Relevant History

The Blue Danube

Seen from Graphisoft Park

What I love most about Budapest

Wireless everywhere (where else can I Twitter my lunch?) and the most elegant coffee service anywhere.

Chicken with paprika

Great goulash

The best hotel I've ever been in

I made it to my hotel, the Hotel Kalvin House. It may be the coolest hotel I've ever stayed in. Basically, imagine the abandoned building that Nexus 6 designer J. F. Sebastian lived in, turned into a central European pension. That's this place.

I got here a little after midnight, and got dropped off about half a block from the hotel. I walked down the street, and found the entrance-- a big wooden door, no porter, no big welcoming sign. After a little hunting around, I found an apartment buzzer; there were about a dozen buttons, all but one of them blank.

via flickr

I buzzed, and the door unlocked. I walked in... to almost total darkness. After a few seconds, the motion sensor picked me up, and lights went on. There was a sign pointing to the left. I walked over, and didn't see a was a staircase surrounding a tiny elevator. The lights clicked off.

via flickr

I took the elevator to the second floor, and got out. No signs directing me. After a minute, the door to my right opened, and the proprietor checked me in.

My room is on the top floor, essentially the attic. The decor is basic Scandinavian hotel modern, with a few more traditional central European touches. There's free wireless, which is very cool-- I was wondering about that, but happily it's becoming the standard these days.

via flickr

Budapest, hotel, Hungary, night, Travel, Kálvin House

Running into the Antiquities Road Show

After my technology transfer breakfast, I went back to my room, packed and checked out of the hotel, and then headed out for a walk. I first braved the crowds and stopped at Boots to pick up a couple things. From there I went on to Blackwell's, because... well, it's a huge bookstore. (There's a Caffe Nero on the first floor of Blackwell's, but they makes Starbucks' over-roasted coffee seem like a light refreshing brew.)

I wandered downstairs to what's (accurately) called the basement, only to discover that the "basement" occupies about half the block, and seems to stretch under the Balliol College gardens. It was very cool.

via flickr

I picked up a copy of Donald Braden's and Susan Greenfield's latest books, then wandered over to the Bodleian Library, and around the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's Church.

via flickr

Back in Budapest

I landed in Budapest just before midnight, breezed through Customs, and now I'm on my way into town. I arranged for a ride with an airport shuttle through Expedia, and so far the experience has been good. Of course, we're 10 minutes frmo the airport, so we'll see how things go from here.

We just passed a car with a DVD player built into the ceiling. I'm conditioned to seeing Pixar movies on those screens, and it seemed odd that kids would be out this late. As we passed, I got a second's glimpse. No kids in the car. The driver was watching it. And it's a porn video.

Welcome to Budapest.

The place seems darker than London, in terms of the amount of public lighting that's used (or available).

My Nokia N95 seems to be getting reception here fine. I bought a Vodaphone pay-as-you-go account, and I think I enabled the international calling feature, and though it's about $1.50 to connect a call when you're outside the UK, I think it's worth it if it helps me avoid problems. Plus, just being able to keep up with the family is a huge thing. I called home when I was in Heathrow, and chatted with the kids for a couple minutes; they're not very conversational on the phone, since they can't see themselves like on iChat or Skype, but still. I like being able to do it.

My Mac is seeing a steady stream of wifi signals as we drive along. It's pretty interesting. When I was here last, I was struck by how unwired the place is, even though I couldn't get a power converter on a Sunday to save my life.

Budapest, Travel

Off to the bus

I'm heading out shortly to get the bus from Oxford to to Heathrow 5, for my flight to Budapest tonight. It's mid-afternoon, but I'm leaving a lot of time because 1) I don't want to get stuck in unexpected traffic, 2) Heathrow 5 is said to be a lot better, but still could be a disaster, and 3) Oxford is so packed with tourists you can't turn around.

Not that I've gone native or anything-- I find I get more American rather than less when I'm in England; if I were here for a month, I'd probably end up dressing like a cowboy-- but it really is very crowded.

