Relevant History

Quote of the day

"Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus." - John Fugelsang

Biking with my son

This afternoon my son and I went biking in Bayfront Park.

Yes, he's wearing a t-shirt that says "Hamsters Love PLOS" [Public Library of Science]. No, he doesn't get beaten up for it. This is why we live where we live. Via flickr

It's a beautiful afternoon, and we had a good time biking up and down the hills... though I need to adjust my derailleur.

via flickr

Now it's back to refreshing Ezra Klein's blog every five minutes to see what's going on with the HCR vote. We may let the kids watch TV during dinner tonight. They'll be disappointed it's not Mythbusters, but so be it.

[To the tune of Sarah Shannon, "Watch Over You," from the album City Morning Song (a 2-star song, imo).]

With my nephew at Cafe Zoë

Article on social scanning now available

Last week on Future2 I put up a series of posts on social scanning, my experience with scanning tools, the design of a simple scanning system, and its potential individual and professional benefits. They were extracted from a longer think-piece on social scanning, a PDF of which is now available.

In the next few weeks I'll flesh it out with footnotes, respond to a few points that people have already brought up, and send it off to a journal. The feedback I've gotten suggests that the field could definitely benefit from such a system-- if built to be simple, social and scalable (qualities my friend Mike Love and I argued are the hallmarks of good knowledge tools).

[To the tune of Charlie Parker, "Night In Tunisia," from the album The Charlie Parker Story [Disc 3] (a 3-star song, imo).]

Spring is here... and delicious!

Firing up the grill on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. It seemed the thing to do, with the warm weather and the sun going down later!

What's an auction without a flaming robot?

Too brilliant (though completely NSFW)

Bill O'Reilly rant remix (thanks, Jess!)

[To the tune of Joni Mitchell, "Strong And Wrong," from the album Shine (a 3-star song, imo).]

Context is meaning

I find this amusing:

[To the tune of Joni Mitchell, "Strong And Wrong," from the album Shine (a 3-star song, imo).]

Sensecam, Alzheimer's, and memory

An article in the New York Times on experiments using what sounds like Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits technology "to help people with Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders."

The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen the memory of the event....

In Pittsburgh, researchers had Mr. Reznick go on three excursions with a Sensecam around his neck, and a voice recorder in his shirt pocket and a GPS unit. On one trip, he went to an exhibition of glass sculptures with his wife, Sylvia, his son and a granddaughter.

The Sensecam takes hundreds of pictures in a short period. When researchers began exploring it as a memory aid a few years ago, they had patients and caregivers look at all the pictures together.

I'm not surprised that scientists would be using this technology for Alzheimer's patients. If today's early adopters are twentysomethings, in the next couple decades we're going to see a shift: the most augmented, information technology-intensive Americans are likely to be the elderly, who will be using these technologies (often embedded in more ordinary-looking everyday devices) to battle memory loss, stay independent, and of course post pictures to their Facebook accounts.

[To the tune of Emerson Lake & Palmer, "Tarkus," from the album Live at the Wheeling Civic Center (November 12 1977) (a 2-star song, imo).]

Could futurists make scanning a social activity?

Scanning is one of the fundamentals of futures practice. Futurists regularly scan the news, magazines, scientific literature, and other materials for new emerging trends, to detect the appearance of potential futures, or to find interesting anomalies or weak signals that herald disruptions or paradigm shifts. Scanning is common but it is not competitive: we don't do it for money, but to enable us to make money. However, we tend to scan alone: even though we all draw on some of the same sources, scanning is ubiquitous but solitary. Put another way, scanning is immensely inefficient.

via www.future2.org

Why I'm a futurist

In the car this afternoon as we headed for the Y, my son (absolutely out of nowhere) said: "You know, Dad, in 2090 I'll be 88 years old."

I don't expect to be around in 2090. But there's every chance that he'll be.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney & Wings, "Venus and Mars / Rock Show / Jet," from the album Wings Over America (Disc 1) (a 4-star song, imo).]

Sledding at Granlibakken

This morning we went sledding at Granlibakken, a resort on the California side of Tahoe. (It seems to be going through an identity crisis: its singularly uninformative Web site describes it as a conference center and lodge, but the big sign at the entrance calls it a ski and racquet sports center.) We often go sledding on the last day of our trips to Tahoe.

