Relevant History

Prince Caspian

I took the kids to see the new Narnia movie last weekend, and we all thought it was pretty good.

Thinking over the film these last few days (and not giving away anything essential), what sticks with me most is the transformation of Susan, the oldest girl and an archer, into an efficient and remorseless killer. While Peter and Edmund are all adolescent bluster and heraldry, Susan just notches arrows and brings her opponents down, without all the histrionics. (She makes Orlando Bloom's Legolas look like Hamlet.)

What's also interesting is that nothing is made of it in the plot. Susan doesn't start taking out people (or trolls, or horses, or whoever) to make up for being neglected by her parents, or because she's competing with Peter, or anything like that. if anything, it's either old-fashioned sublimation, or just the sort of thing a protective older sister does... in a dangerously unstable alternate universe.

At Bucks County Coffee Co., 30th Street Station

Heading to the airport very soon, and thence back home.

via Flickr

New York was fabulous. The place is growing on me. At Penn I was always very dismissive of the place, a reaction against all my classmates who lamented the fact that they were stuck in a provincial backwater. But actually, even if it isn't All That Is Good and Civilized, I must confess that New York is pretty interesting.

via Flickr

My meetings gave me a lot to think about. As James Watson said (paraphrasing here), you should always spend time with people who are smarter than you, because people who aren't can't help you see new things.

via Flickr

Now back to my regular life: my daughter's Little League playoff game is tomorrow, I need to get a new cell phone this weekend, and my camera is starting to have problems. And I've got articles to write.

30th Street Station, New York City, Philadelphia, train

Up

Awake again, after five hours. Haven't decided if I'm going to take my garment bag to Penn Station before heading to NYPL-land, or just carry it with me.

However, that's not the decision to make today. There's a new Alan Furst novel, The Spies of Warsaw, and so the question is, how soon before I can pick up a copy?

Alan Furst, New York City, travel

Entering Koreatown, so shake that Korea now...

I'm going to bed soon, but wanted to post a bit before finally turning in.

I'm staying at the Red Roof Inn on 32nd Street (I believe, anyway). It's surprisingly good, for a place that's substantially cheaper than most New York hotels; my view is nothing to write home about, but I can't really complain about the location.

The hotel describes itself as being "in the heart of Koreatown," but since Koreatown is about three blocks long (it is to Korea as Chinatown is to China, as my brother put it), if you get anywhere in Koreatown you can reasonably claim to be in its heart.

While its small, Koreatown is pretty neat. It's just like being in Seoul, except the cars are different.

We went to Seoul Garden and had some barbeque, a traditional Korean delicacy, along with a wide assortment of pickled and/or highly spiced vegetables.

We then took a little walk around the block, but since my brother lives in deepest Brooklyn, and I thought I was tired, we called it a night.

I kind of look forward to the time when rather than having to sleep, I can just take some Provigil and work continuously for 48 hours on a trip, then go home. So much of business travel is structured by the need to rest; if you could eliminate that-- and in some cities, there's enough activity 24/7 to make it possible-- then all kinds of possibilities open up.

New York City, travel, Koreatown

On my way to New York

I finished up things at the National Academies, and am on the 6:00 Acela to New York.

via Flickr

As a friend of mine put it, the Acela rocks. It's basically a nice European train, which makes sense, since this is just about the only part of the country that could support train service of this sort. And yes it's expensive, but the Keck is about 7 minutes from Union Station, and my hotel in New York is two blocks from Penn Station; so even though JetBlue or the Delta shuttle is cheaper, once you figure the time and cost of getting out to Dulles or Reagan, up to JFK or Laguardia, and then back into midtown, it's easily a wash.

Today's meeting was pretty good. We got a lot of useful criticism, which from a group of very smart scientists and VCs is what you want. If you just get faint praise, or worse yet no reaction at all, you know you're in really serious trouble. Only really promising projects are worth tearing into.

Acela, amtrak, New York City, train, travel

Bolt Bus

Maybe next time I'm on the East Coast I'll try this.

New York, New York

Tomorrow I'm spending the morning in New York. I'm meeting a friend who's an IP lawyer, a hedge fund guy, and a collaboratories designer, and by a remarkable set of coincidences, they all work within view of (or literally within) the New York Public Library.

View Larger Map

One of those strange things.

Then I'm back to Philadelphia, and on the plane home.

New York City, work

In 30th Street Station

I'm in 30th Street Station, waiting for my (now delayed) train to Washington DC. This is not an unfamiliar situation: I spent a lot of time in 30th Street Station was I was living here, as it was my portal back home to Virginia, up to Boston to the MIT archives, or other points along the Northeast Corridor.

via Flickr

Greetings from Cosi

On the Penn campus!

