Relevant History

Taking inventory

The obligatory post-trick-or-treat sorting and counting. Now comes the trading between the children, which has to happen before they're too full of sugar and incapable of thinking rationally.

Greeters

My daughter set out "her minions" to watch the door. Not sure who is guarding her room, though.

Happy Halloween!

My daughter is Laura Ingalls Wilder, my son is a garbage can.

More proof of why these kids love school

Yesterday before the kids' school day started, I went to the dentist. I didn't think it would take that long, and so the kids opted to come with me, rather than go to early morning child care.

My crown, via flickr

Long and short, we ended up leaving there about 9:30, and by the time we got out the door, my daughter was pretty upset. I walked her to her class; they were having a meeting, and everybody was in the main room. She put her guitar and lunchbox down in the back room, but couldn't go out; she was too weepy, and even though she hadn't missed the activity she thought they'd already be doing, didn't want to have everyone looking at her when she went back out.

We spent a few minutes talking about it; finally, when it seemed clear that I couldn't get her to go out, I offered to take her to Starbucks with me for a quick drink, and bring her back before her activity started. So we left, went to Starbucks, and came back about twenty minutes later. By now, she was fine, and went running off to activities (in this case, sculpture class), no problem.

front porch, via flickr

Right as she was heading to class, my phone rang. The school office was calling: Elizabeth's female classmates wanted to make sure Elizabeth was all right, and encourage her to come back.

This is a crew that's been together for the last three years, and include several girls who've been together since nursery school. Now, it was touching that her girlfriends wanted to make sure Elizabeth was all right. But the other thing that struck me was that they'd go en masse to the office and ask that someone call me. When I was in fourth grade, the office was definitely someplace you did NOT want to go; certainly you didn't go there with your friends and ask for a favor.

leaf spiral, via flickr

It's not that the girls assume that they can go anywhere, or are unsupervised: Peninsula is unstructured in the same way that a medieval village is unstructured, which is to say it has a minimum of formal regulation but a ton of custom, and its residents are guided by an awareness that they have to get along because they're going to be living together for a long time. (There are also all kinds of rules about boundaries, what trees you can climb and which ones you can't-- apparently there are marks on the ones you can't climb, but I've never seen them.) But they took for granted that they could use the office to check on their friend, and that no one would find that strange.

It says a lot about how the kids view teachers and staff, and how they see their own place at the school.

children, Peninsula School

The scariest night of the year

From the Examiner:

Halloween costumes have gotten out of hand. Gather any group of parents and you'll quickly hear about how the choices of costumes have gone from witch and princess to sexy witch and pouty porn princess.

Thank goodness my daughter wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder this year. My son's a garbage can-- really, a garbage can with the bottom cut out so he can walk. He first wanted to be a garbage can on wheels, and have me push him around the neighborhood, but that idea died a quick death.

children, parenting

Peninsula picture of the day

A Day of the Dead display, the Big Building.

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

The Longevity Revolution

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

The aging of the Baby Boom generation is a perfect example of what Peter Schwartz calls an "inevitable surprise." For years futurists have been talking about it for years, warning that it would be an event of tremendous importance. But most companies haven't taken it very seriously: like the new millennium, it always seemed distant, even as it got closer.

This lapse is made more peculiar by the fact that it's so easy to see. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you're a boomer. You're part of the story, and there are 80 million of you in the United States. But few people think of themselves as getting older but not old, not crossing into that social Hell of polyester clothes and retirement homes—to say nothing of boredom, inactivity, poor health, and looming mortality. Most of us would say, that's not going to be me. I've spent my whole life being active, and I'm damned if I'm going to just shuffle offstage now.

Here's the thing: we won't have to. Instead of giving in to old age, boomers are going to dramatically change what aging is. They're going to use their money and political clout to alter our perceptions of age, the way elders live, and their place in society, the economy, and politics. Boomers will have as great an effect on our notions of aging as they had on youth in the 1960s. Indeed, so big are these changes that historian Theodore Roszak speaks of a "longevity revolution" as important as the Industrial Revolution.

