Now I love Phil even more.

On Pandalous I find a conversation about the "Greatest Literary Love Scenes" and posted there, this passage from For Whom The Bell Tolls (which I've never read): Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to now beyond all bearing up, up, up, and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them. If you know any other great ones, please post them in the comments!

Years ago I too was given a copy of A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes, one of the singularly least romantic books about romance, as evidenced by the quote, also read to me once, at the end of this story. I lasted only a week or two as an undergraduate semiotician.

It's been a long time since I've posted an unordered list, and since I'm already on a roll blogging today, here you go: Predictive Modeling Warns Drivers One Hour before Jams Occur "IBM is about to deploy a system that will predict traffic flow up to an hour before it occurs, giving travelers ample time to avoid trouble." Wow, how Minority Report. Scientific American used to be just at the limits of my powers of comprehension. Since when did they get so boring and laymanlike? I feel like I'm in a literary chasm between popular non-fiction and research papers I don't understand and there's nothing in between. OK, that petered out quickly. I'll try again soon.

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. -- Leo Rosten I was reading some of my old posts the other day, just to remind myself who I was (it's easy to forget!) and I realized that I used to write more personal, heartfelt blog posts. (I also think my interestingness peaked in 2003). Stewart and I used to have an argument, before we started the company that eventually became Flickr, of the importance of happiness vs. what I called "doing great things." "Doing great things" was ill-defined, and when I encountered the quote above on Nabeel's blog I thought Rosten did a good job of defining what it was. Not to slight happiness. Happiness is a kind of genius. It can be cultivated too, as genius can. Put in your 10,000 hours of happiness and you will be a veritable Mozart of Joy. Start now.

Fred Wilson and I, on the way back from an Etsy board meeting, were talking about how many entrepreneurs had dropped out of college. Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey -- the founders of Twitter -- are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And of course Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. As an angel investor, I've invested in two college dropout founders this month. What gives? College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar. Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company, and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes. A small number of people -- maybe in the high hundreds or low thousands -- have the knowledge of how to start and run a tech company, and things change so fast, only people in the thick of things have a sense of what is going on. Take a few years off and you're behind the times. Some publishers have asked Chris to collate his blog posts on entrepreneurship into a book, but he said, What's the point, it'd be out of date by the time it hit the bookstores. As Fred pointed out, the basic skills necessary to start a tech company -- design or coding -- are skills that can be learned outside of the academy, and are often self-taught. Industry knowledge can only be picked up by observing other startups and using their products, talking to other entrepreneurs, watching their presentations, attending conferences where they are speaking, and most importantly, building stuff yourself, and learning from peers who are doing it better than you are. Now that there are so many blogs, and so many entrepreneurs willing to share their experience and knowledge, it's a lot more accessible. You can even ask direct questions to people like Kevin Rose or me on formspring! I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all. There's no money in poetry, but then again, there's no poetry in money either.

Hunch is growing. We just closed a $12 million Series B funding led by Gideon Yu at Khosla Ventures, one of my favorite guys, whom I've known since he bought my prior company at Yahoo for a nickel and a smile. After Yahoo, Gideon was CFO at YouTube, heading up the $1.65 billion Google acquisition, then next was CFO at Facebook during the famous Microsoft investment (at a $15 Billion valuation!) and now is a partner with legends Vinod Khosla and Pierre Lemond at Khosla Ventures. Gideon is the world's most energetic and passionate guy; he came and talked to our whole team for several hours (in what we called the "reverse partner meeting") and will be joining us on our board. While we had enough cash in the bank to take us out almost another year -- we run a very capital efficient operation, 12 employees, some not even taking salaries they're so gung ho -- there was a lot of enthusiasm for our financing and we decided it was time to go turbo. So turbo we went. Hunch is like Amazon or Netflix recommendations, but for everything. To build the system, we needed a vast amount of data about people, their tastes and preferences, and the things that they like. Our ambition is to build the "taste graph" of the web, analogous to the "social graph", mapping every person on the web to every entity on the web (be that a hotel, or a tennis racket, poet, cookbook, etc.) and their affinity for that entity. You can see how you could take your Hunch taste profile and apply it to just about anything -- to find you a hotel in Dallas, or your true love on a dating site, or things you like on eBay or Etsy. We've spent the time since launch gathering that data, and we can now really build this out. You'll be seeing a bunch of new features coming soon! Psyched? Yes. Yes, we are. Techcrunch: Hunch Takes $12 Million From Khosla Ventures, Adds Former Facebook CFO To Board Of Directors All Things D: Hunch Gets It Right, Adds a $10 Million Series B Round Led by Khosla Ventures Paidcontent: Decision-Making Site Hunch Raises $12 Million

I was wondering at the picture of Heidegger's spatulate head on the cover of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, then noticed what seemed to be missing from the back of his skull was in fact his slicked-back hair, and noticed the mustache he is wearing in the style most commonly associated with Hitler. Given the subject of the book, this is certainly not an accident. I hadn't much followed Heidegger Nazi controversy, however the author of this book, Emmanuel Faye, believes that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a grey cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds", and that the vast literature on Heidegger continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a worldwide scale". That seems hyperbolic, but OK. I'd always been entertained by the very thing that seems to most frustrate philosophers about Heidegger, such as when he writes things such as "the Nothing noths", but now it seems that was not as harmless an entertainment as I had thought.

The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: "The greatness--and also the abyss--of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness." Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom. No wonder the cool kids wear black. Paul La Farge in Cabinet (via Bobulate) And I just let my Cabinet subscription expire, I've subscribed since the very first issue!