Besides, I need to do some work for my workshops on Monday and Thursday, having been distracted by things back at the office. The difference between going an academic conference when you're an academic, and going to a conference when you're, well, me, is that when you're an academic, you don't have regular work still going on, and other people needing you to do things.

England, Oxford, Oxford University, Travel

Technology transfer breakfast

Had breakfast with an SBS student who's doing a summer project on technology and IP transfer. It was a good time: I find the SBS students interesting to talk to, both because they're working on cool stuff, and because they're useful informants about the local culture of the business school.

One of the things we talked about was the degree to which you could think about intellectual property as something akin to a manufactured object, or something that's inherently social. If it's the first, the challenge people who want to facilitate intellectual property have to deal with involve reducing transaction costs and asymmetries, because IP is something that you could move as easily as an iPod moves from the factory floor in China to your door. If it's the second, though, and if the transfer of intellectual property is more a process of social negotiation in which creators and users of IP create a common understanding around pieces of IP, then you need to design a very different system: one that facilitates relationships between creators and users, rather than facilitates transactions between anonymous buyers and sellers.

I've finished packing, and now I'm going to go check out, walk around for a while, then take the bus from Oxford to Heathrow Terminal 5. I'm going to leave ont he early side, to make sure I get there with plenty of time; then I figure if I have a long wait, i can wander around T5 and take pictures, while my clothing disappears into some strange black hole.

England, innovation, Oxford, Oxford University, Said Business School, technology, travel

Last day in Oxford

I got a decent night's sleep last night, and woke up without yesterday's confusion. I'm having breakfast with someone I ran into in SBS-- a graduate who's doing some work on innovation in Asia, and overheard me talking about the subject-- then I'll finish packing, and get things together to leave this afternoon.

I'll spend a little bit of this morning playing tourist, but mainly I'm going to work on things for the Budapest and Vienna workshops.

England, Oxford University, travel, Oxford

Back at SBS

My day starts in earnest now. I never got back to sleep, so I spent a couple hours doing e-mail and reading, and making sure my various alarms work. (They do.)

I'm meeting someone at 9 (in a couple minutes), then another person at 10.

I actually had quite a good conversation last night at the pub-- we spent a while talking about an article I'm supposed to be writing about the future of futures, and it was one of those drunken states in which you manage to think through a bunch of things all of a sudden. Incredibly, I pretty much remember it all. Usually it's only a plane ride or gigantic amount of coffee that puts me in that state.

conference, England, future, Oxford University

I'm late! I'm late! No wait...

When I finally got to sleep last night, the sky was getting light. Not much time until I have to wake up, I thought. Naturally, having been out last night, once I was in bed I fell right to sleep.

I woke up with a start. How long had I been asleep? Why didn't I hear the alarm? What time is it? I crawled out of bed and looked at the computer. 10:30???

DAMN!

I was supposed to meet people at 9 and 10, not to mention the conference, which cost a small fortune to attend. Damn it. Damn it.

I ran-- staggered or sleep-walked, more like it-- into the shower. How the Hell does this thing work? Finally I got a shower going, thought the bath never stopped running. I got out without killing myself, but I did slip enough to get a bruise. Damn improvised plumbing and layout.

I had a wake-up call and my computer alarm set. How could I have slept through both of them? The computer alarm is a godawful air raid siren, to boot. This is going to be a real problem on workshop days. If I can't wake up on time, Bad Things Will Happen.

No time to shave. I gotta get over to SBS, figure out where things are at, and make some apologies.

Check the clock again. 10:40 PM.

A long minute, staring at the computer.

10:40 PM?

The computer is still on Pacific Time. I haven't changed it.

That means it's... add 8... try to add 8...

It's 6:45 AM.

I'm not late.... I didn't sleep through the alarms. They didn't go off... because they're not going off for another 45 minutes.

