But the Kauffman Foundation has done some research on the ages of entrepreneurs which they announced earlier this summer. Take a look at the chart below. First, I apologize for how hard it is to read, Edward Tufte would not be pleased (and if you don’t know who Edward Tufte is then rush and buy “The visual display of quantitative information” immediately, and then perhaps his other books too).

The chart shows how recently, if anything, older entrepreneurs have been increasing. But at the very least is shows that there are plenty of entrepreneurs at all ages.

Of course there are entrepreneurs who are even younger too. My son works for YouTube and the most popular channel there is an annoying teenage kid called Fred who speeds up his voice. He is on track to be the first YouTube millionaire and is currently making over $50,000/month by selling ads and merchandize. There are 1.5M people subscribed to his channel.

Talking of being entrepreneurial, here’s one of my ideas. Most sites on the internet are largely developed by people for people like themselves, at least initially. On this basis I think older retired people must be an underserved demographic. They are also the richest age-group (in most countries there is a vast transfer of money from young to old going on in ways that will not be sustainable for the current younger generation by the time they are old). And they have lots of time, which is a scarce commodity. And many of them, although not all, are online. So I haven’t managed to think of a great idea but I firmly believe that this is a great place to look for an opportunity.

So entrepreneurs come in all ages although the kids that make it big seem to get all the publicity.

However, things have not gone well and the OLPC has laid off over half their staff and appears to be in a death spiral. It turns out that it is the Toyota Prius of education, better at making rich westerners feel good than having any actual impact.

I think there are three problems. Firstly, in most of the world people access the net through their phone and not through a PC. It is similar to the way Iridium failed because, despite its technical brilliance, everyone already had a mobile phone by the time Iridium was available. By the time OLPC was available everyone already had a mobile phone. Obviously not everyone, but if they were going to get something that was it.

Second, there is absolutely no evidence that computers in education improve educational standards (nor, by the way, small class sizes, nor universal pre-school education: both are good for employees in education though so I’m sure we’ll get lots more of both). There is even a certain amount of evidence that they have the opposite effect by adding a distraction for teachers. For basic education (the three Rs of Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) computers can’t do much except perhaps for drills and apparently not in a way that helps. For more advanced stuff, they don’t do a lot except allow access to the richness of the net, and for that computers don’t have a lot of advantage over phones.

Thirdly, if you are going to spend money on kids’ education in really poor countries, what do you think the most important thing you could spend some money on would be? It turns out that anti-worming pills is probably the answer. Nearly 2 billion people (1/3 of the world) suffer from intestinal worms and they are a major reason that kids have high absentee rates: they are sick a lot. Spending 50c per child increases school attendance by 25%. Bed nets wouldnt go amiss either in the malarial zones ($10 each).

So an OLPC computer (which actually costs $200) could increase attendance of 400 children by 25%. Now that’s an increase in education. As is so often the case, the glitzy solution is much less useful than something comparatively boring. It’s like that number that $20B is all that it would take to give everyone in the world clean drinking water. So little…why arent we doing it?

The first great thing, especially when traveling, is it will hold a more books than you want to worry about. It will apparently hold thousands but I prefer just to keep a couple of dozen max that I’m either reading or have on deck to read.

The screen is really good for reading provided it is light. It is really high contrast, not quite as good as paper but close. It works well in bright sunlight since it is reflective. However, there is no backlight so you can’t read in the dark, you need a light to reflect. The screen is slow to update which isn’t a problem when reading a normal book, a quarter of a second or so when you turn the page is fine, quicker than turning a paper page.

However, any book like a reference book or a travel guide that you want to jump around in isn’t really a good match for the Kindle. The screen update is too slow and the navigation just isn’t rich enough (partially because the slow screen makes a good on-screen user interface pretty much impossible). Nor is it good for any book that you want to skip chunks of. I tried reading 1000 records to hear before you die and it was painful when I came to a record (modern jazz say) that I wasn’t interested in so I wanted to skip 4 or 5 pages to the next record.

