Category: Entrepreneurship

Movie Entrepreneurs Often Self-Finance Their Projects

(p. C4) The essential tragedy of movies is that they are wildly expensive to make and release. That’s one reason that filmmakers, especially those who want to control the means of production, have funneled their own money into their projects as long as movies have been around. Charlie Chaplin invested in his own work, as did John Wayne and Spike Lee. In 1979, when Coppola’s partly self-financed war film, “Apocalypse Now,” opened, he told The Times, “If I ever get the bucks that, say, George Lucas got from ‘Star Wars,’ I’d put every penny into changing the rules.” Lucas, who had invested his own money to help make “Star Wars,” used profits from that film to continue the series.

. . .

Weeks later, . . . all I could think about was something [Coppola] said in 1982. “It’s so silly in life not to pursue the highest possible thing you can imagine, even if you run the risk of losing it all,” he said. “You can’t be an artist and be safe.”

For the full story see:

Manohla Dargis. “Willing To Risk It All For Art.” The New York Times (Friday, June 8, 2024): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 6, 2024, and has the title “Francis Ford Coppola: ‘You Can’t Be an Artist and Be Safe’.” In the last quoted paragraph, I quote the numbers from the print version. The online version, as of the time I checked, had numbers from June 10, 2024.)

Neuroscience Evidence Suggests Knowledge Can Be Nonverbal

You can know how to ride a bike, without you being able to explain how to ride a bike. Michael Polanyi’s famous bike example shows that some actionable (“tacit”) knowledge can be nonverbal. Our dachshund Walter knows (nonverbally) that when I get the watering can from the top of the refrigerator, he is likely to be able to run out of the door to the deck with me soon. A dog can have nonverbal knowledge. In some areas of knowledge, most especially in medicine, we often mandate that action is only allowed based on verbal knowledge, and even more narrowly, on a particular kind of verbal knowledge, randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs). Outcomes outcomes would be better and quicker if we allowed action on all kinds of knowledge.

(p. D5) Dr. Fedorenko . . . [is] a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., using brain scanning to investigate how the brain produces language. And after 15 years, her research has led her to a startling conclusion: We don’t need language to think.

. . .

The scientists . . . ran studies to pinpoint brain circuits that were involved in language tasks, such as retrieving words from memory and following rules of grammar. In a typical experiment, volunteers read gibberish, followed by real sentences. The scientists discovered certain brain regions that became active only when volunteers processed actual language.

Each volunteer had a language network — a constellation of regions that become active during language tasks. “It’s very stable,” Dr. Fedorenko said. “If I scan you today, and 10 or 15 years later, it’s going to be in the same place.”

The researchers then scanned the same people as they performed different kinds of thinking, such as solving a puzzle. “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits,” she said.

In a paper published Wednesday [June 19, 2024] in Nature, Dr. Fedorenko and her colleagues argued that studies of people with brain injuries point to the same conclusion.

Strokes and other forms of brain damage can wipe out the language network, leaving people struggling to process words and grammar, a condition known as aphasia. But scientists have discovered that people can still do algebra and play chess even with aphasia.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Is It Still a Thought If It’s Not in Words?” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 25, 2024): D5.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed word, and bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 19, 2024, and has the title “Do We Need Language to Think?” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The Nature paper co-authored by Fedorenko, and mentioned above, is:

Fedorenko, Evelina, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Edward A. F. Gibson. “Language Is Primarily a Tool for Communication Rather Than Thought.” Nature 630, no. 8017 (June 20, 2024): 575-86.

Polanyi’s tacit knowledge is different from Hayek’s local knowledge, although they are both important and are often discussed together. Michael Polanyi’s description of “tacit knowledge” can be found in:

Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966.

Dick Nunis Was Resolved That Walt Disney’s “Dreams Would Live On”

(p. C3) When Disneyland opened in 1955, it was, in many ways, a disaster: There were rides out of service, restaurants that ran out of food, soft asphalt that consumed the heels of women’s shoes—all of it broadcast on national television.

