I don’t want to give too much away, but from watching the trailer you can tell it’s gonna be good.  The story explores “emoticlips” which are a way to digital encode and transmit emotions, like a podcast.  Drama heats up when a viagra ad shows up, something about blackmail.  And my favorite line asks if you’ve tried Googling “omnipotent self-aware botnets.”

I just saw a fun trailer for the play on YouTube, shared here for your convenience…

You can get your tickets now from Brown Paper.

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.

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.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

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.

Enjoy!

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.

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!

The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational.  A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know existed.  I wrote about the bridge breaking competition.  There will be another Make Magazine competition this time around, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  Brady and Bre have promised us more space since it was so packed last time around.

So if you’re in town and want to hear me blather, come by the CHAC next Tuesday, February 13th at 8:30 pm for talks.  (Or even better, at 6:30 for the Make Contest which should be rad.)  Hope to see y’all there!

I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain.  Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it."  Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain.  It was a full on  storm.  Things broke.

In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph.  Roads were closed everywhere.  Power flickered all night.  Things banged loudly.  My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain!  By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes.  My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!!  It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS.  Oops.

A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out.  We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed.  Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing.  We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief.  Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two.  They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones.  I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a  giant short-circuit.  I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple.  Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds.  For some reason we were cheering.  After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.

It was amazing.

At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing.  When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside.  Show’s over.  Don’t wanna die tonight.

I disagree.  I think now is the time to

Buy More Stuff!

I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word.  Someday soon I hope to have time to join them.

The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue with them.  My friends have gotten into prolonged arguments with shoppers and other passersby who don’t like the message they’re  spreading.  My friends retort with "How could you possibly tell your family and friends that you love them except by buying them more stuff?"  But even this doesn’t persuade those who are persistently disturbed by this message.

Maybe someday they’ll get it.  But I’m not holding out much hope.

Why?  To slow down traffic of course!  How does paint on the ground cause people to drive slower?  I’m not really sure, but it sure does.  I see cars slow down and even try to "go around" whatever this thing is in the middle of the street.  I think the fact that it’s so unusual is enough to make drivers question what’s going on.  It reminds me of the uncomfortable feeling I get when I see a car driving the wrong way down a one-way street: "Something’s wrong here.  I’m not sure what’s happening.  I’d better slow down because who knows what will happen next." 

I understand they’ve done two of these now.  And I understand they have further plans for this intersection.  If these street murals become commonplace they probably won’t be so effective.  But for now it’s a beautifully creative and constructive way to address a local community problem.  And now that I know about the fantastic group in my neighborhood, I’m looking forward to participating in future projects.  Go team!

First off, if you don’t have a fair amount of rock climbing
experience and mountaineering experience, or have a lot of experienced friends who are
willing to babysit you, go with a guide service.  This year I
went without a guide service and I’m really glad I did it.  But 3 of
the 4 of us had been up previously with RMI.  RMI used to be the only officially licensed guide service, but the NPS just opened up to allow two more: Alpine Ascents and International Mountain Guides.  How all this pans out remains to be seen.

Going with RMI had some fantastic benefits:

• Lighter pack
• Don’t need to carry safety gear b/c the guides carry that for you.  (lighter pack)
• Don’t need to carry a tent b/c RMI operates a building at Camp Muir.  (lighter pack)
• Don’t need to carry a stove or a rope or a bunch of other stuff.  (lighter pack)
• More likely to summit b/c you’re carrying a lighter pack
• Don’t need to learn crevasse rescue skills
• Really just need to haul your body up the hill without much thinking

As for training and preparation, I have some specific advice as well.  Get in shape.  It’s really physically draining.  Get in really good shape.  Stairmaster, bike, run, whatever.  The best thing you can do is to hike to Camp Muir a lot.  Camp Muir is the 10,000′ base camp for most people trying to summit Mt Rainier.  It’s a 5,000′ vertical ascent from Paradise, which makes it a really solid workout.  IMHO it’s also a fantastic way to spend a sunny Summer day.  Plus you get experience at moderate altitude.  If you do that a half dozen times in a summer with increasing weight each time, you’ll be in pretty good shape.  And you’ll get to know your gear pretty well, which is also super important.  I like to load my frame pack up with several gallons of water as ballast.  Get to the top, and make some friends by giving it away to the thirsty climbers, and save your knees the effort of hauling it down the hill.

