Relevant History

New Year's Eve Surprise: Appearing on the Wall Street Journal

This morning, I got a call from Andy Jordan, a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Could I talk about the cultural significance of the Zune problem for an online video piece?

Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Zune problem? Who gives a damn about the Zune?

But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that if you want to be a talking head, the first thing you have to do is answer the phone. The second thing you have to do is always, always say, "Sure! I can talk about that!"

I guess that's two things. Still.

So, we talked for a minute-- journalists always want to hear what you're going to say before they ask you on-camera to say it, particularly for these kinds of background pieces-- and I passed muster. I don't know if I sounded good, if I just said what he needed someone to say, or I was the only person he could find on New Year's Eve. It pays to not ask too many questions. Andy asked if I could go up to the San Francisco Wall Street Journal studio and do a video. He e-mailed me the questions he wanted to ask, and the address of the studio. I had just enough time to change clothes, hit Google News on the iPhone, get a sense of what was going on with the Zune, and formulate some answers to his questions as my wife drove us up 280.

Once we got up to the studio, the engineer gave us a quick tour, the kids retreated to one side to watch, and I got settled and miked. I read over the questions a couple more times, switched my iPhone to airplane mode, turned over the answers in my mind, then we started recording. We didn't have a connection to New York, so I had to pretend I was the interviewer and read the questions, then pretend I was listening to them, then answer them. Very DIY.

letting them adjust the camera height, via flickr

For the kids, the most interesting thing was that they could project images on the green screen behind me. What I was saying wasn't that interesting. It was just a bunch of what my daughter dismissively calls "grown-up talky-talky."

practicing looking thoughtful, via flickr

The interview was generally all right. I'm definitely getting better at them. But I need to learn to say what I'm trying to say in about half as much time. Sound bites are harder than they look, especially when you're trying to craft the verbal equivalent of tuna sashimi rather than cheez puffs.

Here's the finished segment:

Thanks folks, I'll be playing the Green Room all week. I'm also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Working this morning

Finishing up a couple essays before the end of the year. This is always a good place to focus and revise.

The kids are at child care for the morning, and my in-laws are coming for dinner tonight. But the next few hours are mine.

Foggy morning

Nimitz Way, Tilden Regional Park

When I was a postdoc at Berkeley, most weekends I would take about half a day, and ride up to Tilden Regional Park. Usually I'd start with a couple espressos at Cafe Milano (a beginning to strenuous activity that would probably kill me now, but this is the kind of thing you can do when you're 28), then ride through the Berkeley hills, to Grizzly Peak Road, and thence to Wildcat Canyon. Tilden is a huge park, and the section I usually went to was the northern end, which has a terrific botanical garden, and a road with one of the best views of the entire Bay: Nimitz Way.

via flickr

Pop tells the story that when the Oakland town fathers were talking about naming part of 880 the Nimitz freeway (for those of you who don't know who Chester Nimitz was, go find out), his widow objected, on the grounds that she didn't want people hearing about her late husband's name in the context of traffic jams and car crashes. She couldn't have objected to Nimitz Way, which is a great paved trail that runs from Tilden Park in to Wildcat Canyon.

Today, the kids got to ride Nimitz Way, and they had a great time.

via flickr

Nimitz Way starts at Inspiration Point, on Wildcat Canyon Road.

via flickr

From Inspiration Point you can see the San Pablo Reservoir, but Nimitz Way takes you in the other direction, to the west.

via flickr

The path is paved, and reasonably smooth, so it's popular with joggers, bicyclists, parents with strollers, etc.. There's a pretty healthy proportion of groups of older hikers or bicyclists.

via flickr

The path runs uphill and down, but none of it is really strenuous, and it goes through some redwoods and eucalyptus groves (all planted, it seems, by one or another local group). For me, the real payoff is Peace Grove, which is about a mile and half from the trail head. You leave your bike at the bottom of the hill, and take a short hike, past the Peace Grove trees (one might sense a theme here), and up to a circular stone monument-- more like a really big conversation pit-- finished in the early 1960s.

via flickr

The view is spectacular. The pictures I took today-- on an overcast day, with a camera that's rapidly dying-- don't do it justice, but even on a day like today, the place is phenomenal. I don't know if there's anywhere else where you can see Marin, the Golden Gate and San Francisco, south to Palo Alto, then north to Orinda.

via flickr

It's been about fifteen years since I was last there-- maybe thirteen-- and I wonder why in the world it's taken me so long to get back there. It's one of those places that mentally seems far away, but really isn't, and richly rewards the time required to get there. There are lots of places, or people, like that: closer than you think, and well worth spending time with.

