Eric Wilson

Revenge of the Nerds: How SOPA was killed

Great post-mortem from POLITICO’s Anna Palmer on how the effort to kill SOPA and PIPA amounted to a disruption of Washington’s traditional lobbying game. Highlights:

>Fights are no longer just about which side has the most — or best — lobbyists. The new world of Washington influence is more diverse:Traditional access lobbying is waged alongside campaigns that use media, grass-roots activism and the Internet — activity often not reported in federal lobbying filings.

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Several lobbyists pointed to last week’s massive online mobilization that tanked two fast-moving anti-online piracy bills as the perfect example of how the influence game is changing. While clients are still willing to pay for access lobbying, there is more of a focus on nonreportable strategy through social media and other grass-roots initiatives.

And the best nugget from the story:

“A well-resourced content group of people completely got outmaneuvered by the guys in the basement,” Ogilvy Government Relations’ Drew Maloney said of the anti-piracy fight. 

You must have friends

“In this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime-not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be always polite but never obsequious. None will respect you more than you respect yourself.”

— Advice to Andrew Jackson from his mother

via Art of Manliness

No amount of honesty…

“It is, of course, not enough that a public official should be honest. No amount of honesty will avail if he is not also brave and wise. The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. When this truth is accepted as axiomatic in our politics, then, and not till then, shall we see such a moral uplifting of the people as will render…”

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1900, The Strenuous Life

Quote

Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats.

A crab on the altar

“I remember that my own grandmother, a devout Wesleyan, believed to her dying day that at the Roman Catholic mass the priest let a crab loose upon the altar, which it was his mysterious duty to prevent from crawling sideways into the view of the congregation. (Hence the gestures of the celebrant.) How she became possessed of this notion, or what she supposed eventually happened to the crustacean I never discovered. But she affirmed with the utmost sincerity that she had once with her own eyes actually watched this horrible rite in progress; and there could be no doubt of the deplorable effect that solitary visit to a Roman Catholic church had on her estimate of Roman Catholics in general, though she was the soul of charity in all things else.” — Dom Gregory Dix

What could go wrong?

“The Plan to Bring an Asteroid to Earth”:

A robotic probe could anchor to an asteroid made mostly of nickel-iron with simple magnets or grab a rocky asteroid with a harpoon or specialized claws (see video below) and then push the asteroid using solar-electric propulsion. For asteroids too big for a robot to handle, a large spacecraft could fly near the object to act as a gravity tractor that deflects the asteroid’s trajectory, sending it toward Earth.

“Once you get over the initial reaction — ‘You want to do what?!’ — it actually starts to seem like a reasonable idea,” said engineer John Brophy from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped organize the workshop.

Use definite, specific, concrete language.

Good thoughts from the Harvard Business Review blog on spoken communication:

Qualifying words lessen the importance and the value of the nouns and verbs they accompany. Those nouns and verbs represent the products, services, and actions of the business — the family jewels — that the presenter is pitching, and a presenter should not diminish their worth. Parents do not describe their children as “sort of cute.”

Instead, follow the advice of the Strunk and White classic, The Elements of Style: “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” To accomplish this you must diligently delete meaningless words and phrases from your speech, a task easier said than done due to their pervasiveness.

Things you don’t know about yourself

From a NASCAR press release:

Eric Wilson, the No. 29 team’s jackman, is proud to have learned his craft at the knee of NASCAR Hall of Famer Junior Johnson. Johnson was a superlative driver and perhaps even more accomplished as a car owner and team leader. But he also was one of the best jackmen to ever work pit road.

Becoming a jackman happened by accident for Wilson, a 41-year-old Bethlehem, N.C., resident who, in 1995, was carrying tires for Johnson’s No. 11 Ford team and driver Brett Bodine. The crew chief, Mike Beam, departed mid-season and his jackman followed. Johnson sauntered into the shop one morning and beckoned Wilson outside.

Wilson recalls Johnson telling him, “’I’ll show you how to jack a race car.’ I guess it was because I was 25 and in shape. He told me to be a team leader. It really helped me. There was no way I was going to let that man down.” The team won the annual series pit crew championship later that season. Wilson continues to hold the fastest time for a jackman, set in 2008, during the NASCAR Sprint Pit Crew Challenge presented by Craftsman.

Johnson’s advice created not only a position expert but a teacher as well. Wilson, a native Texan who moved to the Hickory, N.C., area to race and later win a NASCAR Dash Series championship, hired on with Cal Wells Motorsports where he worked as a crew member and pit crew coach from 2001-06. He joined Michael Waltrip Motorsports in the same capacity the following year and later with Ray Evernham Motorsports.

Jim Cooper: A lonely man

Jim Cooper, a well-respected Member of the House of Representatives, is highlighted in Joe Nocera’s Op-Ed “The Last Moderate.” Here are a few good excerpts:

The reason is that Cooper is the House’s conscience, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era. He remembers when compromise was not a dirty word and politicians put country ahead of party. And he’s not afraid to talk about it. “We’ve gone from Brigadoon to Lord of the Flies,” he likes to say.

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To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s, when Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House, “Congress was functional,” Cooper told me. “Committees worked. Tip saw his role as speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats.”

The problem with sperm donors

This New York Times article “One Sperm Donor, 150 offspring” highlights the dangers of artificial insemination from a genetic perspective. The science-based concerns back up the moral and ethical questions surrounding this as well:

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.