Wear lots of sunscreen, especially on the bottom of your nose.  I recommend Aloe Gator 45 Gel, which has the physical consistency of crisco.  You might need steel wool to get it off, but it’s one of the only things that can really protect you from the super-bright glacier-reflected rays. 

Also, talk to your doctor about getting some diamox (acetazolamide).  It’s an altitude sickness drug which can both cure a case of AMS ("acute mountain sickness" — no, really, it’s a technical term) and will also help you acclimatize to the altitude faster so you’re less likely to have a problem in the first place.  It’s generally quite safe unless you have sulfa allergies.  The first time I went up, the stupid RMI guides advised one of my climbing partners not to take it (because drugs are bad and they’ve never needed it), and he didn’t summit because of AMS.  The worst thing about it is that it makes you pee more, and the benefits are marked.  Be sure to try drinking some coke when you’re on it.  It’s truly bizarre — no matter how fresh the bottle, it tastes flat and you can’t feel any bubbles on your tongue.  Diamox’s mechanism is to crank the CO₂ thermostat in your blood-stream to keep your blood’s pH neutral as you ascend, and a side effect is that carbonated beverages taste flat.  Go figure.

You’re gonna need a lot of gear.  Much of it can be rented.  I don’t really feel like going into it all here — maybe I’ll write more later if y’all want.

Be prepared for a really long hike.  We took 34 hours from car to car and of that 21 hours were spent hiking with a heavy pack on.  Our packs were about 55 pounds each getting up to base camp and probably 20 pounds up to the summit.  It took about 4 days before I didn’t feel constantly hungry and thirsty.  It’s intense.

And of course, like the lawyers say, use your head.  If you have to read this, go with a guide.  I’m really no expert, and people die up there.  But when you’re standing on top of the world at 14,411′ it all feels worth while.

"Where is the Paramount Theater?"

"Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work.  It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off.  It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!" 

"Oh, I’m sorry.  It’s actually on Pine."

Personally, I’ve given up trying to keep them straight.  I just call them both Pinke.  (Pronounced with a long I sound.)  It’s much easier this way.  I don’t need to think about it.  When I get there I can generally figure it out.  Many people I talk to don’t even catch that I wasn’t specific and understand the general idea which is perfect.  Some people hear it and understand my intent instantly.  Some ask.

I think this generalization stresses out the people I’m talking with less.  I think that if I were to specify one of the two streets specifically, people would sit there and rack their brains trying to remember which one I had named.  Since they’d have probably a 30% chance of misidentifying the street in their heads, and I’d have about a 40% chance of having said the wrong one in the first place, the odds of successful communication would be just 54%.  That sounds no better than a coin-flip to me, especially considering that 12% of the time communication would have worked because we both got it wrong!  I think information is actually being conveyed more effectively by not specifying Pike or Pine, but instead just saying Pinke.

In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.”  For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in the Winter, it’s never quite dry here.  And it rarely actually rains either — real rain with lots of big heavy drops.  We tend to have this persistent heavy fog that moves downward and gets things wet.  Sometimes it’s lighter and sometimes it’s heavier — it’s pretty arbitrary when you’d call it rain and when you wouldn’t.  Thus the consensus model.

Right now I’d actually say we’ve got about a 60% chance of rain.  80% is pretty darned heavy IMHO.  I don’t think it’s possible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some transplanted diehards from monsoon territory will always hold out and say “this ain’t real rain” as their goretex hats turn into buckets.  Likewise, in Winter I suspect the minimum chance of rain is about 5%, owing to the bitter so-cal transplants who whine that it’s always raining here, regardless of what’s happening in the sky.

So grab a double-tall skinny hazelnut latte and hunker down by the fireplace for a few months.  Here’s looking forward to snowboarding!