A preview of Michael Lawrence’s Bach Project was screened at EG2007 to much regard.
In another EG2007 story of kismet, John Abele, who spoke about his family’s submarine search, has decided to provide substantial funding to the film so it can finish production.
Read all about it in the Baltimore Sun.
I wonder what connections will be made next year?
Last week Kara Swisher had a short conversation with Michael Hawley about what the plans were for EG2007.
Now she’s compiled a 5 minute video showing “the brass band that opened the conference; shell art; a speech by Wurman; some piano playing by Hawley; former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold making VP Dick Cheney “cute” (no easy task!); Royal Calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth II Donald Jackson teaching the audience some moves; some amazing pictures of real snowflakes; “Heroes” creator Tim Kring talking about the intersection of television and the Internet; and a bracing violin piece.”
Politico has picked up on Rob Glaser’s presentation in this story, ‘Liberal’ lingo’s Tinseltown translation.
Adam was gracious enough to answer a second set of questions I had, sent in by a good friend’s three children, who are huge fans of his show.
For the record, here’s their favorite episodes:
Sophie (11): the one where they try to quietly break into a building
Ben (9): the one where they shoot a hole in the ground with a machine gun
Owen (6): the one with the yodeling avalanche
Thanks again Adam, you’re a true gentleman.
Chatting with Nathan about the Dvorak keyboard layout.
(These are loose, John went fairly deep into the three stories.)
Want to tell three stories that were under appreciated by my editors. I think I’m the longest surviving technology reporter in Silicon Valley. Peter Kerry is at the Merc and one of my heroes, but he’s mostly an investigative reporter. Went to school with William Hewlett Jr., grew up in Palo Alto. Was the paper boy at the house where Steve Jobs lives now. A few years ago Larry Page moved in the hacienda behind my mother’s house. One coda to the pretexting HP scandal, which is using social engineering techniques to find out what numbers you’ve called, I’ve never been a privacy stickler, but what really pissed me off was that Jay Keyworth (is that right?) was talking to 8 other reporters and not just to me.
About 5 months ago my wife tried to pay her phone bill via phone, it had a password, it turns out that HP had gotten his wife’s phone records!
What newspapers might have given us that the web hasn’t yet. All of my computer friends promise me agents that will do the kind of meta-information like things that will recreate the newspaper-like experience, we have torrents of information that’s not the same, like the front page of the New York Times. It’s very carefully crafted.
Why is the New York Times like the Metropolitan Opera? Average age is 60 and increasing by one a year.
Why are these stories not on the front page of the NYT? Sometimes acts of God. Too early. He wrote a story on the world wide web in 1993, he said think of it as a map to the buried treasure of information. When there was an explosion of economic activity I sulked for 5 years. Sometimes it’s Politics inside the NYT. He broke the Poindexter story twice, he was going to do Total Information Awareness. It got stuck on A-11, Washington Post did the story the next day but didn’t front it because the Times didn’t front it.
Adam Savage talks about what he wants to do after Mythbusters:
The web thing that we’re all talking about, is less than 5,000 days old. If 10 years ago I told you everything was coming, and that it all was coming for free, you wouldn’t have believed. We thought the internet was going to be TV but better. Wikipedia is impossible in theory, but possible in practice. We have to get better in believing the impossible.
What about the next 5,000 days? What we’re getting out of all these connections — laptops, cell phones, etc — is we’re getting one machin. It’s the most reliable michine ever made: zero downtime. The internet is longer than 5,000 days, I’m just talking about the web. 100 billion clicks per day on all the computers around the globe. 55 trillion links. 1 billion PC chips on teh internet, 2 million emails per second, 8 terabytes per second of traffic, 65 bilion phone calls per year. It uses 5% of global electricit on the planet. The number of of links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain, to a first approximation, the size of this machine is close to your brain.
But your brain isn’t doubling in power every 2 years.
If the size today is 1 HB, 1 human brain, in 30 years it will be 6 billion HBs, and in 2040 the processing power will surpass the processing power of humanity. In the next 5,000 days we’re going to embody it, give it structure, and become co-dependent. Every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. The web will own every bit.
