Relevant History

Look on Contemplative Computing

Just a note: most of my blogging these days happens on my Contemplative Computing blog, though I also maintain an active (but not too active) Twitter account.

"What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?"

Jessica Francis Kane, writing in The Atlantic, talks about a Marcus Aurelius quotation that she took to heart:

Book 8, #36

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own.

She reflects:

I thought about how Marcus Aurelius's concerns and mine differed, but I was inspired by the idea that the spirit of them, separated by so many centuries, was similar. His words helped me get to the desk, and stay there, during all the years it took me to write my first good story. Writing is hard, but is it unbearable? Who would say that it is? Even asking the question, I'm reminded of the one exclamation in the passage: "You would be ashamed to confess it!" His words helped me navigate rejection, which is certainly no fun, but if you ask yourself if it's unbearable, you find yourself preparing the next self-addressed stamped envelope pretty quickly. The words helped me survive the protracted sale of my first novel, and they reminded me to start writing again after a long hiatus after the birth of my first child. I wasn't sure how to make room for writing with a baby. It is difficult, but beyond endurance? I got myself back to the desk.

Personally, I think nothing prepared me for writing as well as studying the Victorians. Not because they invented the world as we know it (in many ways they did), or because their work was awesome (though it was), but rather because they got so much done. Tomes, multivolume histories, three-decker novels. Theories, scientific discoveries, expeditions, surveys. Buildings, massive urban redesigns, vast public buildings, and more than a few dark Satanic mills. New ways of seeing the world, of traveling it, or recording it.

And they still managed to take month-long vacations, or at least have high tea. The older I get, the more impressive that part is-- and, I begin to suspect, the more important it is for understanding why they were able to get so much done. It wasn't just the absence of television or Facebook. My intuition now senses that they were productive because they had a better sense of when to quit for the day. They could be more productive because they were more measured.

Granted, I have absolutely no real evidence for this, and I'm sure it'll be years before I can really chase it down, but their lives were about as well-documented as you can get without FitBit and SenseCam, so I'll bet you really could study their work habits, how much time they spent at work and play, how they saw the differences between the two, and how it made them great.

Remembering Riki Kuklick

Yesterday I found out that one of my mentors from college and graduate school, Henrika Kuklick, died.

Riki was one of the professors who got me hooked on the history of science, and along with Rob Kohler helped make me who I am. In the fall of my freshman year I had taken a seminar with Tom Hughes, mainly because it sounded interesting and he had a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and then in the spring had a class with Hughes and Rob, who would go on to be my undergraduate and graduate advisor. In my sophomore year I took Riki's sociology of science class, and from then on hardly a semester went by when I wasn't taking something with her.

Riki was a kind of intellectual performer I'd never encountered before. I never knew anyone who could keep track of so many thoughts: I marveled at how she could start a sentence, divert herself, then go off on something else, but then work her way back up and finish the sentence 20 minutes later. She had a kind of unreserved enthusiasm for life and ideas that really resonated with me; my decision to work on Victorian science was influenced in no small part by her description of living in England and working in the archives there. When I was a bit older and had more of a critical sensibility, I found her scholarship to be really outstanding, erudite without being purposely complicated: I taught her Great Zimbabwe Ruins article in several of my classes, and it always went over well.

She was also a great person and teacher, always supportive and generous, great at helping you think through arguments. Not the closest reader, though; lots of chapters came back with "Good work" scrawled at the end, and little more. (That's why you needed Rob Kohler on your committee. That man could line edit a diffraction grating.)

There are lots of people who can hardly remember classes from college, or the professors they had. Riki, in contrast, introduced to me a set of questions about the ways people, ideas, and technologies interact that I'm still dealing with. It's why I dedicated my first book to her and Rob. And I think I'll spend the rest of my life working on things that we talked about. Fortunately they're very big questions.

I find as I close in on 50, I don't particularly notice my age: I've had some grey hair since I was in graduate school (it'll do that to you), and aside from bifocals, I'm not in worse physical shape (though that's not the highest bar ever set), and more important, I'm a better writer and thinker than I've ever been in my life. But what I can't comprehend is other people getting older, too: my parents are in their 70s, which I find weird, and Riki was 70, which to me is inconceivable: my memory of her was fixed in the 1980s.