Tinkering

I'm at a conference on "Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge: Production in the Digital Age," at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. There are about 40 of us in a second-floor open conference room, and include some really awesome people. Given my interest in DIY science, the relationship between craft knowledge and formal knowledge, and the history of scientific practice, this should be a really interesting couple days, and one that can feed into several of the different projects I've got going on.

conference, tinkering

Carnegie Foundation

Up at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching this evening, for the opening of a conference on tinkering. It looks like it's going to be a really fascinating event. There are lots of cool people, it's a wonderful subject, and the venue is really nice.

via flickr

I hope to be able to liveblog and Twitter the conference, but I'm not sure what the rules are. Will find out tomorrow.

conference, DIY, Stanford University, tinkering

My daughter is going through a privacy phase

She was especially proud of the blood on the spear. Apparently it makes the stuffie look REALLY ferocious. I hope I don't need to take her to a psychologist....

The futurists' paradox

[A repost from my old Red Herring blog.]

Futurists live with a paradox. On the one hand (as they are the first to admit), it is impossible to predict the future. On the other, it is more important today than ever to try.

In a world that changes slowly, prediction is easy and uninteresting: the future will be much like the present, and the only real uncertainties are natural disasters like famine or drought. In a rapidly-changing world, in contrast, prediction is hard but important. The value of knowing the future, in other words, increases in proportion to its impossibility.

Futurists discovered this problem in the 1960s, when the modern field got its start. At the time, futurists thought that with enough computing power and the right programs, it really would be possible to predict the future, or at least assign statistical probabilities to major events. After a few years, thought two things became clear. You couldn't predict the future. And you didn't need to.

Specific events are impossible to predict because so many nearly-random factors can influence them: call this the "for want of a nail" problem, after the famous line in Shakespeare. History is filled with grand events that turn on some small hinge—a last-minute decision, a missed connection, the failure of reinforcements to arrive in time. The future will be full of them, too.

But even if you couldn't answer fortune teller-level questions, futurists could see the broad outlines of the Future: the world that's shaped by demographics, long-term economic patterns, geopolitics, and culture. Just as the Annales school of historians argued that the longue duree—the grand patterns of history shaped by climate, culture, demographics, and economics—were more important than the short-term world of politics or biography, so now did futurists argue that they could chart the coastline of the future.

Robert Burton on "The feeling of knowing"

Today at lunch I heard a really fascinating talk on certainty and knowledge by Robert Burton, author of a recent book called On Being Certain. It's a terrific project, because it makes a radical but to my mind entirely plausible case about the nature of certainty-- that it's not the product of logical operations, but an emotional state whose inner workings are (for now at least) forever mysterious.

But first, let's back up a bit. For a long time psychologists have mapped (and argued over) the differences between knowing things, and knowing that you know them-- between cognition and metacognition. The work of Ben Libet in the 1980s showed that there's a "ready potential"-- a gap of several hundred milliseconds between when we make a decision, and when we become aware of the decision. More recently, John-Dylan Haynes' work shows that this potential can, under some circumstances, be a lot longer.

There are also interesting examples of people being certain about things under circumstances where certainty is not really possible. William James, in his study of religious experience, talked about "felt knowledge" and mystical states: "Although so similar to states of feeling," he wrote, "mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge." Deja vu and cortical stimulation all generate a feeling of certainty, even in the absence of evidence. Baseball players talk about being able to see the ball and adjust their swings accordingly, when neurological studies show that they can't possibly have enough time to both track the ball, figure out how they should change their stance or the angle of the bat or the speed of the swing, and execute. Ditto for tennis players and other athletes who require lightning-fast reflexes; really, many of those sports shouldn't really exist at all.

All of this leads to Burton's argument that there's a really big disconnect between knowledge and certainty. Here's the book blurb:

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

What does this mean? Looking at 2+2 = 4 gives us both a correct answer, and a feeling that it's right (metacognition); looking at Einstein's theory of special relativity does not. Likewise, optical illusions are things that we can logically know work one way, but emotionally feel wrong.

