Relevant History

Dinner

Since I spent a lot of yesterday (and the day before, until about 1:30 am) working on a proposal, I suggested to Heather that we have dinner at the Eagle.

The Eagle bar, via flickr

File under Saved From Myself

After 6, it seems, the only remaining snacks in the lab are Scandinavian rye crisps. (I suspect there's a late-afternoon run on all the good stuff.) Definitely a reason to get out of here.

Starbucks on a rainy day

One reason airline food is lousy: being in an airplane dulls your sense of taste

One of the things I read a lot about when I was researching weight loss is the physiology of hunger. On one hand, hunger is so simple, elemental and familiar at first blush it seems impossible that you could study it (much less learn to adjust it, which was my ultimate goal).

But one of the most important things i learned is that hunger is a psychological state as well as a physiological one: we can be distracted from hunger by excitement or fear, or conditioned to be hungry at particular times of day regardless of our blood sugar. We can be made hungry by proximity to foods with attractive smell, packaging, texture (what chefs and food designers call "mouthfeel"); we can be made hungry by foods that we've at a notable times, with friends, or in memorable and pleasant places. We misinterpret fatigue, stress, and thirst as hunger. Proximity to food, or the smell of something delicious, triggers hunger.

In fact, our appetite is so malleable it can be disconnected from a need for calories: in his book The End of Overeating, former FDA commissioner David Kessler argues that food designers—manufacturers, retailers, and restaurants— have become geniuses at creating foods that are not just tasty, but so addictive they stimulate desire among people who are full. Further, obesity appears to have some of the same properties of a communicable disease: it is influenced by large environmental factors, as well as the influence of one's social circle.

Today, via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this piece by Peter Smith in Good about airline food, and research on the effects of airline environments on taste:

even under optimal conditions, cooked to the exact specifications of the latest celebrity chefs hired to reinvigorate flaccid airline fare, the taste of food changes when you’re inside a parched, hypobaric metal tube that’s vibrating and humming along at 550 miles per hour.

Recently, Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines conducted research inside a stationary Airbus A310 designed to replicate flying conditions. Deutche Welle reported that flyers said their taste buds felt dulled, requiring 20 percent more sugar and salt (explaining the particular appeal of V-8 or a Bloody Mary). In another study published this fall, British and Dutch researchers outfitted volunteers with headphones playing loud background noises and found that the noise made foods appear less salty and sweet. Loud noise did make crunchy foods appear crunchier—more Munchie Mix, anyone?

Really interesting. Though I would argue that there's a big difference between eating sea bass in Singapore Airlines business class, and eating chips on Ryan Air.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, "Unrequited," from the album Metheny Mehldau (a 1-star song, imo).]

Mindfulness and contemplation in weight loss, futures, and computing

Over the last couple years I've lost about fifty pounds. As nerdy as this will sound, while I was a fat kid and spent my adult life overweight, it was only in the last two years, when 1) I started to worry that it was now or never-- that my condition in my 40s would determine how long I would live and what kind of life I would have, and 2) I could make it into as much a cerebral challenge as a physical one, that I managed to take off the weight.

By cerebral I mean this: in order to get past the various things that had kept me from losing weight in the past, it was necessary for me to read a lot about nutrition and dieting, dive into the literature on obseity and satiety, and think about how what I'd learned from behavioral economics could be applied to weight loss. At a certain point, I realized that the challenge of losing weight was a classic futures problem: complex, uncertain, requiring all kinds of near-term tradeoffs for long-term benefits, and hard to sustain. Maybe, I wondered, my training as a futurist help me lose weight? Conversely, could I learn something about futures problems through the experience of losing weight?

I think the answer to both is yes, and I've written an article-- available as a PDF-- that explains those answers in detail.