Everything will be connected, there’ll be an internet of things. The cost of manufacturing will be its embedded electronics, not its materials. TV, film, video, phone, podcasts, newspapers, etc become one media platform, and follow the same laws of media. Copies have no value. Value is in the uncopyable. Media wants to be liquid. Network effects rule.
First stage was exchanging packets. Second step is linking pages, the unit has been reduced to pages. You can’t stop someone from linking to you. The third stage is linking the data. We’re going from machine-to-machine, page-to-page, now data-to-data. All the data about you should be carried around, all your relationships. Semantic web, web 3.0, global graph. You have to be open to having your data shared.
After that is the internet of things, the physical thing become part of the web.
Co-dependency, always on. Total personalization requires total transparency. We are the web. We’re going to be the machine. Next 5,000 days isn’t going to be the web, only better. It’s going to be something different, it’ll be smarter, more personalized, more ubiquitous. We have to begin to htink about this as the web only better but a new stage, that’s more global, it’s a big machine, more reliable than its parts.
There is only one machine. The web is its OS. All screens look into the one. No bits will live outside the web. To share is to gain. Let the one read it. The one is us.
The message that I have is simple: We’re not in charge anymore. It’s over. I’m a geek, I’m a technologist, just didn’t qualify for the geek session so I got thrown into this session. We invent, control, debug, our hope is we’re having some effect, and we’re not! Society has taken over, it’s not about what we invent anymore, doesn’t matter if it’s media or technology, it’s the same thing, it’s over.
There are a few reasons: “Technology was anything that was invented after you were born.” — Alan Kaye. That quote has become debased because it was used in Newsweek. The rate of change in society is relative to the age you were when you introduced to the dominate technology of the time. If you’re 16 when the car comes, there are 16 year changes. That’s the fundamental rate where it moves. You get introduced to the computer when you’re 4, so the rate of change is 4 years.
I have kids that graduated high school when the other one was going in, they can’t relate to each other, they’re a generation apart.
I go visit companies, I listen to how they design “products” but there are no more products, there are architectures. We don’t make things, we make the tools that allow everyone else to be creative. The typical design session I call RFD, reasoning from daughter, “did you see what my kids did?” There’s two kinds of parents in the world: the kind that wants their kids to be better than them, and there’s the kind that’s threatened by that.
It’s easy to have an idea, but scaling is the fundamental problem. Two varieties: the raw technical challenge. A friend said it was easy to make a great high school in a city, but no one has made 99 great high schools and created a great school system. Viral systems are scalable, incremental, and value-adding. Intelligence is at the edges, costs are low, they are agile. The internet’s ability to scale has exceeded our ability to use up that scale.
A green network, everyone brings to the network what they take from it. When you get to radio or wireless it’s not so easy, it’s not like fiber where you can always lay more, or storage where you can just buy more. Radio is finite. Is the limitation on communication that we can do wireless rooted in physics or is it rooted in the technology of the times? Take two flashlights, cross the beams, do the photons fall on the floor when they run into each other? The way you scale these broadcast systems is to move the intelligence to the edge.
They’re going to try that at MIT, called Living the Future. Give every student their own programmable wireless device. Replace the MIT ID, the RFID is a technology whose time has passed. I walk up to a door and it says who are you and my badge tells it everything it knows. I want a badge that asks the door who it is before giving them all my info.
There is no way to nail down what imagination is, but for me it’s metaphor. Those with imagination seem to see associates here and there, more free with some than others. When creative people take tests sometimes they test closely to psychosis. A traumatic childhood, her father and brother died within one year of brain tumors.
String theory of imagination, suddenly you wake up, repression and flashback, reincarnation and past life regression. Sometimes I’m given to thoughts of the supernatural. At least 7 levels of anxiety, a preoccupation with death. We’re trying to create a symbolic form of immortality, what it is that might or might not continue to exist. People are going to watch what you’re doing and criticize you. Obsessiveness. Stories can try to capture an ephemeral moment. Accidents, coincidences, and luck. I visited a remote province in China, they have no written form of their language, was part of work for the opera I’m working on.
