Embracing Chaos

Last week I went to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Fremont and got a couple new CF bulbs for the house.  I love their selection — they have everything from tiny 7W candelabra bulbs to these massive 150W bulbs that look like death-rays.  A giant 105W bulb (pictured) is now trying to make my monstera deliciosa's home in the living room a little more like tropical mexico and less like winter-in-seattle.

Seattle Times just ran a story about a local non-profit that I’m quite fond of.  Blue Nile Children’s Organization has been supporting orphans in Ethiopia for years.  For $30/month donors, mostly local to Seattle, provide Ethiopian children with basic necessities and access to education.  Now they’re expanding the scope of their support by building a medical clinic in Addis Adaba.  From the ground up.  It’s quite impressive.  It will be run by Ethiopian doctors, with regular visits from US and Candian physicians who will help both provide care and train the local staff in specialty procedures.

If you’d like to hear more about BNCO, consider coming to their annual fund-raising Gala on February 21st.  Guaranteed good food and entertainment on top of all the worthwhile stuff.  Or read the Times story.  It mentions my wonderful fiance (did I mention that I’m engaged?) and her ongoing efforts to support the clinic.  I’m really looking forward to seeing it in person when it’s built and operating!

Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop.  It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. 

Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects.  So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that struck objects as they went around.  We then built frames to hold up things like pot lids or copper pipes to be struck, and attached everything from small chains to bundles of spaghetti to the rotating frame to strike them.  The real enabling insight came from the women on the team who realized that by spacing the arms un-evenly we could create an interesting rhythm.  The one-two-and-three rhythm across a variety of instruments ended up sounding much like a drum circle that actually got people dancing.

Thanks to Espressobuzz for capturing our creation on video.  Thanks to Josh Kopel for bringing the event to Seattle, and Shelly Farnham for organizing.  And to my wonderful teammates whose energy and creativity made the Spinning Spaghetti Monster possible.

The UW Business School recently got a name: Foster.  Michael G. Foster to be exact.  Although just "Foster" is perhaps more fitting since 3 generations of the Foster family have contributed to making this possible.  Just how much does it cost to get a prominent business school named after you?  About $50 million.  Here’s how it went down.

It all started way back in 1928 when Albert Foster graduated from UW Business School.   Not too long later, he founded the brokerage firm A.O. Foster & Co. which was successful enough to enable his family to get into the philanthropy business.  Albert’s son Michael G also attended UW Business school.  Michael G died a few years back and his relatives wanted to honor his memory some how.

Balmer Hall, the building which currently houses the UW Business School is mercifully scheduled for demolition almost as soon as I graduate next year.  The plan is to build three new buildings.  The Foster family intended to name one of them after Michael G, but after seeing the architectural plans thought that maybe one building wasn’t enough to honor his memory so the discussion expanded to multiple buildings and next thing you know they were asking the same question you did.  We can pretend the conversation went something like this.

"How much for 2 buildings?"

"That’ll be another $10 mil."

"How much to throw in the whole school?"

"$50 million is what we’ve been saying all along."

"But we already gave you $3 mil to name the Albert Foster Business Library.  How about we give you $46.5 and we call it a deal?"

And so it was.  It’s good to know that Foster Business School is built on rock-solid negotiating skills.  :)

In all seriousness, it’s nice to see philanthropy with few strings attached.  I hear "generous donors" are often really demanding in how their money is spent.  But not here.  They even released the naming rights for the individual buildings back to the school to help offset more of the construction costs.

Overall I must express heartfelt thanks to the Fosters.  I’ll be proud to earn my MBA from Foster.  I already like it better than UWBS.

Want to read more?  Visit the Foster Business School on the web, or read what a professional information-disperser wrote about the transaction.

I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future.  Here’s the site’s self-description:

Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self.

Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: "tagmindr" and "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS.

(SMS, Email and IM coming later.)

The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking you’ll get back to it, but of course you never will.  With Tagmindr you can set a specific date when it will pop up in your feed reader so you will remember to check it out again.

