How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  15 In 1998, Viacom asked the two men: Quotations and details about the making of the South Park movie from Pond, 2000.

  16 In 2006, Peter Skillman, an industrial designer: TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) 2006. Video at http://​bit.​ly/​skillmanTED.

  17 developed with Dennis Boyle: Skillman gives details on the genesis of the marshmallow challenge on the TED website at http://​bit.​ly/​skillmanbackground.

  18 Creative professional Tom Wujec confirmed this: Wujec’s slides, and a talk he gave at the 2010 TED conference, at http://​bit.​ly/​wujecTED.

  19 “Several teams will have the powerful desire”: From Wujec’s marshmallow challenge instructions at http://​bit.​ly/​marshmallowinstructions.

  20 “Although children’s use of tools”: Quotations from Vygotsky, 1980.

  21 In 1954, something unprecedented happened: Cornwell, 2010.

  22 Before microsociology, the dominant assumption: Model adapted from David McDermott’s website Decision Making Confidence at http://​bit.​ly/​mcdermottdavid.

  23 Sociologist Erving Goffman called the moves: Collins, 2004.

  24 the average office worker attends: Data from my own online survey of 123 self-described “office workers,” working at various levels of their organizations.

  25 the more creative an organization is: See Mankins et al., 2014.

  26 “I was assigned to work with Bill Mylan”: Johnson, 1990.

  27 In 1966, Philip Jackson: From Jackson, 1966: “The other curriculum might be described as unofficial or perhaps even hidden, because to date it has received scant attention from educators. This hidden curriculum can also be represented by three R’s, but not the familiar one of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. It is, instead, the curriculum of rules, regulations, and routines, of things teachers and students must learn if they are to make their way with minimum pain in the social institution called the school.”

  28 “The crowds, the praise, and the power”: Jackson quotations in this section from Jackson, 1968.

  29 “The personal qualities”: The complete quotation from Jackson is:

  “The personal qualities that play a role in intellectual mastery are very different from those that characterize the Company Man. Curiosity, as an instance, is of little value in responding to the demands of conformity. The curious person typically engages in a kind of probing, poking, and exploring that is almost antithetical to the attitude of the passive conformist. The scholar must develop the habit of challenging authority and questioning the value of tradition. He must insist on explanations for things that are unclear. Scholarship requires discipline, to be sure, but this discipline serves the demands of scholarship rather than the wishes and desires of other people. In short, intellectual mastery calls for sublimated forms of aggression rather than for submission to constraints.”

  30 airplanes killed 2.2 million people: Wartime casualty figures are notoriously unreliable and always disputed. To quote statistical historian Matthew White (White, 2013): “The numbers that people want to argue about are casualties.” Here, 2.2 million is the sum of casualties and losses listed in the Wikipedia entry “Strategic Bombing During World War II” (http://​bit.​ly/​WW2bombing), which reflects the consenus of historians: 60,595 British civilians; 160,000 airmen in Europe; more than 500,000 Soviet civilians; 67,078 French civilians killed by U.S.-U.K. bombing; 260,000 Chinese civilians; 305,000–600,000 civilians in Germany, including foreign workers; 330,000–500,000 Japanese civilians; 50,000 Italians killed by Allied bombing. Adding these numbers together and taking the high end where there are ranges gives a total of 2,197,673. The sources for these numbers (all of which are listed in the entry itself) include Keegan, 1989; Corvisier and Childs, 1994; and White, 2003.

  31 fired three thousand shells for each bomber: This number is based on the efficiency of German 88mm guns, or “eighty-eights,” at destroying Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, which was 2,805 shells per bomber destroyed. Westermann, 2011, cited in Wikipedia at http://​bit.​ly/​surfacetoairmissiles.

  32 the Lockheed SR-72: Demonstrations of the SR-72 could begin in 2018, with initial flights in 2023, and full service in 2030, according to Brad Leland, Lockheed’s portfolio manager for air-breathing hypersonic technologies, in Norris, 2013.

  CHAPTER 9: GOOD-BYE, GENIUS

  1 whenever he removed his Quaker-style “wide-awake” hat: Galton recommends the wide-awake in his book The Art of Travel (Galton, 1872)—“I notice that old travellers in both hot and temperate countries have generally adopted a scanty ‘wide-awake’ ”—so I have assumed he may have worn one. The wide-awake is also known as the “Quaker hat.” Images at http://​bit.​ly/​wideawakehat.

  2 He wrote later that they were “savages”: Comments from Galton, 1872. For example: “Seizing Food—On arriving at an encampment, the natives commonly run away in fright. If you are hungry, or in serious need of anything that they have, go boldly into their huts, take just what you want, and leave fully adequate payment. It is absurd to be over-scrupulous in these cases.”

  3 in Britain, for example, an “E3” carcass is “excellent”: From the EC, or EUROP, classification grid in the U.K. Rural Payments Agency’s “Beef Carcase Classification Scheme,” available at http://​bit.​ly/​carcase.

  4 “The negro race has occasionally, but very rarely”: Galton, 1869.

  5 In 2010, the average person: According to the Global Burden of Disease 2010 study (Wang, 2013), the world average life expectency is 67.5 for men and 73.3 for women. The unweighted average of these two values is 70.4, which rounds to 70.

  6 “The power of population is indefinitely greater”: Malthus quotations from Malthus, 1798, and subsequent editions.

  7 famine declined as population increased: See Devereux and Berge, 2000, for a comprehensive study of famine in the twentieth century.

  8 the First and Second World Wars combined: Data from Pinker, 2010, which uses Brecke, 1999; Long and Brecke, 2003; and McEvedy and Jones, 1978 as sources.

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