She went back as part of a story for National Geographic, but between the first visit and the second, there was a fire and a fifth of the homes were destroyed. The average per capita is less than $100. The fire was caused by a man whose quilt had fallen into the warming fire, and the son of the man was banished to several kilometers from the village. They felt it was because of bad Feng Shui that the city was still cursed to an extent. The story ended with a flood, and she asked the Feng Shui master if he thought the luck was still bad, but he said it had hit the entire province and it was just bad weather. They simply needed to rebuild and get on.
For six decades he and his brother have been looking for a submarine lost in WWII, wose skipper was their father. They found it off the cost of Alaska, after a Japenese historian found some more information about its last battle. The U.S.S. Grunion was surfacing, trying to finish a cargo ship it had tordpedod, but the ship fired back 84 times.
There are some fascinating coincidences — three submarines from WWII were found the same year. In 2000 someone went to a antique store and mought a diagram for $1 of the wiring of the Kano Maru. A man in Japan was a WWII hobbiest and had translated an article on an event that occurred in the summer of 1942. In a obscure Japanese Maritime Journal. The Grunion attacked the ship, shot a torpedo that struck the stern, detroyed the stern gun and radio. It was an armed freighter and had another gun. He and a friend went to a Japanese defense archives, and dug up the logbook of the captain and two eyewitness accounts. Usually after a war the two countries get together and figure out what happened, but the Grunion was lot. The Japanese occupied two US islands, one of which was Kiska. In 2005 they started talking about the possibility to go down and find it.
They have a crab boat, the Aquila, and used it as a research vehicle. Got two scan sonar Scanfish and scoured almost 250 square miles looking for potential targets. On the fifth day, they discovered a shadow that looked a little like a surface ship. They anchored in the Kiska island, the wind would blow 85 miles per hour. They launched the ROV with the camera on it. They have a WordPress blog. When they dropped the ROV in the water, they found the submare in 20 minutes, which never happens. The Kiska volcano had erupted 3 times since 1942, and there had been a 9.0 earthquake, so they weren’t expecting to find anything, but he submarine was nearly intact.
Today I’d like to talk to about the number thirty-two. It’s two raised to the fifth power. To an economist it’s interest because it measures the difference in consumption rates between first and third world, we use about 32x oil and power. Today the world has about 6.5 billion people, will rise to about 9 billion in the coming decades. Several decades ago people considered population the most important issue.
The product that matters to us is total world consumption. Local population times local per capita consumption rate. Population only matters only as much as they consume or produce. Most of the impact occurs in the first world. The US consumers 322x more resources than Kenya. This difference in consumption rates motivates countries to support their “crazy people.”
To improve your conditions in a third world country, you can either try to do it at home, or immigrate to someplace that has higher consumption rates. It’s proven impossible, even for Japan, to keep out the immigrants. Each immigrant raises the world consumption rates, even if most immigrants take time to ramp up.
Americans are obsessed with China, good reasons. It has the most rapidly growing economy, and consumption rates, and there are 1.2 billion Chinese, 4x the US. We reason that the world is going to run out of resources much quicker if China reaches its goals of reaching first-world consumption rates. The rates have risen from 32x below first world, to 11x first world rates. Let’s assume nothing in the world changes except China reaches first-world consumption, assume all populations stay the same, everyone else consumes the same amount, and that there is no immigration. You’ll see that China catching up will double the world’s consumption rates, including oil and metal consumption. If India catches up too, world consumption rates triple.
If the entire world was at first world consumption rates, it would be the equivalent of 72 billion people at current consumption distributions. We promise and hope that we hold out to third world countries is that if they embrace free economies and honest governments they can have similar rates as us. But it’s a cruel lie, and we’re having maintaining our consumption rates in the first world. The only sustainable outcome, that China, India, etc will accept, would be an outcome where consumption rates were equal around the world, but there’s not enough resources.
The only thing that would work is if we met in the middle, at levels significantly below current first world consumption rates. The world doesn’t have enough resources. Consumption and living standards are related, but not tightly coupled. Consumption in the US much wasteful. Places in Europe use half as much oil as we do, but their quality of life are higher. Look at the cars in the garage of the Getty, think of their gas consumption, and ask if that consumption really contributes to quality of life.