Little wonder, then, that there was trepidation as the Walt Disney company approached the 1971 opening of the far more ambitious Walt Disney World, especially as the word spread that it might not open in time. So, when Dick Nunis, the head of operations at the parks in Anaheim and Orlando, took control of the project, he was given carte blanche to do whatever it took to open the gates on Oct. 1.

. . .

Nunis, who died Dec. 13 [2023] at the age of 91, fired contractors who got in the way, held meetings at 5 a.m. and put signs up all over the property that said the park would open on Oct. 1. He made sure construction workers knew that their families were invited to the park a week before opening. He flew palm trees in on helicopters the night before the gates opened.

Not only did he understand the logistics of what it would take to hire thousands of employees, motivate construction workers and oversee the myriad details of opening a resort, he had worked closely with Walt Disney for a decade and knew how the company’s founder and creative visionary—who had been dead for almost five years—would have wanted it done.

“He understood the culture that Walt wanted there,” said Sandy Quinn, who started as marketing director of the resort years before it opened. “Walt didn’t want employees, he wanted a cast. He didn’t want customers, he wanted guests. They weren’t uniforms, they were costumes. And it was a mindset.”

Nunis didn’t just get the Magic Kingdom and the first phase of Disney World open as planned. He spent his 44-year career at Disney opening and overseeing parks around the world, and acting as a steward of Walt Disney’s philosophies as the company grew in the decades after his death in 1966.

. . .

“I had no idea at the time, but in those early years with Walt, he was looking for someone he could mentor by nurturing, challenging, and testing, to ensure that his ideals and those dreams would live on,” Nunis wrote in his memoir. “He was looking for an ‘apprentice.’ As that apprentice, my role and my life expanded beyond what I had ever imagined.”

. . .

Mary Nunis said that although the couple visited Walt Disney World on occasion after he retired, he didn’t walk the park as he had for the more than 40 years he was with the company, which she believed was because he wouldn’t be able to handle seeing something he wanted to change and not be able to change it. But he remained fiercely loyal to Walt Disney and his ideas.

“He just loved Walt Disney,” Mary Nunis said, “and knew that dream was what he wanted to try to maintain.”

For the full obituary, see:

Chris Kornelis. “Dick Nunis Got the Magic Kingdom Open.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024): A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date January 5, 2024, and has the title “Dick Nunis, Walt Disney’s ‘Apprentice’ Who Got the Magic Kingdom Open, Dies at 91.”)

Nunis’s memoir, mentioned above, is:

Nunis, Dick. Walt’s Apprentice: Keeping the Disney Dream Alive. Los Angeles: Disney Editions, 2022.

“A Major Environmental Group” Will Fund Geoengineering Research

(p. A18) The Environmental Defense Fund will finance research into technologies that could artificially cool the planet, an idea that until recently was viewed as radical but is quickly gaining attention as global temperatures rise at alarming rates.

The group hopes to start issuing grants this fall, said Lisa Dilling, associate chief scientist at E.D.F., who is running the project. She said research would focus on estimating the likely effects in different parts of the world if governments were to deploy artificial cooling technologies.

. . .

The Environmental Defense Fund has previously expressed skepticism about techniques like these. But Dr. Dilling says the discussion about ways to cool the planet isn’t going away, regardless of opposition. “This is something that I don’t think we can just ignore,” she said.

The group will fund what is sometimes called solar radiation modification, or solar geoengineering, which involves reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space. Possible techniques involve injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, or brightening clouds to make them more reflective.

. . .

That a major environmental group like the Environmental Defense Fund is investing in solar geoengineering research sends a powerful message, said Larry Birenbaum, a partner at the LAD Climate Fund, one of the groups funding the research. He said his group had been urging environmentalists for years to pay attention to solar geoengineering.

