What’s New with Wu

What happens when you mix geek with weightlifter?  Yuri Vlasov, one of the greatest lifters of all time.

Google’s Free the Airwaves campaign!   I recorded this video in support, though for some reason I look kind of evil in the video.

No more Mr. Not Nice Guy.

[what follows is discarded prose, a story I started that went nowhere]

Back in the third century BC, aiming to impress the world, Dionysius of Syracuse sent to the Olympics fancy pavilions and several teams of horses.  To entertain spectators, he hired professional actors to recite poetry.  “At first the multitude thronged together because of the pleasing voices of the actors” wrote a contemporary observer, “and all were filled with wonder.”   Unfortunately the poetry Dionysius chose was his own.   “But on second consideration, when they observed how poor his verses were, they laughed Dionysius to scorn.” Some, it seems, “went so far in their rejection that some of them even ventured to rifle the tents.”

At the modern Olympics the urge to impress the world remains, even if it has taken different forms.  The Dutch have taken Dionysius one better, making their pavilion out of a Museum the size of a large city block, renamed the Holland House, which is stuffed full of Dutch curiosities and equipped with spotlights that penetrate what they can of the Beijing sky.  The Holland House admits all foreigners, and Chinese who bear invitations.  Last Wednesday the main beer hall featured a man with a large orange swirl for a head, dancing rave style to Dutch techno music.   As Sherrisse Pham, a longtime Beijing resident put it, “that’s Holland for you.”

A more American way of doing things is captured by “Club Bud,” also set up for the Olympics.  Club Bud is an unlikely combination of the downhome Budweiser beer brand, and the snobby, celebrity-centered club culture of New York or Los Angeles.  A goal of Club Bud, according to a statement by marketing manager Mike Thompson, is to be “the hardest ticket to get.”  A velvet rope, generally unknown to Beijing, graces the entrance.  Instead of the usual celebrities, it is atheletes who are the attraction, along with American sports celebrities like boxing champion Evander Holyfeld.  Tickets for Club Bud are indeed difficult to come by, as only the wealthy, the connected, and the highly athletic are welcome.

But it is the hosts who are making truly Dionysiusian efforts to impress the world and themselves.  At the Olympic events, the venues, especially the national swimming center or Bird’s Nest stadium, are showcases first and sports arenas second.   For many locals and some tourists, the point is to get into them and be part of the Olympics – the sports, somewhere down below, seem secondary.  As Dai Lu, a young member of the communist party who attended swimming heats told me, “its the olympics and the architecture, its new beijing, that’s why we want to get in.”
…

So I am particularly proud of this piece about Olympic weightlifting that I wrote.

For some reason I felt very moved to write it, rather like the Dumpling Manifesto.

This is a picture of Vivian Lee, who is on the Australian team (the Australian record holder for 48kg) and something of a philosopher of the bar.

I’m in Beijing this week, writing some stuff for Slate.  The murder was about 10 mins from my house.

This struck me as a rather odd photo of President Bush.

Posted in NY Times. Not a headline of my invention, but ..

I have never been the biggest fan of Jurgen Habermas- he is hard to understand, and his interest in never-ending public sphere dialogue remind me of an endless faculty meeting.

But I must admit that lately I’ve been turned on lately to his whole Lifeworld writings and the colonization thereof.  Maybe this happens to everyone once you reach a certain age, and decide that in a sense what you are fighting for and yearning for in nearly everything is a sense of informality and humanity in the environments and relationships you live in .

Bell’s engineers had an answering machine invented by 1935.   However it wasn’t until 1980 or so that answering machines became widely available - why?

Interestingly, according to a great paper by Mark Clark that I came across recentlt, internal memos show that Bell was afraid that if there existed recording devices, people would stop using telephones.

Quoting from my book:

Internal memoranda show AT&T certain that recording devices, if widespread, “would greatly reduce the use of the telephone.”   The idea was that the potential of a record of a conversation would make people unwilling to use the phone – either for fear the record would be used to contradict contracts, or because people would want to speak about illegal or immoral matters.     The mere technical possibility of recording conversations would “change the whole nature of telephone conversations,” and “render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed.”

The lesson from this is that it isn’t always textbook reasons that are offered for suppressing products - but sometimes just pure wierdness.

I’m in the midst of a long debate with Derek Slater (of Google) about structural separation.  He may post about it more on the Google policy blog at some point.   The key question is, when can an industry cut succeed in breathing life into dead markets - and when will it be counterproductive?

To my mind, looking at the history of telecom, a good regulator is like a very good butcher.  The trick is to not to chop to often, and know what it means to cut an industry at the joints, not the bone.  

This may be a bit ex poste, but my example of cutting at the joints is Carterfone - blasting open the consumer market for telephones, modems and the rest.   Trying to cut the bone is more like UNE-in-America  – resisted heavily, and never all THAT successful in building a competitive market of any kind.

I’m writing along with the book a new travel article on Mongolia.  Travel writing that doesn’t suck is hard -fortunately  Seth Stevenson is my guide for this kind of stuff.

His Japan series is totally classic in my opinion, even if you’ve spent time in Japan.