Relevant History

Over the flu

The last several days I've been laid up with the flu. I started getting a sore throat on Thursday, when I was in Berkeley, and by Friday morning I could barely do anything. I spent the next two days sleeping. It's a very strange thing for me, given how hyperactive I usually am, to not want to do anything at all, and succeeding at it.

Fortunately, I got back some of my energy on Sunday, which was good because I was going to chew up the bed if I spent any more time in it (why does lying in bed hurt if you do it too long?), and now am not quite back to normal, but can definitely see normal from here.

The one good thing I discovered is that Lost In Translation turns out to be the perfect movie to watch when you're sick. That sense of physical and cultural dislocation, or being thrown out of time (and Tokyo is a perfect backdrop for that feeling, given how bright it remains), nicely parallels the feeling of being sick-- of drifting outside of normal time, or being simultaneously trapped in and alien from your body.

Back to work now.

[To the tune of Sun Kil Moon, "Ocean Breathes Salty," from the album Tiny Cities (I give it 2 stars).]

Quote of the day: On managerial cosmopolitanism

From bookforum.com, via Crooked Timber:

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.

I suspect I'm being insulted in this paragraph, but I'm still too jet-lagged to figure out exactly how. No, wait...

Inexplicable bathroom designs

For a continent that's pioneered social democracy, good industrial design, and a generally above-average interest in social welfare, Europe seems to have some of the most dangerous bathrooms in the world. Let me give two examples, both from hotels that otherwise I thought were very good.

First is from my hotel in Vienna, which is in the center of the city, blocks from Stephensplatz, on a nice square, etc.. The main thing going on here is that the absence of a shower curtain-- just the half-wall glass thing-- seriously raises the odds that I'm going to get water everywhere, and then slip and break something.

k&k hotel, vienna, via flickr

The Royal Oxford is even trickier. I love the hotel in every other respect, but the bathroom is tiny, it's got the half-glass wall thing, and the bathtub is really high. Now normally I like deep tubs, but when it makes it hard to keep your balance in what's likely to be a slippery environment, I'm less of a fan.

royal oxford hotel, via flickr

Maybe people in the rest of the world can handle this kind of thing fine. Maybe shower curtains are the equivalent of Humvees with spinning rims-- unnecessary, wasteful, and uniquely American. Or perhaps the dangerous bathroom is like Europe's architectural equivalent of Inspector Clouseau's butler, Kato: by constantly trying to kill him, Kato helped keep Clouseau alert and in shape. Of course, it didn't go Clouseau's apartment much good....

[To the tune of Dixie Chicks, "Wide Open Spaces," from the album Wide Open Spaces (I give it 3 stars).]

High Street then and now

Me in 2006:

via flickr

And me now:

via flickr

I think I'm wearing the same brand of jeans and style of shirt in both pictures, but that's where the similarities end. Thank goodness.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)," from the album Hail To The Thief (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).]

Parking and biking

Slate's Tom Vanderbilt has a good article about the role of parking in shaping the attractiveness of different kinds of transportation. He points out that:

parking helps make commuters—a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home—required in new residential developments—is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end.

When it finally dies, I would love to be able to replace my car with a serious electric bike (or more likely a cheap used car and an electric bike), but parking is kind of a concern. It's one thing to park a $400 bike by chaining it to a fence; I'm not sure what I'd want to do with a bike that cost twenty times that much.

[To the tune of Ides Of March, "Vehicle," from the album Vehicle (I give it 5 stars).]

First post from new machine

Not exactly a completely new machine, but tonight I installed a new hard drive in my MacBook (the one the Institute let me have when they let me go). I'd long had less than 5 or 6 gig free on my factory-installed 80 gb hard drive, and had to carefully manage my remaining space-- regularly burn DVDs of pictures of the kids (which I should do anyway, but still), look for attachments and downloads to clean out, etc..

At first I thought about taking it to one of the shops around here, and having them do it for me. Then I figured I knew enough technical people, I could mail order a hard drive and get someone to do it for a case of beer. The new drive, a 500 gb Seagate, and a plastic external enclosure for the old drive (I found a deal online), arrived yesterday.

I started poking around a little at the instructions for doing a hard drive upgrade on a MacBook, and soon realized, I could do this myself. Not only that, but I wanted to try.