It's one of life's ironies that the gap a person leaves when they're gone is as large as the impact they made when they were alive. By that standard, Riki's passing leaves a very large gap indeed.

Password Strength Checker

As a public service, I point you to the Microsoft online password strength checker.

Of course, the XKCD comic on passwords is really the last word on the subject.

"we are failing our children by not giving them the tools they need to properly navigate this scary new world"

Hollee (really?) Actman Becker has a great, heartfelt and smart piece about Instagram beauty contests (as terrible as they sound, read about them yourself), and the responsibilities parents have to helping their kids use technologies in ways that are smart:

we are failing our children by not giving them the tools they need to properly navigate this scary new world, and by not monitoring their interactions in this world closely enough once we do….

Because the minute we give our kids an iphone or ipod or any other gadget that puts technology quite literally in the palms of their hands, we become responsible for whatever happens next….

We potty train our kids, teach them good table manners, spend 10 minutes deciphering the food label on a candy bar before we let them eat it. And yet, we set our kids up on social media, and then for all intents and purposes, we hang them out to dry.

Checking our kids’ news feeds to see what they are viewing, scrolling through their profiles to see what they’re posting, investigating the people who want to follow them, finding out who they’ve given their password to and monitoring all of their accounts (because most kids have more than one instagram account in case you didn’t know) doesn’t make us helicopter parents.

It makes us smart parents.

As the father of a girl who just turned 14 yesterday, I say: Read the whole thing.

Maroon 5

This week I took my daughter and a friend hers to the Maroon 5 concert. In the Virginia of my childhood, concerts were raucous and druggy affairs; you could get a contact high taking a deep breath at a Doobie Brothers show (before Michael McDonald joined, anyway). Here, things are different. When we reached the HP Pavilion, the entrance was cordoned off; instead of walking right in, we had to go through a long barricade that diverted us away from the door, only to dissolve back into chaos once we got up to the entrance. 

HP Pavilion

"Typical crappy HP interface," someone behind me said.

Welcome to a rock concert in Silicon Valley, where you can overhead offhand UX slams.

For those of you who have never heard them: take the pop sensibility of any single-named star, sonic elements of disco, Motown, and 1980s pop, contagiously singable hooks and some wonderfully unexpected bridges and transition, and you have Maroon 5. (Check out "Makes Me Wonder" as a perfectly-crafted song illustrating all of the above.)

Maroon 5

As for the lyrics, well, they're not Shakespeare. Most of their songs are about sex, and the rest sound like it. Adam Levine, like Amy Winehouse, is one of those singers who could make "pass the salt please" sound like a double entendre; fortunately his lyrical sensibilities are much closer to Cole Porter than Dr. Dre, so I'm more sanguine about my kids listening to them.

Over here, Adam!

Part of their charm is that even their songs about heartbreak aren't sad: the melodies and rhythms are as peppy as their songs about seduction and sex. If Taylor Swift sounds like she's always surprised and hurt when a relationship fails, Adam Levine treats it as just another phase; he's not at all cavalier or callous, but in songs like "Misery" and the fantastic "This Love" the downsides of relationships are-- not to be enjoyed, exactly, but as much a part of romance as the good parts. You can be as passionate about the "she's driving me crazy" or "I'm driving myself crazy because I drove her away by being so thoughtless" phase as the rest of it.

During "Stereo Hearts"

Maybe that's why a significant proportion of the crowd on Wednesday night was, as my daughter noted, recently-divorced middle-aged women: this is music that takes an easy attitude to the consequences of poor judgment, while also tapping into middle school memories of listening to their older sisters' copies of Off the Wall and Songs in the Key of Life.

I'm glad I got to take my daughter and her friend. It suggests that maybe as we get older it isn't inevitable that I become completely alienated from them.

And as you can tell from the pictures, the show was awesome. Just incredible. And the only thing smoking was the dry ice.

Ain't we got fun

"The rich get rich and the poor get nothing
In the meantime
In between time
Ain't we got fun....

It's funny, or merely ironic, to hear Alma Cogan's "Aint' We Got Fun" while on hold with a credit card company.

As a big fan of giant writeable spaces...

…I need this stuff in my next office.

Two years ago...