Brian Dorsey came up with the idea and gathered a bunch of us together at his house with the goal of building a web 2.0 app in 6 hours.  We spent an hour or two setting up our dev environments and talking over the goals of what we were going to do.  Then we did a skills inventory, and divided up into teams to start doing the work.  I worked on the back-end team which was a ton of fun.  The project is written using Django, an MVC-based web application framework for Python, which is conceptually quite similar to Rails.  It’s got a few things that are way cooler than rails and a few things that are definitely lacking.  From noon to 6pm we coded, while others did graphic design, HTML layout, and wrote copy.  I had to leave fairly promptly but at the time it seemed we had slipped just a bit — there were still a few issues rendering the design on the production server, and the back-end code still had a couple of bugs.  It seemed like another hour or two’s work total.

Thanks and props to all the wonderful people I met and got to work with.  Special thanks to Anders for holding my hand through basic Python and Django to a level of minor productivity.  I gotta say that Python is really clean.  Makes me realize how much Ruby can look like incomprehensible Perl.

My talk about Venture Capital Term Sheets that I mentioned earlier has been accepted for the next Ignite Seattle which is tomorrow night at the CHAC.  If just you want to come hear me talk, I’ll be speaking sometime after 9:45 PM.  But the rest of the night (schedule here) looks fabulous so I plan to show up at the beginning at 6:30 PM.  I’m doing my best to make this talk slower and more sane than my last talk.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

"The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!"
    -Steve Martin in The Jerk

Steve Martin was very excited to get the new phone book because his name in it meant he was somebody.  But in 2007 when 10 pounds of dead tree show up on my front porch, I’m just annoyed.  The phone company wants to deliver this to me because their advertising rates are based on the number of phone books they deliver.  It doesn’t matter that there is zero chance I will even open the thing.  I take it straight from my porch to the recycling bin.  Like many things, the internet has made these objects obsolete for many of us.  But the old business model tries to hang on anyway.

So I decided to do the planet a favor and help support the robolucion and try to get them to stop sending me these things.  I called…

…which was printed on the front of the bag, and after navigating their phone tree managed to speak to somebody who was happy to take my name off their distribution list.  I encourage you all to do the same. It was painless.

The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world.  Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember.  The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent.  Anyway, here’s the video:

Enjoy!

[Here is the full text of what I practiced for my talk at Ignite Seattle last night.  I didn't manage to cram it all into the 5 minute presentation, largely because the audience was reacting a bit too loudly in places.  IMHO that's a good thing.  You can download my slides (slightly updated from the presentation).  Video coming soon -- check back.]

I’m here to talk about a system of morality that’s based on the upcoming end of society as we know it.  I’ll explain why only geeks and hippies can save the world.  I’m serious — I’m talking about the possible destruction of everything we know and care about.

Let’s look forward to the next 1,000 years.  What’s life going to be like?  Are we going to be flying around in spaceships visiting other planets like in Star Trek?  I don’t think so.  Or will we be killing each other over the last few gallons of gasoline like in Mad Max?  Maybe, and this is what I’m really scared of.  Or will the machines have risen up to try to destroy us like in Terminator?  Again maybe, but I’m not really worried about this, and I’ll explain why.

Now look back a billion years ago.  That’s when life first showed up.  And then a million years ago humans showed up.  Just a thousand years ago they had printing presses, and a hundred years ago we had cars and ten years ago we had google.  Progress is speeding up faster and faster exponentially and it’s not going to stop.

What’s happening is that people are getting smarter and more capable of solving complex problems both by themselves and by collaborating with others using tools like e-mail and text messaging.  Our brains are slowly starting to merge with computers.  Look at cell phones: who here actually remembers any phone numbers any more?  And who cares?  We don’t need to.

We’re heading towards what’s known as The Information Singularity.  This is where human brains and computers actually merge into the same thing.  When this happens technology will progress so fast that un-aided humans will be completely unable to keep up.  This is where all of our technology is heading.  But you know, we might never get there.

What if there was a nuclear war?  How far back would that set us?  100 years?  100,000 years?  Would we ever be able to get back to where we are?  Maybe not.  That could be the complete end to evolution as we know it.  Nuclear war’s not the only way this could happen either. 

