Start-up junkies

If you always wondered what life is like in a start-up (maybe before starting your own?), “Start-up junkies” might just be the show for you. It is a documentary which chronicles the growth of a real Seattle-based start-up, “Earth-Class Mail”, in 24-minutes installments. Earth Class Mail’s vision is to deliver your postal mail through the web. I have watched 3 episodes so far, and found it pretty entertaining to watch. It was especially interesting to me, because it provided a window into two aspects I haven’t experienced, even though I spent the previous five years working in a start-up in the silicon valley. Applied Strategies was fully self-funded, so it never had to go through the whole VC funding mating dance - and after watching it unfold, I am glad it didn’t… The other aspect I enjoy is the click-and-mortar nature of their business, which mixes cutting-edge technology with old-school artifacts like giant mail warehouses; it introduces a nice extra level of complexity: adjusting a software prototype is way easier than modifying the way a physical “factory” operates!

Order without design

I was looking into some information on simulation techniques a few days back, and stumbled across this quote about social sciences in a presentation by Prof. Klaus G. Troitzsch.

“the problems which they try to answer arise only in so far as the conscious action of many men produce undesigned results, in so far as regularities are observed which are not the result of anybody’s design. If social phenomena showed no order except in so far as they were consciously designed, there could be no room for theoretical sciences of society. . . It is only in so far as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation.”

Excel, named ranges and INDIRECT()

I am just wrapping up a project which involved adding some new functionality to an existing Excel financial model. The model was fairly typical: in a nutshell, it contains financial forecasts for every product of a company, and aggregates the results into the overall value of the portfolio of products.

One aspect which ended up being pretty tedious was the creation of summaries. The spreadsheet was very nicely structured; it made good use of named ranges to describe input variables - but it also used them heavily in output summaries. As it turns out, this is error-prone and makes the maintenance and reorganization of sheets quite a hassle.

So I struggled for a while with this issue, and came up with a way to build summaries in Excel using a different technique; it relies on the INDIRECT function, and offers a few interesting benefits.

Switching to BlogEngine.Net

If you have experienced any weirdness with this blog over the past few days, I apologize - and will have to ask you to please bear with me for a little more: I have just spent part of the week-end switching from DasBlog to BlogEngine.Net. The brunt of it is done now (I reached the mythical “it’s 80% finished” point), but I still have to complete porting my old posts and review their formatting.

Are you more Chimp or Bonobo?

Discovery.com has an interesting piece on a recent study of the risk attitude of chimpanzees and bonobos. The experiment was conducted the following way:

The apes had to choose between two upside-down bowls. One was the “safe” bowl, which always covered four grape halves.The other was the “risky” bowl, which covered anything between one and seven grape halves.