The fact that you can download for free the first few chapters of any book Amazon sells (on Kindle, not all books are available) is great. You really can get into a book a certain amount before you commit to buy it. And when you do buy it, it is always cheaper than the paper version, usually $9.99. The integration with Amazon is really clean. If you decide to buy a book on your Kindle it will be there within a minute (it uses Sprint’s network although they hide that and call it Amazon’s Whispernet). You can also buy online on your PC (or iPhone) and it will upload it to your Kindle immediately.

The iPhone app works well too, and is synchronized with your Kindle so that you can read a book partially on your Kindle and partially on your iPhone and it will keep track of where you’ve got to. I’m not sure about the privacy implications of Amazon knowing just where you have got to in every book you have read, but they know so much about my reading habits anyway. I’m sure some lawsuit will want it all in discovery and there’ll be the usual arguments that the government can’t let you have privacy because terrorists and pedophiles might be detected by their reading habits on their Kindles.

Apart from the relatively slow screen that means that skipping around in a book doesn’t really work, the thing I miss most compared to a paper book is that there is no way to tell how far you are from the end of a chapter. At the bottom of the screen there is information that tells you how far you are through the book, but when I read a book on paper I tend to peek ahead a few pages and see how long the current chapter is before I decide whether to read one more chapter (or the rest of the chapter) or go to sleep, leave the café or whatever. That may be just me, we all have little idiosyncracies about how we read.

Chris Anderson’s book Free is available for Kindle. The main thesis of Free, as I’m sure you know, is that a lot of things that have real value are available for free (this blog, for instance, although the real value bit is in the eye of the beholder) because copying digital data is free. He put his money where his mouth is: Free on paper costs over $20 but when it first came out on Kindle it was free. I’m afraid if you didn’t get it during that first month then it’s now $9.99.

But mainly because French as it is spoken is not at all the way it is written. For example, correct French for we are going to eat is “nous allons manger” but spoken is much more likely to be “nous, on va manger” which literally translated is “we, one is going to eat.” There is a future tense “j’attendrai” that expresses that you will wait, but spoken it isn’t used and you say it the English way “je vais attendre” or “I am going to wait.” That’s before getting to the fact that the French have lots of slang (argot) that you never get taught in school. Weirdly the French even have some words that are obscene depending on context. For instance, un baiser is a kiss, but baiser as a verb is pretty much the equivalent of the F-word and considered just as obscene.

I really only learned to speak French when I went to live there. The best way to learn any foreign language is to (a) go and live in the country (b) get a native girlfriend or boyfriend. Since I was married when I went to France, I was only able to do the first of these! When you go and immerse yourself in the language like that a couple of things are surprising. First, you will dream in the foreign language. Dreaming seems to be some sort of mental garbage collection, and there’s a lot of foreign garbage to be collected when you are learning so much. The second thing, which occurs when you’ve been there for a longer time, is when you can’t remember the word for something in English but you know it in the foreign language. I remember trying to think of the English for a purchase-order but I’d forgotten what we called it; but I knew it was bon de commande in French.

French has genders, but unlike German at least there are only two. Cute things tend to be feminine: un batiment (masculine, a building) but une maison (feminine, a house). But like most foreigners you perfect the sound halfway between the masculine and feminine articles (le/la or un/une) and assume anyone listening will hear the correct one.

But the biggest problem is that French has lots of silent letters that are written but not pronounced. It is fairly easy when reading to ignore them but it is hard when writing to remember just what to add back in. My written French is terrible even though I now speak it pretty much fluently. The silent letters result in words being spelled totally differently but pronounced the same. For example, all of the following are pronounced identically: “ver” a worm, “vert” green, “vers” towards, “verre” a glass (not to mention “verres” glasses). And just to add to the confusion “vers” doesn’t just mean towards, it’s also a verse of poetry and the plural of the aforementioned worm.

Another good way of learning any language is to listen to the news. In France there is a radio program France-Info that puts out the news every 7 minutes with other stuff in between. Newsreaders speak clearly, fairly slowly, don’t use slang and generally are easy to understand. Since you already sort of know what is in the news much of the time (and if you miss it it’s coming round again in 7 minutes) it helps a lot when you first are learning. Trying to understand a French sitcom is the absolute opposite: spoken fast, slurred words, slang, jokes, a nightmare for the beginner.