…my wife and I were in Stockholm. Just realized.

downtown Stockholm, via flickr

Funny how time flies.

mosaic, Stockholm train station, via flickr

My new camera and Last Great Things

Yesterday I bought a new camera, a Fujifilm X-E1. I've been coveting it since it was announced: it looks like the rangefinder cameras my dad had when we lived in Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the specs are fabulous, and the reviews have been pretty ecstatic. My wife and I went to the camera store, checked out a couple different models, and after some deliberation, we took the plunge.

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We thought about a Nikon D7000, because we already have a D5000 and are quite happy with it. But while the D7000 gets great reviews, I felt that the X-E1 would be better for the kinds of professional uses I expect to put a camera to in the coming years-- lots of street photography and observations of people using devices-- and it'll be very easy to travel with. The D7000 is fabulous, and feels equally professional, but it's a much heavier camera, both physically and visually. This one will be less obtrusive.

Though I've had it for about 18 hours (8 of which I've been asleep), and have mainly taken pictures of the dog (who I don't photograph enough) and my son and his friend (who are having a sleepover), I think it's going to be a camera I can spend years working with.

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As you can see, it's got a very retro, Leica rangefinder aesthetic, though it has an electronic viewfinder rather than an optical one (or the cool hybrid that the X-Pro1 has). Of course, you can set everything to adjust itself automatically; but exposure speed, aperture, and focus all have dedicated manual controls on the camera or lens, and the ISO can be accessed from the Fn button just beside the shutter button.

Dive into the options menus, and there are tons of other things you can adjust, custom profiles you can create (that'll be next on my to-do list), and special effects-- simulators that mimic the distinctive color profiles of different Fuji films, a couple black-and-white films, and so on.

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The other two things about it that I think I'm going to love are that it's very light, and it's surprisingly small.

The pictures don't really give you a good sense of how small the camera is. The body is about a quarter inch longer than an iPhone, and perhaps a quarter inch taller, so it's Not Large At All. And the body weighs about 12 ounces (350 g), which is Really Light.

So while it's mean to be a two-handed camera, you can comfortably carry it in one hand.

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My talks feature all my own pictures, and so having good a good camera is a professional necessity; it's an important part of the Brand of Me, and helps me get my ideas across to my audiences.

More than that, though, I feel like this is the kind of device I could spend a decade working with. These days, as specs constantly improve and costs drop, it's easy to convince yourself that the Next Cool Thing will make you a better photographer, or writer, or golfer, or guitarist. Of course, there is a marginal truth to that, but it's a lot more important to learn how to use a device to improve your own ability to see, or your voice.

That doesn't mean NOT taking advantage of technology. It not relying on its improvement alone, and being thoughtful about how you can both exploit it and improve yourself. (There are things I've almost completely outsourced to devices. In the last ten years I've memorized the phone numbers of my wife and kids, but entrust all the others to my iPhone.)

There's one other calculation for me. As I get older and more reflective, I think less about how many more turns of Moore's Law I can consume, and how many cool devices I can acquire. The challenge isn't to get the Next Great Thing, but the Last Great Thing: as much as possible, to choose things that, whether I live another five years or another fifty, will last; serve me well; constantly give me pleasure; and help me consciously extend or augment my own abilities. This requires a level of thoughtfulness and self-understanding, and frankly a certain amount of money: a $1400 camera is a lot more likely to fall into this category than a $300 one.

So we'll see if I made the right choice.

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Les Mis

Yesterday the family went to see the new film version of Les Miserables, with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe et al. I can see why critics dislike it, but I found it quite engaging. Yes, Russell Crowe approaches singing the way some Americans approach making themselves understood in a foreign country-- if the cabbie doesn't understand you, just yell your destination, and your words will be magically translated-- and the close-up style that worked so well in The King's Speech takes a little getting used to.

But the movie is every bit as manipulative and heart-tugging as the play, Tom Hooper can be sweeping and bold when the scene calls for it (some of his shots of Paris and Javert singing from rooftops reminded me of Gore Verbinski), Amanda Seyfried and Samantha Barks were terrific, and the film did the musical justice.

Copy edits!

Just got these in the mail….

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Very exciting, in the way that only a vanishingly small number of grinding, attention-demanding tasks can be.

How do you say "Mayan Apocalypse" in Russian?

From the Guardian, proof that the world is flat, but mainly in the worst kinds of ways:

The apocalypse is surely near when Ramzan Kadyrov emerges as the voice of reason. The ruthless leader of Chechnya is among dozens of Russians officials, priests, doctors and psychiatrists aiming to calm an anxious populace frantically preparing for the end of the world later this week.