The piece is also kind of personal because it's a bit of an intellectual pivot. On one hand, it's the first article that draws on my reading on mindfulness and contemplative practices, and tries to applies that work to futures. There are lots of futurists who have been interested in meditation and Eastern religions-- it's at least as common among Bay Area futurists as 5.11 Tactical shirts-- but not much explicit use of the idea of mindfulness as a tool for thinking about the future. Partly, I think, it reflects a certain suspicion that writers on contemplative practice display toward thinking about the future, a suspicion that I try to argue is misplaced. But I've come to believe that mindfulness and attention to the now is an essential starting-point for seeing how the future could unfold.

On the other hand, mindfulness and contemplation is a big part of what I'm going to be working on next year at Microsoft Research. I'm going there to start a project on contemplative computing, a form of computing that doesn't fracture your attention and capacity to think long thoughts, but protects and supports it. It's become clear that, in our headlong rush to become more connected and accessible, we're accidentally eroding our capacity to think about complicated problems for long periods. For stockbrokers, pundits, ER doctors, elementary school teachers, and other people whose lives are all about speed and instant reaction, this may not be an issue at all; but for people who are creative for a living, the destruction of our ability to concentrate is a great loss.

Some people have tried to deal with the problem by going off Facebook, taking "digital sabbaths," and otherwise taking a break from digital devices and the digital world. While I certainly understand the impulse, I don't like it, for a few reasons. First, in the long run it's impractical: a movement designed to give us a break from our mobile devices and laptops is going to have trouble dealing with a hyperconnected world of pervasive computing. Second, I actually like being connected, and don't want to live without my digital augmentarium. Third, while I'm as much in danger of being distracted by the Web and Facebook as anyone, there are also times when I can use devices to be creative and reach that mental state of "flow." Finally, the digital sabbath movement implicitly accepts the idea that information technologies have to be this way, and that humans and tools are opposites. In contrast, I buy Andy Clark's idea that we're natural born cyborgs, and my instinct is that the future will offer great opportunities to design information technologies that are better able to support concentration and contemplation-- in other words, to learn how to create tools that help us be better, more focused cyborgs. Figuring out what those tools could look like, and how to design them, is the big task I'll be taking up in Cambridge.

Grilling

My daughter asked if we could grill. When we told my son he said, "Grilling with who else?"

I do tend to cook for several more people than are actually here, no matter how many people eat.

Chinese restaurant kitsch

Ezra Klein's experience matches mine:

I owe an apology to every kitschy Chinese restaurant I've ever rejected as aesthetically inauthentic. No one loves China kitsch more than the Chinese. Red lanterns, tiny figurines, caged birds, silk hostess dresses, dragon designs and everything else I associated with silly Chinese restaurants was present in places that had no idea what to do when Westerners walked in and tried to order food.

[To the tune of Mono, "The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain," from the album Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005 (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!

Evoutionary fitness

Over the last couple years, I've lost about fifty pounds. (It was sixty, but then I started going to the gym, and have built up muscle mass. A fair trade-off.) I'm one of those people who can't lose weight steadily: a diet works, then I hit a wall, and an enormous amount of effort is necessary to start losing again. Playing on a concept from evolutionary biology, I jokingly called these "out-of-fitness plateaus." But it turns out that there are people who actually have thought about applying evolutionary biology to fitness.

A couple days ago I posted about weight loss and long-term thinking about the future, and how the challenges of dieting are a nice example of how the challenges we face in all long-term projects. In response, someone pointed me to a fitness guru named Arthur De Vany, and explained, Nassim Taleb "often credits Devany when discussing... [his] weight loss and new found fitness (which incorporates.....randomness)." (Taleb is author of The Black Swan, and one of my favorite people.)

Turns out De Vany is a professor emeritus in economics at UC-Irvine, and an expert on complex networks and natural resources. He's also author of a major book on the economics of Hollywood. As Taleb says, "at seventy two, [De Vany] looks like what a Greek God would like to look like at forty two." It's true-- the guy is seriously ripped (and I suspect he makes more as a fitness expert than an economist).

