Something I saw tonight at Stanford:
via flickr
Juggler practicing on the Quad.
via flickr
Since I'm attending a conference on collaborative visualization and distributed intelligence, I expected to see a lot of really cool things today. I just didn't expect the best one to come after the day was over.
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.
Continue reading "Xtreme Skyflyer, and learning new and unusual sports" »
Next stop for the Tour de California!
They were done drawing with the yellow Lance Armstrong chalk.
This year my son started taking fencing lessons. So far he really enjoys it. After a few weeks working on footwork, parries, and attacks, they're now finally fencing each other.
He's the one in the blue shorts. Anyone who knows how I dress will not be in the least surprised
I realized this morning that fencing is pretty much the perfect sport for a 7 year-old boy. It teaches grace and quick thinking, which are good. But it also has lots of equipment, which makes it even more interesting. Finally, of course, there's the whole point (as it were) of fencing, which is to hit other people. The first day, the instructor asked if anyone knew what you did in fencing. My son raised his hand and said, "It's poking people with swords!"
En garde!
I think I'm going to insist he learn archery, riding, and flower arranging. Then he'll be a samurai.
Attack! Or possibly parry!
I'm an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, where I work with students on projects related to the future technology and strategy, and a visiting scholar in Stanford's HPST program. Previously I was a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley; managing editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica; and an academic. More professional details are available in my c.v.
I have a new venture in stealth mode; I'll be writing a lot about it late this fall. I'm also finishing on a book on the end of cyberspace, tentatively titled The End of Cyberspace. (My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.)
The banner is from a picture taken at Hidden Villa, a farm and conference center in the hills above Silicon Valley, March 2009.
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