So today I went to my local Frys, bought a couple tools and an anti-static wrist strap, borrowed an OS X install disk from a friend, and after dinner, cleared off some space on the dining room table. My son joined me, even though he was a little disappointed that he wouldn't get to smash up the old hard drive (he really likes taking things like that apart). We watched a couple videos on YouTube and followed some instructions I found online, and 10 minutes later, we had the drives changed out.

men at work, via flickr

After that, it was a matter of booting up from the install disk, then using Time Machine to do a complete restore of my old machine-- really just a matter of clicking on some buttons and then going for coffee. Or in this case, putting the old hard drive in its new enclosure. (I haven't had something so aggressively transparent since my Palm IIIc, or maybe my iMac.) A couple hours later, the restore was complete, the old internal hard drive was happily working as an external hard drive, and all was well.

old and new drives, via flickr

Considering how much (really how little) work it was, the payoff is pretty spectacular. I have what feels like a new machine, with a boundless amount of memory; and I have the experience of having done it all myself.

I think I'll upgrade the RAM next. Now that it's my machine, I can improve it as much as I want. That's as good a metaphor for my new life as any.

look at the size of that thing! via flickr

[To the tune of John Coltrane & Don Cherry, "The Invisible," from the album The Avant-Garde (I give it 2 stars).]

Typical northern California beach experience

Half Moon Bay State Park this afternoon. The beaches here prove Mark Twain's great line about summers in San Francisco. Nonetheless I'm confident that after lunch the kids will play in the freezing water!

Xtreme Skyflyer, and learning new and unusual sports

This week the children are between Peninsula summer school and their respective camps, so we're doing things with them. Today we took the kids to Great America. I've been tempted on my last couple visits by something called the Xtreme Skyrider, a ride that basically involves being suspended from a cable, dragged 150 feet up into the air, and then released. You free fall for a couple second, then you swing.

I decided I finally wanted to do it, and Daniel immediately said he wanted to try it too. So he came along.

The first thing they do is put you in this thing that's a combination of a harness and one of those long bibs that, say, radiologists wear. Not the most fetching outfit-- it doesn't allow a flight suit-like swagger-- but since there's nothing else attaching you to the cable, I was all right with that.

Underwater in the rainforest

Looking up through the underwater tunnel into the rainforest canopy and the dome.

Canopy level

Silent Running

California Academy of Sciences rainforest. Very space age. Reminds me of the classic sci fi film.

Building a labyrinth

We spent this afternoon at the house of some good friends, helping them expand their labyrinth and having a Solstice Day cookout.

First the kids (and a few of the parents) cleared the ground.

Then we laid down rocks in a spiral.

The kids then filled the labyrinth with sand.

It was a very interesting time, and the kids really enjoyed working on it.

Emanuel Derman on Tithonus

From Emanuel Derman's blog:

Tithonus got eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. (See Alfred Lord Tennyson and Aldous Huxley.)

The whole point of eternal life is eternal youth, or at least eternal middle age.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "I Am the Highway," from the album Audioslave (I give it 4 stars).]

The great Strawberry Street Cafe reunion

Wednesday night I got together with some high school friends, and my high school choir director, for dinner at Strawberry Street Cafe, a restaurant in the Fan.

strawberry street cafe, via flickr

These are people I was pretty close to in high school-- I spent a huge amount of time doing choir stuff, and several of us were also the core group for the school's honors and AP courses-- but haven't seen in person for a very long time, and reconnected with on Facebook over the last year or so.

I chose Strawberry Street Cafe because everyone knows where it is, it's kid-friendly, and because I didn't really know it. The place was just a couple years old when I started high school, and it advertised regularly on the radio, so I heard about it... but never went there. It remained part of a cool grown-up Richmond that I was too young and poor to visit myself. Reconnecting with my past social reality in a place from a past imagined landscape seemed nicely symmetrical.

strawberry street, via flickr

It was especially lovely to see my music teacher, who was a terrific influence on me, and who went on to run a very successful intensive performing arts school, from which she's retiring in a few weeks. She was an influence not just because I spent a lot of time in her classes, or because I've continued to play (I have my old guitars, but don't really use them; I expect my daughter is going to take them over sooner or later). Of course I continue to love music, but I peaked as a musician in college (I didn't want to devote the time to meeting ever-higher performance standards, to say nothing of taking the hit on my grades).