On the plane

I'm on Flight 188, about half an hour outside Philadelphia. I worked for a while, napped fitfully, then woke up again and am doing some more stuff.

Not quite long enough a flight to enter a deep version of the Airplane Creative Zone-- some of my best ideas seem to come to me on the long overnight flights to Europe-- but I did make some headway in an article I'm writing for one of my colleagues at Oxford, on a future of futures. Essentially I'm trying to lay out what our work would look like if we were to create the field from scratch, and took into account what brain scientists and psychologists have learned in the last twenty years about the way people think about the future.

future, neuroscience, psychology, travel, writing

At PHL

I'm at the airport, waiting for the train to downtown. The airport is pretty much as I remember it.

Now to 30th Street.

airport, Philadelphia, travel

Morning at Penn

I've got a couple hours between the time I'll get into downtown Philadelphia and my first meeting, so I'm thinking I'll be able to store my bag at 30th Street Station, and go up to Penn for an hour or two. That should be nice, unless it rains. I don't think I've been back on campus since 2001 or 2002.

Philadelphia, travel

On my way to the East Coast

I'm at SFO, about to catch United 188 to Philadelphia. I'm on a slightly crazy trip this week. I'm in Philadelphia tomorrow, meeting with people at the Chemical Heritage Foundation; Wednesday I'm in Washington, for a National Academies meeting; Thursday I'm in New York, to meet with various people at the New York Public Library and elsewhere.

Except for dinner with my brother, it's all future of science-related, all the time. The project has pretty much taken over my life, which is just what I wanted to have happen.

As is my wont, I'm on the redeye, and will step off the plane and into a full day of meetings. I'm going to spend as much of the flight as I can refining the talk I'm giving in Washington (I'm nothing if not predictably obsessive about these things), as the rest of my trip just requires being sharp and interesting. And while I tell myself I do this mainly to prove how much of a road warrior I am-- and how young-- the fact is, I prefer to have the few extra hours with my kids than to spend an extra night on the road. Perhaps when they're older none of us will feel like this is so valuable, but for now it definitely is. I suspect the kids think so, too.

I made it to the airport in twenty minutes, and remembered my travel mug this time (I forgot it when I went to Malaysia and Singapore). So so far, things are going well.

I think with this trip I'll get into 100K territory on my frequent flyer miles. This year I'm probably spending close to two months on the road-- broken up into several big trips and lots of little ones, but still, the days add up. I'm already taking the kids to Europe this summer, but I should think about another trip with them. I feel like they're not traveling enough. By the time I was my daughter's age, I'd spent two years in Brazil, and been to Korea once; of course, my parents were divorced, so things kind of balance out.

Philadelphia, scienceX2, SFO, travel

At the Exploratorium

Today we took the children to the Exploratorium, the wonderful hands-on science museum in San Francisco.

via Flickr

While we were there, we were interviewed by a Santa Cruz grad student who's writing a dissertation on science education. She observed us at one of the experiments, then interviewed the kids about the Exploratorium. What was fun about it? Did they feel like scientists when they were there? How was it different from science classes at their school?

via Flickr

This last question-- or something pretty close to it-- proved to be a hard one for them. Interviewing them about hands-on science turned out to be a bit like interviewing fish about water: coming from Peninsula, they really haven't been exposed to other ways of learning about science.

via Flickr

I hope they don't slow her research down too much by being weird outliers in her data-set.
The question about whether the kids think they're being scientists at the Exploratorium got me thinking: in some ways, they're not scientists, but subjects. Obviously for someone interviewing them for a dissertation about science museums, they'd count as subjects; but I realized that when I go with them to the Exploratorium, I'm usually observing them, trying to figure out what engages them, and how to nudge them toward engaging with the the exhibits in ways that are more likely to make them remember some deeper principle afterwards.

Exploratorium, Peninsula School, San Francisco, science

Recovering my digital life

Sunday night, as I was putting my son to bed, my hard drive died. We were listening to Dobie Gray's classic "Drift Away" (my children are strangely familiar with classic rock) when my computer suddenly froze. When I tried to restart, instead of the happy Mac face, the screen displayed a folder with a question mark.

Not good.

The next day at work, our IT guy confirmed the problem: there had a been a hardware failure in my hard drive, and it was now toast. He could put back some of the lost data, but I was going to be on the hook for whatever software I'd put on the machine, as well as my music.