The kids complained occasionally about the inclines, but I think even they enjoyed the view. And they didn't even get to visit the botanical garden or steam trains. Next time.

Greetings from Peace Grove, Tilden Park

Simplicity

Another example of the death of bling. Damon Darlin, who seems to have taken over the Ping column in the New York Times (formerly written by my friend), notes a growing preference for simplicity in consumer electronics: over the last year, most consumers "chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.... It is not just the economics of a shopping-fatigued nation at work here. Consumers found the simple devices, which don’t need instruction manuals to set up and use, more appealing."

"This shift in consumer preference to the cheaper electronic device could well be a reaction to the recession," he suggests, another datapoint in the growing trend "to have our wits about us" at all times, and not be dulled by either booze or blinky lights. The downside in this trend-- if you can call it a downside-- is that most companies don't really know how to make things simpler: as lots of good product designers will tell you, it's a lot easier to pack new features into something than to strip them out.

It takes a lot of careful thought to eliminate things, to think hard about what really matters and focus only on those things, and still end up with something that's balanced and usable. (This is as true for a life as it is for a digital camera, now that I think about it.) It's easier, and in some ways more pleasant, to be diverted by plentitude and activity, than to make difficult choices that can pay off in the long run.

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Watching the sea otters.

Watching Avatar on our way to Monterey Bay Aquarium

We gave the kids one of their presents early, because we're taking a long car trip today and to keep these particular gifts from getting buried in tomorrow's craziness.

In exchange for cleaning out about 80% of the junk in their rooms, I promised them iPods. They delivered, so it was my turn. I put on their favorite music, "Finding Nemo" (perfect for the aquarium), and some episodes of "Avatar: The Last Airbender," a show we've really come to love.

Turns out we missed about half of season 3, so the kids are now in the back seat with me, getting back story and seeing how fast the video will reorient itself if they flip the iPod over. Well, for once, the box isn't more interesting than the present itself! (And given Apple's awesome packaging, that says a lot.)

Of course I'm doing some work, but I still have Miami Vice on my iPhone....

Movie star Christmas tree

My son noticed that the Christmas tree at the Stanford Theatre is decorated with pictures of old movie stars.

Octopus watch TV, have no personalities

Marine biologists have discovered that "octopuses can watch television and understand at least some of what they see," but that "despite their intelligence, lack individual personalities." Macquarie University scientist Renata Pronk

collected 32 common Sydney, or gloomy, octopuses from Chowder Bay, near Mosman, and showed them a series of three-minute videos screened on a monitor in front of their tank.

One video featured a crab, an octopus delicacy.

A second starred another octopus, while a third had a "novel object" they would not have seen: a plastic bottle swinging on a string.

Miss Pronk then watched each octopus for any consistent response pattern, such as boldness or aggression.

When the crab movie was screened "they jetted straight over to the monitor and tried to attack it", she said, adding that was strong evidence they knew they were watching food.

When the octopus movie was screened some became aggressive while others changed their skin camouflage or "would go and hide in a corner, moving as far away as possible".

On viewing the swinging bottle, some puffed themselves up, just in case the object was a threat, while others paid no attention.

But significantly, when the experiment was repeated over several days, she found no consistent response from any octopus. Such random responses implied octopuses have no individual personalities.

She suspected previous efforts to show movies to octopuses failed because their sophisticated eyes were too fast for the 24-frame per second format of standard-definition video.

I guess I'll go for something else on the sushi menu from now on. What's the stupidest tasty fish? Eel? They don't seem too bright. And apparently the personality thing is actually a serious scientific issue:

Their reactions to these videos demonstrate whether they are bold or shy or where they fit between. This is the most common way of determining personality. Octopus diverged from the vertebrate lineage millions of years ago so their expression of personality would suggest that this trait is nearly universal. The question that arises from this is: 'What is the selective advantage of having a personality?' Renata will infer from her study the ecological and evolutionary implications of octopus having a personality.

Quote of the day

From Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick, on Dick Cheney's recent foray from the secret location to conduct exit interviews in which he "takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open:"

[Waterboarding's] illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.

NSA, futures, and predicting for the last conflict

Bruce Schneier points to an excellent interview with James Bamford, the journalist who's written three books on the NSA (National Security Agency)-- 1982's The Puzzle Palace, 2001's Body of Secrets, and now The Shadow Factory.