We normally thing of thoughts and logical and reasonable, but they consist of lots of things: sensory inputs, biological predisposition, prior experience, and mental sensations. All of these are flexible, contingent, fragile, constructed, and otherwise... uncertain. Certainty isn't a logical conclusion, it's an emotional state. "Certainty and other feelings of conviction," Burton says, "are neither conscious choices nor even thought processes. They are mental sensations that arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason." Later in the talk, he added, "The feeling of knowing operates as an intermediary between the world, and your conscious thoughts... We think of the feeling of knowing as the logical result of a line of reason, it's actually the other way around."

However, while that "a-ha" feeling of certainty is not something you can arrive at through logical means, it can be trained. After all, physicists do look at the theory of relativity, and have that a-ha feeling.

I suspect you could take this idea and blend it into things like the sociology of science-- how does it mesh with concepts like tacit knowledge?-- and Kuhn's arguments about the psychological dimension of paradigm shifts (something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention among later readers).

IFTF, psychology, decision-making, certainty

New glasses

About two weeks ago, I lost my glasses. In the house. It was the weirdest thing. I lose pens all the time (and if they're really expensive, usually find them); leave my iPod headphones in clothes; have two watches because one of them is often off on some mysterious excursion; but I never lose my glasses.

However, this time, I took them, put on contacts, found some reading glasses (talk about something that I lose!), then... I have no idea what. The glasses were abducted by aliens, or something.

I had been thinking about buying some new ones anyway, and thought I needed to get my vision checked, and have enough contacts and reading glasses to function perfectly well, so it wasn't the end of the world.

Since high school I've worn wire-framed glasses: aviators, round standard issue minority professional glasses, or variations of those two. I decided to go with something different this time. Black Oakley metal frames, black on the outside, red on the inside.

via flickr

I'm glad I've got them. Not only do I like the look, but I'm really glad to be able to see in the distance, then read something in front of me, without having to look down; reach in my jacket for reading glasses; reach in another pocket for them; possible look elsewhere; put them on; then look down and read. It's bad UI for your eyes.

In the last couple days, I've gotten better at reading without my reading glasses; not great, but between my eyes reshaping themselves a bit, and my brain being better able to puzzle out fuzzy shapes and interpret them as words, I was fairly functional. It's a reminder of just how much our sense of the world, and our senses, function at an intersection of technologies, bodies, and brains. We think of vision as something that's pretty straightforward, but in fact it's not: there's a complicated collaboration between glasses or contacts (or glasses and contacts); our eyes (and the muscles that adjust the shape of our eyes); and our brain's ability to process the signals it receives, and the control it can exert over how the eye behaves.

glasses

The Crepe House

A nice place near the Opera House that we discovered today in San Francisco.

Best perspective on the financial meltdown

This quote from the Guardian may displace Sad Guys on Trading Floors as my favorite cultural artifact of the crisis...

[Icelander] Palme Vidar, with the wisdom of 73 years, is equally ruminative. "This is a small country," he says. "We have always swung, between feast and famine. There have been terrible times before, too, when the sheep bubble burst and the herring fleet failed. We always hang on. And you know, we were not going in a good direction. When I was a boy, if you went to the harbour to fish and you got wet, you could not fish again until the next day, because you had only one pair of trousers. Today people have too many trousers."

If you can survive both a sheep bubble (what a concept), and your herring fleet failing... AND to top it off, dealing with too many trousers-- well, you can get through anything.

business

A start

Definitely asymmetrical, but a promising beginning.

Raw materials

Building a map

My project for the next couple days. Start with a blank wall. Play lots of Mono, Zep and Sound Tribe Sector 9. End with a map of the future of science.

Amabile and Khaire on creativity and leadership

From Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire, "Creativity and the Role of the Leader:"

  [T]here is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest.... One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.

[via metacool]

"I used to think Michael Palin was the funniest Palin on Earth"

John Cleese on Sarah Palin:

humor, politics

Today's workspace

Ghosts of commerce

The last trace of a Mercedes dealership, High and Hamilton, Palo Alto.

Is this kind of odd?

From my homeland.

Notice the golden light shining behind her head, and McCain doing an impersonation of Corcovado.