Essentially, the idea is that we didn't evolve to work out three days a week, eat three balanced meals, etc.: we're built for long periods of light activity (picking berries) and sudden bursts of intense stress (chasing the mastadon, running away from the tiger), and for eating episodically. As De Vany describes his approach,

Brief moments of high intensity are mixed with exercise on all scales in a way that trains all the metabolic pathways. Power Law training follows the natural patterns of all wild living things and mixes intensities of all scales in a healthful, fractal pattern. It is how children play when they are left to their natural patterns.

Taleb's description of its effect on him (from the introduction (pdf) to the new edition of The Black Swan) is worth quoting at length, if only for the swipes at bankers:

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles to fuel.

Brainwashed by the cultural environment and by my education, I was under the illusion that steady exercise and steady nutrition were a good thing for one's health --not realizing that I was falling into the rationalistic arguments; the Platonic projection of wishes into the world. Worse, I was brainwashed while having all the facts in my head.

From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence the predator will necessarily go through periods of feasts and famine. That's us, humans --we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day", "eat in moderation", idea tested it empirically to see if it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.

After my Aha! flash, under guidance from Art de Vany, I embarked on an Extremistan barbell lifestyle: long, very long, slow meditative (or conversational) walks in a stimulating urban setting, but with occasional (and random) very short sprints, making myself angry imagining I were chasing the bankster Robert Rubin with a big stick trying to catch him to bring him to human justice. I went to the weight lifting rooms in a random way for a completely stochastic workout --typically in a hotel when I was on the road. Like the Grey Swan event, these were very, very rare, but highly consequential weight lifting periods, after a day of semi- starvation, leaving me completely exhausted, then I would be totally sedentary for weeks and hang around cafés. Even the duration of the workouts remained random --but most often very short, less than fifteen minutes. I put myself through thermal variability as well, exposed, on the occasion, to extreme cold without a coat. Thanks to transcontinental travel and jet lag, I underwent periods of sleep deprivation followed by excessive rest. When I went to places with good restaurants, like Italy, I ate in quantities that would have impressed Fat Tony himself, then skipped meals for a while without suffering. Then, after two and a half years of such apparently "unhealthy" regimen, I saw serious changes in my own physique on every possible criterion --the absence of unnecessary adipose tissue, the blood pressure of a 21 year old, etc. I also have a clearer, much more acute mind....

The only thing currently missing from my life is the absence of panics, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night.

[To the tune of Derek and the Dominos, "Got to Get Better in a Little While," from the album Live at the Fillmore East (New York NY), 24 February 1970 (a 3-star song, imo).]

I was right about Chuck E Cheese

Years ago I wrote a post about how the bad design of Chuck E Cheese made it difficult for me to keep track of my (then very young kids), and how I thought this was kind of a flaw:

I spent the several hours feeling like Marlin in Finding Nemo-- in a vaguely threatening environmnent, wondering where my kids had gone. But I finally figured out what bothers me about the place. Not the fact that Chuck E Cheese combines the noise level of a Metallica concert, the franticness of the Filene’s Basement wedding dress sale, and the visual stimulation of the Akihabara; nor that their pizza is terrible and overpriced.

Actually, all those things do irritate me.

But what makes me feel like there’s something actually dangerous about the place is that it’s almost impossible to know where your kids are and what they’re doing.

This post generated a certain amount of hate mail, as well as some comments agreeing (usually for different reasons) that Chuck E Cheese was evil. So I was heartened to see Bob Cook post this in True/Slant:

If you have children in sports, or children of any sort, you probably already know about the hell that can be Chuck E. Cheese, where the ad tagline says it’s a place where a kid can be a kid, but leaves out that a parent can be a fucking maniac. Watching their kid at a ballgame can bring out the worst in some parents, but even close access to weaponry such as hockey sticks or baseball bats does not bring out the level of mayhem as close access to animatronic rodents and lousy pizza.

Turns out that, according to a Wall Street Journal article Cook cites, "Law-enforcement officials say alcohol, loud noise, thick crowds and the high emotions of children’s birthday parties make the restaurants more prone to disputes than other family entertainment venues."

Ah, the memories....

[To the tune of Charlie Parker, "Max Is Making Wax," from the album The Charlie Parker Story [Disc 3] (a 2-star song, imo).]