One of the things Bamford is interested in explaining is why the NSA hasn't worked very well in the last few years, and his analysis is striking:

NSA was never designed for what it’s doing. It was designed after World War II to prevent another surprise attack from another nation-state, particularly the Soviet Union. And from 1945 or ’46 until 1990 or ’91, that’s what its mission was. That’s what every piece of equipment, that’s what every person recruited to the agency, was supposed to do, practically — find out when and where and if the Russians were about to launch a nuclear attack. That’s what it spent 50 years being built for. And then all of a sudden the Soviet Union is not around anymore, and NSA’s got a new mission, and part of that is going after terrorists. And it’s just not a good fit. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing, they missed the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, they missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, they missed 9/11. There’s this string of failures because this agency was not really designed to do this. In the movies, they’d be catching terrorists all the time. But this isn’t the movies, this is reality.

The big difference here is that when they were focused on the Soviet Union, the Soviets communicated over dedicated lines. The army communicated over army channels, the navy communicated over navy channels, the diplomats communicated over foreign-office channels. These were all particular channels, particular frequencies, you knew where they were; the main problem was breaking encrypted communications. [The NSA] had listening posts ringing the Soviet Union, they had Russian linguists that were being pumped out from all these schools around the U.S.

Then the Cold War ends and everything changes. Now instead of a huge country that communicated all the time, you have individuals who hop from Kuala Lampur to Nairobi or whatever, from continent to continent, from day to day. They don’t communicate [electronically] all the time — they communicate by meetings. [The NSA was] tapping Bin Laden’s phone for three years and never picked up on any of these terrorist incidents. And the [electronic] communications you do have are not on dedicated channels, they’re mixed in with the world communication network. First you’ve got to find out how to extract that from it, then you’ve got to find people who can understand the language, and then you’ve got to figure out the word code. You can’t use a Cray supercomputer to figure out if somebody’s saying they’re going to have a wedding next week whether it’s really going to be a wedding or a bombing.

It seems to me that futurists may be in a similar state. The NSA needed to look hours or days into the future, using an incredibly specific set of signals, while futurists look years into the future and use a very broad set of signals-- indeed, it seems that almost anything can be a "weak signal," which can either be a sign of healthy curiosity or poor discipline-- but the underlying issues are the same.

Over the past few years I've had some working contact with people from... various institutions in the greater Washington, DC area... and my sense is that 1) they're all really smart and dedicated, and 2) know that they're trained for a different challenge than the one they're now facing. It's a familiar position. The more I've thought about it, the more it strikes me that futurists' practices have evolved in the last forty years to serve a world that is less and less important. This was a world in which small elites-- strategists, CEOs, politicians, people with their hands on nuclear triggers or levers of power-- ran the world (or everyone assumed they did). It was a world in which the future could be considered at particular times-- during strategic reviews or five-year plans. It was a world that we affected through texts, presentations, brainstorming exercises and scenarios.

i have the bad feeling that the world has changed enough to make these old assumptions and practices obsolete. Okay, not completely obsolete: corporate strategy is going to be around for a while, if only because no one has yet come up with anything better. The question is, what's next for the future?

Merry Christmas

Just arrived-- the volume with my latest article.

Second scholarly piece this year. Not too awful a record, but next year will be better. Dammit.

Palo Alto church, this afternoon

Quote of the day

Susan Cheever in Proof, the New York Times blog on alochol:

[T]he last time I saw anyone visibly drunk at a New York party [was 10 years ago]. The New York apartments and lofts which were once the scenes of old-fashioned drunken carnage — slurred speech, broken crockery, broken legs and arms, broken marriages and broken dreams — are now the scene of parties where both friendships and glassware survive intact. Everyone comes on time, behaves well, drinks a little wine, eats a few tiny canapés, and leaves on time. They all still drink, but no one gets drunk anymore. Neither do they smoke. What on earth has happened?...

I don’t drink. I know the savage, destructive power of alcoholism. It’s a soul stealer. Yet, there’s a mischievous part of me that misses all that extreme behavior, all those nasty but somehow amusing surprises, all that glamor even when so much of it ended in pain, institutions and early death. For us sober people there is a kind of drunkenfreude to watching others embarrass themselves, mangle their words and do things they will regret in the morning — if they even remember them in the morning.

(The consensus in the comments is that she's just getting older, and not hanging out with people who can still drink seriously.)

Tom Cruise, sex, money, and the future

A perfectly entertaining fluffy piece on Slate on Tom Cruise and Risky Business takes a sudden turn into actual insight, when it talks about how Cruise and his friends paid for their adventures by cashing in savings bonds given to them by relatives.