It all seems strangely familiar. It's almost like they're tapping into some kind of deeper symbolism here... but I can't quite put my finger on it.

politics

Great and infuriating article about adjunct hiring practices

In the Chronicle:

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, long criticized for its workplace policies, is a “more-honest employer” of part-time workers than colleges that employ thousands of adjunct faculty members. That was the harsh message delivered to a group of college human-resources officials here on Monday by one of their own: Angelo-Gene Monaco, associate vice president for human resources and employee relations at the University of Akron....

“We helped create a highly educated part of the working poor, and it’s starting to get attention from outsiders,” he said, noting that unions are trying to organize part-timers, and lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are examining the issue.... “We rely on them for a very important function, and we assume that they will continue to accept mistreatment in return.”

academia

Working at home

I had a morning meeting at Peninsula that ran until about 11:15, so after it was was over, I went outside, sat on the front porch, hopped on the wireless network, and went back online.

[via flickr]

It's not at all unusual to see parents around the school-- unlike the schools I went to, when the only time you saw a parent on-campus was when someone was in serious trouble.

Right before this picture was taken, my son walked by, asked me was I was doing there, but really had no particular interest in the answer. It was curious that I was there, but not strange enough to deserve more than a second's thinking about.

menlo park, mobility, Peninsula School

The Power Point from Hell

This presentation by Sequoia Capital, a VC firm here in the Valley, is pretty terrifying. But the first slide really tells you everything you need to know:

Silicon Valley, Silicon_Valley

On Krugman

Balloon Juice has a very nice piece on Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, and the long-term payoff of taking controversial stands that you really believe in. Indeed, that seems to be a theme this year: As Science reported (quoted in Balloon Juice):

"Fluorescent proteins have revolutionized medical research,” says oncologist and imaging expert John Frangioni of Harvard Medical School in Boston... [but if 2008 Nobel Laureate Osamu] Shimomura’s pursuit of jellyfish fluorescence were funded today, says [chemist Marc] Zimmer, it would be more likely to earn scorn than anything else.

Don't fence me in... a conventional office

Years ago, when I was helping the Institute look for new offices, I visited Gate 3, a "work club" across the Bay in Emeryville. It was a wonderfully cool space, and I really loved the vision: the space was part open office, part meeting space, and part members-only club, with a downstairs cafe and space for social events. Unfortunately, it was ahead of its time, and eventually it folded. (The creators of Gate 3 seem to be trying to bring the idea back in North Carolina.)

The idea of offices for drop-in work has continued to fascinate me, though it seems clear that they're hard to get off the ground. So I was pleased to see that Ophelia Chong (who is probably the only person who'd think to work Cole Porter lyrics into a piece on temporary workspaces) has a nice piece in 404 about an effort to create such spaces in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a city of re-invention and of hyphenates...Our resumes can be compared to layers upon layers of paint that is never allowed to dry, because we are constantly changing the perception of who we are.

Our definition of what employment is about re-invention as well, we are historically a nomadic work force and because of this our freelance workforce is the highest in the country, 36-38%, almost 20% higher than the rest of the country. We are nomads that travel from village to village selling our wares and services, client to client with a laptop in tow....

In the new economy the idea of full time employment has moved towards working on a series of projects as a subcontractor, in Los Angeles we are more accustomed to this form of employment than most of the country, which is why BLANKSPACES does not have to explain it's purpose, we get it.

architecture, blogging, office

Buckley + Obama

Christopher Buckley has endorsed Barack Obama, and as always he's thoughtful and funny about it:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

politics

Up early

For the last couple weeks (I know this because I documented it in my Twitter stream), I've been waking up at 5 a.m. Completely wide awake. At first, I figured this was just jet lag-- my body had no idea what time it was, so why not get up at 2 p.m. Central European Time, or 8 p.m. Singaporean time?-- but it's gone on too long to be just a blip.

It seems that I've become a morning person. And I'm completely mystified by it. I've always been the sort of person who woke up grudgingly at best, who wasn't even really conscious until the second cup of coffee. Ever since I finished my Ph.D. qualifying exams, I've loved sleep-- not just the rest, which I'd always appreciated, but the physicality of it-- of being under the blankets, of lying down, and all the rest.