But I learned a lot from her about how to perform, and those bits of craft and instinct have been a great help. It's not just that workshops and talks are performances, obviously they are; but I think you can fruitfully think of a lot of knowledge work as one kind of performance or another. As the Bard said, all the world's a stage; so knowing how to play is always going to be useful.

me and my music teacher

It was a nice reminder that some of the organizing tools I use for work and research are ones that I can use in my social life as well. When you spend a lot of your time with books and words, and come from a profession that alternated solitary contemplation and intensive gossip about colleagues, but featured very little genuine planned collaboration, it's easy to develop a sense of yourself as not that social, and maybe not that good at it. Wrong. As one of my daughter's friends once told a boy who was teasing her about being introverted, "I'm not an introvert. I'm very extroverted. I just don't like you very much."

And even if I do test as an introvert on some psychological scale, I can fake it.

There were eleven of us at the dinner, including two kids, four and five years old. (Most of my class seems to either have 5 year-olds, or 15 year-olds; I'm the only one with a child in the middle.) Two of my cohort married each other, two others had remained in regular contact these last 25+ years, but the rest of us were at best erratically connected. So it wasn't just me parachuting into an old social circle for an evening; it was a chance for the circle to reconstitute itself. I don't know why I assumed that people who'd remained in or returned to Richmond after college would have stayed in touch-- Richmond is a big place after all, and life does intrude on old connections-- but the fact that many of us were reconnecting after years was pleasant. It wasn't any less something that people were doing for me... but it was also something I was able to do for them.

And Strawberry Street Cafe was a good choice: the food is good, they were very gracious about our ever-expanding party, and they were welcoming of the kids. For me, it was good for another, entirely unexpected, reason.

For whatever reason I had no desire to go back to my old high school, to the apartments we lived in, or other places I saw on a daily basis; both Mom and I opted for the places that we always thought were special, like the VMFA and Maymont Park. (As one of the characters in Dune memorably put it, "People I miss. A place is just a place." While I admire that gruff practicality and emphasis on loyalty to comrades and family, I don't actually agree with it at all-- places do matter-- but some places remain more attractive than others, for whatever mysterious reason.)

the fan, via flickr

Walking through the Fan, I was struck by how well it compares with similar neighborhoods in Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco, and how it feels like a great urban area for kids and families; I could appreciate the immense amount of energy that's gone into restoration and renovation of the turn-of-the-century housing stock. As someone intimately familiar with parenting and property ownership, I could appreciate things I couldn't twenty-five years ago, and imagine myself there.

virginia museum of fine arts, via flickr

Likewise, I always liked VFMA, but it felt like an expression of Richmond polite society, a UFO populated by Izod-wearing aliens. But in the year since, I've spent time in the British Museum and MOMA and the Smithsonian and DMA, I've given a talk at the Globe Theatre, I have a wallet full of membership cards to Bay Area institutions. I'm no longer alien to these people, I am them.

And I can now appreciate that the nicest parts of Maymont compare favorably with similar places in England and the Continent: it's not just a lonely Old South wannabe of a great estate, it IS a great estate.

maymont park, via flickr

Staying away from my high school Richmond and planting myself squarely in the places I imagined as defining grown-up Richmond let me start seeing the place differently. Maybe it's the start of a relationship with the place that has less to do with who I was, than with who I am. Which is good, because in the last year I had the very distinct sense of part of my old self being sloughed off, to make room for something new.

I thought I was visiting to reconnect with some of my past. But maybe I was visiting to create a future.

[To the tune of Carly Simon, "You Belong to Me," from the album Carly Simon: Clouds in My Coffee 1965-1995 (I give it 3 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. 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. Heard 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) You can push sometimes, 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 to some degree, but 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).]

Seed Magazine piece

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

Life lessons from dentistry

This afternoon I was at the dentist, for what felt like the tenth time this year. Come to think of it, that's not far off: for some mysterious reason, I've overcome my aversion to dentistry, and have been getting a huge amount of work done these last few months, including stuff that I really should have dealt with years ago. (A great example I set, both as a futurist and a parent!)