("You people have a lot of bonds," observes one of the hookers, dryly.) It is a perfectly calibrated act of rich-kid heedlessness but with the clever subtext that, during a time of runaway inflation (as the '70 were), it makes little sense to save for "the future." This is a word the script of Risky Business never loses a chance to deploy. The hookers say future and mean the shameless score. ("He's got such nice friends. Clean, polite … quick. I think there's a real future here.") The boys say future and mean some far off Valhalla to which they may never be invited. "I don't want to make a mistake," Joel whines to his friend Miles, his Faustian tempter, "and jeopardize my future!" "Joel, let me tell you something," replies Miles. "Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

The '80s did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying "what the fuck" and thereby securing your "future," is simply no longer tenable.

I guess this is why I read Slate. Or why I read at all.

Quote of the day

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Newsweek:

High-frequency data is the problem, because we can't interpret it correctly. Our environment is increasingly complicated, and the data that we choose to single out and interpret isn't always relevant [to the problem we are trying to understand]. You can always find correlations if you look.... So you have the idea that you are charting the world of randomness, but you aren't.

The deceptions of predictability

I've been reading a fair amount about the Bernard Madoff thing-- it's hard not to-- and one of the things that I keep seeing is the argument that the very predictability of Madoff's returns both reassured investors on a psychological level, and should have given them the jitters. From the Guardian:

Michael Markov works for a global technology firm that has developed software that analyses the performance of investment funds. In 2006, on behalf of a client, he put Madoff's figures through the programme and was surprised to find no correlation between his returns and the movement of the market. On a whim, he input the statistics from the Bayou group, a Connecticut hedge fund that had been found to be operating a $450m-pyramid scheme three years ago, and the numbers did partially match.

A mathematician by training, he is baffled. Logic dictates that the better the returns given by a fund manager, the smoother the profits they achieve, the more you should press them to ensure they are what they seem. Due diligence should increase as the stakes do.

"Unfortunately, it's often the reverse. The smoother the numbers, the more people trust."

Fundamentally, humans like predictability. It's reassuring. It's also not the way the world works. (Nassim Taleb would have a field day with this.)

On a completely different note, I also recommend Ron Rosenbaum's piece lamenting the decline of the Jewish gangster, and his replacement with figures like Madoff. Overdrawn, but still entertaining:

[T]he more I read about Bernie Madoff, the more disgusted I am, not just with him but with the whole crowd of country-club suckers he allegedly conned, the phony "gentility" (in every respect) they represent.... What went wrong? If you ask me, the Bernie Madoff scandal was a tragedy of misguided upward mobility—not about Jews and money but about Jews and a sadly imitative notion of status....

What an inversion, a perversion of true Jewish respectability to imitate the most dull-witted of their WASP brethren. I thought Jews were supposed to respect brains, not golf bags. Shows you how wrong stereotypes can be. Or maybe the wisdom of Abbie Hoffman's aphorism: that Jews have to decide "whether to go for the money or to go for broke."

Give me a Jewish gangster any day. They go for both.

Take Meyer Lansky, or rather "Hyman Roth," Lee Strasberg's version of Lansky in The Godfather 2. What is it we like about him? The TV dinner tray! He runs the world's underground financial system, an illicit stock exchange and banking system combined, but what he likes most is the simple life at home in front of the tube with his wife. Sure, he'll enjoy an evening from time to time at one of his luxe Cuban casinos, but country clubs? Please.

On the other hand, this article lays out why the whole affair is pretty unfunny, and how many people and charities have lost vast sums of money.

Cheap, user-tunable eyeglasses

As someone who wears glasses, I was struck by this report that an Oxford physicist has developed eyeglasses that can be "'tuned' by the wearer to correct his or her own vision." As the Guardian explains,

[Josh] Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

Silver calls his flash of insight a "tremendous glimpse of the obvious" - namely that opticians weren't necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.

This is one of those small things that could have very big consequences, both directly and indirectly. The development of relatively inexpensive eyeglasses centuries ago, Annales historians argued decades ago, helped reorient European consciousness away from smell and touch, and toward sight. (That this paralleled the start of the Scientific Revolution was no accident: good vision is a prerequisite for good observation.) Closer to home, cheap eyewear has economic benefits that are so obvious-- right in front of our noses, as it were-- that those of us who live in places with relatively affordable eyewear easily miss them.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. "So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see."

Lego exhibit at MOAH

The Bay Area Lego Users Group winter exhibit at the Palo Alto Muse of American Heritage. Very popular with the local kids, or parents looking to get the kids out of the house!