As with many people, I first encountered Que reste-t-il de nos amours by Charles Trenet in the beginning of Baisers volés, by François Truffaut, aka Stolen Kisses. Since the lyrics online are either wrong or incomplete, I'm posting them here, because I love this song. I translated it, below. .................... Ce soir le vent qui frappe à ma porte, Me parle des amours mortes Devant le feu qui s'éteint Ce soir c'est une chanson d'automne Dans la maison qui frissonne Et je pense aux jours lointains. Que reste-t-il de nos amours? Que reste-t-il de ces beaux jours? Une photo, vieille photo De ma jeunesse. Que reste-t-il des billets doux? Des mois d'avril, des rendez-vous? Un souvenir qui me poursuit Sans cesse. Bonheur fané, cheveux au vent, Baisers volés, rêves mouvants Que reste-t-il de tout cela Dites-le-moi Un petit village, un vieux clocher Un paysage si bien caché Et dans un nuage le cher visage De mon passé. Les mots, les mots tendres qu'on murmure Les caresses les plus pures Les serments au fond des bois Les fleurs qu'on retrouve dans un livre Dont le parfum vous enivre, Se sont envolés pourquoi? .................... Tonight, the wind that knocks at my door tells me of love that died Before the fire which turns to embers. Tonight, an autumn song In a shivering house I think of days long ago. What remains of our love? What remains of those beautiful days ? A photograph, an old photograph of my youth What remains of the love letters? The months of April, the rendezvous? A memory that haunts me without ceasing. Faded happiness, wind in our hair Stolen kisses, a living dream What remains of all that Please tell me. A small village, an old clock tower A hidden countryside And in a cloud the beloved face of my past. The words, the tender murmured words The truest caresses The oaths sworn deep in the woods The flowers found in a book whose perfume intoxicates you. Why did they fly away?

Matt Mireles advances the classic arguments for why NYC is not a good place for a startup in his piece for Business Insider -- raising money is hard, and talent is scarce -- but I'd like to make a couple of points to the contrary: VC and Wall Street exist as almost completely different worlds. You can exist within one without ever encountering the other. In Matt's post it seems as if the two are competing for investments or mindshare. They aren't. They may be competing for engineers, but that is less and less the case. Thank you financial meltdown! I've seen a ton of startups doing their seed funding here, as part of Founder Collective and while it's not uncommon for a gang of NYC-based angels to group together and invest in a company, it's significantly more common for the angels to be a mix of east and west coast angels. I mean, we all talk to and know each other coast-to-coat -- Hunch, New York-based -- has significant angel investment from out west. For the time being NYC angel investing is a subset of the larger, Silicon Valley dominated angel investment world. Being away from the Valley can be an advantage. A kind of groupthink can start to occur in the Valley if you're not careful and it's hard to see outside of it. We started Flickr in Vancouver, BC -- not known as a hotspot for world innovation -- and yet we were able to attract New York and Silicon Valley angel investors in our very early stages. Raising money is hard *all over*. Doesn't matter where you are. But if you build something people want, you will find investment. Matt is right about a lot of things: He implies that you shouldn't hire people out of Wall Street jobs, and I totally agree. Their expectations are mismatched to startup life and all those cushy perks are completely absent. But the positive trend is that those kids just out of school who *would* have gotten sucked into Goldman Sachs are now significantly more likely to go into startups. We've gotten a bunch of recent grads at Hunch. Specialized technical talent *is* harder to find in NYC than in the Valley, though we've had a great amount of success recruiting people to come to New York from the Valley, especially at Etsy, which has been growing its engineering group over the past year. And Matt is absolutely right that what New York really needs right now is a Billion Dollar Company -- an eBay or a Google or a PayPal or a Facebook -- and an exit that releases all the people working there from their obligations and frees them to go forth and start new companies. PayPal's progeny are spectacular -- LinkedIn, Yelp, Slide, YouTube -- there needs to be something similar in New York.

When I came to this country, over twenty-five years ago, I was amazed that creationism was still taken seriously, and assumed that it would blow over. It never did, of course. I can't help but look at it as a left-over of a medieval mind-set unresponsive to overwhelming counter-evidence. At the same time, I must say that I don't think the recent wave of God-questioning rants have helped much. They have polarized the issue, whereas in my mind it is eminently possible to look at religion as a collective value system and at science as telling us how the physical world operates. Even though I am not religious myself, I think the conflict between science and religion is unnecessary and overblown. This seems very sensible. Recently a good friend of mine was arguing on behalf of religious abolitionists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and I felt similarly ill at ease. I've always thought within every religion lies the true, original religion, its pure and holy impulse -- no matter how corrupted by human failure, malignity and malevolence it persists. I'm a twice-annual unconfirmed and unchurched Catholic -- Easter and Christmas -- and I love the rituals. The rest of the interview, which has nothing to do with religion, is great.

One of my favorite talks at TED this year was Philip Howard's on four ways we could fix our horribly messed up and inefficient legal system. This would be huge:

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP -- if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. Today at TED David Cameron, according to Chris Anderson the "next PM of England" quoted the second half of this speech from Robert Kennedy.

[The Yequana] had a habit of telling a joke in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. Though some were snoring loudly, all would awaken instantly, laugh, and in seconds resume sleep, snoring and all. They did not feel that being awake was more unpleasant than being asleep, and they awoke fully alert, as when a distant pack of wild boar was heard by all the Indians simultaneously, though they had been asleep, while I, awake and listening to the sounds of the surrounding jungle, had noticed nothing.