Pub crawl

Last night I met up with a friend of mine from Saïd, a recent MBA who's still living here in Oxford. I supervised a project when he was a student here, and we've kept in touch off and on since then. The last time we went out drinking I came up with some of the essential ideas in my Future 2.0 argument, so I had high expectations for our get-together.

We started out with a couple pints in the Oxford Retreat, a nice and relatively quiet pub just up the road from my hotel. It overlooks the stream, so it's a great location, but it's not popular with (as one of my friends puts it) the students who come here to learn English and have sex; so it was a good place to talk.

via flickr

I'm not sure what's happened to me, but in the last few months my relationship with alcohol has changed significantly. Until recently one drink would more or less put me out; but now, with my jumped-up metabolism (or something), I can drink a lot more, and not have it floor me. Not that I plan to start heavy recreational drinking; but it's always useful when your limits turn out ot be farther away than they used to be, especially when you're on the road and seeing lots of people, a disproportionate number of whom will propose a drink, toast, another bottle of wine, etc..

see-- i was working! via flickr

From there we went to the Eagle and Child. For those of you who don't know, the E & C was where J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and I believe T. S. Eliot hung out (I'm sure about the first two). It's right across the street from Balliol and St. John's, so it's pretty centrally located. At first, I couldn't believe I was hearing the name of the place right-- the friend I was drinking with is from Latin America, so I thought his accent could be getting in my way. But in fact, it is the Eagle and Child, and the pub's sign does have an eagle bearing away a swaddled baby.

a picture is worth a thousand words, via flickr

We had a couple more pints here, and I ordered some dinner.

via flickr

Originally I was going to go with the fish and chips, but after looking at the menu I decided to order the Game Pie. When it arrived, I asked the waiter what kind of game it was; I could imagine a big tin of something just labeled "game" in the back. He said, "Tonight sir, we're serving Monopoly."

via flickr

Served me right for asking, I guess.

After that I walked around to clear my head and take pictures. If I could be drunk for an hour, then switch it off, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about alcohol. But the fact that I need to essentially engage in an exercise regimen or take a hot bath to clear my head puts an upper limit on how much I'll ever enjoy it. Which is just as well. I've been addicted to enough things in the course of my life, and certainly don't need one more.

Day 2 in Budapest

Today was the second day of the conference on ubiquitous communication in an intelligent world. It was one of the most stimulating conferences I've been to in the last couple years, and that's saying a lot: but it was small, intimate, really well-supported, and aimed for a high level of cooperation and productivity. And it worked. Something I'm going to want to replicate.

We finished up in the afternoon, and a couple of us walked over to the Buda side of the city, then climbed up to the castle. We went over to the historic district, which I'd never been to, and took in the Hungarian Telecommunication Museum. Don't laugh. It was actually really interesting.

via flickr

From there we walked through the castle, and made our way to the Elizabeth Bridge.

via flickr

After crossing it, I headed back to the hotel, hung out for an hour, then went out to the Central European Cafe for dinner.

via flickr

Apparently this was a place where a lot of the early Hungarian network theorists used to hang out and work, so naturally I had to go there.

After that I almost went back to my room and went to bed, but decided to go for a walk instead. As I was passing an outdoor cafe, I ran into one of my fellow workshop participants, and I talked him into coming with me to the Frank Zappa Cafe.

via flickr

For those of you who don't know, Zappa was actually a pretty powerful influence in Eastern European countercultural circles: Vaclav Havel described him as "one of the gods of the Czech underground," and Radio Prague explains that

Frank Zappa's popularity in Prague is closely connected to the dark days of the dissident era, when his music and that of the Velvet Underground were blacklisted by the censors. For example, Frank Zappa's second album, Absolutely Free was smuggled into Czechoslovakia within a year of its 1967 release, and critics claim that the music influenced the famous Czech underground rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe. Zappa's tunes thus came to represent freedom and independent thought to dissidents in Czechoslovakia. Reports have it that when young kids in communist Czechoslovakia played heavy rock music, the police would tell them to "turn off that Frank Zappa music."