Rancho San Antonio

This morning I took my son and one of his classmates to Rancho San Antonio, one of the county parks.

via flickr

It was more like a walk than a "hike," since we went about two miles, mainly stayed on the bike and pedestrian trails, and went at a 6 year-old pace.

via flickr

The park-- the lower parts that we were on, anyway-- is mainly oak trees and grasses, and quite pretty.

via flickr

Some of the park was a farm (coincidentally, a portion of the park was owned by the same people who founded Peninsula School), and Deer Hollow Farm is still open. You can still see lots of fences around the park, and in some way I can't precisely identify, it feels like land that was once cultivated, but has been reclaimed by nature.

via flickr

(More pictures are available on flickr.)

Rancho San Antonio

An easy hike this morning with my son and one of his classmates.

Underwater sculpture

Jason de Caires Taylor's underwater sculptures are eerie and entrancing. Check out the gallery.

Denver Art Museum

Sunday afternoon, I braved the single-digit temperature, ice on the roads, and responsibility for my dad's beloved Honda Element to go see the Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Museum, the new (2006) Daniel Libeskind addition.

denver art museum, via flickr

Over the last few years, Denver has been building the area around DAM into a more coherent cultural complex, and trying to turn it into a Destination. The Denver Public Library is right beside the art museum; the historical society and state museum are up the block; and there's a new performing arts complex.

the old (now north wing), denver art museum, via flickr

The main stairway is a wonderfully dynamic space: not only is it a petting zoo of exotic angles, but as I returned to it through the afternoon, it looked different as the light changed.

stairway, via flickr

I know people have criticized the building for being confusing and vertigo-inspiring, but I found it no harder to navigate than a more conventional, square building. Each floor has two or three galleries, and once you have a working mental model of the basic layout, you can figure out things pretty easily.

daniel richter exhibit, via flickr

In fact, the unusual shape of the building probably makes it easier to orient yourself: when you're in a gallery that comes to a sharp point at one end, you know that the exit is in the other direction.

fourth floor: modern and african, via flickr

More generally, I think the shape of the galleries gives the exhibits a measure of dynamism that they wouldn't have in a more conventional space. The Clyfford Still exhibit, for example, has a number of huge paintings-- Still was arguably the first Abstract Expressionist, and he worked on the large scale characteristic of the movement-- that weren't just hung from the walls; they were suspended from the ceiling in a way that made them look like they were either floating, or had emerged from the angled wall behind them.

clyfford still, via flickr

And spending time in the Daniel Richter exhibit, which has a lot of tough, street-wise paintings, was definitely made more interesting by the space. I'm not sure that this would enhance the experience of looking at Dutch still-life paintings or Venetian portraits... but maybe it would.

daniel richter exhibit, via flickr

Peninsula this morning

The Big Puddle is getting pretty, well, big. My daughter is very excited. Excellent puddle surfing today! (Don't ask.)

Back to my regularly-scheduled life

View from my seat

I'm... conveniently near the galley. Should make getting up easier. Which us good, because we seem to be delayed at least an hour. But it's an aisle seat on an exit row, so I really have no complaints.

This trip was very good. Normally when I come to Colorado it's with the kids, so even though we stay with my parents, I'm here in my capacity as Grandchild Travel Manager and Wrangler I hadn't quite realized how consuming that role is, and how much it reduces the opportunity for the adults to talk amongst themselves. We all so naturally reorient around the children, and it happens so gradually, it's easy to not notice what gets lost. So it may be selfish, but it was good to see them without the kids.

Me and Pop

At dinner last night.

I used to think that I was a lot like him. The older I get, though, I'm coming to realize that in some deep quantum entanglement way, I am him.

Denver Museum of Art

At the new wing of the DMA. It's a new wing, technically, but it so completely overshadows the old building, it's almost sad.

This should be interesting.

Evergreen this morning

Extremely cold this morning! It snowed a little last night, and last night's low is forecast to be today's high.

Nonetheless, I may go down to the Denver Art Museum and see the new Daniel Liebskind (sp?) wing, which I hear is very interesting, possibly even vertigo-inducing.

Hiking in Elk Meadow and Bergen Peak

This morning I went for a hike through Elk Meadow and Bergen Peak.

via flickr

I've done this hike, or parts of it, a couple times, but it's one of those trails that doesn't get old, even though it's neither particularly technical, nor horribly long-- about seven miles round trip, with a thousand-foot ascend.

The trail was pretty snowy, but it wasn't terribly cold, and I was out before the cold front moved in, so it was a good several hours' exercise.

via flickr

Nigella Lawson interview

The Guardian has the really bad habit of running fascinating interviews that distract me from what I should be doing. I ran across one with Nigella Lawson conducted by Fay Weldon, and was hooked pretty quickly.