We know how to manage fisheries sustainable. We could meet historic fish levels sustainable, the world’s timber needs sustainable, etc. It’s likely that consumption rates in the first world are going to be lower in our lifetimes, the only question is whether that’s by force or choice. The gap between consumption rates of first and third world are going to be more equal. These are not trends we should resist, the main thing lacking is the political will. Some encouraging events, Australia just had an election that reversed their ecological course of the last decade. I would describe myself as a cautious optimist. The world has serious problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.
We don’t have to be here, we could get things off the web, out of a book. There’s something so enormoursly special about conversation. They haven’t invented a computer that nods. Think about that. When you talk to another human being they nod, sometimes a lot, sometimes imperceptably. Sometimes a noise comes out of their mouth like from Jeff Bezos that you hear for miles around. As much as we don’t have to come to a conference, it’s expensive, it’s a committment, it’s the space between the events is as important or more important. These conversation are longer than a speech! The celebration of conversation, which we’re never taught in school, how to talk to another human being. The number one thing in a relationship, it’s not about sex, it’s not about money, it’s about having a conversation. (Especially in later years.)
You can have conversations with animate objects and inanimate objects. Buildings you can’t have a conversation with aren’t as good building. Same for books. All of my books are not so good, the last two were pretty good, Understanding Health Care and Understandni Children. My goal was to have a conversation with the page. I do love the art of talking to people, and reacting, and taking that goal into all of our work. The best speeches are those where the person can be having a conversaiton with the audience.
Two Jewish women every Friday they have a luncheon date, have a drink, then lunch. They go in, the first one says “Oy!” The second one says “Oy vey!” The first one says “Let’s stop talking about our children, time for something else.”
Think about the comedian, and this amazing thing that they do, of giving you a different look at something. I cant wait to see Jonathan Winters. Some comedians are amazing, I learn so much. “Everything is in walking distance if you have enough time.” Think of that sentence, that’s a two semester course in city planning, in how to talk to another person. A friend was picked up by the police because she was walking in LA, in Beverly Hills.
I’m not surprised I was invited, but that doesn’t make it not an honor tobe in front of you. He’s going to read some Wormanisms.
Everything takes place someplace. All news, everywhere should be organized that way. We get into bad habits of watching TV news and we have no idea where it’s happening, you have to get grounded. What is it that makes you get into something, takes it away, what’s the first sentence someone says clears the anxiety. If a booger is hanging out of my nose that’s all you could think about if you were talking to me.
You have to in a conversation, understand what it’s like to not understand. You have understand understanding. Which is a funny word.
I once was forced to do my own road atlas, because I realized you don’t drive across the United States alphabetically. Most do one state per page, which means they’re all at a different scale.
I did a fable in 1975, called the architecture of information, was running the AIA national conference with 5,000 people. Even I could not do the keynote at a conference I was chairing, that was too over the top, so decided not to have a keynote. Wrote a keynote fable, a historic fable of the futuer. One of my favorite books. The main character was the commisioner of Curiosity and Imaginition. First thing he does is change the laws of copyright to the right to copy, he flipped everything in society and flipped it. The only thing you could copyright was bad ideas. One new department, Waiting to be Wanted. Dedicated to old buildings and old people. Life didn’t come from chloroform. They found life coming from hot sulfur water, or cold methane gas.
There’s been some wonderful presentations, I had never heard Nicholas better, not to say he’s been bad before. He’s really a pain in the ass, so tough, so funny, so hard to get to sometimes, but he’s done such a service for it. In 1984 at the first TED conference he announced the MIT Media Lab.
One minute to go: 19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century. 51% of the people live in urban areas. Borders between nations are hostile. There are sister cities but no sister countries. We know nothing, comparitively about the cities of the world. Even when you take census from city to city, sometimes it’s block data, sometimes in census tracks, you may have a number but no density. You might know mean income, but what about the cost of living? We started a project called 19.20.21. No two cities ask the same questions, have maps drawn to the same scale, we’re going to develop new ways of mapping, have comparative statistics. Most of the major cities in the world are on the water, so will be impacted heavily by global warming and the water level rising. Cities are the new unit of significance, not countries.