At first I figured I had given my backside enough of a workout snowboarding for two days, but after it looked like my daughter was getting cold feet, I got a saucer and joined them. As soon as I reached the top of the hill, she took off. (Mission accomplished.)

After a couple hours we stopped for lunch, then did a couple more runs before getting on the road again.

The drive was as pleasant as it can be, when the traffic is heavy and there's the usual mix of alpha male professionals who seem to believe that the Lexus LX 470 will turn into a pumpkin if it's back in the garage of their faux Craftsman before 6 p.m., amped-up young men in 1988 Celicas who treat I-80 as a place to practice their mad Super Mario Kart skillz, and large trucks.

Taken by Heather-- I don't drive and self-portrait!

What makes it redeemable is that parts of 80 are stunningly beautiful: obviously Tahoe and the Sierras are great, but I find the hills and ranch land around Fairfield to be singularly magnificent, especially in the 10 minutes of springtime when they're green. I find the mall-ization of large parts of 80 disturbing: even I can remember in the mid-1990s commuting from Berkeley to Davis, and driving past large sections of farmland and orchards, much of which have now been "developed" into retail or apartments. It's a trend that doesn't feel sustainable, in the various senses of the word.

[To the tune of Rosanne Cash, "I'm Movin' On," from the album The List (a 3-star song, imo).]

In the snow

The family at Diamond Peak.

What impresses me most is that it's a good picture of my son, who normally manages to be looking away from the camera or doing bunny ears when the rest of us look okay.

And how my daughter came to channel Anna Wintour is beyond me. It must be all that Project Runway.

[To the tune of Mono, "Lost Snow," from the album Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005 (a 4-star song, imo).]

The secret to snowboarding is to get up more times than you fall down

We're spending the weekend at Incline Village, at a place owned by a friend of my wife's family. We haven't been skiing in a couple years, and it's always an adventure.

This year the kids both decided they wanted to try snowboarding. They were impressed by the snowboarders at the Olympics, and while they're pretty good skiiers, they're also young, so they have a good shot at learning new skills rapidly. (The neuroplasticity of kids never fails to impress me.)

via flickr

So this morning the kids and I rented boards (my wife, who's skiied for some time, saw this as an opportunity to do some more challenging runs free of children, and took off for the lifts) and took a lesson. After a couple hours of training, and another hour or so of snowboarding on their own, the kids both decided to go back to skis, and in short order were throwing themselves down the hills. I decided to stick it out, and see if I could actually learn how to do this.

via flickr

Part of the reason I wanted to keep going is that I'm not a great skiier, and didn't feel like I had a lot of embodied knowledge to undermine me. And after about half an hour, the two felt so different, I suspected I could go from one to the other without penalty. But mainly it was a challenge. In some ways, it's desperately counterintuitive: you keep your balance and control the board by leaning far to the front, which is different from many other sports I've done. With each run, I felt myself getting marginally better-- more comfortable going a little faster, better able to do the toe turns (which I figured out a lot faster than the heel turns, to my surprise-- it seemed to me that the latter should be a lot easier).

But I still kept falling down-- crashing out on heel turns that threw me on my back, catching an edge in a toe turn (less and less frequently), falling to keep from running into someone. After a certain point, my backside was really sore, my wrists were starting to complain, and my quads were killing me. But it became a point of pride to keep going.

via flickr

By the end of the day I was running pretty confidently. At one point I discovered, no kidding, that it helped to imagine Will Smith shouting "Aw Hell no!" when I was starting to wobble. And, while my shoulders are sore and I really don't enjoy sitting, I feel better than if I had switched to skis.

Perhaps I'm turning into a masochist, or maybe this is a sign of maturity, but I find I've reached a point in my life where the rewarding things are difficult, or have serious costs. But I find my capacity for doing hard stuff is going up proportionately. I'm better able to push through muscle fatigue when I'm lifting weights. I can be more mindful about how hunger and mental alertness are associated (food is turning into a narcotic, I'm afraid), and just stay away from food during the day, knowing that there's a significant upside that's worth the cost.

via flickr

You have to accept falling down a lot and getting hurt. And then you have to get back up and keep going.