So what's going on? What can prompt such a sudden, and apparently thorough, behavioral change? Nobody seems to really know, which isn't surprising, given how much we still have to learn about sleep. It's clear that everyone needs it, and that our need for sleep and ability to do it both change over time (not always in sync-- something that can lead to serious problems).

This shift may be coming early: according to a 1962 British article on changes in sleep patterns, "In general the sleep pattern of the female tends to change earlier than that of the male, usually during middle age. The change in the male sleep pattern with age is not only less marked but tends to be fully established later—some time after the retiral age of 65 years." On the other hand, it may not: more recent studies have argued that middle age is when the biggest changes occur, and that substantial changes in sleep habits can happen among people in their 20s and 30s.

Anyway, so long as it happens, and the kids aren't also getting up incredibly early too, I figure the smart thing to do is just roll with it, and try to use the time productively.

Off to pour another cup of tea, and work on an essay on the future of futures work. Maybe in this dark quiet, I can get a draft of it finished.

sleep

Words to live by, from the Central Bank of Jamaica

Particularly these days.

[via The Big Picture]

economics

My friends are geniuses

Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The one upside to the downturn.

business, humor

Quote of the day

When HBO makes a movie about Wall Street over the last couple weeks, this'll will be playing during the final scene:

It's high time for a walk on the real side
Let's admit the bastards beat us
I move to dissolve the corporation
In a pool of margaritas
So let's switch off all the lights
And light up all the Luckies
Crankin' up the afterglow
'Cause we're goin' out of business
Everything must go

(Steely Dan, "Everything Must Go")

music, quote, Steely Dan

Bad savings rate good

As a futurist, I know that I really should have a lot more for retirement than I should. But suddenly my bad habit of not putting enough money in my 401K seems like a brilliant strategy. From the Washington Post:

Retirement Savings Lose $2 Trillion in 15 Months

The stock market's prolonged tumble has wiped out about $2 trillion in Americans' retirement savings in the past 15 months, a blow that could force workers to stay on the job longer than planned, rein in spending and possibly further stall an economy reliant on consumer dollars, Congress's top budget analyst said yesterday....

For many Americans, pensions and 401(k) plans are their only form of savings. The dwindling of these assets -- about a 20 percent decline overall -- is another setback just as many people are grappling with higher gas and food prices, more credit card debt, declining home values and less access to loans....

Defined-benefit plans are company-sponsored programs that provide retirement payouts based on an employee's salary and tenure. The company shoulders the bulk of the investment decisions and risk. Defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, turn those tasks over to the worker and are subject to the whims of the stock market.

Increasingly, employers have switched workers into defined-contribution plans. The federal government has also pushed 401(k) plans heavily, approving a law late last year that makes it easier for employers to automatically enroll their employees in them and other similar retirement plans.

[via wparker]

business

Quote of the day

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection… There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers… and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)

evolution

Quote of the day

The banking system, betting against Black Swans, has lost over 1 Trillion dollars (so far), more than was ever made in the history of banking. (Nassim Taleb, "The Fourth Quadrant")

Black Swan

Great explanation of the current financial crisis

From Slate:

The complex derivatives behind the current financial havoc aren't literally martingales, but what's wrong with the martingale is one of the things that's wrong with the derivatives. There's no question that you can reduce risk drastically by combining different investments in a single portfolio; that's what plain-Jane instruments like index funds do. What sounds an alarm is the claim that you can get low risk and high returns in the same happy package. "Once the limits of diversification have been reached," John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, told me, "rearranging the set of claims involved isn't going to reduce risk any further, so if all parties appear to be making risk-free profits, the risk must have been shifted to some low-probability, high-consequence event." In other words, if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably heading toward some outcome too bad to be borne. Or, as financial skeptic Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote last week, "It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law's checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don't understand."

Political commentary

I turned on the VP debate, and Sarah Palin was on. My son looked up and shouted, "Hey! She is evil!"

Strong words, even for us. "Why is that?"

My daughter said, "Because she hunts moose!" She then pouted for emphasis.

politics