Relevant History

On NPR

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier."

In my sound bite, I reveal that I like paper because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

I played the piece for my kids this morning before I took them to school. At the end of it, my son came up to me and said, "You know, Dad, you really do drop your stuff a lot." Gee, thanks kid.

[To the tune of Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Projects (PJays)," from the album "So...How's Your Girl?".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, media

It's 6 a.m here--

--and I've been up for a couple hours working. I tend to run on nerves on business trips, and this one is no different; combine that with the time difference, and it means I'm falling asleep at what for me are radically early times, and getting up before the crack of dawn.

Time for a shower.

[To the tune of Alanis Morissette, "Uninvited," from the album "City of Angels".]

Technorati Tags: Malaysia, Shah Alam

On my way to Irvine

I'm on my way to southern California tonight. I'll be there for a couple meetings at the National Academies.

I'm in San Jose airport, which I think is the most business-oriented airport I travel through. San Francisco has lots of tourists, as well as business people; Oakland I only see late at night when I'm doing the redeye to DC, and everyone looks the same at 11 PM. San Jose, in contrast, seems like it's 90% lawyers, Intel and Cisco people, and other high-tech types. Of course there are some tourists or families, but the proportion of people checking their Blackberries and talking on their Bluetooth headsets is much higher than SFO or OAK.

My flight is seriously delayed, but that just means I'm working on my talk in the airport rather my hotel room. Business travel is an odd combination of going somewhere, and ignoring your surroundings.

I don't think I'll be able to get to Disneyland, except possibly on evening between the first and second meetings. This is a shame, as I'm very fond of Tomorrowland, and consider it an essential destination for any futurist. There's nowhere else quite like it-- and certainly the future shows no sign of being like it.

[To the tune of Bruce Hornsby, "Every Little Kiss," from the album "The Way It Is".]

Technorati Tags: IFTF, Irvine, National Academy, work

Saturday afternoon

My son and a friend of his are having a playdate at my house this afternoon.

I'm taking this as an occasion to try out the new USB headset that just arrived, and to do some work on my article on paper spaces. I'm not quite as negligent as, say, Homer Simpson in "Treehouse of Horror," and I figure that so long as no one is crying and nothing is breaking, I probably don't need to involve or concern myself with what's going on.

[Blogged with Flock]

Technorati Tags: work, parenting

It looks I'm doing a lot of this in 2008

Looks like I have several big trips this coming year.

Flying from San Francisco to Frankfurt, September 2007, via flickr

One or two to Asia, and at least one that'll take me back to Europe. I'm also applying for a very cool-sounding conference in Oxford in late June. Plus whatever we can afford to do as tourists.

Train from Oxford to Shrivenham, November 2006, via flickr

I'd better buy some more Post-Its.

Flying from San Francisco to Sydney, via flickr

Technorati Tags: mobility, travel, work

I've gotta come here more often

Spent most of the morning in the unrenovated (but earthquake reinforced) Stanford library stacks.

via flickr

There's something about the exposed pipe, asbestos, and proximity to vast numbers of books that makes me work better. There are much nicer areas in the library, but I'm kind of old school. Or maybe this wing reminds me of Penn's Van Pelt Library, which was also kind of industrial and extremely functional, though in more of a New Brutalist way.

[To the tune of Mono, "Sabbath," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: library, mobility, Stanford University, work

Quote of the day

Computers are a mercy for writers, but they do encourage books that are too long. I write by hand first and then type it up. Writing with a fountain pen is a real pleasure and many writers are pen queens - you'd be surprised at how some of the toughest guys can't wait to tell you about their new Mont Blanc. (Hanif Kureishi, quoted in the Guardian's special report on writers' rooms)

Since my son and I were trying out fountain pens tonight (he was trying out mine, having become curious about them after leafing through a pen catalog) this jumped out at me.

Trying out a Rotring Skynn I bought in Oxford a couple years ago

And yes, I'd be happy to tell you about my Mont Blanc!

[To the tune of Joe Jackson, "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)," from the album "Body and Soul".]

Technorati Tags: computer, office, space, writing

Renyi Institute this morning

I'm going to go to the Renyi Institute, one of Budapest's most important centers for pure mathematics, this morning. (I know how to have a good time.) We're starting-- have started, really-- a new project on the future of science and technology, a kind of turbocharged, Web 2.0-ified version of the Delta Scan, and so I'm going to log a little time on the project by going over and talking to people there.