“We’re not going to convince everyone about the necessity for research,” said Mr. Birenbaum, a former senior vice president at Cisco Systems. “The climate community in general needs to be convinced, because this is on the fringe now, and it deserves not to be.”

For the full story see:

Christopher Flavelle. “Experiments to Artificially Cool the Earth Are Getting a Major Backer.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): A18.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 10, 2024, and has the title “Environmental Group to Study Effects of Artificially Cooling Earth.”)

“America Is Where Everything Is Possible”

(p. 23) Remo Saraceni, a sculptor, toy inventor and technological fantasist best known for creating the Walking Piano that Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced on in a beloved scene of the hit 1988 movie “Big,” died on June 3 [2024] in Swarthmore, Pa. He was 89.

. . .

Remo Saraceni was born on Jan. 15, 1935, in Fossacesia, a city on the southern coast of Italy. His father, Giuseppe, worked with relatives to make shoes and other leather goods, and his mother, Filomena Carulli, managed the home.

Remo began inventing as a boy. His father got into trouble, he told The Chestnut Hill Local, when Remo turned a poster of Mussolini into a kite.

He took classes in electronics in Milan and worked as a radar specialist in the Italian military, but as a civilian he worked as a television repairman. He also started his own brand of large portable suitcase-like turntables. He came to the United States in 1964 for the World’s Fair and to seek a better livelihood — even though he spoke no English and had no American friends and no savings.

He again found work as a TV repairman and affixed a note to his bathroom mirror: “America is where everything is possible.”

For the full obituary see:

Alex Traub. “Remo Saraceni, 89; Invented Walking Piano in ‘Big’.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 16, 2024): 23.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date June 14, 2024, and has the title “Remo Saraceni, 89, Dies; Inventor of the Walking Piano Seen in ‘Big’.”)

Europe’s Regulations Reduce Economic Dynamism

(p. A23) Growth and dynamism: In 1960 the E.U. 28 — the 27 countries currently in the European Union, plus Britain — accounted for 36.3 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2020 it had fallen to 22.4 percent. By the end of the century it is projected to fall to just under 10 percent. By contrast, the United States has maintained a roughly consistent share — around a quarter — of global G.D.P. since the Kennedy administration.

Think of any leading-edge industry — artificial intelligence, microchips, software, robotics, genomics — and ask yourself (with a few honorable exceptions), where’s the European Microsoft, Nvidia or OpenAI?

. . .

How much state protection, in social welfare and economic regulation, are Europe’s aging voters willing to forgo for the sake of creating a more dynamic economy for a dwindling number of young people?

For the full commentary, see:

Bret Stephens. “This D-Day, Europe Needs to Resolve to Get Its Act Together.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 5, 2024): A23.

(Note: ellipsis added; bold font in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 4, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Alert Children Make “Staggering Discovery” That “Advances Science”

(p. D2) In the summer of 2022, two boys hiking with their father and a 9-year-old cousin in the North Dakota badlands came across some large bones poking out of a rock. They had no idea what to make of them.

The father took some photos and sent them to a paleontologist friend. Later, the relatives learned they’d made a staggering discovery: They’d stumbled upon a rare juvenile skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

. . .

The friend of the father who identified the fossil, Tyler Lyson, who is the museum’s curator of paleontology, said in a statement that the boys had made an “incredible dinosaur discovery that advances science and deepens our understanding of the natural world.”

. . .

In a video, the brothers, Jessin and Liam Fisher, 9 and 12, and their cousin, Kaiden Madsen, now 11, said that they were busy hiking and exploring when they first came across the bones and had no inkling they could be so special. “I didn’t have a clue,” Jessin says in the video. At first, he added, Dr. Lyson believed they belonged to a duck-billed dinosaur.