Today the dentist removed an old filling, and started the process for putting on a crown. While I was in the chair, I caught up on a couple SMSes, then thought about just what I didn't like about going to the dentist. The obvious things are that it's painful and time-consuming.... But in point of fact, it doesn't take very long (I'm usually in and out in less than and hour), and if done right, it doesn't hurt (fortunately, my dentist treats novocaine the way a really good bartender treats the vodka in a dry martini). In fact, the worst thing about being worked on is the sound. Even if I'm not feeling anything, that high-pitched whine, and the high-frequency vibrations in my bones... well, they don't set my teeth on edge, but I find every couple minutes or so I have to relax.

So it turns out, it's not that I dislike it. In reality, I don't mind it at all, but managed to convince myself that I didn't like it. Not a bad lesson.

I go back next week for the permanent crown. Bring it on!

Please rise for the national anthem

Singing Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" with the Bell Brothers.

via flickr

And man, do I need to replace that shirt, which is an artifact of my previous body. Maybe I should ignore the credit limit, take a weekend in San Francisco, and Just Do It. I currently have two pairs of jeans and a black jacket that actually fit; everything else ranges from oversized, to cavernous, to drapery.

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.

Bell Brothers at Cafe Zoë

A local band appearing at my favorite cafe.

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

I think I'll need the extra boost today.

Worst. Internet. Come-on. Ever

A little while ago an IM window opened with a note from someone I don't know. While I've got my IM set to reject connection requests from everyone but my buddies, these sometimes get through. (At least I really HOPE I don't know this person, because if I do, I've got poorer taste in friends than I thought.) The note read:

criticalcoho (3:24)
I hereby solicit Internet sex.

OMFG.

It's the use of the word "hereby" that first had me rolling on the floor. Is this a notarized solicitation? Maybe that makes it legal....

But really, what kind of sexual experience would you want that would make this appealing? Only if you have a fetish for clumsy, fumbling, awkward encounters-- the sort where you accidentally chip a tooth-- would you think to reply. "Feel like you're 17 again! But in all the wrong ways."

On the expert mind

I've been reading some pretty cynical stuff about expertise recently, so to cleanse the palate I checked out this Scientific American article on "The Expert Mind:"

[Florida State professor K. Anders] Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study....

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields....

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.

Weekend at Hidden Villa

This weekend my son and I spent two night at Hidden Villa. It was a trip organized by the parent of a classmate of my son's, and it was us and about half a dozen other families. Hidden Villa was founded by the same people who started Peninsula School (the Duvenecks were amazingly entrepreneurial-- they also were involved in the creation of the Pacific Arts League, and they've immortalized by having a Palo Alto neighborhood named after them), so it has something of a special resonance with Peninsula families.

Hidden Villa is still a working farm, and there are a couple farm stands just to the left of the entrance. There's a pretty large organic garden, chickens (the eggs are excellent, I'm told), and a number of cows, goats and sheep.

via flickr

While the kids were all excited about going camping at Hidden Villa-- they'd all been there on field trips at least once-- we were actually staying at the hostel, which consists of several heated cabins near a terrific lodge. (Basically, any time you get ready for a weekend by going to Costco rather than REI, you can tell it's not going to be real camping.) The lodge is a wonderful building, large and spacious, not particularly luxurious, but incredibly comfortable to be in.

via flickr

And it's one of those spaces that, because of where it's situated, manages to feel wonderfully luxurious. I especially liked the screened-in porch, which for some ancient reason I'm drawn to.

via flickr

We did a potluck dinner the first night, then various of us took charge of the remaining meals. We didn't have a complicated schedule for cleanup, but somehow it all worked out: I think when you're a group of parents of small kids, cleaning up is kind of automatic. The idea of either leaving the dishes for tomorrow, or not doing anything while other people were working, were both kind of unthinkable.

Besides, the lodge has a fabulous kitchen. Propane rather than gas for the stove, which means it heats up more slowly than normal, but otherwise it was a fantastic workspace.

via flickr

Saturday morning we went for a hike, which led (after a refreshing uphill climb) to a stream that the kids found very diverting. It also reminded me that for kids, the most important thing you can bring to keep them happy and uncomplaining isn't lots of water, or good shoes, but other kids. If you're with your parents, everything quickly becomes a drag; if you're with classmates, it's all cool.

via flickr

After the hike and lunch, we went on a tour of the farm. Needless to say, the kids loved the chance to interact with the animals-- pet the goats and sheep, feed the chickens, that sort of thing.

via flickr

I realized at a certain point that, in addition to the obvious appeal of a beautiful natural location, there were two things I really liked about the weekend, and it got me thinking.