So, in memory of Zappa and to celebrate the spread of democracy, we sat there and drank a substantial quantity of palinka. We agreed that the cherry was the most interesting, and plum was good but simpler.

via flickr

After that I wasn't quite ready to go to bed, so I walked around some more, and found Raday Utca (where this blog's old banner was photographed). I discovered another cafe that looked promising, so I had a couple more drinks and did some writing. I figure so long as I get up tomorrow, I'll be fine: I can sleep on the train back to Vienna.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "Autumn Leaves [Take 1]," from the album Portrait In Jazz (I give it 4 stars).]

The world is flat, and Cafes Zoë are unavoidable

There's one in Menlo Park that I go to a lot.

via flickr

Tonight I found another one in Budapest, on Raday Utca. Rather different, but still the same name (allowing for the fact that Hungarians, like Asians, put family names first).

via flickr

Now I need to look for them in Vienna and London....

[To the tune of Wynton Marsalis, "Autumn Leaves," from the album Live at Blues Alley (Disc 2) (I give it 3 stars).]

The dangers of travel

I never knew Britain was so dangerous:

Crumbs: half of Britons injured by their biscuits on coffee break, survey reveals

An estimated 25 million adults have been injured while eating during a tea or coffee break - with at least 500 landing themselves in hospital, the survey revealed.

The custard cream biscuit was found to be the worse offender to innocent drinkers.

It beat the cookie to top a table of 15 generic types of biccy whose potential dangers were calculated by The Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation.

Hidden dangers included flying fragments and being hurt while dunking in scalding tea through to the more strange such as people poking themselves in the eye with a biscuit or fallen off a chair reaching for the tin.

Yet another good reason to stick to my new diet. But given my usual food preferences when I'm on the road, it's a miracle I haven't hurt myself already.

[To the tune of Pearl Jam, "Little Wing / Maggot Brain," from the album Live 1995 (I give it 4 stars).]

A few of my favorite things: What I enjoy about travel, biking, workshops, and cooking

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of stuff: biking, organizing a Memorial Day dinner, preparing for a week-long trip to the East Coast, thinking about the craft and design of workshops. (These are the expert workshops that I organize all over the place.)

In many ways these are very different activities, but I really enjoy them all. I recently realized that despite their differences, they actually share a few qualities.

1) They're active, embodied knowledge.

Obviously bicycling is physical, but cooking is a nice combination of fine motor skill and lifting big heavy things (or in my case, avoiding setting myself on fire); you're always on your feet in a workshop; and travel is pretty physically strenuous, for good and bad reasons. Maybe I'm getting older, I'm less of a couch potato, or my ADD is increasing (and I know these are somewhat mutually exclusive explanations), but I find my patience with sitting for long hours and just reading is decreasing. I can do it, but I'm happier engaging my body. And nothing is better than activities where you're involving your body, but you have to think about what you're doing. (Gregg Zachary had a great piece last year on the rediscovery of the virtues of manual work. I'm part of a movement.)

cycling hunter's point, via flickr

Like Richard Sennett's craftsman (and I really recommend his book), I enjoy things that are physical or tangible, but also engage the mind. Thoughtful action is where it's at.

gestural interface missile command, via flickr

2) There are real deadlines.

My capacity for finishing things that have open-ended deadlines, or fake deadlines ("so we all agree that we'll finish our tasks by next week, right? right?"), is plummeting to near zero. I have too much other stuff in my life that absolutely has to get done.

hard deadlines: flames don't wait, via flickr

So hard deadlines are good for me now. Essential even. The workshop starts at exactly this time, the plane leaves at exactly that time, the guests are arriving now.

Hard deadlines also put a nice bound on craftwork, by preventing you from tinkering forever with something. A paragraph could always be better, but as Sennett writes, the demands of the trade force craftsmen to accept limits, to do the best job they can within the time they have, and to learn to be satisfied with that. As graphic designers say, "Finished is Good."

