I thought the internet panic over the new TSA pat-downs and body images was a bit of an overreaction. It turns out that the pat-down may be much better than the alternative, going through the back scatter imaging system. It seems the science is very untested on the risks of this system, and those risks could be quite real.

Check out this letter from concerned scientists to the government urging more testing.

Some key points they make:
– people compare the level of radiation to exposure in a chest x-ray or cosmic rays. But this is a totally different radiation. By design it doesn’t penetrate the skin — so while a chest x-ray just flies through you, this all just stops in the skin.
– all the analysis compares the dosage … Read More »

When I founded my first company, I referred to myself as “founder and CEO”, and in retrospect, I believe it was a mistake. Were I to do it over again, I would de-emphasize my founder status.

The benefit of keeping the founder title accrues more notably to more junior founders: if the company grows and over time people are hired above you, it offers ego compensation to keep that founder tag on your business card alongside “product manager”, if you’ve effectively been demoted from VP of Product. This seems less relevant for a CEO, who should get sufficient ego out of that title alone.

The reason I think it was a mistake to emphasize founder status is that I was essentially implicitly trying to say I was better than the other, non-founder employees. That I was special, and … Read More »