Imagine that somebody got so pissed off that they bio-engineered a super-virus to kill all white people.  And it accidentally killed all people.  Or what if global warming got to the point where the weather is so bad that advanced society just can’t exist?  The ecosystem could collapse.  We could run out of energy resources.  Gray goo.

I believe that in the next thousand years something is going to render our planet uninhabitable to life as we know it.  And the question is, when that day comes, will we be ready for it?  Will technology have advanced to the point where we don’t need life as we know it in order to preserve what we really care about? 

Well what is it that we really care about?  This is the critical question facing our society right now.  We can’t close our eyes and hope it just goes away — it won’t.  Now some will say "EARTH FIRST!  People made this problem and we need to back off and let nature fix itself."  But I don’t buy that.  I say we embrace the chaos and push forwards.  Here’s why.

I believe that the most valuable thing in the world is complex thought, information, ideas, memes, logic, reason, discussion, art, emotion.  All of these things are way more important to me than things like birds.  Or plants.  Or even humans.  Because we don’t need bodies to listen to music.  Or to tell stories. Or to fall in love.

We can achieve salvation through technology.  When the upcoming robot revolution arrives, I say we let the robots win.  Don’t fight them — join them!  Let’s cast off these weak unreliable human bodies and transcend to a society of pure thoughts and ideas.

We can do it!  We can build a network of computers powerful enough to hold all of us at once.  We can upload our consciousnesses into these computers by simulating the human brain in software.  It’s an incredibly hard problem — way harder than say simulating the weather.  But we can do it.  Computers are getting faster and faster all the time and likewise our understanding of the brain is getting better and better.  Someday soon we will be able to simulate an entire brain in software down to the very last neuron and when that happens, that computer will actually have the personality of a real human being.  It’ll work because there is no quantum soul.  We are nothing but our neuronal structure.

Some people will miss having bodies.  They’ll miss things like kayaking and eating food.  But they won’t miss dying.  Just like nobody misses having a warm fire to come home to in their cave.

You know, our lives are pretty darned good here and now.  So I gotta ask: What are you going to do with this?  Are you just going to play?  Be a hedonist?  Or do you want to do something that matters with your life?  Do you want to work to preserve complex thought and information into the next millennium?  It’s up to you.

But if you do want to help, listen to Avi.  Install compact fluorescent bulbs.  Shop at Madison Market and support sustainable agriculture.  Get political and try to calm down the crazies who want to blow everything up.  In other words, be a hippie.  We might not be able to stop the fall,  but we can definitely postpone it.  Hopefully for long enough.

Or work from the other side to speed up technology.  Talk to Bre about building robots.  Write educational software to make people smarter.  Work on communication tools.  Research how the brain works and how to connect it directly to computers.  In other words, be a geek.

Because it’s the geeks and the hippies who are going to preserve what’s really important into the next millennium.  If you ask me, to not do so is to act immorally.  This system of morality is based on two axiomatic assumptions:

    1) We cannot keep going like this forever.

    2) Complex thought and information are more valuable than nature and life.

If you’d like to read more about this, Kurzweil has written lots of good books on the singularity.  My good buddy Mez has written a fabulous book on relevant technology trends.  Or you can read my blog at embracingchaos.com.  Thanks.

So I’m preparing my slides for my Ignite Seattle talk tomorrow night (tonight? Tuesday night) and I go over to my friends’ place to practice with them and I am reminded that the format is not 15 slides for 20 seconds each but rather 20 slides for 15 seconds each!  So now I’m trying to split each of my slides into four thirds and rejigger all the timings.  Fun!

I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me.  I decided to take an extra class at school this quarter, and midterms are on us in a big way.  That combined with a great wilderness first aid class that took up my entire weekend, I’ve been averaging less than 5 hours of sleep each night for the last week, and it’s starting to limit my critical thinking abilities.

This format is also completely absurd.  But I think that’s part of the idea.  My friend Barry is taking a rather sensible approach of repeating a few slides with minor variations — a sensible cop out if you ask me!

Still, I encourage everybody to come.  It’s starts at 6:30 PM at CHAC which is at 12th and Pinke.  It’s going to be a fun information-rich geeky thought-provoking chaotic time.  For my loopy part, I’m embracing the chaos.  Go team!