At lunch I caught up with Bob Metcalfe and asked him what he thought about the acceleration of technology. He believes in it, but with one important twist.
Creator of Heroes. How it got started, the internet fanbase, and where it’s going.
Global consciousness, and how I as someone with a hit TV show can hopefully raise that consciousness. When I was young I was a total geek, but anyone can stumble into greatness. This is a hugely powerful message for people, it’s the reason or the huge success of the Harry Potter series. At the heart of that success is the idea, potent wish fulfillment, that even the most neglected of us can be chosen for something extraordinary. I was a terrible student in school, had difficulty learning to read and write. Was interested in nature, found solace in the natural world around me.
I remember having experiences of sensing an overwhelming connectedness to everything and everyone. I was having these peak experiences that were shaping my consciousness even though I wans’t fully aware of what to do with that. Unable to articulate that, I internalized them, made them something wholly my own. There were very low expectations for a kid like me. No one expected much, but I sort of did. Just wasn’t sure what form it would take and how it would show up. I could prove people wrong.
Let’s jump ahead a few decades… graduated college as religious studies major, was interested in photography and film, went to USC Film for graduate. Worked at the B, C, and D level of Hollywood production. Just worked any job he could get. My classmates wo were getting ahead were doing it by writing scripts. Being a screenwriter is still the best and fastest way to enter into the film business. Anyone can be a screenwriter, you can be a weirdo or deviant and it doesn’t matter. In Hollywood they say if Hitler wrote a great screenplay they’d send a limo to the airport to pick him up.
Got started writing a cheesy episode at Knight Rider. I was drawn to the solitary lifestyle, which carries with it some irony, because I ended up working in series television which is the most social of all screenwriting careers. It’s very intense. Was staffed on many shows, working with other writers. My writing started to draw on these themes of interconnectivity that I had internalized as a kid. One of those assignments led to me creating a show on my own, Crossing Jordan. First year was a constant battle with the network about the creative soul of the show, saw it as a spiritual theme around death and existence, the network saw it as a crime drama, with action and tied up in a nice neat bow every week. Didn’t wield much power at the time, and chose keeping the show on the air, 117 episodes and 6 years. 1 out of 85 shows makes it to a fith season, it’s a very small group.
I became a bankable show runner and creator. In the last year I was given a development deal which meant that they guaranteed me a chunk of money to come up with a new show for them. When it came time to pitch, I waited and the phone didn’t ring. Since I started with NBC it had gone from #1 to #4 in the ratings, the new network president had come in with a mandate that he would completely reinvent the network. He was going to go to Sundance to get drama, an edgy nightclub in New York for the new comedy stars, young and inexperienced was what they were looking for, and that wasn’t me. Having a show on the air for six years had turned me into a journeyman hack. I had sublimated my own creative instincts and asked “how high” when they said jump.
I got pissed off and really anger. Great creativity comes from everywhere, I was flubbed and I didn’t just want a show on the air, I wanted something big, bold, and wanted to prove them wrong. Only problem was I didn’t have an idea, so I was just left angry and worried about it.
I knew I needed that could exist on multiple platforms, primarily the internet. Viewers are getting harder and harder to find in traditional television. You need DVD sales, a literary arm, take advantage of the internet, else you’re at the mercy of the slipping Nielson ratings. Lost and 24 had come around and proven that these serializations could really work, and did very well internationally. Charles Dickens had written some of his best novels as serializations in the newspaper, with a cliffhanger each week. I became obsessed with these interlocking stories told in very short brush strokes, haiku storytelling. Audiences need far less story than they used to, they’re so sophisticated in the elements of storytelling. They want to guess, predict, be wrong, be right, they can be mad, frustrated, all of that is fine, all you don’t want is indifference.
