What’s New with Wu

Atari’s Missile Command is still the scariest game ever.

Here is a great, indeed must-read paper on the 19th century problem of “Patent Sharks.”

Maybe I’m just getting old or watching too many movies, but I think right now is something, if not a golden age, at least some kind of bronze age, and at least not the cheese age people my age have gotten used to growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.

Over the last month or two I’ve seen

Children of Men

Pan’s Labyrinth

Letter’s from Iwo Jima

The Queen

The Departed

Little Miss Sunshine

Old School

Some of these weren’t perfect — but that’s more good films in a month than you usually see in a year.

Okay I watched old school on DVD.  Frank the Tank has a certain appeal.

Book review in the Guardian.  Also, tomorrow I’m taping a show on NPR’s On the Media with Brooke Gladstone.

Josh Lerner from Harvard Business School came through Columbia and our IP workshop today. Great presenter. He did a paper on patents on the finance patents, which, he finds, are litigated at about 27x the rate of normal patents.

And other findings generally suggesting that most of the patents in the financial sector aren’t held by any of the companies that are financial innovators.

Nice news, named to the SciAm 50 this year — Scientific American’s list of people who have contributed to science and technology this year.

The award was given to many much more impressive contributors, including Warren Buffett, Elizabeth Goldring, Al Gore, and Paul Allen.

Award was for work on the value of network neutrality.

Zephyr Teachout and I are trying to write a story that guesses what the future of political technology will be.

It’s hard!  It is way easier to write about these things are fiction, because then you assert matters with confidence.  When its fiction, you can’t be wrong.

Story should be coming out on Sunday in the Washington Post, if all goes according to plan.

Not really a big deal, but I noticed reaching 10,000 downloads on SSRN today. The % of those papers that were actually read — well that’s another story.

Law review articles aren’t much read — but they when they are read (like when they end up being useful for a case before a court, or for someone else’s research) they are read really intensely. So writing them, as compared to other articles, is kind of a strange business — you can’t expect alot of readers, but then you may have some very intense ones. They may also show up after you are dead (I often rely on writings from the early 20th and 19th centuries.)

Academic articles are also kind of a lottery. Most simply wash through and become history. But the odd article becomes an absolute classic, and changes the field. In advance it is impossible to say which will happen, though the former is all you can bet on.
The same is probably true of books and magazine articles. As an author, it is easier to take comfort in knowing you have alot of readers. But in truth, especially in popular writing, most of your readers, a few years from now, won’t remember a single word.

tim wu