For the full story see:

Livia Albeck-Ripka. “Family Discovery: Stumbling Upon a Tyrannosaurus Rex In the Badlands of North Dakota.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): D2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 10, 2024, and has the title “Family Discovers Rare T. Rex Fossil in North Dakota.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The study co-authored by Camarós, and mentioned above, is:

Tondini, Tatiana, Albert Isidro, and Edgard Camarós. “Case Report: Boundaries of Oncological and Traumatological Medical Care in Ancient Egypt: New Palaeopathological Insights from Two Human Skulls.” Frontiers in Medicine 11 (2024) DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1371645.

On the antiquity of cancer, see also:

Haridy, Yara, Florian Witzmann, Patrick Asbach, Rainer R. Schoch, Nadia Fröbisch, and Bruce M. Rothschild. “Triassic Cancer—Osteosarcoma in a 240-Million-Year-Old Stem-Turtle.” JAMA Oncology 5, no. 3 (March 2019): 425-26.

Biden’s Tax and Regulation Plans Shift “Demonized” Silicon Valley Toward Trump

(p. B1) In 2021, David Sacks, a prominent venture capital investor and podcast host, said former President Donald J. Trump’s behavior around the Jan. 6 [2021] riot at the U.S. Capitol had disqualified him from being a future political candidate.

At a tech conference last week, Mr. Sacks said his view had changed.

“I have bigger disagreements with Biden than with Trump,” the investor said. Mr. Sacks said he and his podcast co-hosts were working on hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, which could include an interview for their “All In” show.  . . .

Such public support for Mr. Trump used to be taboo in Silicon Valley, which has long been seen as a liberal bastion. But frustration with Mr. Biden, Democrats and the state of the world has increasingly driven some of tech’s most prominent venture capitalists to the right.

. . .

(p. B5) Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, the investment firm founded by Mr. Thiel, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted. This month, Mr. Trump made a virtual appearance at a venture capital conference in Washington. There, he thanked attendees for “keeping your chin up” and said he looked forward to meeting them.

“Four years ago you had to issue an apology if you voted for him,” Mr. Asparouhov wrote on X.

Mr. Sacks, Mr. Palihapitiya and Founders Fund did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia Capital declined to comment.

The comments and activity by the group of tech investors are particularly noticeable given Silicon Valley’s blue background.

. . .

The . . . “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

That feeling has hardened under President Biden. Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March [2024] to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.

Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats, a person familiar with the situation said. The dinner was earlier reported by Puck.

For the full story see:

Erin Griffith. “Silicon Valley Notables Are Shifting to the Right.” The New York Times (Friday, May 24, 2024): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2024, and has the title “Some of Silicon Valley’s Most Prominent Investors Are Turning Against Biden.”)

After Safe Drinking Water, Vaccines Were the Second “Most Successful Medical Interventions of the 20th Century”

(p. B11) Dr. Paul D. Parkman, whose research was instrumental in identifying the virus that causes rubella and developing a vaccine that has prevented an epidemic of the disease in the United States for more than 50 years, died on May 7 [2024] at his home in Auburn, N.Y., in the Finger Lakes region. He was 91.

. . .

In 1966, Dr. Parkman, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr. and their collaborators at the National Institutes of Health, including Maurice R. Hilleman, disclosed that they had perfected a vaccine to prevent rubella. Dr. Parkman and Dr. Meyer assigned their patents to the N.I.H. so that the vaccines could be manufactured, distributed and administered promptly.

“I never made a nickel from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everybody,” he said in an oral history interview for the N.I.H. in 2005.

President Lyndon B. Johnson thanked the researchers, noting that they were among the few who could “number themselves among those who directly and measurably advance human welfare, save precious lives, and bring new hope to the world.”

Still, after Dr. Parkman retired from the government in 1990, as director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, he expressed concern about what he called the unfounded skepticism that persisted about the value of vaccines.

“With the exception of safe drinking water, vaccines have been the most successful medical interventions of the 20th century,” he wrote in 2002 in Food and Drug Administration Consumer, an agency journal.