"People are buying candles saying the end of the world is coming," Kadyrov said in comments published on his official website last week. "Does no one realise that once the end of the world comes, candles won't help them?"

For more than a month, Russians around the country have been buying up candles and matches, salt and torches in an effort to outsmart the apocalypse some believe will come when the Mayan calendar runs out on Friday.

Davis does a black-and-white cookie impersonation

Hmm, this looks interesting!

Ha! You leave me alone all day, and this is what you get!

Look at me! I'm a black and white cookie!

Can we go in the car now?

Quote of the Day: Nassim Taleb

"We practitioners and quants aren't too fazed by remarks on the part of academics – it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns." (From his new book Antifragile, rather negatively reviewed in the Guardian)

 

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Hello Davis

I had two cats die this spring and summer, and after they were gone, I really had no interest in replacing them. They had been with me for seventeen years, since they were kittens, and I'd always thought of myself as a cat person; yet, with their passing, I felt like that part of my life was now done.

In contrast, a few days after Christopher died, after I'd cleared out his dog bed and packed away his food and toys-- indeed, the afternoon I got his ashes back from the crematorium-- I realized: I want another dog. After my wife and I talked it over, we agreed that it would be good to get another dog.

We decided to get a rescue, mainly because there are so many dogs in the Bay Area who need homes. Christopher, so far as anyone could guess, was a Carolina or American Dingo, and that's a pretty distinctive breed; you don't see many of them. There's a Carolina breeder here in California, and a couple places in the Rockies that specialize in Carolina rescues, but they're not a breed that shows up on Petfinder or the adoption Web sites; so I quickly gave up the idea of getting another one. (I also wasn't 100% sure getting the same breed was the smart thing for me.)

The Bay Area dog adoption market, it turns out, has a couple weird quirks. First of all, there are tons of chihuahuas and pit bulls, or mixes involving one of those breeds. Second, we import unwanted dogs, from as far away as Taiwan (which has several native breeds, but where it's very tough to survive as a stray). Apparently the Bay Area can't produce enough unwanted dogs, and has to import them. Who knew. I filled out a long form, had a phone interview, and got set up to see a couple dogs.

So on Sunday we went to a pet store deep in Campbell to meet two dogs: a five year-old border collie-husky mix, and a two year-old lab. The scene was crazy: a pen full of adorable puppies, crates with adult dogs in back, and people everywhere. If the wedding dresses in Filenes Basement could bark… you get the idea. We tried out both dogs, and were really split: collie-husky was great, calm, and watchful without being too eager, but she could jump tall fences. The two year-old was more compact and energetic, but also more kid oriented, so naturally the children gravitated to him.

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Eventually, we went with the two year-old, took care of the paperwork, bought an inordinately large amount of hardware, toys, etc., and brought him home. We renamed him Davis: my wife and I met there, and while he had been called Dallas by his foster family, he didn't recognize the name.

We're not really sure what breed he is, and probably never will be. I decided that he's a "labramuddle," because he's smaller than a traditional yellow lab and his face is a bit squarer, but friends suggest he could be an English Labrador.

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It's been less than a week, and Davis is settling in nicely. He has a crate that he sleeps in at night, and we're still working on how to manage him during the day.

He's very much of the "I'll follow whichever human is doing something" model, but he's more into following the children than Christopher was: I think he likes my son's manic energy, and certainly enjoys the attention the kids lavish on him.

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We've taken him to the dog park a couple times, and fortunately he enjoys spending time there.

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In the last couple days I've discovered that he's an absolute fiend for chasing balls, which is hardly surprising in a dog that's bred to be a retriever. For me, though, knowing as little about dogs as I do, everything is still a revelation. (It also means exploring the world of dog toys.)

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However, for all his crazed energy, he's also good at just hanging out under the desk while I work.

We're quite happy with him, but frankly, we got lucky. Choosing a dog after less than an hour, in a crowded exciting and slightly frantic environment, hardly guarantees good results. if I had to do it again, I'd go to one of these adoption fairs first, with absolutely no plans to get a dog, so I wouldn't be overwhelmed by the energy and emotionalism of the event; then I'd go back a second time, and start looking at the dogs.