You can take this too literally. I don’t mean buy a house on the first day of a 3 month assignment, that would be silly. But don’t put off doing things you would do if you lived there for an extended period. In particular, don’t put off making the effort to make friends and don’t put off learning at least the basics of the local language if it’s not one you speak.

My father was an officer in the Royal Navy so I was what in the US is called a Navy brat. We moved a lot, every year or two. If you take the view that it’s not worth bothering to make any friends because you will only be there for a couple of years, then you’ll never have any friends at all. Then, one day, when suddenly that two year assignment turns out to be five years, you wasted the first couple of years. I actually went to boarding school so most of my friends were there rather than at home; it’s good to keep at least one foot on the ground.

But then in my twenties and thirties I moved every few years. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, but I actually worked there for 6 months before school and for another 6 months afterwards, so I was there for four years not three. I went to Scotland to do a PhD and ended up living in Edinburgh for nearly seven years. I came to the US for what we intended to be a couple of years and it stretched to five years. Then I went on a two year assignment in France that turned out to be six years. Since then I’ve been back in the Bay Area but who knows if and when I might go somewhere next. The pattern in most of those moves is that I ended up living in places much longer than I expected and so the earlier I treated it as a significant period of my life rather than as a temporary assignment then the more I would get out of it.

For instance, in France I started to learn French before we went, rather than waiting to find out that my two year assignment turned out to be much longer. By the end I spoke it fluently. Nothing will make you “go nuts” (in Christian’s terminology) faster than sitting back saying “it’s not worth learning the language, making friends, exploring the area or anything, because I’m only here for a year.” Anything longer than you’d contemplate living out of a hotel room means that the golden rule should start to kick in.

I told this rule to a friend when he moved to work for me in France, having been temporarily based in Germany and then Paris. He said it really influenced him: he rented an apartment he wouldn’t mind living in for a long time, found a partner, learnt French fluently, took his driving test and so on. Last time I talked to him, he was still there, twenty years later.

When you learn scuba diving, you get taught how to help a buddy whose air has run out. You have a spare regulator for just this emergency. But, as my instructor pointed out, you only know for certain where one of them is. It’s in your mouth, so that’s the one you give your buddy. In the same way, the only thing you know for certain about where you will live is that you live here right now, so that’s what you have to build your life on.

Basically the way you roast beans is to apply heat while they are tumbled until they reach the desired level of doneness, then you cool them down as fast as you can so they don’t continue roasting. One problem is that in the middle of the process, the chemical reactions that the heat induces in the coffee become exothermic, or an alternative theory is that once all the water has been driven off the temperature can rise uncontrollably fast. It is a major problem in roasting that you will have fires when the roasting process runs away.

There are two critical points in roasting, known as first crack and second crack. These are points in the roasting when you can actually hear the beans crack and indicates a certain point in the roasting. Actually it is pretty hard to hear the cracks in a home roasting machine which noisly blasts hot air through the beans, but coffee roasters all talk about these points since they are well defined. Pros regard these, along with aroma, as a more useful way to assess doneness than color. Beans are roasted“to first crack is complete” or “until first snaps of second crack" and so on. So if you really want to bluff your way in coffee roasting, these are great terms to drop into the conversation!

Green unroasted beans do not deteriorate for about a year. Roasted beans start to deteriorate almost immediately. For the ultimate in coffee you want beans roasted no more than a week or two earlier, and only ground just before the coffee is made. Once roasted, coffee beans produce carbon dioxide. You’ll find if you put freshly roasted beans in a ziplock bag that the bag starts to expand. In a fresh espresso, that gas coming out during the brewing process is what makes the characteristic crema on top of the coffee and gives it its beguiling aroma. Old coffee doesn’t do that.

If you want to know more, including lots of pictures of coffee beans through the process, then look here.

Then you grind the beans and make coffee, Ritual Roasters tell you more than you want to know in this video about how to taste coffee (known as “cupping”) or how to make the perfect espresso (21g of coffee and ¾ oz of water). Next time you are in the city, treat yourself to the ultimate cup of coffee.

I lived in France for over 5 years in the late 1980s. Like all countries, France is a mixture of things some of which are admirable and some of which are frustrating.

