I just saw an amazing competition. The best Rubic's Cube solvers in the world were at the Exploratorium today. I was there as usual as a volunteering making toys with kids. Throughout the afternoon bigger crowds gathered around the Rubic's Cube area. The ways it worked was that each competitor would give their cube to the staff who would set each cube to the same random configuration. Then each competitor would solve their cube as fast as possible. The fastest guy, Macky, could finish in ~15 seconds. He always wears a blue hat bearing his name. This 15-year old teen just moved from Japan to Pasedena to be near the Rubic's Mecca--Cal Tech. The slowest solvers took thirty seconds. Macky easily won the 3x3x3 glamour event, but other participants could compete with him at the 4x4x4 (80sec), 5x5x5 (160sec), blind, a fewest moves events. I don't understand how they could solve it blind. Macky, like all but one of the others, uses Jessica Fridrich's solving method, which focuses on rows. Jessica was fast, but twice her cube broke during competition. The crowd gasped each time, just like when a figure skater falls. Lars Petrus's corner method requires fewer turns, but it also requires more thought, and is thus slower (20-30 seconds). When finished, they spiked the solved cube on the table like they had just scored a touchdown. It was better than TV!

Along with long tail and the broader thing called disintermediation, one of the biggest qualitative differences between physical retailing and internet retail is the ability to directly measure the effectiveness of advertising. With Google ads for my own commercial site, I can tell exactly how much advertising money each sale has cost me. Jeff Bezos describes the same thing on a bigger scale:

About three years ago [Amazon.com] stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets - Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis - to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. So we put all that money into lower product prices and free shipping. That has significantly accelerated the growth of our business.

The one thing that may eventually kill that revolting thing called the television commercial is hard evidence that it is not cost-effective. We can only hope that time comes before our civilization is gone.

CNN Will Cancel 'Crossfire' and Cut Ties to Commentator
By BILL CARTER

Published: January 6, 2005

CNN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, "Crossfire," the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night.

[...]

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

[...]