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After all, a dog could be with you for years (if he's a lab, Davis should live 10-12 years), and while we made a great choice, I've spent more time researching which movie to go to on the weekend.

But we've got him now, and he's been great.

Goodbye Christopher

A couple weeks ago Christopher, the dog we inherited in January, died. My wife took him for a morning walk, he went to sleep in the backyard, and never woke up.

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He was 14, so we knew when we took him in that he was more or less on loan. Still, it was a shock, even if it wasn't really a surprise.

I hadn't lived with a dog since I was a kid, and when we took him in I didn't really know what to expect. But he proved to be very smart, and great at communicating his needs. I quickly realized that if I just paid attention to what he was doing, I could decode what he wanted-- though sometimes it was especially easy.

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It was also instructive living with a creature who didn't really just wanted to belong, to be part of the family, and was happy so long as he could be with us. As someone who lives among highly analytical, calculating people, I'm constantly trying to figure out what clients want, what readers want, what funders want to hear, etc. Being with someone whose mental model of himself and others was really straightforward and guileless was instructive.

At the same time, it was also cool that he was a dog, and did dog things. While he took pleasure in being with us, he also enjoyed having his own, very different, incredibly physical life, one where smells and dirt were really fascinating. 

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His life intersected with ours; it didn't overlap completely. I found that cool.

We went to the dog park pretty regularly, and he had several friends there, including one dog he would follow around and just drool on. They were both quite elderly, so it was a charming sight.

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He also made me a lot more familiar with my neighborhood. Taking him on walks twice a day meant I developed an intimate sense of my surroundings, albeit from a somewhat canine point of view. (I never knew things smelled so interesting around here.)

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A friend-- one of the many Peninsula people who had contact with him over the years-- said that he was such a good dog he was sure to come back as a human. I'm not so sure he needs to; if it's possible for a dog to achieve canine nirvana, I think Christopher managed it.

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In Seattle

I was in Seattle this weekend at the POD Network conference, a conference of academic technology and professional development types.

I've not been in Seattle in a while, so it was cool to be there. And the crowd at the conference was terrific: very technically savvy, so they knew what I was talking about, but they could also ask interesting questions, and very engaged. Especially impressive for a crowd that had already been at the conference for three days and hadn't yet had lunch.

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It was the first time I'd given a big talk since finishing the book, and it was good to see that it seems to hold up in public.

After my talk I spent the afternoon on the monorail (how often as a futurist do you get to ride on an artifact from the future?) and visiting the Experience Museum Project and Seattle Public Library, two of the cooler pieces of architecture... well, anywhere in the world.

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The Experience Music Project is said to look like a melted Jimi Hendrix guitar from above; that could well be urban legend, but I do know is it's really cool on the ground.

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Book cover!

Here's the cover for the contemplative computing book:

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Little, Brown spent a lot of time on it, and I think they've managed to communicate a lot in a very small, challenging medium. They were also really good about explaining the design choices, making clear that they thought worked, and accommodating those changes I thought would improve it (or explaining why they would be hard to implement).

So the machine chugs along, and we get one step closer to having a finished book on the shelves!

 

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"Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them."

The one problem with writing a book for users, taking a Buddhist-inflected approach to information technologies that emphasizes how people can take back control of their minds, is that I'm less likely to get onto this kind of gravy train:

Ferguson's critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent's Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson's writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

That number means that Ferguson doesn't have to please his publishers; he doesn't have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn't have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama's failures at any event you want to have me at.

What's so worrying about this trend is that Niall Ferguson, once upon a time, was the best. I'm one of the few people who has actually read his history of the Rothschilds, The World's Banker, all 1,040 pages of the thing, and it is brilliant, a model of archival research. I find it fantastically depressing that the man who could write that book could end up writing a book like Civilization or an article with just as much naked silliness as the Newsweek cover.

I feel very much the same way about Victor Davis Hanson, a man whose military history is really absolutely first-rate, whose The Other Greeks fairly exploded with insight into Greek society and philosophy, but who's been mailing in sloppy, thoughtless pieces ever since he left the farm for The Farm. Sad.

 

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"we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs"

From the conclusion of Bertrand Russell's 1948 BBC Reith Lectures on "Authority and the Individual" (mp3, or transcript):

We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs. In regard to what is important we are passive; where we are active it is over trivialities.

Word.

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