I was wondering at the picture of Heidegger's spatulate head on the cover of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, then noticed what seemed to be missing from the back of his skull was in fact his slicked-back hair, and noticed the mustache he is wearing in the style most commonly associated with Hitler. Given the subject of the book, this is certainly not an accident.

I hadn't much followed Heidegger Nazi controversy, however the author of this book, Emmanuel Faye, believes that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a grey cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds", and that the vast literature on Heidegger continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a worldwide scale".

Paul La Farge in Cabinet (via Bobulate)

As with many people, I first encountered Que reste-t-il de nos amours by Charles Trenet in the beginning of Baisers volés, by François Truffaut, aka Stolen Kisses. Since the lyrics online are either wrong or incomplete, I'm posting them here, because I love this song. I translated it, below.

....................

Ce soir le vent qui frappe à ma porte,
Me parle des amours mortes
Devant le feu qui s'éteint

Ce soir c'est une chanson d'automne
Dans la maison qui frissonne
Et je pense aux jours lointains.

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces beaux jours?
Une photo, vieille photo
De ma jeunesse.

Que reste-t-il des billets doux?
Des mois d'avril, des rendez-vous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit
Sans cesse.

Bonheur fané, cheveux au vent,
Baisers volés, rêves mouvants
Que reste-t-il de tout cela
Dites-le-moi

Un petit village, un vieux clocher
Un paysage si bien caché
Et dans un nuage le cher visage
De mon passé.

Les mots, les mots tendres qu'on murmure
Les caresses les plus pures
Les serments au fond des bois
Les fleurs qu'on retrouve dans un livre
Dont le parfum vous enivre,
Se sont envolés pourquoi?

....................

Tonight, the wind that knocks at my door
tells me of love that died
Before the fire which turns to embers.

Tonight, an autumn song
In a shivering house
I think of days long ago.

What remains of our love?
What remains of those beautiful days ?
A photograph, an old photograph
of my youth
What remains of the love letters?
The months of April, the rendezvous?
A memory that haunts me without ceasing.

Faded happiness, wind in our hair
Stolen kisses, a living dream
What remains of all that
Please tell me.

A small village, an old clock tower
A hidden countryside
And in a cloud the beloved face
of my past.

Matt Mireles advances the classic arguments for why NYC is not a good place for a startup in his piece for Business Insider -- raising money is hard, and talent is scarce -- but I'd like to make a couple of points to the contrary:

• VC and Wall Street exist as almost completely different worlds. You can exist within one without ever encountering the other. In Matt's post it seems as if the two are competing for investments or mindshare. They aren't. They may be competing for engineers, but that is less and less the case. Thank you financial meltdown!
• I've seen a ton of startups doing their seed funding here, as part of Founder Collective and while it's not uncommon for a gang of NYC-based angels to group together and invest in a company, it's significantly more common for the angels to be a mix of east and west coast angels. I mean, we all talk to and know each other coast-to-coat -- Hunch, New York-based -- has significant angel investment from out west. For the time being NYC angel investing is a subset of the larger, Silicon Valley dominated angel investment world.
• Being away from the Valley can be an advantage. A kind of groupthink can start to occur in the Valley if you're not careful and it's hard to see outside of it. We started Flickr in Vancouver, BC -- not known as a hotspot for world innovation -- and yet we were able to attract New York and Silicon Valley angel investors in our very early stages. Raising money is hard *all over*. Doesn't matter where you are. But if you build something people want, you will find investment.

Matt is right about a lot of things:

• He implies that you shouldn't hire people out of Wall Street jobs, and I totally agree. Their expectations are mismatched to startup life and all those cushy perks are completely absent. But the positive trend is that those kids just out of school who *would* have gotten sucked into Goldman Sachs are now significantly more likely to go into startups. We've gotten a bunch of recent grads at Hunch.
• Specialized technical talent *is* harder to find in NYC than in the Valley, though we've had a great amount of success recruiting people to come to New York from the Valley, especially at Etsy, which has been growing its engineering group over the past year.
• And Matt is absolutely right that what New York really needs right now is a Billion Dollar Company -- an eBay or a Google or a PayPal or a Facebook -- and an exit that releases all the people working there from their obligations and frees them to go forth and start new companies. PayPal's progeny are spectacular -- LinkedIn, Yelp, Slide, YouTube -- there needs to be something similar in New York.

This seems very sensible. Recently a good friend of mine was arguing on behalf of religious abolitionists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and I felt similarly ill at ease. I've always thought within every religion lies the true, original religion, its pure and holy impulse -- no matter how corrupted by human failure, malignity and malevolence it persists. I'm a twice-annual unconfirmed and unchurched Catholic -- Easter and Christmas -- and I love the rituals.

I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them. As I say in this post from 2005, the internet is built on a culture of generosity -- the first web page I built was when I noticed there was no page on Nabokov and realized I could just make one. Amazing! And it dawned on me that every other page on the web -- this was 1994 -- had come about for the same reason. Then the dotcom thing happened. And then Web 2.0 brought us back to the web's roots -- communication and contribution. That is why I love participatory media and must defend it.