So I've spent a fair amount of this week reconstructing my life, and making sure that the next time this happens, I'm better prepared. Hours downloading software, trying to remember passwords to countless Web 2.0 accounts, configuring things so they look familiar. Some things weren't hard, but I still haven't gotten some things worked out. Didn't Ecto have a button that showed what music you were listening? If it's in the new version of Ecto, I can't find it.

Reconstructing my music collection has been hardest. Part of the problem is that it's just so big: 6000+ songs, over 30 GB of material, and of course many of the songs I listen to most are things I bought on the iTunes store. I've been pretty good at backing things up, but it had been a month or so since I'd last saved my purchases, so there was that gap to deal with.

The iTunes music import process is okay, but not great. Most important, when I reimported music from my backup drive, my ratings and play count were stripped out. This may sound trivial, but most of my smart playlists sort music based either on my ratings or the popularity of songs; so losing this information was a big thing.

Tonight, though, I discovered a program that seems able to restore that missing information: something called Senuti. It lets you copy music from your iPod to your computer, and it handles metadata much better than anything else I've tried (even Apple's own process).

This may be the first case where losing my ability to do data-mining on myself really hurt. Normally we think of the data we've created, or the programs we use, as the most valuable parts of out digital archive; but for my music, having information about what and how I've listened really matters.

itunes, music, software

I love John Hagee

I'm no theologian, but basically, John Hagee is saying that Hitler was like Moses... an insane, genocidal, anti-semitic, megalomaniacal Moses, but Moses nonetheless.

But doesn't McCain's returning Hagee's endorsement cause its own problems? Because you could say that all Hagee is saying is that nothing happens-- a sparrow doesn't drop from the sky, a breeze doesn't blow, an ultimately suicidal racist doesn't take over half of Europe-- without the knowledge of the Almighty. So isn't McCain really saying that He is not, in fact, omniscient and omnipotent? I suppose this might be a brilliant ploy by McCain to lock down that bloc of voters whose theological views harken back to the church before, say, the Arian Heresy, but if so, he's playing a really subtle game.

politics, religion

Quote of the day

Rove's declared ambition to create a "permanent majority" seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illustions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans. (George Packer, The New Yorker, 26 May 2008)

politics, quote

The culture conundrum

Terry Eagleton has a piece on Raymond Williams and the challenge of culture in the 21st century:

"Culture is ordinary," [Raymond] Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from Black Mountains to Cambridge spires as in no sense untypical. Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighbourliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair and that he once acidly described as "one of the rudest places on earth". Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams's view it had given birth to a culture that was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labour, union and cooperative movements....

The real sense in which culture since Williams's death has become more ordinary has little to do with Dante or Mozart. One of Williams's key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art, but a whole way of life in common; and culture in this sense - language, inheritance, identity, religion - has become important enough to kill for. Dante and Mozart may be elitist, but they have never blown the limbs off small children....

Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths.... Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism.

There's also this great line: "In a rare moment of disillusion, he told me that the difference between teaching adults and students in the 1950s was like 'teaching doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons'."

Tags: culture, history, criticism

Simone Weil on art and authorship

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.-- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, quoted on Britannica Online

Tags: quote, art, authorship

New post

The blog is inexplicably missing. I thought a new post would wake it up.

My 6 year-old political commentator

My son saw this picture on Wonkette, and asked, "Is that someone at the Maker Faire?"

"Why do you think that person was at Maker Faire?" I asked.

"Because of those things in his ears," he said. "Those headphones."

Technorati Tags: children, politics

Artifact from Maker Faire

At the Maker Faire, we had imaginary covers of a 2018 issue of Maker magazine, and invited people to draw on them. This exercise yielded perhaps the best artifact from the future of all time:

via Flickr

Tags: makerfaire, iftf, future

Important new report

This is funny.

Officials from the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together warned that, despite their best efforts, everything appears to be falling completely apart and "getting way out of hand," according to a strongly worded report characterized by panic, frustration, and numerous typographical errors that was released to the American public Monday.

I especially like the debate between the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together, the California Center for Not Worrying About Stuff So Much, the Sitting Around and Expecting Others to Take Care of Everything Foundation, and the National Blame Allocation Council.

Technorati Tags: humor

Because everyone loves encephalopod robot dirigibles

Via Alex Halavais, the Festo Air Jelly:

Today's game

Little League, Silicon Valley style: Smart Energy versus Leader Ventures. Only here...

Hot water

A woman is like a tea bag: you never know how strong she is until she is in hot water."
Eleanor Roosevelt, via The XX Factor

Tags: eleanorroosevelt, quotes

Dive!

My son is a penguin

 

It's a pleasantly cool day here in Silicon Valley, but my son insisted that he wanted to swim. He'll probably do polar research one day.