It is a great place to live with a deep culture. Food and wine, in particular, are an integral part of the culture in way they are not in the US. My kids got a 3-course lunch every day in school, since it was regarded as part of a school’s job to educate children about food. Eating in France is truly a social experience as well as just refuelling. When I first moved to France I was recommended to read the books by "Major Thompson" an Englishman living in France and bemused by the local habits (actually Pierre Daninos using this as a way to poke fun at his countrymen). He would pick on little things that the French made big often without even noticing. For example, lunch is at noon exactly in France. And it really is. When Disney opened in Paris they hadn’t planned for the fact that every single French family would want to eat at precisely 12, not spread out their meal from 11 to 3, which resulted in longer lines to eat than to get into Space Mountain. Dinner is late (but not Spanish late) and some restaurants don’t even open until 8pm.

The French culture has at its base an assumption that French culture is clearly superior to every other culture. It tends to be rather backward facing though, and sometimes willfully ignorant. If you think of French food, you think of that wonderful cuisine in the little restaurant in the little village. All true…but did you know that the largest private sector employer in France is McDonalds. The reality and the perception are not quite in step. I lived 20 miles from the Italian border but it was almost impossible to buy Italian wine. After all, French wine is obviously better. In Summer, the south of France is inundated with everyone in Paris since the French largely vacation only in France since that is where the best food, the best wine, the best beaches and the best vacation are to be found.

France has a two-speed society. If you have a job, even more so if you have a job in the public sector, then life is good. You are well paid, you can’t be fired, you have a generous pension, you have maybe 8 or even 10 weeks of vacation. If you don’t have a job then you are probably not getting one any time soon, and this was true even before the current downturn. Companies will do everything they can to avoid hiring people since once hired they cannot be fired. You might have read that per-capita productivity in France is higher than the US. This is true, but it is not really something to be that proud of. It reflects the fact that using a lot of capital makes more sense than using people; with a high minimum wage marginal jobs (supermarket bagging, say) don’t get done at all. And, especially, only employed people are included in the equation and the 10% or so unemployed are not counted as inefficiently producing nothing. In the US right now we are really worried at the unemployment rate. It has been at about that level in France for 30 years. Further, that doesn’t count the 2M people, mostly young, who had to leave the country to find a job. London is "France’s" 6th biggest city, in that more French people live in London than all but 5 French cities.

France has a streak of racism beneath the surface. A Swedish friend of mine, who had messed up his form applying for a work permit, was helped through it by the official. “Of course, if you were Arab, we’d have just rejected it,” the official said casually, as if it was obvious that anyone would share that opinion. Many of the “Arabs” are in fact French. The rules for French citizenship are not quite as immediate as in the US (if you are born in the US you are American, period) but take a second generation (if you are born in France, you are French if either your parents are French or your mother was born in France). Nonetheless, many of the people who originally immigrated from Algeria and Morocco have been there for generations.

The combination of a welfare state, the difficulty of getting employment for anyone, and the racism meaning that getting employment if you are of north African descent is even harder, is a toxic combination. The word “banlieue” in French means suburb, but it has come to mean the areas of public housing where the “immigrants” end up. Unemployment among the young can be as high as 50% and there is a level of violence in these areas that makes some of them no-go areas even for the police, and worrying for anyone. I once had to pick up a prescription in Cannes in the middle of the night when one of my kids was sick. I called the police to find out where the duty pharmacist was (no 24 hour Walgreens in France; you need permission from the existing pharmacies to open a new one, so obviously it is never forthcoming). They refused to tell me, but would only meet me at a street corner so they could escort me to the pharmacy since it was in one of these danger areas.

So the France you think of and see as a tourist is real. The history, the food, the wine, the language, the countryside, the markets, the cheese. But behind the curtains is some disturbing stuff and some foolish public policy that needs to get addressed for France to once again be truly great.

If someone is single, then the advice is really easy. Go for it. Living overseas gives you the opportunity to do two things. The first is to experience a country in a way that you never will as a tourist or business visitor. And the second is that it will change your view of the US by seeing it from overseas and seeing how other people see it. You have no real commitments and may even be able to put all your belongings in a couple of suitcases.