There are so many things wrong with Jaron Lanier's recent manifesto in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted from his book) that I hardly know where to begin. The self-proclaimed "father of VR" believes that people who don't get credit or compensation for their work are lesser, humiliated beings without dignity -- the work in question being such activities as saving a bookmarks to delicious, correcting spelling errors on Wikipedia, exposing one's listening history on Last.fm, and the like. As the "father of VR" and a musician who has had various other occupations he has a particular lens through which he is viewing our latter-day participative media. He seems not to have built participative web sites, hailing from a Mondo 2000-era view of the world. For a non-participant all these new types of media would naturally appear to be what he calls a great "global mush". To discerning users of social media, you see what you deliberately select. The point is to filter out the noise, the mush. Obvious, no?

Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate. These types of software and platforms are specifically designed for conversation and contribution. That is the point. There is no final product such as a book, movie, song or album. This method of creation would be pretty poor for designing a space shuttle or an ad campaign or writing a biography. There is no final product to which the epithet "design by committee" might apply. He is misconstruing goals.

He also appears to believe that quality is a zero sum game. A bunch of amateur musicians singing in someone's living room take nothing away from Lady Gaga.There's a lot of tilting at windmills in this excerpt. I've never heard anyone assert, as he appears to think everyone in the digital arena is constantly asserting, that "collectives make the best stuff" -- quite the opposite. Everyone agrees that 99% of everything is crap, and no one is claiming Wikipedia's entries are better written than those of Charles Lamb or Edmund Gosse in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (my favorite). But really, who cares? By sharing my (admittedly crappy) snapshots on Flickr, I'm not claiming to be Margaret Bourke-White. And my sister *likes* to look at photos of my dog. Who am I hurting? Should I charge a penny to look at my photo? Do I need a photo credit? No. If someone other than my sister admires my cute dog, they are welcome to do so for free.

Additionally Lanier does not understand that people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money. You shouldn't need a motivation or justification to correct spelling or factual errors on Wikipedia -- a certain desire for orderliness, good grammar, or truth should be sufficient. Those who enjoy correcting spelling and grammatical errors online -- I do -- are they thereby "robbed of dignity" as Lanier would have it? Of course not.

From David Weinberger's post, The opposite of "open" is "theirs":

The biggest myth about starting a tech company in NYC is that it's difficult to hire top tier programmers. At Hunch, based in New York, we've hired a team of incredible MIT engineers and are constantly interviewing for new talent for the "pipeline". Being on the board of Etsy, I've also help with hiring engineering talent.

The reality is it's hard to hire top tier engineers no matter if you're in CA, NY or Vancouver, where Flickr was based. Good engineers come from all parts of the world -- Cal Henderson was living outside London when he started working on Flickr and moved to Vancouver. These engineers are often recruited to move to a startup hub. Those are primarily CA and NY, with some other cities having their own smaller scenes (Boston, Austin, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Pittsburgh...)CA has a much larger tech scene and much better weather. NYC is a more exciting, diverse city with a strong tech scene. And there's plenty of back and forth -- John Allspaw just moved out to New York from SF to work on Etsy, joining Chad.

But what NYC is actually missing is not engineers. In NYC you can find lots of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills - engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups. It is these hybrid people that we are always looking for at Hunch and for whatever reason find them much more often in CA than NYC.

I think the problem in NYC is primarily cultural -- a lot of MIT talent is hardcore eng. and the designers often come out of print (publishing and advertising are huge out here) NY web devs are more than capable of adapting to CA-style, multidisciplinary approach. At Hunch, we want everyone to embrace the social and technical tools that they are using and building -- blogging, tweeting, contributing to open source. This is what I think what NYC needs more of.

When I hear about startups that have made some amazing technical innovation in NLP (natural language processing), OCR (optical character recognition), image recognition, speech recognition, I am somewhat skeptical. The government, especially DARPA, many university research departments, Xerox PARC (and Interval Research, where I worked briefly in 2000) have sunk a lot of time and money into this kind of research, in some cases billions of dollars, and a lot of this research not only available but free to all comers. Improving on them is a vast and difficult task, and even a 5% improvement on the existing state-of-the-art is invisible to the end user - the innovation has to be an order of magnitude better to 'feel' better.

There were dozens of startups that approached us at Flickr with tech that could do fantastic things with image recognition software. But we were pretty good at getting people to tag photos with what were in them. The image recognition software could tell us if a photo was a photo of Mom, but not if Mom was smiling, or looking puzzled, or dancing on her 50th anniversary. People adding tags, descriptions, titles and comments turned out to be better sources of metadata for those photos, and that metadata could then be used in interesting ways.

Some easier, faster, less expensive and I think, more satisfying ways for startups to innovate using these technologies are:

1. Find a new way to use the tech that serves a pressing consumer need (this is hard)
2. Find a new source of data (the original PageRank algorithm's use of links as its primary data source)
3. Create a new source of data and apply the tech to it (in the example above, Flickr using "social engineering" to create a vast amount of human-added metadata)

To have credible tech, it's a bit of a Goldilocks problem. If you build something too easy, it's not defensible, and you'll be easily copied. Too hard, and it's a job that requires government research or academia. Startups whose strength is technical should try to something of middling technical difficulty. Some startups, such as Twitter or Daily Booth, can be successful without a lot of tech. Nothing wrong with that! But I see startups all the time making tech claims that I find dubious.