An Eyeful

I talk to venture capitalists a fair bit because I’ve been involved in a bunch of start-ups and technical advisory boards. And I do an interview column for Searchsecurity, where I try to interrogate interesting people in order to find out how they got interesting. This morning I was transcribing the audio of an interview I did with a woman executive who was a venture capitalist for years, then went on to start her own company.

It’s fairly rare to find woman executives who are willing to talk about gender bias, because, I’m sure it just increases their inter-cranial pressure to the explosion point. But we went there, anyway.

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Yummy “NopeFish”

My friend who introduced me to this guy’s twitter feed calls it “Nope Fish.” I suspect they all taste more or less the same, but I can understand why a sushi chef wouldn’t want those pretty faces staring at customers through the glass.

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A Mind-Boggling Gun

I’ve been avoiding writing about this because my supply of expletives needed to regenerate. And, frankly, I’m a bit baffled by the topic – whenever I try to think about this, I wind up with my jaw hanging, scratching my butt, and going, “can there possibly be more to this story that I simply do not understand?”

I’m talking, of course, about the 2 main guns on the USS Zumwalt.

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Are You a SPUG?

From the San Francisco Call, November 14, 1913.

“Spug” is the unattractive nickname of a society which is doing a useful service in discouraging the giving of useless presents. The full name of the organization is the “Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving,” or S. P. U. G., “spug.” The society was organized last year and has just begun its 1913 campaign to discourage the habit of indiscriminate and unnecessary gift making.

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Hijinks on the High Seas

I’ve always been interested in naval hijinks, mostly because navies are the premier means of “projecting power” for nation-states.* And, of course, gathering intelligence as well. The US’ military has a huge emphasis on naval force-projection because of the logistics of having a navy: a carrier task force group is a movable city with its own inner supply chain. As mentioned elsewhere, you can tell a lot about the purpose of a nation’s military by its force structure.

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Watch the Story Change and Unfold

The initial headline:

“China ‘seizes US vessel’ in S China Sea” (link) isn’t quite deliberately deceptive, though if you look at the page the first thing you see is a great big white non-military-looking ship; you have to read in more detail to realize that it’s a drone that was seized.

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I Wonder if it’s Real

I stumbled on this back when the “news” first broke and concluded it was a “wait and see” kind of thing. I’m still waiting and I still haven’t seen. Allegedly someone bought one of William Shakespeare’s books on Ebay for $400.

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