The first was the very unforced combination of quiet and company. I was with a dozen other adults and a lot of kids, but I never had the feeling that it was a strain: everyone got along very well, but things were unstructured enough-- and there were always enough parents around who could keep an eye on the kids, who paid us essentially no mind whatsoever and formed their own self-regulating tribe-- to allow you to wander off on your own. I enjoyed spending time with them because they're really nice people, but also because I didn't have the sense that anyone had to be entertained.

The kids were also really easy to deal with. They're generally a very well-behaved bunch, but you put them together, and they essentially seal themselves off from adults, lose any real interest in any of us adults, and take care of themselves until dinner. In the evening, they'd play games, or cluster around whatever parents were reading (everyone, and I mean every single child, brought a couple Bone books, so it was a virtual Bone-reading marathon all weekend). Very different from how things can be at home: my kids are pretty independent, but I felt like I spent less time interacting with ten kids there than I do with my own at home.

It was an interesting experience, and it made me wonder: why in the world don't we do this all the time? If kids are easier to deal with in larger numbers (a counterintuitive proposition, but maybe not that inaccurate), why do we insist on (or default to) taking care of them ourselves? Maybe the cohousing movement is onto something....

via flickr

The second thing that made me really think was the realization that part of what I liked about the weekend was that it offered some of the same rewards of traveling: it offered a chance to strip away life to a few essentials, and to live with a degree of thoughtfulness and enforced simplicity-- but without the frantic, focused edge than I have to maintain when I'm on the road. At one point, when I was sitting in the lodge and playing Go (the parents include a number of really serious Go players, and I got my ass kicked all weekend), it struck me that for these two days at least, I had effectively traded dealing with stuff for interacting with people. It was a good deal.

A few months ago I went through a phase of throwing out old stuff, and as I've lost weight I've been shedding clothes that are too large for me. But I now wonder: could I get rid of another 95% of what I own, keep a core of essential stuff, and have a better life? Do I need all those books from graduate school? Am I really any more likely to finish Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism than I am to get through the rest of Normal Cantor's the Civilization of the Middle Ages? Of course not. So why am I keeping them? Things like travel and this past weekend suggest that it would be possible for me to radically reduce the number of objects I have in my life, and not really miss them.

via flickr

I'm not about to renounce all worldly goods, and I don't want to sound like a cross between Thoreau and Wigan Ludgate (the hacker-turned-recluse in William Gibson's Count Zero). But would I be happier with a much smaller, thoughtfully designed, and ruthlessly efficient personal infrastructure?

Could one live like that all the time? Out of the equivalent of a couple, say, a couple large suitcases? At what point does owning less make you richer? Can you, in essence, trade things for more friends? I'm not sure, but it's worth trying to figure out. Like I said, a monastic renunciation of worldly goods isn't in my future; but maybe a lighter life would be more worth living.

Cat and oranges

In some countries that would be the beginning of a recipe. I suspect soy sauce and either oregano or catnip would also appear.

Today's Peninsula picture

My daughter on her way to the library this morning.

I'm taking the weekend off and going camping with my son. There's no cell phone reception where we'll be, so I'll be completely unwired. More removed from my digital self than I am when I go to London or Singapore. A weird idea. I've packed clothes, food, sleeping gear, and Fagels' translation of the Iliad for myself and several Bone graphic novels for my son.

Back on Sunday.

Break-in

There's been a small epidemic of break-ins in our usually safe neighborhood-- robberies when people are away at work. Yesterday it was our turn.

I got home with the kids about 5:30, and as I was pulling up to the house, saw the front door open. I left the kids outside, went in, and pretty quickly it was obvious that we'd been hit sometime during the day. Of course, I called the police immediately, they came and did a report, then I spent 45 minutes on hold with Allstate, waiting to file a report.

The thieves were very selective. Lots of little electronics (games, the Wii, a couple iPods and DS Lites), some silver, and a significant portion of my wife's jewelry, most of which (like 99.9% of the jewelry in the world) has a much higher sentimental than financial value. But lots of little things add up to a non-trivial chunk of change.

