Relevant History

The Will to Power... and Carry Nunchucks!

In the car yesterday, and unexpectedly philosophical conversation with my children:

Daughter: My seat's too hot! My seat belt's too hot, too.
Me: Well, you remember what Friedrich Nietzsche said: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."
Son: Which ninja said that?
Me [trying not to crash the car]: It was... umm... Friedrich.
Son: I think he's the blue one.
Daughter: Why are you coughing, Daddy?

I like to think this is the first time "Nietzsche" and "ninja" have been conflated, but Nietzche's work does have a certain ninja-like quality about it.

Liveblogging Harry Potter in England

My wife is now on her way from Cambridge to Hamburg, to spend the weekend with friends before flying home next week. Before she left, though, she got copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Apparently, it was quite the scene.

Most of the people here seem to be adults and teen-age girls.  There are a few little kids, some look under 10, and I am not quite sure what the point of that is, although the fellow who just came by had a brilliant Harry Potter costume on, he looked just like the young Harry Potter – but should he be up this late getting the last book?

It should be no surprise that many adults have academic robes to use for this in Cambridge.  What is a surprise is how many children have them.  Did they get them just for this?

The family that dresses up together, stays together

[There's] a large group of very small boys, they look they are like they can’t be older than 8.  They are dressed as a Quidditch team, they look very cute, but they will be so tired tomorrow.

12:50.... I walked past Waterstones. The line went out the door, and all the way down the street past the gates to Sidney Sussex College.  It was amazing.

Also, one of the exchange programs had a bunch of students who wanted copies, but the program has a strict curfew; so they agreed to send some of the tutors out to buy copies for all the kids, and bring them back to the college.

I really need to reread volume 6 before too long. I hardly remember any of it.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 1," from the album "Vienna Concert".]

Technorati Tags: books, Cambridge, England, Harry Potter, travel

Monterey Bay Aquarium

I took my kids and mother to the Monterey Bay Aquarium today.

via flickr

I love the aquarium. It's 100 miles away, but we're family members, and generally go there every couple months. Certainly nothing else that's 100 miles away (which would include everything from Davis to Marin) holds the same attraction, at least at this stage in the kids' lives. For me, the place is like Disneyland, in the sense that it's so clearly better at what it does than anyone else, and so brilliantly designed to fulfill its mission.

via flickr

The latest thing they do well is something called the "Real Cost Cafe." It's a diner where, with your seafood order, they give you the other things that are caught when the trawler brings up the shrimp that ends up in your scampi, or the rest of the shark that's thrown back in the water after its fin is cut off.

via flickr

It sounds pretty macabre, and of course it makes some very serious points about the need to pay attention to economic externalities. And you'd think that it would repel children. Yet it's now my kids' favorite part of the aquarium. Partly it's the novelty, but they also like finding the best thing on the menu.

via flickr

We've also now discovered a small beach a couple blocks away, right off Cannery Row, that the kids like to go to after the aquarium. So they're wet when they get back to the car, but at least they're more tired.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: aquarium, monterey, montereybayaquarium

The future of California

Today, in my ongoing program to Keep the Kids Occupied While Mom is in England, I took the kids to Great America, an amusement park not far from our house.

Great America is your basic big, corporate amusement park that has a few themed zones (the water park has some nods toward Australia-- at least, those parts of Australia that bear a remarkable resemblance to the South Pacific), but the overriding theme always is, CAN HAS I YR MONEYS?

But there's one distinctive thing about the place. Like most amusement parks, Great America skews to the lower end of the population curve: its clientele consists mainly of teenagers, and parents with young children (teenagers not wanting to be caught dead in a public place with their parents).

So it's notable that the crowd is probably 80% East Asian, South Asian, and Hispanic. A couple years ago I heard that someone argue at a conference on the future of families that if you want to sell breakfast cereal or houses or vacations to California families, it's worth realizing that the families with Mom chauffering the three kids around in the minivan while Dad's at work-- in other words, the traditional American nuclear family*-- are more likely to be named Ramirez or Lee or Singh than Jones or Parker.

This is the future of California. It would completely freak out Lou Dobbs.

* Leaving aside that "traditional" and "nuclear family" are oxymoronic, unless you compress your notion of "traditional" to include things that are only about fifty years old.