3) They require preparation.

The day of the cookout, I spent hours chopping vegetables, checking marinades, cleaning off platters (you can never have too many platters at a BBQ), locating plates and cups, setting up staging areas for food and drinks, laying out tools, etc. (I noticed, though, that this wasn't tedious, it was pleasant. It was a classic example of what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.)

Likewise, when you travel, you've got to think a lot about what to pack, how to structure your time, how to get among different places, etc.. A bike won't work with a flat tire, nor will a cyclist work if he's dehydrated, so you'd better be prepared for those possibilities. Every ride requires some kind of adjustment: technical climbs mess up gears; thorns flatten tires; I get hungry. Having the resources to deal with those things lets me keep riding.

With workshops, you have to think in advance about everything, and I mean everything: you have to go over the agenda minute-by-minute, think about the flow of the day, tinker with questions and exercises to eliminate ambiguity and focus people, lay out materials, move the furniture around, make sure the caterers know when to appear, etc., etc. (Indeed, there are things that we normally don't think about that I'd like to start experimenting with, like lighting and ambient sound, making some activities more embodied and physical-- sitting is exhausting-- and playing with the day's menu to keep people from getting weighed down by muffins and too much coffee.)

Good preparation doesn't require you to think just about one thing. It requires you to think about a lot of different things, big and small; to think about timing and process; about division of labor; about contingencies and strategies. That's part of what makes it pleasant.

future of science workshop, malaysia, via flickr

But here's the important thing.

Some of that preparation is meant to help you keep things on track, and do things exactly the right way. But most serious preparation isn't about scripting. Rather, its about making it possible for you to adapt to whatever actually happens. I've never had a workshop run exactly the way I imagined it would: more people show up, they turn out to be interested in other things than we'd discussed before, the room isn't laid out the way we expected-- a thousand different things can go akimbo.

I used to think that the point of planning workshops in such great detail was so I'd have more control over them. Wrong. You never have control. You have whatever you have when you get in the room. The point of doing all that planning is to deeply understand the intentionality and philosophy behind the workshop, so you can improvise your way to the same end-point, and you have the tools at hand to do so.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

[Update: I've realized that this is my complaint about humanities graduate training: it socializes you to believe that you possess skills that are useful only in a very specific future-- namely tenure track jobs in your field-- and train you to believe that you're less qualified to succeed at a different future, and that any other future is a failure.]

If you know that you're going to go off the map-- if events are going to conspire to send you in another direction, and they will-- the best that you can do is have the right gear, and a clear picture of where you want to go.

4) They have serendipity.

The upside of plans not working out the way you expect is that they can work out better. Sometimes the very coolest thing isn't on the map, and the only way to find it is to venture into the unknown.

One of the great pleasures of having a big party is that mixing up friends who don't know each other can have pleasant results for everyone. The best rides are ones that have a brilliant hill and view that you didn't know about. The best trips are the ones that expose you to something you've never seen before, or didn't even know was cool. I fell in love with Budapest not because I'd always wanted to go there, but because it's an amazing, complicated, Old World post-socialist place that I find alternately fascinating and frustrating. I love London because it rewards walking: I know it well enough to be able to navigate by Tube or on foot, but every time I go out in the evening I discover something-- a little square, a park, a row of businesses-- that charms and captivates, and that I'd never heard of.

surprise in the london underground, via flickr

Workshops have serendipity too. Tons of it. You want to build connections between ideas or fields that even experts hadn't seen before, or explore the cross-impact of trends that people normally think about separately. When that works, the results are awesome-- and the amazing thing is, the results are awesome a lot more often than you'd expect. You never know what the outcome of a workshop is going to be-- and if you do, there's really no point in having it in the first place. This doesn't mean that a workshop shouldn't have certain goals or deliverables; far from it. But it's like an evening walk in London: you know where you're going to end up, you know that there are certain landmarks you'll pass, but you don't know what else you're going to see along the way. Your job is to be open to the serendipity, so you can take advantage of it.

5) They draw out people.