I lost a couple things-- in particular some nice headphones a Danish think-tank gave me a couple years ago-- but the stuff I cared about was untouched, mainly because the burglars didn't care to take books (which are all inscribed) or DVDs (for whatever reason), and I don't know enough about jewelry to have any. Later I realized that most of the highly portable and valuable things I care about are in my garage office, or in my pockets or about my person. If I were mugged I'd lose my entire personal data infrastructure.

But this was like the twister that leaves one trailer untouched and carries its neighbor to the next county (or nearest pawn shop).

An odd piece of karma. Or like a flu that hits everyone, but leaves one parent well enough to take care of the rest of the family.

The experience makes me want programmable RFID tags, so I could more easily mark small, expensive things that don't necessarily have unique serial numbers. And better locks on the windows. At least the latter I can get at Home Depot.

Grrr.

Cats in the tent

They're outdoor cats now. But not very outdoor...

"We can hike to the curb from here"

?????

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.

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.

Then and now

A friend of mine-- a fellow STS person, now living in China-- and I were talking about losing weight. He dropped about 100 pounds in the last two years, which given my own recent experience, I find extremely impressive.

This exchange, and a friend's recent remark that I've shed a roly-poly, Buddha-like personality for something more Trotskyite, made me go back and look at pictures from a couple years ago. This was in London, June 2005, at about 240:

via flickr

And Denver, December 2008 (and about 10 pounds ago), with my dad:

via flickr

Yeah, that's different. Don't know about Trotskyite, but definitely not the same.

It's really interesting how much losing this weight has made me feel like a different person. Not just healthier, but fundamentally different.

Cat and mouse

For the last couple days the cats have been inside, as it's been raining like crazy and their usual outdoor hangouts have been flooded. This morning I saw this.

One of the cats had a pipe-cleaner mouse on his bed. I think my daughter made it.

And does anyone use pipe cleaners to clean pipes any longer? Or to put it another way, what percentage of pipe cleaner sales are to people who actually have pipes, rather than children?

Dinner

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

Yum.

Generations

The challenge of working with twenty-somethings....

One of these things is not like the other!

On Saturday I took my son to buy a new bike. Across the street from the bike store I saw this apartment building.

via flickr

Earlier this year he and I had been at the original.

via flickr

How, I wonder, did the first come to be named after the second?

Somehow Wonkette tapped into my life

I've been taking a break from reading the hundred or so other sites I normally visit, in favor of a big pile of things on my desk with paper, and covers, and long arguments, and no hyperlinks. Having lost a bunch of weight by cutting out junk food, I'm hoping I can get my brain back into shape by feeding it a more robust diet.

However, I took a moment during lunch to browse Wonkette, and came across this post about Google Latitude:

If this becomes half as popular as the inexplicable “Twitter” fad — and there is certainly somebody “alpha testing” an “app” to combine these dastardly tools right now, in Palo Alto, or Budapest...

Hey!

Comfort, illustrated

If only I could relax like that.

Actually I'd probably go nuts in a few minutes.

Okay, back to writing.

Quote of the day: Timothy Ferris

Not sure I agree with this, but it's still interesting.

What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom...

The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'

Remember - boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.'

I recently realized that for me, the opposite of being depressed isn't being happy, but rather being active. So perhaps happiness and boredom are opposites.

[via Overcoming Bias]

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.

Movie star Christmas tree

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

Palo Alto church, this afternoon

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.

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.

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?

Fox Theatre

Waiting for Act 2 to start.

Intermission

Hanging out on the balcony between acts.

I can't see!

Two heads are harder to see around than one.

But I'll be asleep soon anyway, if previous years are any guide.

Nutcracker Madness

We're at the traditional afternoon performance of The Nutcracker. It's a never-ending sea of red velvet, dresses with big bows in the back, white tights, and French braids. (Daniel and I are on the obligatory blue Oxford shirts.)

This is the fifth year we've gone to the show, but the first time that Elizabeth hasn't been in it. She enjoyed ballet, and loved being in the show, but we all agreed that the level of commitment required at her age was more than we could handle. Fortunately she hasn't expressed reservations about the choice.

Though she's not wearing velvet or a French braid. Maybe she was never THAT into it, really.