Another line on my c.v.: Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford University

I don't think this was a very well-kept secret, but now it's official: in addition to my day job, and my work on the end of cyberspace book, I'm now officially an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It's a two-year appointment, which runs through the spring of 2010 (through Hilary Term, for those of you keeping track across the pond). I don't teach any courses, but I do work with students, and am on call to do things with SBS groups visiting Silicon Valley.

via flickr

The appointment was initially approved in March, but they only got me up on the Web site this week. Such is the pace of things there. (And as one friend said, "My god, your picture on the SBS website is so Californian!" It was taken in the garden of Howard Rheingold's house. You don't get more California than that.)

I've still got my affiliation with Stanford, and thank heavens for that: having access to the Stanford library has been critical to my continued viability as a thinker. But I've got a couple executive MBAs I'm working with at Oxford, and have had a good time collaborating with people at the James Martin Institute. And in the last few years I've been to more conferences there than Stanford.

Strange to have closer intellectual ties to a university in England than to one three miles away, but such is life these days. Or my life, anyway.

Needless to say, this is a real thrill. Not because it represents some prospective return to academia, but because it's an interesting hybrid position. SBS is one of several business schools that are real intellectual hot-houses these days. Some of the best B-schools are no longer places that just train people to crank out exotic formulas or spout jargon, but are seriously thinking about what it will mean to do business in this century. Oxford the added virtue of having the James Martin Institute, which in the next few years will-- if it has any sense at all-- become the global epicenter for serious futures work. So this is a good time to get connected to this little world.

I've already promised several people that I won't start speaking like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, as tempting as that would be.

[To the tune of Drew Barrymore & Hugh Grant, "Way Back Into Love [Demo Version]," from the album "Music & Lyrics".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Oxford University, postacademic

Something to remember when I go to Germany this summer

Using the title "Dr." if you have a doctorate from the U.S. can get you into trouble:

Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you're a doctor could land you in jail.

At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home.

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

The law was modified in 2001 to extend the privilege to degree-holders from any country in the European Union. But docs from the United States and anywhere else outside Europe are still forbidden to use the honorific. Violators can face a year behind bars.

[To the tune of Blue Öyster Cult, "Godzilla," from the album "Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best of Blue Öyster Cult".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Germany

Spring Fair

At the Peninsula Spring Fair

FREEBIRD!!

Interesting day

This morning, I was at Castilleja, listening to a symposium on power. It was a pretty good time, and a pretty high-powered crowd. Unlike the Tom Friedman talk, this one was for alumni, so the current students were next door in the chapel, listening to the proceedings on closed-circuit TV (like a pay-per-view sports event).

L to R: Laura Tyson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Pamela Matson, Jimmy Wales, Marissa Meyer, Kavita Ramdas, John Doerr. Not shown: Mark Hurd and Condoleezza Rice. Via flickr

In the afternoon, I watched my daughter play baseball. She got a couple base hits, and did a pretty good job as catcher.

Then we all went to Maker Faire.

via flickr

Tomorrow is the Peninsula Spring Fair. I'm going to miss part of it, as I'm going back to Maker Faire, but I should be able to get there in time to take some pictures.

[To the tune of U2, "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," from the album "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb".]

Technorati Tags: Little League, Maker Faire, Palo Alto, Peninsula School

When did I turn into Ward Cleaver?

Today I took off a little early from work to take my son to his Little League game. As someone who played soccer in high school as an act of defiance against football-addled Southern culture, I find my children's participation in organized sports slightly mystifying. It's not particularly mysterious, though: it's completely my wife's fault, as she's the big baseball fan in the family.

The local league is a typical Silicon Valley reinvention of an American institution. Almost all the teams are sponsored by dot-coms, financial services companies, or French restaurants. A couple weeks ago, my son's team, the Astros (sponsored by visual search engine SearchMe.com) played against the Yankees (eHealth.com); last week, they went up against the As (sponsored by Interwoven).

Today, they played the Orioles (sponsored by Left Bank).

After the game, we went back to Peninsula, to the annual student rock concert. The concert is a fun time, as much (or maybe just a tiny bit more) for the atmosphere as for the music. And as one of my fellow parents put it, it's nice for the kids to spend time on campus without all the high-pressure academic stress weighing them down....

Though it can be entertaining to hear the kids.

My daughter is already talking about what songs she wants to sing when she's old enough to perform next year.

So my afternoon and evening were taken up with Little League and a student concert. I truly have been domesticated....

[To the tune of Lucrezio de Seta & His Scurvy Brothers, "Century's End," from the album "The Nightfly Live Show".]

Technorati Tags: children, Little League, Peninsula School