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U2 singer Bono was knighted yesterday. He told reporters that his youngest son "was disappointed that his dad was not presented with a Star Wars light saber."
"He thought I was becoming a Jedi," Bono said.
[To the tune of Hermeto Pascoal, "Intocável," from the album "Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer".]
Technorati Tags: music
My wife left tonight for a week. Every year she leads a class trip to Washington DC, Jamestown, Williamsburg, Monticello, and other historic places in Virginia (though the whole state is one gigantic historic monument to colonial and Civil War history). So I get to play single dad for the week.
It's not bad: between the annual Washington DC trip and my travels, the kids are familiar with the phenomenon of having just one parent in the house. I already went to Trader Joe's and stocked up on shrimp, fish sticks, and various other things that the kids like but only get to eat when it's just me here (my wife's not big on seafood). I'm now mentally reviewing the household Index of Forbidden Movies, and trying to decide which of the items-- Spider-Man, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or Star Wars 3-- I might offer as a carrot for good behavior if things get desperate.
It's important to be prepared. And it's the sort of thing you can sell as a "we're only doing thing this because Mommy's not here" activity, which makes it more desirable. Of course, one day they'll read this post, and feel slightly betrayed. But until that day....
[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Sonate no. 16 op. 31 no.1 in g gr.t., ," from the album "Piano Sonatas Vol. 2".]
[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Sonata in F minor, Op. 57 "Appassionata"," from the album "Piano Sonatas".]
Except for the box of unsold Alien Loves Predator t-shirts, perhaps. Otherwise, it's brilliant!
(click to see the big version)
[To the tune of Derek & The Dominos, "Little Wing," from the album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs".]
Or so I argue (albeit very, very briefly) in today's New York Times.
A very cool graphic illustrates the piece, too
Now when anyone Googles "caffeine" and "gateway drug," I'm going to rise to the top of the search results. I don't know if this is a good thing or bad.
Mmmm... brains...
[To the tune of The Band, "Long Distance Operator (Outtake)," from the album "Music from Big Pink".]
Today I took my daughter to a birthday party at the Tech Museum of Innovation. (It's an extremely cool place for a birthday. At the end, I asked her, "Was the birthday party educational?" She replied, "Sort of." Which is more than can be said about many venues.) Since she's old enough to just hang out with her friends, I dropped her off and headed to the new city-SJSU library to do some work.
Along the way, I walked around the downtown and San Jose State U. area a bit. The city has spent, or encouraged private developers to spend, gigantic sums of money on redevelopment in the area. So there are now lots of new tony apartment buildings, and numerous upscale or upscale-ish chain restaurants (are Gordon Biersch and PF Changs upscale?). All of this is pretty well-executed, and here and there you also seem some genuinely interesting architecture: the new City Hall is really cool, the Tech Museum is fun, and the San Jose Rep is a pretty neat space.
And yet, somehow, it doesn't hold together. For all the money spent on development, and the various New Urbanism touches, downtown San Jose still feels weirdly uninhabited. The new buildings don't signify vibrancy and community: instead, they just signify "redevelopment happening here!" Now, I was there on a Sunday afternoon, and arguably this is the worst time to visit a downtown. Yet, even around the edges of the campus, which are now surrounded by some very big luxe apartment/townhouse buildings, I didn't get that feeling that you get around, say, Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, or a million and one little parks in London, of a space that's inhabited, and has a private life that you'll only glimpse through parted curtains and gaps in the hedge. Instead, the downtown has all the intimacy of a financial district after the markets close.
I'm not sure what's keeping that spark from catching, either. At one level, they seem to be doing everything right: more commercial stuff, more downtown housing, some cool public spaces. But some of it feels too programmed: there seems to be a preference for food court-style chains over the mom-and-pop places that make a neighborhood distinctive. It also didn't feel dense enough: more people on the streets would attract more business, and generate more activity of all kinds.
There's also something about the new buildings that can be strangely office park-ish. In the area around Fairmount Hotel, for example, there are pedestrian walkways and plazas, but they're big and concrete, too large to be personal and too small to be grand. Some corporate headquarters occupy entire city blocks, or big chunks of a block, and are surrounded by manicured grass or concrete pads. It's almost as if the big buildings in downtown San Jose want to be like suburban corporate headquarters rather than buildings in San Francisco or New York. It may make for better executive parking, and spaces that are easier to program and manage, but it works to the overall detriment of the city.
Still, I hope it comes together, and the downtown becomes more than a tourist and Friday night entertainment destination. Successful cities are cool, and it's strange that the Bay Area only has one world-class city. Plus, San Jose sits in one of the most fabulously wealthy and important regions in the world; it ought to be more impressive.
[To the tune of The Band, "Tears Of Rage (Alternate Take)," from the album "Music from Big Pink".]
Technorati Tags: architecture, city, san jose
The last couple days I've added some really outstanding music to my collection, but it's a strange combination of stuff.
First, two albums by The Band, Music from Big Pink and The Band. I can't believe I didn't grow up with these, and have them memorized by the time I was in high school. I've long had The Band's greatest hits, but somehow their most popular songs manage to not quite be as amazing as songs like "Whispering Pines" and "Tears of Rage." The apparent looseness of the music is very misleading: while it sounds like they treated the beat as an optional thing to be followed now and then, they were very thoughtful in their choices of instruments and arrangements. It's the very definition of genius: music that doesn't call attention to its own complexity, but instead offers you a space to fall into.
Second, just by chance I stumbled upon Sound Tribe Sector 9, an electronic/ambient group that completely blows me away. I discovered Mono and Mogwai not that long ago, and STS9 reminds me partly of those two, but jazzier: some of their work also has overtones of the great Southern jazz group Sea Level (whose Cats on the Coast is tremendous). Their 2004 New Year's Eve show is very, very good. Go check it out.