If you have a partner who is going to move with you, then it is much better if they will be able to work too. Otherwise your partner will have a hard time unless there is a large expat community. And if there is a large expat community, they’ll have a hard time learning the lanaguage since they’ll not need to use it. Further, the almost colonial life of the expat wives (it’s usually wives) can be very bitchy especially if a lot of them work for just one or two companies. It reminds me of Kissinger’s remark about why academic politics is so vicious. “Because the stakes are so low.” But work permits might make it hard or impossible for them to work (for example, the spouse of an H-1 visa holder in the US is not allowed to work).

If you have small children, meaning not in high school, then I’d still advise you to go. Any disruption to their education caused by changes in school systems will be more than outweighed by the education they get simply from living overseas and being immersed in a different culture.

The only time that it may be unwise to accept a position overseas is if your children are in high school, especially if they are nearly finished, and need to get the right boxes ticked to get into the right college. Also, children at that age have deeper friendships that are less easily ruptured. I’ve seen people move overseas with teenagers and they’ve had a great time; I’ve also seen sullen teenagers (but then sullen teenagers are not thin on the ground anywhere).

Depending on where you might be living, having to learn a foreign language is something that I regard as an additional positive, not something negative, especially for Americans (and other English speakers. You’ve probably heard the joke about “What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.”) If you live in a foreign country for a few years, it is hard to avoid becoming fluent or at least passable in the language. If you have small children, they will amaze you by becoming almost instantly bilingual. My daughter started in the local French school speaking almost no French; within 6 months it was her language of choice for playing with her dolls or watching videos (in those days I could reel off the names of the seven dwarves in French). One bit of advice: when you return to the US they will become almost instantly monolingual again unless they get to keep using their foreign language.

You will have two sets of challenges when you arrive in a foreign country. One is that you won’t really understand the culture, and you will keep being caught out by people’s attitudes in ways that they don’t even realize are an attitude until it is pointed out. For example, here’s an American quirk only foreigners are really aware of. When you first meet them (and later too), Americans hate to leave you without an invitation to meet again—we must get together for a barbecue sometime—but usually they don’t really mean it. Other nationalities generally don’t do this, but it doesn’t mean they are less friendly.

The other challenge is practical: what is the equivalent of Safeway, Home Depot, where can I buy such-and-such a breakfast cereal (you probably can’t), where do I get a key cut. This last one caught me out in France when I was regarded as insane for expecting the hardware store where I’d just bought a lock to cut a key. Didn’t I know to go to the shoe repair shop for that? On the food front, the best is just to eat what the locals eat as much as possible and accept that it is going to be hard to get some things. If there is a large expat community then there will probably be some food store that sells American food. But it will be very expensive. And isn’t part of the fun of living in Germany, say, that you don’t have to have Skippy brand peanut-butter and can just have the wonderfully-named Erdnussmuss (ground-nut-mousse = peanut-butter) or the powerfully addictive Nutella (chocolate and hazelnut spread).

If any of you have lived overseas and would like to write a guest blog about your experience, then drop me an email (paul®greenfolder.com).

One of the biggest drivers of changes in relative values has been the exponential improvement in semiconductor technology due to Moore’s law. Even those of us in the business underestimate it. People just aren’t very good about thinking about exponential change. I can remember running the numbers and working out (a long time ago) that we should have workstations that ran at 10MIPS, with a megabyte of memory and 100 megabytes of disk. What didn’t even occur to me was that these would not be refrigerator-sized boxes, they would be notebook computers; or even Palm Pilots. And a high-end 1 BIPS “supercomputer” with 16 gigabytes memory and a 2 terabyte disk would have seemed totally unbelievable to me, even as I read the numbers off the graphs. But that’s what I’m typing this blog entry on.

If you are not in a business where exponential change is the norm, people find it really had to think about. For example, in How laypeople and experts misperceive the effect of economic growth people were asked what would be the overall increase in national income in 25 years if it grew at 5% per year. Over 90% underestimated and only 10% of them were even within 50%. Surprisingly, the experts weren’t much better than the laypeople. Quick, what is the percentage increase? See the end of the entry for the answer.

If the timescales are extended more then the numbers become even more dramatic. Alex Tabarrok in his TED talk shows that if the world GDP continues to increase at 3.3% per year for the rest of this century (below what it has been running at) then the average per capita income in the world will be $200,000. That’s the world average, not the US which should be in the millions. Our great-grandchildren will be much richer than us (if we manage to avoid catastrophes like blowing up the world).