[To the tune of Jean Sibelius, "Valse Triste, Op. 44," from the album "Finlandia/Tone Poems".]

Technorati Tags: culture, demographics, Great America

Why do these kids love school?

My son demonstrates one sanctioned use of the "pillow room" in his kindergarten class: pile all the pillow up in one corner and jump on them.

The pillow room, he explains, is also where people go when they need to calm down.

And you never, ever jump on pillows if someone is under them. You have to check first. (And the kids do: as I've noted before, they're pretty adamant about enforcing such social norms.)

How many kindergartens have pillow rooms, I wonder?

[To the tune of Jean Sibelius, "The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 22 No. 2," from the album "Finlandia/Tone Poems.".]

Technorati Tags: menlo park, Peninsula School

The failure of biotech

I read Gary Pisano's Harvard Business Review article, "Can Science Be a Business?" today. It's pretty mind-blowing. Its basic contention is that "biotech has not delivered on its promise because the industry’s structure–much of it borrowed from Silicon Valley–is flawed." (114) Strong stuff.

To those of us who live here, the "Silicon Valley model" (whatever we happen to mean by that) sometimes is thrown about as a kind of silver bullet that can be profitably applied to any industry; but I think Pisano's article offers some valuable clues to understanding the conditions that are necessary for it-- or for other kinds of highly networked, open models of innovation-- to work.

Combined with last month's conference in Finland on culture and innovation, where I gave a talk about the often-overlooked relationships between innovation and manufacturing (a particularly rich creator of productive cultural resources), I think I'm getting close to a better understanding of when networked, outsourced, or open innovation models work, and when they don't.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation

My future blogger

My wife made it safely to England, and started blogging about the trip. (She had to get a T-Mobile account at a nearby Starbucks, as the college she's staying in (where she has lodgings?) charmingly refuses to get wired.) While in King's Cross Station on her way to Cambridge, she saw the famous Platform 9 3/4.

via flickr

Upon seeing the post and picture, my daughter said, "I've got to post a comment." (They're pretty blog-savvy.)

She'll have a Myspace before I know it.

This is now how we keep in touch with each other when on the road. Not so much through the phone or chat, because the time zones often don't work out, especially when you have small children (though sometimes it works); and not through mail, because that's slow (and often my trips are over before a letter could arrive). Blogging is now the equivalent of those epistolary conversations I used to conduct with friends when I was abroad, brought up to speed for an age of rapid travel.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny Group, "Better Days Ahead," from the album "The Road to You".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, Harry Potter, Kings Cross, London, train

Everything you wanted to know about the space slug-mynock symbiosis

There's a 13,000 word-long article on Star Wars Creatures in Wikipedia. And people dare question its credibility.

Technorati Tags: Star Wars, wiki

Ratatouille

After dropping off my daughter so she could go to a birthday party, my son and I went to see Ratatouille. It was brilliant. It's your basic Brad Bird "unlikely buddies triumph despite many adversities, several crazy chases, and a big misunderstanding that must be overcome" movie.

The critics are right: Bird has become quite brilliant, the animation world's answer to Spielberg or Kubrick. One of the long tracking scenes, which follows the main character (a rat named Remy) through the walls of an apartment building and up to the roof, is as imaginative as the spider scene in Minority Report; the animation is fabulous; and the action scenes... they're terrific, but I can't help but think, "Boy, this would make a great ride. I wonder how much that concern shaped the scene." Then I wonder, so long as the scene is good, does that matter?

And my son loved it, too. No doubt he'll love the ride as well.

Technorati Tags: children, movies

Single Dad, again

We took my wife to the airport today: she's going to London, to do a summer course at Cambridge. After going to England half a dozen or so times over the last three years, it's a way to restore the karmic balance within the house.

I hope it's good for the kids to have one parent now and then. Or so I hope, given how often I've been on the road.

After the kids and I came home, I cooked pancakes, and they watched a little television. Unfortunately, watching anything requires SALT II-level negotiations, and usually conclude only under the threat of me choosing something for them. If my son can't make her sister watch a show about monster tricks, and my daughter can't make her brother watch Cinderella III, they're agreed that at least they should avoid having to watch whatever I choose. It's a classic example of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Technorati Tags: children