[To the tune of Kuni Kawachi & Friends, "Kirikyogen," from the album Love, Peace & Poetry: Japanese Psychedelic Music (a 3-star song, imo).]

Quote of the day

From a review of the new graphic novel Story of O:

It's the great paradox of women's lives that we are expected to begin life with a passionate union and then immediately put it away and get on with the business of working and raising children.

[To the tune of Patti Smith, "Gimme Shelter," from the album Twelve (a 4-star song, imo).]

The greatest political column since Sally Quinn...

...did that stupid thing about dueling weddings:

My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs, Health Care, And The Economy
By House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)

It is my responsibility as an elected official to look out for the people back home, the voters who sent me to Washington. So, after 20 years representing Ohio's 8th District, I know what the good citizens of Montgomery, Preble, and Butler counties really want: someone who engages in the kind of calculated political gamesmanship that increases his standing in the Republican party while simultaneously hindering our country's legislative process at every conceivable turn.

I assure you, the last thing my voters need is some well intended, do-all-I-possibly-can-to-help-the-little-guy congressman running around Washington, working across the aisle, and fighting tooth and nail for jobs, health care, and financial reform to ensure their tax dollars never end up in the hands of banks capable of holding our entire economy hostage.

Want to reach your goals? Be oblique

John Kay may be my favorite business writer. For some time he's been thinking about a concept he calls "obliquity," which is the subject of a forthcoming book, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. An essay from the Financial Times in 2004 explains the concept.

Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them.... [These are systems in which] the attempt to focus on simple, well defined objectives proved less successful than management with a broader, more comprehensive conception of objectives.... Obliquity is equally relevant to our businesses and our bodies, to the management of our lives and our national economies.

And yes, it is counterintuitive.

Isn't it true that you must do better if you set out to maximise something - happiness, wealth, profit - than if you don't? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Life is too complex and uncertain for us to be able to predict and follow the most direct perceived route to success. Our knowledge is always imperfect, and events are influenced by the unpredictability of other people and organisations. Instead, our objectives are best achieved by a more meandering approach that enables us to adapt our strategy to changing situations. And we learn about the nature of our objectives and the means of achieving them through a process of experiment and discovery.

Part of what's brilliant about Kay's argument is that it ranges very widely. He compares CEOs who think broadly versus those who focus more exclusively on profitability, and finds that the second are more likely to destroy value: as he puts it, "Obliquity gives rise to the profit-seeking paradox: the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented." In forestry, it turns out that letting small fires burn helps protect forests from huge fires by clearing undergrowth. He talks about architecture and urban planning ("a house is not simply a machine for living in"), and the complexity and adaptability of biological systems (and how markets are like them). (Indeed, while he doesn't trumpet this, Kay's may be the best application of biological concepts to management and organizational theory around.)

Interesting stuff in theory, but what does it mean? Kay lays that out in a recent Management Today article:

• Have objectives, but keep your approach flexible so that you can overcome unforeseen obstacles and take advantage of surprise opportunities.
• Know that your knowledge is always imperfect and incomplete. Cast your net wide - always go fishing for more.
• Don't be afraid to change tack once you've started if you see a better course.
• Meandering can lead to serendipitous discoveries and unexpected benefits.
• Think laterally to solve problems: indirect solutions can often be the most effective answer.

Quote of the Day: John Kay on aggregating expert opinion

This is a couple years old, but still well worth reading:

The study of business is afflicted by confusion between the results of a survey of what people think about the world and a survey of what the world is really like. At another recent meeting I heard a platform speaker announce that 40 per cent of books would be electronically published by 2020. A pesky academic asked exactly what this number meant and what evidence it was based on. The speaker assured the audience that the number had been obtained in a survey by eminent consultants of the opinions of the industry’s thought leaders.

I imagine most of the thought leaders had no more idea than anyone else what the question implied, or what the answer was, and did not devote more than the briefest consideration to their response, so I am not surprised that the median answer was close to a half. If you want to know the future of publishing, you will learn more by peering into a crystal ball. It will at least give you time to think.

[To the tune of Thom Yorke, "Analyse," from the album The Eraser (a 3-star song, imo).]