However, there is also a problem with our thinking when going the other way. Those of us in electronics and semiconductor tend to think other industries are basically like ours, with R&D driving an underlying exponential growth and thus the accompanying fast upgrading of old equipment. Battery technology, for example, doesn’t increase exponentially in line with Moore’s law. It would be great if an AA battery could contain 1000 times as much power as it could back in 1990, let alone a million times as much as it held in 1970. You’d only need one for your Tesla roadster.

Our cell-phones don’t last too long, not because they break but because the new ones are so much more powerful. So we junk them after a couple of years, along with our computers. But that’s not true for cars. No matter what great new change in cars happens (better MPG, lower emissions, super airbags, whatever) then it takes 20 years for most cars to get it. Many of the cars that will be on the road in ten years are already on the road today. Power stations, bridges, railroads, aircraft are all on even longer timescales. For example, I just looked and over 60% of all Boeing 747s ever built are still active, including some that first flew in 1969 (complete list is here).

When part of life improves exponentially and part doesn’t is when we get the type of dissonance that Agatha Christie experienced from unexpected changes in relative costs. Amazingly, and luckily, disk drive capacity has improved even faster than Moore’s law even though it depends (mostly) on different technology breakthroughs. But things involving large amounts of physical stuff, like metal, just can’t change very fast. Henry Ford would be amazed at various features of our cars, but he’d still recognize them. Early computer pioneers wouldn’t have a clue about a microprocessor.

The answer to what would be the overall increase in national income if it grows at 5% per year for 25 years is about 250%. A good rule of thumb everyone should know is that if something increases exponentially (compound interest) by x% then it takes 70/x years to double. So in this case it will double in 14 years and almost double again in 28 years (so about 3.5x in 25 years, which is a 250% increase).

However, the answer to the actual chicken and egg problem seems obvious to me. Dinosaurs come from eggs. Reptiles come from eggs. All birds come from eggs. So if you take a chicken today and follow its ancestry back through egg and chicken all the way to primordial soup, then there is some point at which you have to decide that the creatures are sufficiently different from chickens that you no longer can call them chickens, you have identified the last chicken. For any reasonable definition of chicken, that creature came from an egg. So at that point you have a non-chicken laying an egg, and that egg hatching into a chicken. So the egg came first.

Going back up the line of ancestry has some interesting aspects. As you almost certainly know, only males have a Y-chromosome. So, if you are male, your Y-chromosome came from your father, not your mother. And his Y-chromosome came from your paternal grandfather. If you follow that line back thousands of generations, every one of those men has something atypical about them. They managed to avoid fatal childhood disease, avoid dying in war, find a mate and have a male child. In one sense that is really obvious, in another sense it is really deep. After all, the odds weren’t that great in the days with low life expectancy, high levels of violence in society and so on.

You may also know that the mitochondria in your cells come from your mother. So in the same way, they came from your maternal grandmother and so on all the way back. And all those women also managed to avoid dying young, less likely to die in war but more likely to die early in adulthood during childbirth, but they all managed to get through all that and have at least one daughter (who lived to adulthood and had a daughter of her own).

If you go back about 170,000 years (about 8,000 generations) you arrive at Mitochondrial Eve, the earliest ancestor (female, obviously) from which all humans today can trace their mitochondria. And about 60,000 years back (only about 3,000 generations) is Y-chromosomal Adam, the earliest ancestor from which all men inherit some of their Y-chromosome.

Firstly, note that these two lived in very different times, 100,000 years apart. There isn’t a single Adam and Eve from which everyone is descended in Biblical style. But we know, by definition, that all the other males in whatever group Y-chromosomal Adam lived failed to have an unbroken line of mail heirs, whereas he did. Similarly other female contemporaries of Mitochondrial Eve failed to have unbroken lines of female descendents, like she did.

The most recent common ancestor of all mankind is actually more recent than either of these two since that is a much less restrictive condition (the line of descent can pass through both males and females). Depending on which groups of people fail to make it in the future due to war, catastrophe or epidemic, the earliest common ancestor (and in a similar way the identity of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam) might get pushed back to different individuals as some lines of descent die out.