Had the format, just needed an idea. My wife an I are raising kids, I’ve become obsessed and concerned with the way the world is these days, and what they’ll be inheriting. Where will the heroes come from? We can’t rely on government or institutions. It’s a post 9/11 idea that the heroes will come from all around it. But the problems are so huge, global warming, climate change, etc, what sort of characters could deal with this? So assumed a new wrinkle, that we as a species could adapt, and what would those first mutations of natural selection look like? Build a show around this, a message of hope and interconnectivity. Make the characters like you and me. Pushing it through network development was going to take everything I had learned as a writer over 20 years. In the right hands it could be awesome, in the wrong hands it could be a pile of. I lied and cheated and schemed and manipulated all the way through the idiocy that is the notes process when you do this, was able to push the production through relatively unscathed and in the form that it would work in. I finally gave that kid who stares out the window a voice. That’s how Heroes got on the air.
It’s not the most original idea in the world, you build and borrow. Just put these pieces together in the right way, at the right time, and on the right network. The archetypal narrative is a very powerful form of storytelling. It can create a collective experience, in our case it created a community. We launched it at ComicCon in San Diego. We had 3,000 screaming and breathless fans that had somehow heard of this show, 3 months before the first episode aired. They drove them to a website, and the early adopters talked and chatted and created their own websites, an unbelievably amount of buzz and took the mainstream press by surprise. The fans grew into a true community.
Here’s all these people connected by this message of saving the world. IT would be criminal not to do something positive with that demographic. We can build a community around this idea of global consciousness. As far as the future is concerned, TV an the internet is merging, and that’s the heart of why we’re striking right now, there’s going to be a dynamic involvement between the fans and a show, we’re moving into the Long Tail of niche entertainment. A future where a show and its fans will have a greater interwoven relationship, feeding off of each others input, creating material together. Ordinary people like you and me come together to do great and noble things.
He told his father he wanted to be a sculptor Paris. His father told him that for every year he went to MIT he would pay for a matching year in Paris when he finished. It was very clever. He was planning to study architecture, because it was art and mathematics put together. His headmaster told him, “I like grey suits, I like pinstripe suits, but I don’t like grey pinstripe suits.” While at MIT he realized that hte mixing of art and mathematics was computers, and began focusing on that.
Didn’t have to worry about earning money, or what people thought of him, let’s tackle a big project. He worked with Joe Jacobson and thought if they could leverage children and bring universal access information to the world.
The OLPCs are shipping! Here’s a picture of the assembly line at the factory, taken at 3 in the morning:
There’s not a person in this room who doesn’t give their laptop or cell phone to their kid to debug it. He doesn’t think the question of “Who’s going to teach the teachers to teach the kids?” is valid at all. Research found that kids that program think differently, and debugging was the closest children could come to learning about learning. His son Demetri set up a school in Cambodia, connected it to the internet, and gave the children regular laptops.
One Laptop per Child is a non-profit, being a non-profit is fundamental. Everyone advised him not to but they were wrong. Why? The clarity of purpose is there, he can see any head of state, anybody because he’s not selling laptops. Second reason, you can get the best people in the world. All of their services are pro-bono, and it’s not to save money because they have money in the bank, but they attract the best people in the world. They couldn’t afford a CFO, they put out a job description at zero salary and had dozens of amazing applicants.
What’s different about OLPC from a normal computer? It used less than 2 watts (which is roughly what you can generate with your upper body?), dual mode sunlight display, wifi mesh network, and it’s rugged.
Design matters. When he graduated from MIT he thought the silliest thing to do would be to go to Paris for six years, so he didn’t. In English the word “cheap” has a double meaning, which is very apt.
If you’re in a desert the OLPCs can talk to each other about 2 kilometers. In the forest it’s about 500 meters. They’re launching with 18 keyboards, English is the smallest. There has never been a keyboard in Ethiopian, they had to go in and help them make a keyboard which is going to be a new standard for the country. In the beginning they decided to go to six country: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand. They wanted to get it out, and then the little countries could piggyback on the bigger ones. He was traveling 330 days a year. Meeting heads of states in a tent, with camel smells everywhere.
Big states were big on the photo ops, but not on follow through. Current launch countries: Uruguay, Peru, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Cambodia. There was a domino effect, Uruguay started it. Add up all those countries, still wasn’t enough. They announced a program for the United States: Buy one Get one. They now have a Give Many Program. Tell people about it, tell your friends about it. $100 target price in 2009, $50 target price in 2012. The first kids just got their laptops. They went to Peru and Mexico, they’re only making about 5,000 a week, they hope next year to make a million a month. In laptop land is a big number. Everyone in the world combined is 5 million laptops a month.
