Scott Adams's Blog, page 394

Teamwork

Water is good for you. Unless you're at the bottom of the ocean with an anchor tied to your ankle. Teamwork is like that. It can be a good thing, but more often it's like trying to breathe underwater. Consider a brief list of reasons that teamwork will make any normal individual perform below his highest potential:

1. Your best time for thinking might be the other guy's best time to take a nap. If that's the only time you can have a meeting, one of you isn't going to be operating at peak performa

One Ring to Bind Them

Over spring break we went to Florida for some family fun. The hotel was right on the beach. Most days we divided our time between the ocean and the hotel's two huge swimming pools. Toward the end of one day, the four of us, plus a stranger or two, were relaxing in the oversized hot tub in the pool area. A 5-year old kid, I'm guessing, wearing swim goggles, came to the hot tub, took a breath, and submerged. He stayed under for awhile then surfaced with treasure: a man's wedding ring and 75 cents

Your Phone

I was thinking about how different our lives will be as cell phone technology continues to improve. Someday your phone will be your only computer, and your home will have a screen in every room that senses the proximity of any phone that approaches. Push a button on your phone and it will take over any nearby screen to display a movie, recorded TV show, or music video. You could browse the web on the big screen, or create a Word document. You might want a wireless keyboard in some rooms, but for

Video Game for Girls

I have an idea for the ultimate video game for girls. I call it What Goes With What. I haven't worked out the details of the game yet, but you could imagine lots of varieties around the core concept I will describe.

Imagine at the beginning of the game your screen is filled with images of shoes, purses, scarves, pants, blouses, and all manner of human adornments. The screen is totally packed with these images, all smallish. The computer randomly highlights any one of these images and you have 30

Home Servers

If you're wondering where the next economic boom will come from, I think it will involve a central computer for your home that handles all of your entertainment, home controller, and computing needs.

Before you rush to tell me "That already exists," and then provide links to things that only do a few functions, let me assure you that it doesn't exist. But there is no reason to think it won't be developed in the future.

I came to this conclusion while searching for a home system that would deliver

Economics of Nuclear Power Plants

My post from yesterday raised questions about the economics of nuclear power plants. So, as is my custom, I spent five minutes on Wikipedia absorbing as many misconceptions about this topic as I could.

The first important concept to understand is that solar and wind power can never replace more than 20 percent of the world's total energy needs because they are not reliable sources for any given hour of the day. We still need baseline energy production.

And then you have the problem of getting the

Saving the Planet and Whatnot

In rough numbers, let's say there are 100 million houses in the U.S. that could benefit from one of these standard greening investments:
- Solar panels- Whole house fans- Improved wall insulation- Better windows- Sealing and insulating all ducts- Improved roofing with radiant barriers

Each of those investments would pay for itself if only you could solve the financing problem. No one wants to plunk down a pile of cash today for a house he might sell tomorrow. And if your payback is over ten years,

Better Index Funds

A stock index fund buys stock in every company that is a member of some defined index, such as the S&P 500. The idea is that if you own, for example, a little bit of 500 different companies, you'll be well diversified and generally do better than the professional stock pickers, thanks in part to lower fees and lower taxes.

The reason index funds are so popular is that it's hard to pick individual stocks that will outperform the average. But I wonder if it is just as hard to identify stocks that w

The Other Scott Adams

I have a common name. There are at least three guys named Scott Adams in my local community. Most big corporations have a Scott Adams on the payroll. We're all over the place.

When your name is that common, it's only a matter of time before one of us gets arrested for serial murder, running a Ponzi scheme, or having a dungeon below the house. So far we have been lucky. Most people named Scott Adams end up pursuing hyper-nerdish lines of business. The most famous Scott Adams who isn't me is a pion

Calendar as Filter

Recently I wrote that newspapers (all of them online) would become extremely local to your family. CNN had a similar article recently, but what they call hyperlocal is your community, not your family. So that isn't nearly local enough in my view.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/01/future.online.news.hyperlocal/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues

Moreover, I think the family calendar is the organizing principle into which all external information should flow. I want the kids' school schedules for sport