Of course, now I'm way too pumped to go back to sleep. Though maybe I'll manage it.

conference, England, Oxford University, travel

Day 2 at Oxford

It's really late here, but I still feel the need to have a short post.

me and bicycles, via flickr

I spent most of the day at the conference; of course I was giving a paper this afternoon, so I was going to a couple talks, but ducking out of others to work on my own presentation. After some frantic last-minute fiddling with the presentation technology in the Edmond Safra Lecture Theatre (work for the nephew, speak in the theatre of the uncle!), I was able to give my talk using ZuiPrezi, which was fun.

said business school, via flickr

After that, I took a little time to write some postcards and get a SIM card for my phone. So now I have phone numbers in the US, UK, and Singapore. Part of me thinks this is cool. Part of me thinks it's a sign I need a different life.

main gate, oriel college, via flickr

Dinner was at Oriel College, one of the oldest of the colleges at Oxford. As I've already confessed, I'm a sucker for these kinds of events.

oriel dining hall, via flickr

This one was a little less alcohol-soaked, but still very good. Dining at the long tables under portraits of the Queen and stained glass pictures of Edward II is never bad when you're an American.

courtyard or oriel college, via flickr

After dinner, I met up with a former student, and we had a few pints at The Jam Factory, a gallery-restaurant-bar near SBS. Damn good beer.

the jam factory, via flickr

After that, I wandered around town for a while, taking lots of pictures. Eventually, after crossing Magdalen Bridge, I doubled back, and stopped at a kebab van for a little something.

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With that, I headed back to the room, to do a couple hours' work. The big difference between going to a conference as an academic, and going as... me... is that my job doesn't stop when I'm away. But so it goes.

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Tomorrow I'm going to meet various friends and business contacts, and generally take it a little easier.

drunken bicyles, via flickr

Substantive stuff about the conference tomorrow.

conference, England, Oxford University, travel, Oriel College

Last post of the night

I've pretty much finished up work on my talk tomorrow, so I'm going to turn in.

via flickr

Greetings from "A Turn to Ontology in STS"

Well, I made it. I may fall asleep, since my body thinks it's 2 a.m., but at least I'll fall asleep at the conference, rather than some random place in England.

via flickr

I got here about an hour late-- not only did the bus take a little while, but I was dropped off about 10 minutes' walk from SBS-- but I got checked in, dropped my bag, and came to the lecture hall. Of course, in classic 19th century fashion, the doors to the lecture hall are at the front, so if you're late everyone can see you. (There are doors in the back, but the young lady who was doing registration didn't tell me how to get to those doors. I think she was punishing me.) So everyone knows I'm here. Not that more than a handful of people might recognize me, of course....

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Walking up High Street, I went past a vast number of teenagers with their parents, all holding maps or slender catalogs. Is a summer school session starting? Or is this what Oxford is like all summer?

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conference, England, Oxford University, Said Business School, STS

On the bus to Oxford

I found the Central Bus Terminal at Heathrow, after a little wandering around and being misled by the station right outside arrivals in Terminal 3.

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I must look like I'm on my way to a conference: the bus driver grabbed my bag, took one look at me, and said, "High Street then, innit?" Umm, yeah.

The bus looks promising. It's nice and clean, and there are power outlets on the window seats (they're not working yet, but I have hopes). On the other hand, the seats are a bit cramped, and recline about 1 degree. However, I should get into Oxford just around 10-- a little later than I'd meant, but I still shouldn't miss much of the conference, and having come all the way from California, I hope they'll forgive me.

I have the vague memory of taking a bus from Heathrow before-- I think there was problem with the Tube, and people were being shuttled from the airport to one of the stations closer to the city. So the novelty of the "luxury coach" experience-- the category really isn't one we have in the States, innit?-- is preserved by the unreliability of my memory.

bus, England, Heathrow, Oxford University

Landing in a couple hours

We're about 3 hours away from London. It's about 8 PM back in California, and 4 AM GMT-- which means I'll be landing around 11 my time, and will basically be up all night at this conference. Should be fun.