Visit Laptop.org.
He’s talking about the process of making a chocolate company. Used to be a space geek, then a confectioner. Chocolate is one of the most complex things he’s seen. How do you choose a chocolate? How do you choose by percentage and origin is clunky. They wanted to create a simplified model of the chocolate universe. What are appropiate existing models? Maybe like wine? They created a new taxonomy for describing chocolate by flavor.
Chocolately, citrus, fruity, floral, nutty, earthy. This moment represents something they’ve been working on for a couple of years, millions of years later, they’re announcing and launching right here at EG.
Dogs have interest. They try to harness the distractions that dogs naturally have. You can’t compete with the dog’s natural views, “rear end vs owner.” You train a dog by making up rules, human rules, we don’t take the dog’s rules into account. We keep these rules a secret from the dog. Then we punish the dog from breaking the rules he didn’t know about in the first place. When dogs are puppies they’re trained to do things like jump up on your leg and you pet him and reward him, a year later when he’s huge he gets punished for jumping up the same way. It’s scare the abuse and mixed messages that dogs get.
He’s showing some videos of very well-trained dogs. The dog books tell you when a dog jumps up you whack them with newspaper, squirt them with lemon juice, all types of abuse. The first stage in training is to teach the dog ESL, because they don’t know what you’re saying. The second stage is training is to make the dog want to do what you want it to do. They mix low-frequency behavior with a high-frequency behavior, like “sit, rub belly. sit, fetch ball. sit, food.” They motivate the dog to want to do it, the need for punishment seldom comes up. Phase three, there’s times when you know best, you have to let the dog know about things they must not do, like run outside the house where they could get hit. They have to enforce the rules without the force. A punishment is a stimulus right after an action that encourages that action not to happen again. You can calmly talk to them.
I have friends who train grizzly bears, how are you going to reprimand a grizzly bear? You don’t, it’s a different approach.
If you go to the Lincoln Memorial and look at the Gettysburg address chiseled in the right, and the word “future” is a typo. It’s spelled “uture.” (Huh.)
It’s about relationship skills. Some people take delight in people getting things wrong so we can moan and groan at them. These skills should be taught to everybody. Where I want to do with this doggy stuff is “You know, your husband is really to change.” Just saying “thank you” is so powerful. This should be taught in schools. Good habits are just as hard to break as bad habits. 75 million dogs in the US, 45 million families
Giving Toys is his company. Used to work at Mattel. He did a lot of toys, most did not go, 1 out of 20 or 30 would go live. Showing a lot of funny demos of various toys that didn’t go, like the flame-throwing tail. Did the McDonald’s cooking toys, which did about 50mm. Eventually left LA and moved to Idaho. Throughout making toys I think there’s a real correlation between art and science, there’s a blend that happens. He was the co-invertor of the Furby, and is about to show a video about its tale.
He was fascinated with film and animatronics. Little artificial life pieces. He worked on Microsoft Barney, it was like a purple dinosaur with bloatware. They decided to make the simplest thing possible with the fewest parts possible and have a little artificial art/life form. He’s going through a slideshow with all of the steps along the way to creating Furby. They would would sneak into HP on the weekends. A friend of a friend worked at the SLA lab at GM. 40 million Furbys (Furbies?) were sold.
Pleo Evolution. Kind of retired, living in Boise on a river, started another company call Toy Innovation. Did a handheld device for teens that hooked up to the internet. Slowed down. Had the old tape of the dinasaur, some other people saw it. They began to try to clone a dinasaur. Picked a Camarasrus because they were so plentiful. The first SLA version they had a cuteness in the dinosaur, the servos had to be shaped like muscles, had a real dedication to be accurate. Hardest part is the skin. 4 years and 10 million dollars later, they now have the Pleo. A very realistic dinosaur that goes through life stages and you can take care of it, they change over item, you take care of them.
It has an open architecture, a USB port and a SD card. You can hack the underlying code to change its homeostatic drives, its personality. There will be drag and drop features for kids.