I don't watch Lawson's shows or read her books, but something about the interview was irresistible.

She talks about her childhood: how she couldn't wait to grow up. How she read and read and read while she waited. "My parents were very young, and more interested in each other than in us." I point out that when she was small, this was normal: if you asked parents which they would save from drowning, the children or the spouse, the answer came back, "The spouse. You can always have more children." These days they say, "The children. You can always find another spouse." But Nigella is not comforted. "At least there were four of us," she says. "Large families are good; you can talk about how much you hate your parents instead of bottling it up." [Later in the interview she adds, "I did feel very guilty having children. I thought: how can I inflict childhood on them? I thought I was joining the enemy camp by becoming a parent."]

She would have liked more children, but it didn't turn out like that. She was married to the journalist and writer John Diamond, and they had Cosima and Bruno - now 15 and 12 - and then John got ill and died over three years, very publicly recording his death from cancer in a newspaper column. Nothing private about that. I decide this is how and why she manages to write as she does - the prose lucid and companionable, persuasive and endearing. Nothing cures grief, but you might as well try. You can't stand and stare into space for ever after the worst has happened. You just have to keep busy. You bring out another book, do another show.

Diamond's death followed the premature deaths of her mother and sister, Thomasina, also from cancer. Grief is never over, she maintains. "There is something quite contemptible about the human spirit; the way human beings carry on with life in the attempt to make everything normal ... otherwise of course you couldn't carry on. And yet I don't admire that. It's a very base instinct. It isn't normal. The question I always hate is when people say, 'How's she coping?' What does it mean? Everyone copes on the outside but not on the inside....

Her own family life now with Charles Saatchi is pretty quiet. "I don't really go out very much. A friend, who'd had children before me, told me that you can have two lives but not three. You can work and have children, or you can go out and have children, or you can go out and work, but you can't do all three. And I don't think you can, really. I've never recovered from that tiredness you get when you have babies. When you become obsessed by what time you go to bed and what time you're getting up."...

Across the train corridor, two men are trying to appear to be trying not to listen. One of them is a fresh-faced lad from Wales, the other an elderly, mid-European intellectual wearing Armani glasses.... [S]he says she went back to Oxford the other day and was seized by melancholy. The elderly intellectual interrupts and denies Oxford is in the least melancholy. He is a professor there. He should know. He tells her he has houses in Oxford, London, Vienna, Paris - it sounds like a proposition. "Yet what I like about men," Nigella says, aside, "is the assumption they all make that they're riveting. Extraordinary. But then I suppose we women just assume we're captivating."

We part on the arrivals platform. Nigella puts on her beret and looks very cute, young, defenceless and, suddenly, French. There is no one there to meet her. I have to go. "You're not even going to try the hot sugared doughnuts they have on the stall?" she asks. I shake my head. Her minder turns up, breathless. Nigella smiles. "If you just stand, they always come."

At first I thought, there's something really sexy about her, even though the parts of the interview that I found most striking-- the ones above-- aren't obviously so. But thinking a little deeper, I realized that what comes across is a combination of practicality, brusque pathos, contradiction (particularly around children, or being a child versus being a parent), and a sensuality that refuses to surrender, that's really appealing: I didn't think at first that the word fit, but I now think the term "sexy" is exactly right. (The last paragraph, with the juxtaposition of the hot sugared doughnuts and the line, "If you just stand, they always come," and the assumption that life magically turns out all right at the end, that really pulls it all together.)

I don't think I would have even known to appreciate it when I was younger, but now I find that kind of attitude very striking.

Breakfast at the Pang compound

The sun is coming up, and we're drinking tea and reading. Pop's finishing a biography of Admiral Marc Mitscher, I'm working on an end of cyberspace chapter. Food later.

Why I love to travel

It's 5:22 a.m., and I'm in a Supershuttle, headed to the Tampa/St Petersburg airport. I got here less than 48 hours ago, and I'm on my way home. William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices is playing on my iTunes, which gives a curiously spiritual feel to the trip. It's not a ride to the airport, its a pilgrimage.

I was thinking about why I like to travel-- not just like it, but really look forward even to short trips like these.

Novelty. Going to new places is really interesting. Going to London and Singapore is no longer novel, but I'm far from exhausting what's interesting about those places (the only time I've been to the British Museum was with my wife, a year and half ago, and I spent most of it staring slack-jawed at the Rogers courtyard).