I managed to avoid watching 27 Dresses and Jumper, but there was a film with Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt that I succumbed to. It involves a terrorist attack against the President at a summit in Salamanca, Spain (actually Mexico City and Santa Fe), and is mainly interesting for how it runs the same scene several times from different characters' perspectives. Despite it having a great cast, I never heard of the thing.

England, travel, UA 930

Greetings from UA 930

We're now over eastern Canada, and the sun is starting to go down. Of course, when you're flying east, the sun goes down really fast, so we're soon going to be in darkness.

I managed to score an exit row seat for this flight, which is nice for the leg room it affords; the fact that I don't have as much storage space is a bit of a pain, but well worth being able to stretch out more.

Whether by luck or design, the other papers in my session tomorrow (Thursday) are pretty nicely matched with my own, though they're quite different from each other. One is about using theatrical techniques to help groups build common views of company processes, organizational challenges, etc.; the other looks at representations of modern finance, as seen through advertisements in the Financial Times. Since my talk is partly about why paper continues to be a valuable medium in workshops, and partly about how we use paper spaces as a foundation for other products that are then used in other engagements with clients and audiences, I'll split the difference between talking about group practices, and creating representations intended to get viewers thinking (about the future rather than banking, but still).

There are a couple fairly active toddlers on the plane, who have been wandering up and down the cabin, with mothers in tow; lots of other people, though, have just gone to sleep. I usually fall asleep right before takeoff, but just nap for a little bit; the ability to sleep through a flight could be a useful skill, but I find it elusive.

England, travel, UA 930

Greetings from the SFO Red Carpet Club

I'm at SFO, waiting for my flight to London. The trip is going to be something. Two conferences at Oxford, one on ontology and STS (I'm really hoping to get through the papers on the flight over so I can understand what the Hell that means, but some friends are going to be there, so when I got the invite I said yes), the other on visualization in business (the perfect conference for me, given my prior scholarly work on scientific visualization, and my current obsession with visualization tools). Then I've got a bunch of meetings in Oxford and London with various people, to do some Institute business.

Saturday I head down to Budapest, for a workshop on the future of science, co-organized with my friends at Ithaka. After that, it's up Danube (or down? must check) to Vienna, and a second future of science workshop, co-sponsored by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Once that's done, it's back to London for a day (EasyHotel, here I come!), then home on the 4th of July).

I'm taking an express bus from Heathrow to Oxford, and I should get to the Said by about 9:30-- a little late for the conference, but still, I'll be there for most of the day. My own paper spaces talk in Thursday early afternoon, so I've got lots of time to carve 20 minutes out of a 40-page paper. I've got to read the other papers in my session, so I can work in some references to their work. Reading other papers always impresses conference organizers.

The last few days I've really been dragging-- tired, feeling overwhelmed, really aware of everything I have to get done or am behind on-- but now that I'm here at the airport, I'm getting that irrational exuberance and burst of energy that comes when I travel. In fact, I think I'm almost at the point where that feeling of spending several days in this high-energy mental zone is more attractive than my destination. It's a weird Pavolovian response to the stimulus of international terminals, foreign hotels, and conference rooms.

I can't actually get onto the wifi here, because I'm not flying first or business class. Maybe I could pay, but the free wifi only comes if you've spent many thousands of dollars. I'm not going to stop coming here-- the chairs are comfortable, the windows let in a lot of sun, there are lots of power outlets, and I do appreciate being able to drink coffee and Diet Coke until I float away-- but it is a study in how, if you drive expectations down far enough, any amenity can be repackaged as a luxury. The Red Carpet Club in Heathrow is okay, but I love having access to it because the main terminal waiting area totally sucks.

I'm also burning a couple DVDs and charging up my iPod (this time I remembered my iPod connector-- last time I went to Europe I forgot it, and had to buy a really expensive on in Frankfurt).

airport, England, SFO, UA 930, United Airlines

Attention, attention

Driving home this evening I heard an interview with Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid. Many of the interview dealt with questions of attention: are we focusing less? Are we less able to focus?