One of the things I'm really interested in is the big trend from Cold War brain drain-- where world-class minds tended to gravitate from the Third World (or global periphery, or global South, or whatever you like to call it), to Europe and the U.S.-- to brain circulation, where people tend to move back and forth between various countries.

Hungary has a pretty incredible tradition in pure mathematics, and the Renyi Institute is interesting to me for a couple reasons. First, I don't know that much about Hungarian science, and I figure mathematics is as good a place as any to start learning.

Second, Renyi runs a school for foreign students in mathematics, and I'm curious to understand why undergraduates come to it. I think I know the answer, but you'd think that mathematics, of all fields of inquiry, would be place-independent. After all, math is the same everywhere. It's all people standing in front of blackboards, or writing equations on pieces of paper. So why travel anywhere to do it? What's that about? Essentially, the school is a case study in brain circulation-- and conveniently for me, it's one in which Americans go abroad, rather than the other way around.

So this morning I checked the directions on the Web site, got out my map of Budapest (99% of the time the free maps you can pick up at tourist information desks or in hotel lobbies are good enough for my purposes), and spent a sleepy minute looking around for it. Turns out it's about 3 minutes' walk from here.

So I've got a little more time to shower and get some breakfast than I expected, which is cool. I'm pretty smoky, and didn't shower last night, as I got back from Tandem around midnight and was working on my end of cyberspace talk.

I'm now really excited about the talk, by the way. It's not all the time you get to come up with a new way of explaining a subject you've been working on for a couple years, but I think I've done it, and that's very satisfying. I'm going to get at least a chapter section out of it, plus an article in the conference proceedings. Mmmmm, c.v. lines...

[To the tune of Sarah Shannon, "I'll Run Away," from the album "Sarah Shannon".]

Technorati Tags: brain circulation, Budapest, end of cyberspace, future, mathematics, Renyi Institute, science, travel

What is it about working on planes?

I spent several hours on the plane working on the talk I'm giving at the philosophy of telecommunications convergence (I'm giving several others, but they're either completely informal or already scripted to within an inch of their lives). I worked through a new angle that brings together some stuff I've been reading on cognitive psychology with the work I've been doing on the shape of the post-cyberspace world, and while I've got some more to do to it, I'm pretty pleased with the basic framework.

I now do some of my best thinking on planes, and I'm trying to figure out why-- and how I can replicate it on the ground.

Part of it is that the flight is often the last serious block of uninterrupted, reasonably conscious time I have to work on a talk. The pressure is on, and either I deliver now or I face screwing up. But I think a big part of it is the utter neutrality of the space: the cabin is a blank space, free of distractions but generally plentiful in caffeine. It's physically blank-- other than the other passengers, there's very little to look at or be distracted by, except for the movie-- and therefore psychologically blank.

I wonder how to recreate this at home. I've been playing with ideas for a home office that involve lots of hulking Ikea bookcases, which would let me bring books home from the office and out of storage; and while I still need that, I wonder if perhaps the actual space where I sit and write should be a lot plainer-- just white or wood, without so much as a pencil cup, just a chair and whatever I carry into it.

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "Nuages," from the album "The Best of DJango Reinhardt".]

Technorati Tags: work, writing

Working Sunday

The kids are asleep (or at least in their rooms and not making noise), the kitchen is cleaned, and tomorrow's lunches are made. The perfect time to do some work.

And I'm entering one of those intense phases where I've got to finish off a couple big projects in the next week, because I'm going to a family reunion next weekend, then am off to Budapest for a week. I'm speaking at a conference on the philosophy of telecommunications convergence (approximately the coolest conference subject ever), then the following week am doing some more Institute-related talks and meetings. The conference is being hosted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which has a pretty amazing building. I suspect no matter what I pack, I'm going to spend the whole time feeling underdressed.

I've never been to Budapest, and know shockingly little about Hungary. In college I dated a woman whose mother was Hungarian, and she (the daughter-- I never met the mother) was brilliant and just a tiny bit volcanic, so I look forward to the trip with just a little apprehension.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Black Tie White Noise," from the album "Black Tie White Noise".]