I'm good at it. I know how to pack, how to get ready for trips, how to navigate airports and customs and security, how to get what I need from hotel and conference center people, how to find decent restaurants and interesting things to do with a free couple hours. There's a craft to travel, and even though it's as idiosyncratic as writing-- everyone's style is different, even if their objectives are the same-- I've learned to do it pretty well, and am still improving.

There are clear goals. Success is easy to measure: you catch your plane, get to the hotel, get prepared, deliver the talk, facilitate the meeting, build the map, please the client, etc. Not a lot of ambiguity most of the time. This contrasts with a lot of my life, where there are very big, but long-term and amorphous, goals, and the linkage between completing them and the reward is-- not unclear, exactly, but not very tight. You finish a piece for a client, and it may be a month before you get any feedback; six months pass between sending an article to the editors and getting reprints; and I'll probably be years before some of the things I do for the kids pay off (if even if they do, I might never hear about them).

On the road, though, I can practice a measure of decisiveness and focus that's hard to exercise in my normal multitasking, collaborative life.

I think a lot when I travel. Some of my most productive hours and best ideas come on planes. Partly this is a matter of necessity-- often I have to 16 hours to finish that keynote or else-- but there's something liberating about having 10 hours sealed in your own little pressurized, caffeinated world, with nothing to do but think and write. (The fact that most of the time the movies are lousy is a godsend. Singapore Airlines' 100 channels is a bit of challenge for me, but I usually manage to avoid it until the return flight.)

Away from it all, uninterruptible, and accustomed to having good ideas pop into my head, it's easy to get into that state where good thoughts appear. And even if I don't have some intellectual breakthrough, I usually get enough e-mail written to feel okay about the trip.

The privilege. Business travel is stressful in some ways, but luxurious in one important way: you spend a certain amount of your time around people whose job it is to take care of things for you. Not quite take care of you as a person; but in my normal life someone else isn't carrying my bags, doing all the driving, serving the food, getting the conference room set up, etc. At home my wife and I share the labor, I've got the kids doing more things, and they help with small tasks like carrying in groceries; but that's not the same as being in situations where it's someone else's job to do things for you.

And often I'm lucky to be going somewhere as someone's guest. I may be working for them, but the act of traveling imposes certain obligations and courtesies on all parties. Even if you're picking up the cost of a person's trip, you're still nice to them.

Of course, there are also times when it's disorienting and alienating. Sitting in a near-empty terminal in the pre-dawn hours, it's easy for that "what the hell am I doing here" sense of anomie to settle over you. But for now, at least, it's a price worth paying.

Dinner at the Moonlight Diner

We stopped for an early dinner at the Moonlight Diner, a reconstructed (or just faux 1950s) diner near the Denver International Airport.

Greetings from Denver; or, déjà vu all over again

Think I'll stay a while this time! And as cool as it is on the inside, DIA's main terminal is really spectacular on the outside.

In SFO, headed to Denver

Less than 24 hours since I was last here, I'm back at SFO, headed to Colorado to spend a few days with my dad and stepmother.

I brought my end of cyberspace manuscript and a couple other things I'm working on. Lest this sound anti-family, consider this: the last time I talked to my dad (yesterday when I was in DIA), we spent about 20 minutes talking about the transferability of science park models developed around the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, and the unintended consequences of Singapore's immigration policy for the development of scientific communities in Asia. This is typical. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Though I also hope to get in some skating or skiing.

Child care

The blurs are kids running, of course.

Fresh leaf maze

Back in Denver, connecting to SFO and home

Might go to the main terminal and admire the architecture. Or I'll stay here and write. Writing wins.

Greetings from St Petersburg

I have tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, so I need to get this posted quickly.

My trip to St Petersburg has been short-- any trip where you get in late and go right to sleep, the wake up the next morning and immediately call the airline to do early checkin for your return flight is, by definition, short-- but it's been pleasant. We have a really good client we worked with here, which always goes a long way to making an experience good. And St Petersburg is more pleasant than I expected: it's not very big or exciting, but quite nice. I can see why people live her.

via flickr

The hotel has also been nice. It's a 1920s hotel, restored to its former glory, and is an excellent example of Roaring 20s Florida Mediterranean Hospitality Style. Though a couple things confuse me a bit. For one thing, there's this really complex thing over the bed:

via flickr

Fortunately the painting is bolted down, but the first time I saw it, I thought, that thing's going to kill me in my sleep. Obviously it hasn't, but still, that's not the kind of thought that interior decorating should inspire.