For the full obituary see:

Sam Roberts. “Paul D. Parkman, 91, Researcher Whose Work Helped to Eliminate Rubella.” The New York Times (Friday, May 24, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 21, 2024, and has the title “Dr. Paul Parkman, Who Helped to Eliminate Rubella, Dies at 91.”)

The 2002 article by Parkman mentioned above is:

Parkman, Paul D. “We Can’t Forget the Value of Vaccines.” Food and Drug Administration Consumer 36, no. 4 (July-Aug. 2002): 40.

Private-Sector Experimentation Versus Washington Inertia in the Fight for Longer Life

(p. A15) Amid today’s technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that several decades have passed since a single innovation has dramatically raised the quality of life for millions of people. Summoning a car with one’s phone is nifty, but it pales in comparison with discovering penicillin or electrifying cities. Artificial intelligence is being heralded as the next big thing, but a cluster of scientists, technologists and investors are aiming higher. In the vernacular of Silicon Valley, where many of them are based, their goal is nothing less than disrupting death, and their story is at the center of “Immortality, Inc.” by science journalist Chip Walter.

. . .

That is the backdrop to Mr. Walter’s absorbing story, which he begins with a visit to Alcor, the Arizona-based organization that says it preserves corpses at minus 124 degrees Celsius “in an attempt to maintain brain viability after the heart stops.” (Current “patients” include baseball legend Ted Williams.) While this life-extending strategy, known as “cryonics,” is often ridiculed, the individuals profiled in “Immortality, Inc.” are high-status, highly regarded figures whose initiatives can’t be easily dismissed. What links them, writes Mr. Walter, is that “they are all troublemakers at heart.” They believe that the “conventional approaches” of most medical researchers and practitioners are, “at the very least, misguided.”

. . .

While “Immortality, Inc.” is focused on aging and the efforts to defy it, the book is also a gripping chronicle of private-sector experimentation and ingenuity in the face of inertia in Washington. “As recently as five years ago,” Mr. Walter writes, “the great pashas at [the National Institutes of Health] . . . looked upon aging research as largely crackpot.” He faults the Food and Drug Administration for refusing to classify aging as a disease. As a result, clinical trials—the foundation of medical research—can’t be conducted.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; Birthdays Without End.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 27, 2020 [sic]): A15.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 26, 2020 [sic], and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Immortality, Inc.’ Review: Birthdays Without End.”)

The book under review is:

Walter, Chip. Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2020.

Species Shifting Their Range Due to Climate Change May Have Enabled the “Playing Around With Resources” That Invented Farming

(p. D6) In the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the Fertile Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a region known as the southern Levant. “The model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

But in recent years, Dr. Zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. Their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same time. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, for example, Dr. Zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago.

People may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too.

In the 1980s, Dani Nadel, then at Hebrew University, and his colleagues excavated a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It consisted of half a dozen brush huts. Last year, Dr. Nadel co-authored a study showing that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. A stone blade found at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun.

“We got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,” Dr. Zeder said. “Now we really understand there was this long period where they’re playing around with resources.”

Many scientists have suggested that humans turned to agriculture under duress. Perhaps the climate of the Near East grew harsh, or perhaps the hunter-gatherer population outstripped the supply of wild foods.

But “playing around with resources” is not the sort of thing people do in times of desperation. Instead, Dr. Zeder argues, agriculture came about as climatic changes shifted the ranges of some wild species of plants and animals into the Near East.

Many different groups began experimenting with ways of producing extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “The First Farmers.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 18, 2016 [sic]): D1 & D6.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 17, 2016 [sic], and has the title “How the First Farmers Changed History.”)

The 2015 study co-authored by Dani Nadel and mentioned above is:

Snir, Ainit, Dani Nadel, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Yoel Melamed, Marcelo Sternberg, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Ehud Weiss. “The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long before Neolithic Farming.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 7 (July 22, 2015): e0131422.