluate the plans being hatched in Washington and how to prevent this particular type of crisis from happening again.
If you’re not that into finance, I recommend reading:
Once you’ve read those, if you want to laugh and see Buffet’s humor, skip to page 21 where Buffett talks about the annual meeting of shareholders. Tell me you wouldn’t want to attend.
The Berkshire Hathaway homepage
This year’s letter to shareholders (you will click on 2008 because he’s discussing the results of that year)
I just had the most uncanny, coolest experience. It’s 6 PM. I’m out on a walk along a road that runs by a swampy river called Birch Creek to a fork in the road. The sky is this glorious blue with brilliant white and gray clouds. I stop and pick some ripe black currents off a little spindly bush growing down off the shoulder in the rocks and continue on.
I take the left fork, south along the hill and enjoy the sight of the mown fields, a scattering of green ton bales standing on the short meadow grass, and the storm clouds gathering over the hills to the west.
A few rabbits spook and run across the road. I reach the mile mark and turn back. I’d already done 30 minutes worth of shred before the walk and needed to get back to practice basketball with my oldest. The whole time I’m listening to Lois McMaster Bujold’s HALLOWED HUNT read by Marguerite Gavin. It’s warm, sunny, lovely. The story is good.
I come back by the fork and hear this sound over the audio. It’s like a single prop airplane in the distance. I continue on another hundred yards. That distant, thin drone grows, but I can’t figure out what it is, so I put the audio book on hold and take off the ear phones.
The air is perfectly still. That muggy stillness that precedes a storm. But all around me is this sound. This thin drone, filling up road. It’s coming from all sides.
Insects?
I look down off the side of the road at the sloughs and cattails and willows and see nothing. I look back up. Look around. And then I notice a small black body speed past. And another. And another.
Flies? It can’t be flies. When have you ever seen a fly pursue a straight line?
Three more. Half a dozen. Another, another, and they’re everywhere. But they’re not flying thickly. Not mobbing. Not massed in some cartoon clump. They’re all spread out. I strain to see them in this odd light.
Bees. They’re dark. Almost black in their flight, but it has to be bees!
And they’re all around, thirty feet to either side of me. Zooming past. There, there, and there. It’s like dozens and dozens of refugees in flight with single purpose. There’s no looping around. No dalliance. No crazy panic. They’re serious, focused. All of them going the same way. Straight ahead on some urgent goal.
There’s a big fat blue dragonfly in the willows that keeps zipping after individual bees as they fly past, trying to get a meal, but each time, just at the moment when it would attack, it spooks and darts back for cover. Dragonflies are voracious buggers. But these aren’t single bees. It must be thinking the other bees are coming for it. Still it can’t resist and darts out again.
And all around is the humming. It grows. The bees directly in front of me see me as they approach and make course corrections. I keep walking. A half a mile and the thin droning still surrounds me. The bees keep coming, but they’re thinning.
Thunder cracks behind me. The wind begins to pick up. The sky behind me is darkening.
The sound of the drone grows thinner, is almost gone. But there are bees still out there, following. I can hear them. See them. Individuals trailing the others, flying past me toward the storm that’s still about a mile off. And I think they’re too far behind.
Maybe their hive was wrecked. Maybe it’s just time to swarm and there’s a queen up front leading them. And somehow her scent is on the wind. Somehow they know to follow.
I don’t know if they’ll find a new place. They’re going to have to cross a mile of mown meadow before they get to anything that might serve as any type of shelter. I don’t know if the wind will ground them, or the main group will find safety but the stragglers will be blown to their deaths. All I know is that I’m sitting here in awe, electric with life.
In Why Publishing is Making You Crazy—and What You Can Do About It: The Tao of Publishing, Steven Axelrod and Julie Anne Long write an interesting post that takes some findings made by Duncan Watts and attempts to explain why writers should only focus on the quality of their work because they cannot reliably affect popularity in any other way.
I agree with them that social-influence seems like a good explanation for the sometimes unexplicable successes we see in publishing and the difficulty publishers have in both predicting and producing a steady stream of hits. However, I do not find support for their main conclusion that writers can do nothing but write. In fact, I suggest that Watts’ findings show quite the opposite.
Axelrod and Long base much of their argument on an experiment conducted by Duncan Watts that tested the power of social-influence on music selection in some controlled music websites. Watts summarizes his findings in the excellent Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?.
