Want to design the book cover for Tim Ferriss's new book? If you win, hope you're happy with a mere $250 first prize:

Best case scenario, you get $250, your cover on a huge international bestseller (awesome for a major portfolio jump), full cover credit, and all the perks that come with massive recognition. Worst case scenario, you give it a shot, have something new for your portfolio, but don’t get recognition or money.

Needless to say, this sparked a huge amount of protest in the comments. Ferriss responds:

For those who think I’m a jerk for offering the above, please feel free to protest by not submitting. Feel free to call me names, too. I find “sweetcakes” particularly offensive.

And again:

To the commenters who insist I’m exploiting the entire design community, I’d like to point out that, if you don’t participate by submitting, it is impossible for me to exploit you.

If a buyer makes a scandalously low offer, there's nothing unfair or exploitative about it: respond by declining the offer. In this case, lots of people want to submit bids, and there isn't that much to differentiate between entrants. If you can't find a higher offer, the odds are that the service you're providing isn't that valuable. It's not so much mean as it is a recognition of what services are worth. The argument is similar for high prices: if a gas station has unfairly high prices, go to a different gas station, or decline to buy gas. If every gas station has the same price, odds are that the price reflects the cost of extracting the gas from the ground and transporting it thousands of miles to its suburban destination. Very quickly, this principle works well for about 999 of 1000 prices, transactions, and contract offers. Some markets have fundamental problems, or take a while to find equilibrium prices, like the healthcare market. Unfortunately these market failures are the ones that get publicized

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I've been making some changes to the blog's design - what do you think? I wanted to make it readable, with a consistent style. Most Athenian grads will recognize the image in the header.

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Some games are better than others; here are some criteria for evaluating a game's strength. How easy would it be for computers to beat humans? I would rank basketball as the toughest game for a team of robots to win, followed by soccer. Baseball would be fairly easy for a team of robots to win. Computers can beat us at chess and checkers. This criteria was suggested by Andy McKenzie. What do you have to do to become really good? I prefer games that involve mastery of strategy over games that involve constant repetition of one activity to become better. In chess, for example, good players have to memorize thousands of opening book combinations. Good tennis players have to practice returning millions of serves so they can return a serve coming at them at 120 mph. Golf players have to hit millions of drives, baseball players have to hit millions of balls in the cage. How susceptible is the game to arbitrary refereeing decisions? This is soccer's main shortcoming; the referees have way too much influence. Same for figure skating. Tennis and baseball have largely solved these problems through technology. How hard is it to explain the game to a newcomer? Basketball, baseball, football, rugby etc are tough to explain to foreigners, and similarly it takes an amount of coordination and practice to become a passable player. Golf is immensely difficult for newcomers. How easy would it be for a newcomer to beat a pro? There is too much luck involved in a game of poker; it's nearly impossible for the best players to survive a field of 10,000 because the game demands they win multiple confrontations where the lower player has a 5%-20% chance of winning. Luck should be involved but not too much. Basketball is a good example - any shot has a chance of going in, and over the long run the team with a higher percentage will win. Soccer games are too dependent on luck; it's rare for teams to score 3 goals, and it's harder to distinguish between teams. How many different ways are there to achieve the target objective? In basketball, you can beat a team by playing tough defense, by getting every rebound, by shooting well, or by not turning the ball over. Every team has its strengths and weaknesses. Settlers of Catan is such a good board game because there are several different winning strategies. Does professional play discriminate among the population? The NBA has one player below six feet. Most players in the NFL and MLB are huge (and can move well). Golf and soccer tilt much more in the favor of people who have played for a long amount of time. Are the games the pros play just extensions of games kids play, where the participants are bigger and better? This is an extension of the robot question. In golf, baseball, and most board games the players do the same things over and over again, regardless of the level of play. Great soccer and basketball require advanced strategy and great teamwork. There are not that many great team games. Every position in football is boring, except for head coach and quarterback. Lacrosse involves too much standing around off the ball and too much emphasis on one-on-one play. I think that we can design better games than the ones we currently play, although it's hard to knock off favorites. Look at Monopoly, a game that takes 2-3 hours and has no real strategy, yet is one of the most popular around the world. Flirting and mating, the game men and women play when they grow up, may be one of the best games on the planet. The players are sorted ruthlessly. "The Game" also requires coordination.

