I’ve recently fallen in love with Dexter, the TV show about a serial killer who kills serial killers. I’ve got through 3 seasons in about a week and a half, and just starting my fourth. I realized after watching a few episodes that the show fulfills all of the criteria I have for a good TV show:

• A like-able, relatable main character
• A “cat-and-mouse” type story arch
• Unpredictable twists and turns
• Darkly comedic
• A well-planned out storyline, with resolutions at the end of every season (*cough* LOST; Heroes)
• Poses interesting ethical delimmas and forces you to ask yourself , “Is this right? What would I do in this type of a situation?”

The last one is a fairly important one. I find that a show can’t just be entertaining, it has to be intellectually stimulating, and Dexter is one that is.

If you’re familiar with concepts in ethics, and specifically ‘utilitarianism’ or ‘consequentialism’ — the belief that in any given decision, the consequence is what matters most, and what should be measured — the first thing you’ll notice about Dexter is that he’s a consequentialist. He believes that it’s justified to take a life in order to prevent more innocent lives to be taken, and for justice to be served to the previous lives there were.

A famous consequentialist dilemma is the one about being stuck in a lifeboat which can only contain 7 passengers when there’s 20 of you. What would you do? Would you throw the weak people off to give the strong ones a chance to row back to the shore? Would you randomly throw off some people so that it’s not unfair to some, while risking some certainty that people left will be able to row back to shore? Or would you just let everyone drown together and no one survive?

A consequentialist would choose the first option, because it’s rational in that ‘most human lives have the chance of being saved’ who could then ‘lead on to affect the world in a positive way making the world, consequentially, better off.’ The fact that you’ll essentially have to murder for this to happen isn’t a factor because in the end, you’re saving some lives as opposed to saving none.

Coming back to the show, through the episodes I’ve kept on asking myself, “Am I a consequentialist?”. While I feel totally justified with Dexter’s decisions, and support him in every kill of his, I’m not sure I would choose to push the weak people out of the boat, because put simply, I don’t think I could. While I would save lives in the end, I’d like to think that everyone on the boat is on the same boat, so to speak, and no life is worth saving more than the other.

So if you’re in the mood for some philosophical pondering, check out Dexter. I’m about to start season 4 now, and if it is as good as the others, I’d have to give it to Dexter to being the most consistently awesome show on television. 

If it’s a hit, this is the last time anyone will ever question Apple or Steve Jobs.

If it’s not, tablets will be officially dead.

I hated this year’s Oscars and it’s obvious why. But one thing that really got to me was best director. I thought I knew what this award was for — guess I was wrong.

Before it was given, the buzz was, “Oh, I hope it’s Bigelow! First woman ever! Yipeee!”. I don’t have a problem with women winning this spot — I hope a woman wins it every year. But to me, best director should be given to the director who was “responsible in a major way, as the director, for making a film (leaving apart the script, acting, technicalities) into what it turned out to be on celluloid.”

Let’s take two other fellow nominees: Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds and James Cameron for Avatar. Without these people, can you imagine their respective films even existing? I doubt anyone in this world would have the vivid imagination and historical knowledge to write and direct something like Inglorious, and add to that the technical-knowhow, curiosity, and drive for something at the scale of Avatar. Inglorious Basterds was Quentin Tarantino. Avatar was James Cameron. These people are true visionaries, pioneers, creative geniuses, directors, and it shows in their products. Regardless of whether you can argue if their movies were critically or commercially appreciated — which they were — you can’t argue their influence on it.

Katherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker? Because she’s a woman who created a decent movie, and for whom winning it would make her the first ever to do so? Give me a break.

This is the question I’ve been pondering ever since hearing the story of Michael Robertson (founder of MP3.com) on ThisWeekInStartups (skip to the interview part around 44 minutes.)

It seems that Robertson’s entrepreneurial strategy — with all his doom and glory — has been to see a general trend (he noticed the word “MP3” was rising on search engine zeitgeists’), to learn about it and chase it, and then to navigate and improvise his way around where things are heading, what users want, and what is technically or strategically achievable. This is a much different style of entrepreneurship to the one we’re used to hearing about — the one of the long-term visionary strategical genius — and one I’m trying to get familiar with.

The idea is that with this style of entrepreneurship, the real genius isn’t in seeing that MP3s will be the future and coming up with an elaborate plan in making that happen, but in seeing that MP3s are a happening trend, in imagining some possibilities and executing on one, learning from every external factor (the users, the lawsuits), and then recallibrating that plan. Instead of following a virtual path that you created in your head, you’re essentially making one and improvising where need be: using all your past knowledge and experience, and the current ‘status of the world’.

When you hear Robertson talk about it and the way things turned out, you realize that despite taking the ‘non-visionary’ approach, he infact turns out to be the visionary — more so than anyone who tries to. The iTunes store? Robertson had that vision, but he couldn’t get the business side of things from the record industry’s part to line up. Steve Jobs made a beautiful device, created a monopoly around it, and he made it work. The app store? Robertson had that vision, too, when he attempted to create a user-friendly retail version of Linux where apps could essentially be downloaded and purchased from a single ‘store’. Steve Jobs made a beautiful device, created a monopoly around it, and he made it work.

When you examine Robertson’s outcomes, along with learning that he worked on pretty much everything we use today before we knew it existed, you also get to see the pitfalls of his approach: execution. Essentially, you never have time to sit and think — since you’re always, in a way, thinking and executing constantly on new things that have never been tried before. This results in you geting so ahead of navigating everything, that you inevitably become the first guy to take the arrow. The people after learn from it, device a master plan along with some key change that resulted in your gloom, and if they get it right, like Steve Jobs did — twice — they become the hero, leaving you in the dust.

In any case, this is a must-listen interview, and it has made Michael Robertson, a guy who I didn’t know a thing about a day or two ago, into an instant favorite entrepreneur of mine. Only because of what he did a few years ago are you getting to listen to music on your iPod, or download cool apps on your iPhone, or store things in the cloud.

The basic takeaway: Michael Robertson rattled through the bushes, swiping his sword around to create a path, running into deadends and discovering new land. Steve Jobs came along with a helicopter, checked out the already-created path from above and mapped out the rest on paper. Then, he buzzed through it in his Jeep Cherokee, and the whole world followed.