In his part of the post, Axelrod points out that the Watts findings indicate “50% of the factors affecting your career could be totally outside of your control—totally random” and that “unless we can separate out those random factors which contributed to an author’s past success [and we can’t, Axelrod suggests], anything we can say or predict about why she succeeded will invariably be way off-the-mark.” And therefore “what’s interesting—and chilling, as well—is that there’s evidence that the harder a person works to make sense of a random event, the farther they’ll end up from the truth.”
In other words, the only thing an author can reliably do to improve the popularity of his stories is focus on their instrinsic quality. And get more stories out so he has more shots in the fickle social-influence game.
I agree that having more product in the market increases your odds. I also agree that focusing on the intrinsic quality of the writing can do the same. I even agree that this is where authors should spend most of their time. However, Watts’ studies do not indicate other efforts are wasted. In fact, they suggest the opposite.
Watts does not controvert anything we now know about marketing. What he does is clarify the power of social-influence in our decision making and the dynamics of ONE type of endorsement system. What Watts shows is:
These findings, however, need to be put in context. From cars, to camcorders, to recipes, the popularity of a product depends on three main factors. These aren’t new ideas and publishing is no different than any other industry. The factors come from long-standing marketing practice:
Each of these three affects the other two. Visibility makes endorsements and initial attractiveness possible. Endorsements make a product more attractive and more likely to be visible. Attractiveness makes something more visible and more likely to be endorsed. And round and round we go.
It’s true that Watts shows 50% of the effect is due to endorsement. But nowhere does Watts suggest an author cannot increase the probability of visibility and endorsement.
In the study, the endorsement method used was a counter showing the number of times the song had been downloaded. It was random, anonymous, and perceived as unbiased. That was a controlled environment. However, what if a singer had been able to ask all those he knew who loved his song to download it from the site? Or what if someone organized such a campaign independent of the singer? Both actions would immediately affect the probability of the song increasing in visiblity and endorsement and, hence, popularity.
It’s too bad Watts didn’t test this in one of his sites to see if he could make a winner. As it was, all Watts was doing was seeing if he could predict a success by quality alone. He was passively observing, not actively taking measures to increase visibility and endorsement.
Furthermore, the counter is just one type of endorsement system. There are a number of others. We’ve all seen how an Oprah endorsement can move the market. The identity of that endorser is NOT random and has great predictive value. Her decision to endorse is still random. But what if you have a way to make your book visible to her? Would it be a waste of time to do so?
Robert Sawyer loves to tell of one action he took with someone with much less endorsement power than Oprah and the effect it had on his sales. Was Sawyer guaranteed visibility and endorsement from that action? No. However, he DID increase the probability, and it resulted in sales. Here’s his account.
Watts confirms that endorsements have a mighty effect on popularity. Even something as simple as a “most downloads” counter can easily overwhelm a listener’s own reactions. But the logical conclusion is not to do nothing. The logical conclusion is that if authors want to increase their popularity, they must not rely only on the intrinsic value of their product, but they must also search for ways to increase visibility and endorsement.
Axelrod is correct that it’s sometimes difficult to see the effect of any given marketing campaign or tactic. This is because marketing efforts are probabilistic, not deterministic. However, probabilistic does not mean random. Furthermore, it does not indicate you cannot increase the probability of success. While publishers may not be able to produce best sellers every time, I’m confident if they decided to stop marketing altogether, sales would drop.
Will all efforts succeed? No. Any marketing progam needs to consider the effect of diminishing returns. The effectiveness of some actions may be difficult to test. Furthermore, authors may not have the budget to run a campaign large enough to increase their probabilities, although there are strategies to become a big fish in a small pond (see Geoffery Moore’s Crossing the Chasm).
Despite all these issues, we know, in general, getting endorsements helps. In general, the right placement in book stores increases visibility. Author visits to schools, if done right for middle age readers, can also increase visibility. Radio interviews, if done right, do the same. There are many things that DO improve an author’s odds. We can increase the probability of visibility and endorsement by taking intelligence, consistent action.
And that’s good news. We might not be able to guarantee a hit, but one thing IS certain—we’ll have no direct influence on visibility and endorsement if we do nothing.
(BTW, for those interested, here’s a great presentation on a related idea:Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age a presentation by Duncan J. Watts.)