I mean this in two senses. First, they can push you do things you didn't know you could. Good rides challenge you to do things you didn't think you were capable of, or leave you exhausted by happy with your performance.

Second, they open up a space for people to contribute. My wife used the cookout as an opportunity to repot a bunch of flowers in the backyard, dig out and repot some aging bamboo, and do other things on her gardening/home improvement list. Once kids started arriving, my daughter made (or taught the kids how make) balloon swords, which they then played with all evening. I hadn't thought of either of these, but people commented on how nice the backyard looked, and the kids all left exhausted and uninjured. Win.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

Workshops require both kinds of drawing out. Running a workshop isn't an exercise in controlling other people, but it's a hard task to create a venue in which everyone can think seriously, think differently, and think together.

It's also not about getting a certain result, but about creating the conditions out of which interesting new things will emerge. Of course, workshops have objectives, but as a facilitator, you have to approach them obliquely, and recognize that the actual work and thinking will be done by participants: you're just ("just" isn't quite the right word!) there to help make it happen.

workshop in laxenburg, astria via flickr

6) Sometimes you can push, but mainly you have to flow.

You can challenge people, but you can't order them to be innovative. You can try to get guests to mingle or introduce them to each other, but you can't make them be chatty and friendly. You can also push yourself, but you must recognize that pushing doesn't get you everything: you can get to the airport on time, but you can't control the weather and need to be able to go with whatever the situation presents.

my son on a happier ride

This morning I got an unexpected lesson on pushing versus flow from my son. We were biking to school, and he has the habit of standing up while pedaling. I can't get him to stop (he's seven, after all), so I was trying to teach him how to do it in a way that maintains his balance. He got frustrated and mad, which made him distracted; and so he took a spill. Bad enough to break the mirror on his bike, add a couple nicks to the brakes or handlebars, and require some ice and band-aids when he got to school. Fortunately nothing on him was broken, and he'll be fine.

As I try to tell the kids, biking is one of those things that demands mindfulness: you have to watch the road, know what gear you're in, know where the cars are, know how tired you are. You can push yourself, but if you lose your concentration-- if you lose the flow-- you're likely to crash. In the course of pushing him, I made him lose what little flow he had.

Still, any spill that doesn't send you to urgent care is a learning opportunity, not an accident. And as a friend of mine wrote after hearing about the crash,

But falling is an essential part of growth. It teaches you where the boundaries are. If you never push hard enough to fall, you will never know if you could grow twice as much or twice as fast-- because you are playing it safe.

So across all these activities-- and maybe across everything you do-- hitting that mix of pushing and flow, planning but staying open to serendipty, and being active is key.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Hourglass, Part 2," from the album Staircase (I give it 4 stars).]

Best sushi name ever

Spotted at a restaurant in Redwood City: Behind the Green Door roll. Regular sushi ingredients, but fourteen inches long.

And the grilled bananas!

Apparently there was something about grilled bananas on the Disney Channel, so the kids wanted to try them. Who am I to say no?

Mothers' Day feast

Grilling on the Frankfurter School

My small grill is called Max Weber.

World's best dad. I is him.

Making dinner for the kids and a friend. Portobellos, asparagus, peppers, corn, kalbi and garlic bread. (Not pictured: the four other people who should be joining us, given how much I'm cooking.)

Delicious but deadly (for diets at least)

Introducing my daughter to chai latte

Just before the Bell Brothers concert. I ordered a small chai latte, and each of the kids wanted a taste. They ended up drinking about 2/3 of it.

So I bought myself another one, and they drank a lot of that, too.

Nonetheless, I figure that even with buying them dinner there, dessert, and drinks, it was less expensive than going to the movies or Great America or any other place we normally go that doesn't have a family membership.

I've almost eliminated coffee, but....

I think I'll need the extra boost today.

Sunday morning workplace

Finishing an essay for Vodafone on tinkering while Heather and the kids are in Golden Gate Park and the California Academy of Sciences. Thought a different place might be usefully stimulating.