Then there's the furnishing of the bath: lemongrass bath soap, mint thyme shampoo, yuzu bergamot body lotion, and lavender hand soap. Apparently the cool thing now is to feel like you're taking a shower in the kitchen of an upscale Vietnamese restaurant. (Actually, the lemongrass bath soap rocked.)

via flickr

After work my colleague and I found a nice tapas and ceviche restaurant near the marina, and had dinner.

via flickr

We then walked along the marina, which was crowded with people doing some kind of charity race. It was nice to be out and about with so many people.

via flickr

Greetings from the Renaissance Vinoy

Welcome to Hell

The ground transportation waiting room. Christmas Muzak is blasting, the Howard Johnsons courtesy van is circling like a shark...

Wait, did William Hung ever do a country music Christmas album? Lord, take me now.

Made it to Tampa. It's just a bit humid here.

Just landed. Pretty nice airport so far.

Snow

I just noticed there's snow on the ground here at DIA. So I'm going from cold and foggy (SFO in the winter), through the snow, to Florida tropical. Makes you think. Mainly it makes you think, how do I dress for THAT?

Battery life

I'm impressed on this flight how much better the battery life on the iPhone is when it's in airplane mode. Turning off thel phone part of the phone makes it pretty economical.

Moral hazards and school lunches

A few weeks ago, I stopped making the kids' lunches. I make the sandwiches and make sure they have milk, but I have them assemble it and choose their side dishes. It's been interesting. Before, they were very picky about what went I'm their lunches, and tended to want different things; now, they put in simple things, and not very much if it, either. They'll grab an apple, or a handful of banana chips, rather than insist on having their persimmon cut in a specific way.

It's an illustration of the moral hazard problem. When the costs to them were slight, they were eager for complexity; when they bear the cost, suddenly an apple is fine.

Frisky

The last couple times I've flown on my own, I've gotten frisked at security. Nothing serious or time-consuming, but it didn't seem random.

Today I finally found out why.

Over the last few months I've lost about 25 pounds. I always fly in a certain model of shirt, a 511 tactical with giant pockets. As I've gotten lighter, the shirt has looked bigger on me; and apparently security gets suspicious if if looks like you could be hiding something other than some extra pounds.

I've already spent a small fortune on tailoring, but maybe once I've hit my target, I'll take these in and have them taken in. (Tailoring's not cheap, I've discovered, but neither are these shirts; and I never like giving up something that still works. It's the impulse that explains why I still have a Newton in my garage.)

But.... Do I now look more like I fit some profile? After I first appeared in her class with my new glasses and beard, one of my daughter's friends said, "You look evil! Handsome, but EVIL!" Is she some kind of security savant? Was Charles Laughton onto something when he observed to Peter Ustinov that all Roman emperors are inevitably thin (this was in "Spartacus")? Does less body fat increase the odds that you're a terrorist?

In Denver

Here for a few minutes, just changing planes. Tampa ho!

Blogging from SFO

I'm at SFO, sitting on the floor near a power outlet, topping up my laptop and iPhone before I get on the plane. There are three or four other otherwise perfectly sane people around me doing the same thing.

The fact that I've got both my iPhone and laptop with me makes this an interesting experiment in technological and communications choice. I'm already a pretty obsessive blogger when I'm on the road. How will having the iPhone change that? I can see a couple likely changes.

More straight-on photoblogging. I can use the virtual keyboard, but wouldn't yet think of writing anything really long or important on it. I already do lots of pictures with short text on the kids blog-- probably too much, in fact-- so it wouldn't be unnatural to port that existing habit over to this blog and the iPhone.

Tweeting rather than blogging. I can see the appeal of this: Twitterific is really pretty nice, and I've got text messaging to Twitter set up too. And if I wanted to self-report in real time, that would be a good way to do it. But that raises the next big question:

Real-time, or nearly real-time? I've done just fine blogging things from my hotel room or lunch, writing a long post or two at the end of the day. And I don't really think anyone who cares about me follows my travels so closely as to want to know where I am in real time: they all have school or jobs (or jobs at schools), or aren't in my time zone (whatever that is).

So if I shift over to tweeting more and blogging less, or writing lots of really short posts, it's going to be just for me.

To some degree, I see the resistance of real time self-broadcasting, and the choice of blog over Twitter, as... not quite a moral choice, but a more disciplined one. Or at least, it ought to be a choice, a decision rather than a reflexive assumption that pushing something out fast is better than waiting until I'm in the hotel.

I can already tell that most of my e-mail is going to happen on the iPhone, though. Unless there are some secret outrageous roaming charges that will bite me at the end of the month, the iPhone will clearly be preferable (no wifi).