This subject seems to be picking up steam. There's a new book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by columnist Maggie Jackson, The New York Times blog Shifting Careers has a guest post by Jackson:

Should we blame the BlackBerry and other devices? No. The P.D.A., the cellphone and the computer did not usher in our hypermobile, split-focus, cybercentric culture. Instead, the first high-tech revolutions more than a century ago created new experiences of time and space that have intensified. Inventions like the telegraph, cinema, railroad and airplane shattered distance and upended ancient temporal rhythms. Our age of speed and overload has been building for generations.

But just as we are working toward a green earth, so we can find ways to create what I like to call “planet focus.” What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

Jackson's blog talks more about distraction. RSS it, then forget to read it for several months.

memory, psychology, attention

NYT on the politics of architecture

A good piece in today's Times on architects' arguments about working with autocratic clients:

With a growing number of prominent architects designing buildings in places like China, Iran, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where development has exploded as civic freedoms or exploitation of migrant labor have come under greater scrutiny, the issue has inched back into the spotlight.

Debate abounds on architecture blogs, and human rights groups are pressing architects to be mindful of a government’s politics and labor conditions in accepting commissions.

The ideological issue is as old as architecture itself. By designing high-profile buildings that bolster the profile of a powerful client, do architects implicitly sanction the client’s actions or collaborate in symbolic mythmaking?

architecture

New trees

Two new ornamental plum trees in the front yard. We're trying to make the yard nicer!

I love boxes

The cat really likes the boxes that cases of Diet Coke come in. He'll be there most of the day.

Dying washing machine

I'm at home today, working while the kids are at a birthday party. The washing machine is also working through many loads of post-camp and pre-trip laundry, and is not happy. Sounds like it's about to explode, in fact.

Since we bought it when we moved into the house, it has had a few years' service. But it makes of wonder what other appliances we might need to replace sooner rather than later. Damn modern life...

Good family picture

Taken by my wife, of course, so she's missing from it. Still...

camp, children, family, winnarainbow

Back from Camp Winnarainbow

We spent most of the day driving up and back from Camp Winnarainbow, where my daughter spent the last week.

I'm pretty sure she had a good time.

This pretty much sums up graduate school

From Sorry I Missed Your Party.

university

What's in a name

My brother and his partner just had their first child yesterday. Needless to say, it's very exciting. They live in New York, unfortunately, which means I've heard about all this at something of a remove, and aren't likely to see my new nephew-- much less introduce him to his cousins-- for a while.

The latest round of e-mails now involves the name. The baby's mom is Chinese, so that name is taken care of; they liked the name Maxwell, so that's in there somewhere; and now we're all trying to work out the Korean name. So far as I can tell, there are rules for how to construct Korean names, based on what generation or age cohort you're part of, and various other factors-- except so far as I can tell, my aunt (who is my dad's older sister and therefore The Family Authority on these issues) obeys these rules whenever she doesn't have some other name that she likes better, or doesn't feel like combining pieces of my grandparents' names.

The one thing that is constant, of course, is that whatever my aunt comes up with is what we use. Some traditions are inviolate.

family

New nephew

Zhi Chang "Max" Pang, born this afternoon!

Possibly the most dangerout thing on the Internet

Massive Music Quiz. Be very afraid.

Go Sweden!

Tags: humor, rabbits, soccer

Quote of the day: on imperfect knowledge economics

A new book* by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg coins the phrase “imperfect knowledge economics” to describe this world of fundamental uncertainty. They use the systematic failure of attempts to analyse exchange rate swings to illustrate the hopelessness of a search for economic explanations that transcend time and place. Frequent discontinuities and transitions in the ways market participants view events mean that economic models, like historical narratives, are context specific. The search for “sharp prediction” – the mantra of the modern scientific economist who seeks to replicate the successes of physics for social science – is doomed to failure.