My corner pub

Last night, as I was having an exceptional second beer in 24 hours (I'd had the first with dinner, and then went to the gym and sauna, so I thought I could risk it), I briefly lamented the fact that when I lived in Berkeley, I had a corner pub-- the wonderful, loud, and interesting Bison Brewery, where I'd go, have a pint or two, and write. I wasn't exactly a regular-- the bartenders and I didn't know each others' names-- but I still enjoyed the place. I don't have a pub here. I drink so little it would hardly be possible. Still, it seemed a bit of a shame.

Today, as my wife took the kids and their friends to the movies, I headed over to Cafe Zoë, to do some work. (I'm now at that age-- or maturity-- where I see that solitude is an opportunity, not the absence of others.) I've been coming here for years, when it was under different ownership. As I was ordering my chai latte, I read a sign they'd just put up announcing a loyalty program. Visit ten times, your next coffee is free-- a deal I'll be able to take advantage of approximately every four days, even when I'm not running a tab. "I should sign up for that," I said.

via flickr

The owner-- Zoë's mother-- said, "Oh, we'll give you this drink for free. You've been here a lot more than ten times. You're a regular."

I guess I am.

Break for dinner

Wandered over to Bangkok Garden, a Thai restaurant on Lytton, for dinner and a break from a piece I'm writing on the future of blogging. Think I'll follow it up with a quick trip to the gym.

Dinner

Somen noodle salad at Sprouts, with a side of the latest draft of my article on reinventing futures for the current century.

Yum.

Wifi wine glasses, medical monitoring, and sociability of aging in place

The New Scientist has an article about a research project that turns drinking glasses into communication devices:

Long-distance lovers can still drink together

Could glowing, Wi-Fi wine glasses let people in long-distance relationships feel more in touch with their other half?... [MIT Media Lab researchers] Jackie Lee and Hyemin Chung... have incorporated a variety of coloured LEDs, liquid sensors and wireless (GPRS or Wi-Fi) links into a pair of glass tumblers....

When either person picks up a glass, red LEDs on their partner's glass glow gently. And when either puts the glass to their lips, sensors make white LEDs on the rim of the other glass glow brightly, so you can tell when your other half takes a sip. Following tests in separate labs, Lee says the wireless glasses really do "help people feel as if they are sharing a drinking experience together".

The technology could also be used to check that hospital patients or elderly people are drinking enough water, Lee says.

There are a couple interesting things here. First, it draws on real-world social activity: it doesn't require users to learn (or learn how to interpret) some new behavior, but piggybacks on very familiar ones. As the article notes, "communal drinking is an important social interaction that helps bind friendships and relationships." This sort of social mimicry has long been part of GUI design-- desktops and trash cans jumped from the real world to computer screens more than twenty years ago-- but we can now start to think about getting rid of the middleman: eliminating the intermediate step of creating visual metaphors, and putting the electronics and interactivity directly in things.

The second thing is the last paragraph: that this system has medical monitoring or aging in place applications. Our work suggests that aging in place could be the first major market for smart home and smart devices: elders who want to continue to live independently in their own homes will be the early adopters for these systems. This is significant market for two reasons: first, there's lots of evidence that retiring Boomers will be willing to spend money to stay healthy and maintain their independence, so potentially it's a lucrative market; and second, the emotional and psychological value of these systems will be far greater in this market than elsewhere. Technology that lets your refrigerator talk to your local grocer is nice; but it doesn't hold a candle technology that lets your 80 year-old mother live safely in the same house she's been in for the last thirty years.

There's a deeper connection between these two things. Ten years ago, as I understand it, the future of in-home elder care would have focused on automation: creating robot nurses, or other systems that do things for you. Today, the focus is more on systems that enable and encourage good behavior, and aim to keep elderly people active and connected to others. The first person who notices that you've been sleeping a lot more, and eating very little, shouldn't necessarily be your doctor; it should be a sibling, or your son or daughter. More and more, these systems become tools for both gathering information about user patterns-- making sure someone's drinking enough-- and communication channels linking elders with friends and family.