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I'd like to learn more about writing/telling/speaking excellent stories. Besides holding readings at my local library, any suggestions about where to start? On a related note why aren't there more classes for this at school? Perhaps the Bible counts.

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As a kid, I loved building sets. I loved pouring out all the pieces, following the instructions and watching a giant machine evolve out of small parts. I still have a giant Rube Goldberg ball machine in the attic, with three different towers involved. I used to dream about making a pinball machine out of Knex but only made the flippers. KNEX controls the entire product; they manufacture the pieces, create the designs and box the kits, resulting in a pretty limited product line. In today's day that's not logical - if you sell a product where half the fun is in customization, and the other half is building the sets, why are they only selling designs they themselves created? Let users propose new designs and work with them to release manuals and custom kits. Give them a cut of the profits and you make the product much more interesting. Imagine surfing designs on the website , all in pictures and videos: four different ball factory designs, a car, a spider that moves, a working printing press, a working arm, a Turing machine, etc. Anything you want to build, you order with one click. Knex puts the necessary pieces in a bag, runs off the instructions and mails it - there should be close to constant returns to scale. They should be taking advantage of their most creative users' creations.

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Today at basketball camp the head coach at camp told a story to the campers about an extremely bright, talented kid from New Jersey. The kid was the valedictorian of his high school class, extremely bright, athletic, tall, good-looking etc. He had his pick of the Ivies, he's going to Yale to study Arabic. But he made one little mistake that cost him a lot; addressing the class at graduation, he told the school how for one assignment, he (K.) and his friend (T.) swapped the names on their papers - his friend (a C student) turned in K's work, with "T." written at the top, and got a C, but K. turned in T's work and got an A. Obviously telling the audience this at graduation was a dumb thing to do (always have at least one person look over your remarks first), and the kid's in a lot of hot water now, not to mention he pissed off all of his fellow students and teachers. But I think the mistake is one that a lot of teachers would make - a writing's "brand" is really important, and when we see the name at the top signaling quality work, we tend to think better of what we're about to read. If we really want to force kids to produce their best work, and give low-performing students a chance, all examined work needs to be evaluated blindly - teachers need to read it without a name attached. There's an argument that teachers should evaluate work while keeping in mind the ability of person who wrote the work, but that argument carries no truck with me - I think the brand/expectations effect far outweighs the latter effect. Furthermore, students should be held to the same standard. I have a lot of trouble talking to kids - I know that in every confrontation with a kid there are times when you need to be tough and times when you need to reassure and encourage, and that there's a correct thing to say, and carry yourself, in every situation, to get the kids to play hard, do what you want and accept your decisions. I am slower to pick up the right way to do things than most. I succeed because whenever I come across a new situation and don't handle it well, I ask someone what they would have done, remember it, and do it the next time the situation arises, building a sort of "response cache." For some people I feel like this skill comes naturally, but maybe I overestimate their skills when they had my level of experience (16 weeks of camp), and underestimate the deference given to adults, vs. 20-year olds. Like most things, the key is to practice, evaluate and improve every week.

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This practice should not really surprise anyone, but should be stopped:

"Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate has read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February - the largest spending bill in history - after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it, as law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University noted in National Review Online: “When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had ‘placeholders’ - blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.’’

Advantage: lobbyists, obfuscators and special interests. Steny Hoyer's complaining in the article above reminds me of my players in basketball camp, whining. If you and the other members of Congress are going to construct horrifically long bills, then yes, you do have to read them before you vote on them. Most great works are remarkably concise: the Bible, whose books tell full stories, but rarely run longer than 30 pages; the Constitution is only seven or eight pages long; the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, shorter than that; the Gettysburg Address two paragraphs. Brevity demands excellence; when lawmakers tack on extra pages every time they feel like it, the result is mediocrity and a reaming of the general public. The problem is that the community that benefits from an extra paragraph (extra funding for a specific project, or whatever) is concentrated, and extremely happy to see their lawmaker add the provision whereas the community that suffers (literally, everyone else) is diffuse, and hard to rally.

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