[To the tune of Sound Tribe Sector 9, "Open E," from the album "2004-12-31 - Tabernacle".]
This is a bit of an update of a 2006 article in GigaOm on cafes as the new garages, but still worth noting. Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a long article about "the new Bedouins," tech workers who have moved more or less permanently out of offices, and now circulate among cafes.
A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins." [ed: the term appears in a 2006 Charter Street post, which is also a nice meditation on the benefits of "going Bedouin"]
San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.
San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to make their own rules.
"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."...
"This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business," [Daniel Pink] said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."
As I argued the last time this meme bloomed, "the shift from garages to cafes" isn't really just about getting rid of offices, but instead reflects "a shift in preference away from [working in] spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions." My sense is that that's still true.
Technorati Tags: business, cafe, mobility, office, wireless, work
The world gets a bit flatter:
Halliburton, the big energy services company, said on Sunday that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there.
[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Who's Sorry Now?," from the album "2nd Wind".]
Technorati Tags: business, globalization
One of the highlights of our trip to Disneyland was when the kids got to be in the Jedi Academy-- a little thing where they get to wear a Jedi robe, swing a light saber around, then "fight" Darth Vader.
via flickr
The children really enjoyed it, which suggests that they might like England. It seems that in the last census, 390,000 people listed their religion as "Jedi."
A campaign on the internet claimed - wrongly - that Jedi, the belief system at the heart of the Star Wars films, would receive official government recognition as a religion if enough people quoted it on their Census forms. An email in support of the campaign, quoted by BBC News, invited people to 'do it because you love Star Wars... or just to annoy people.'
Just over 390,000 of the 52,000,000 people in England and Wales wrote in 'Jedi' on their census form.
The 'Jedi' response was most popular in Brighton and Hove, with 2.6 per cent of Census respondents quoting it, followed by Oxford (2.0 per cent), Wandsworth (1.9), Cambridge (1.9), Southampton (1.8) and Lambeth (1.8).
[via pixelfrenzy]
[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Can We Still Be Friends," from the album "Bootleg Series, Vol. 3: Nearly Human Tour, Japan 90".]
Technorati Tags: children, Disneyland, England, Star Wars
Today, while walking to my car, I had two strange cats (as in strangers, not as in bizarre) come up to me.
via flickr
I'm not sure if I smelled like tuna, or what.
via flickr
I petted them for a moment, then they got in a brief fight with each other. It was weird.
[To the tune of Miles Davis, "All Blues," from the album "Kind of Blue".]
Technorati Tags: paloalto
Tonight we met some friends for dinner at the Dutch Goose, a restaurant in Menlo Park. It's got a kind of roadside tavern ambience-- long wooden tables and booths, drinks served in plastic cups, burger and fries served in those baskets with wax paper, and lots of beer and peanuts. And a pool table and video games.
It's now the kids' favorite restaurant.
But, this being Silicon Valley, there are a couple distinctive things about it. First, you notice that the front window has the usual beer signs-- Guinness, Coors Light, Sierra Nevada-- along with a sign that says "INTERNET."
via flickr
Second, the place has a few people who would fit into a roadside place in Durango-- leather jackets, work boots-- but 95% of the crowd consists of people who look like they've come from tennis lessons, or a hard day doing tax law.
Correction: that's the parents. The kids tend to have on prep school lacrosse sweatshirts, or the uniforms they were wearing at tonight's game.
At one point, another patron came over to our table, and asked if we knew about computers. He couldn't get the wireless to work on his laptop.
via flickr
One of the people at our table is a product manager for a very well-known software package; so naturally, he volunteered to see if he could figure out what was going on. Such geeky altruism was legendary in the Valley in byegone days (especially at places like the Wagon Wheel, of blessed memory). However, after a couple minutes, the wireless proved somewhat elusive, and we had to take the kids home and put them in bed.
As we were leaving, I think our friend might have been saying something about strange LDAP configurations, but I couldn't hear very well over the Bon Jovi.
[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Freddie Freeloader," from the album "Kind of Blue".]
Technorati Tags: Dutch Goose, menlo park, Silicon Valley
This afternoon, my son and I were at Fry's. We stopped in front of the Xbox 360, where someone was playing a skateboarding game. My son watched it for a minute, then said, "Hey! That guy should be wearing a helmet! That's not safe!"
This Gawker interview is the most accessible explanation of economic principles since Thurow and Heilbroner's Economics Explained, and almost as funny.
So let's pretend I don't know anything about the stock market. Actually, there's no need to pretend: I don't know anything about the stock market. What the hell happened yesterday, and why should I care?
What happened is that a rumor got started that the Chinese government was going to clamp down on liquidity; i.e., the Chinese had too much money in the stock market, and were going to take measures to reign in speculation, investment, etc. So, for the first time...ever...the tail wagged the dog. Historically, the U.S. coughs and the rest of the world catches cold; yesterday, China hiccupped, and everyone had a heart palpitation.... [Y]esterday was a historic day.
Because of China?
Exactly. The Chinese own all of America's debt. Plus, they don't fight dumb wars, and have a good deal of cash on hand. It doesn't establish a new paradigm, but it hints at one....
A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing...
But durable orders in Chicago squash the butterfly.
Also, some computers made it worse.
[To the tune of U2, "New Year's Day," from the album "War".]
I'm a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley. I'm also an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Science Technology and Society program at Stanford University.
At the Institute, I work on the future of science and technology. In my free time I'm working on a book on the end of cyberspace. More details are available in my c.v. (PDF). My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.
I also keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
The banner is from a picture taken by Anthony Townsend, while we were walking along Raday Utca in Budapest, Hungary, October 2007.
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