The best that economists and their clients can do is identify qualitative regularities and patterns in events – as historians do – and, like historians, they can say a lot when they accept their inability to make “sharp predictions”. (John Kay, "The fruitless search for exact knowledge," Financial Times, 17 October 2007.)

future

What a stupid idea!

The Bierstick! "Drink up to 24 ounces in less than two seconds." Because the problem with beer is you can't drink it fast enough.

Tags: humor

Spies of Warsaw

Last night I finished the new Alan Furst book, The Spies of Warsaw. Furst is one of my favorite living authors: I choose his books as dinner companions when I travel, and his work is something of a reference point for me. (For those who don't know Furst and his work, this is still a good introduction.)

I thought his last book, The Foreign Correspondent, was very entertaining, but had a bit too much of familiar characters and places for my taste. The problem is that Furst has built up a remarkably rich fictional universe-- imagine JRR Tolkien or Terry Pratchett without magic-- in which places have a lot of resonance and meaning, and part of the pleasure of reading his work is learning more about it. Imagine going to a city you already like and discovering a new cool neighborhood, another excellent restaurant, and becoming a bit more comfortable with the subway: a trip in which you see only familiar sights can be very nice, but lack the pleasure of surprise. (Now that I think about it, the books of his that I reread the least, Dark Voyage and Blood of Victory, take place on the periphery of that world-- maybe too far.) So the challenge is to keep expanding that universe, while throwing new light on the familiar parts of it.

Spies of Warsaw manages to hit a very nice balance between familiarity and novelty. There are a couple secondary characters who we meet originally in The Polish Officer or The World at Night, whose back-stories are fleshed out. The main characters are new, and most of the action takes place in Warsaw (where Furst's earlier books haven't spent much time), or Germany; Paris makes an appearance, but it isn't as big a character as it is in some of his other books.

The stakes are also clearer and higher in this book. Without giving too much away, the central character becomes aware that the Wehrmacht is trying to figure out how to conduct blitzkrieg operations through forests-- which suggests that Germany is going to try to attack France not by throwing itself against the Maginot Line, but by going through the Ardennes. Normally, Furst's characters risk their lives for very uncertain stakes: unless they're trying to save a loved one, they rarely know if the operations they're involved in will make any difference at all to the war. (The recycling of Furst's characters runs the risk of making World War II seem like something that was fought by about fifty people; but having his characters operate in worlds that have completely uncertain, and often very ambiguous, outcomes helps create a sense that you're watching just one of a million little parts of the war, not the central figures whose actions secretly determine the course of the war.) They're also more war-weary in this book. Maybe it's because several of the are French veterans of the trenches of World War I; or maybe it's harder to write a book about war these days without thinking that your characters would be more scarred, and simultaneously more hardened and fearful.

Furst has to write a book set mainly in Budapest now.

Alan Furst, reading

There goes the neighborhood

As if the subprime mortgage meltdown wasn't enough: it turns out we don't live in one of those really cool spiral galaxies, but a bar galaxy.

science

The coolest thing I saw in New York

I visited a friend at the New York Public Library, and got a little tour of the public spaces before it was open to the public. The reading room is normally full; few people who aren't library staff see it like this.

via Flickr

via Flickr

Even cooler, though, was the display in the reception room across from the main reading room. A Gutenberg Bible, and behind it, the original Winnie-the-Pooh.

via Flickr

via Flickr

library, New York City, printing, New York Public Library

At home today

My son is sick, so I'm staying home with him today. I tell myself that I'll be able to get some work done, but since I've got to read the subtitles to Jabba the Hutt's dialogue in Star Wars VI, who am I kidding....

children

My son in a tree

When I got to school today, my son was high up in a loquat tree.

via Flickr

Climbing trees is popular at Peninsula.

via Flickr

children, menlo park, Peninsula School

Cool Buddha

At a friend's house.