During his presentation Pablos demonstrated a bump key, which is a trick to bump a specially crafted key in most locks and it will open it. One of my trading cards was actually getting one from him, and when I tracked him down he gave me a short demo for the camera:
The dinner tonight was really great. I tried to write down the restruants that were present, here they are:
Gelata, a southern Thai restrauant. Burmese cooking of Golden Triangle. Cambodian dishes from Sophie’s in Long Beach. Soul food called Larkin’s. Harold and Bell’s part of large Creole community in LA.
He was initially fascinated with technology as a result of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. He started in a one-room school, then a 80 person-class high school, cornell, then MIT where he was introduced to computers. He authored the first computer programming language for raster movies. “Seen as the founder of computer film in America.” Within 3 years I got into a project that’s been called the most known he did, even today, Harmon-Knowlton Nude. Basically ASCII-art nude woman lying down, fairly abstract. Now he creates art out of objects, all mosaics, quite striking. I’ve got some pictures below, try to look at them close up and then back away. (I think it’s a better experience in real life.)
This is a portrait of Hellen Keller made out of visual braille:
His website is Knowlton Mosaics and he has a wikipedia page.
I asked Brewster Kahle how people could help out the fine work he spoke about earlier.
A classical pianist and music professor. LA is a special place to my family, because my older brother, Angelo, was born here. Next in line, Angelin, Angelina, and Angel. Anybody know what a “hoosier” is? It originated when there was a knock on the door and people in Indiana would say “who’s there? (hoos-ierrrr?)” She’s trying to connect classical music to a new audience, she’s a big fan of the Disklavier piano. She did a performance where they hooked up the MIDI output to have live graphics triggered by her hitting the keys performing a Liszt piece. She’s now doing a Bach piece that demonstrates this.
You can see her website and buy her CD at angelinchang.com.
She wants to change the type of food in school. Teach them the relationship between healthy planet, healthy food, nad healthy kids. We got here because of big agribusiness. Monsanto and DupPont control 90% of the commercially produced seeds. Average food travels 1,500 miles before we eat it. No food with frequent flyer miles. Most school districts can’t afford organic food, but we can’t keep feeding our children chemicals. 70% of all antibiotics is in animal husbandry. The majority is for weight gain. 75% of the antibiotics in the country have become ineffective. US agriculture uses 1.2 billion of pesticides each year, 5lbs for every American. The USDA can not be seen as the final say in what we feed our kids. The point of all of this is sustainable food.
We now have more prisoners than farmers. Unhealthy eating can lead to lot of bad things. She just put a picture of a coffin and tombstone on the screen. 40% of cancer is diet related. 80% of cancer can be prevented through ealthful diet and exercise. CDC has said that children born in 2000 could be the first generation in a long time that lives a shorter time than their parents. Cheap corn and keep soy promote this bad types of food and allow fast food to be so cheap. We need to teach our kids that vegtables are actually colorful and have flavor. In Berkeley they’ve gone totally local farm, no high fructose syrups, etc. Scratch cooking is the center of their program.
1 out of every four meals is fast food, 1 out of four is eaten in front of a TV or computer. Instead of the national school lunch program being under the USDA it should be under the CDC.
Going to talk about the dark side of cuteness. When I was a kid, the story of the three bears, Goldilocks. When I heard that story, I didn’t see anything wrong with bears that talked or made porridge, but I didn’t see any thermodynamic way which it could fit. Marvin has a book called The Emotion Machine. Soon we’ll need to endow our Machines with Commonsense, Knowledge, and Reasoning.
If you have an increase in life expectancy is going to cause a major labor crunch. No one will want to do the work.
He put “emotion” in the title of his most recent book to fool people into being interested, it’s actually about thinking. If you ask people what it’s like to be in love, they can write books and books, if you ask them how they just had a thought or idea, they haven’t the foggiest.
Old view on emotions: Most emotions add features to thoughts, the way an artist adds colors to black and white drawings. Those additions seem mysterious.
New view on emotions: Each emotion tends to SUPPRESS certain features of regular thinking. This does not add any mysteries!
Why did intelligence take so long to evolve? Just a few new genes would have made our brains larger, but this would have caused some grave handicaps. The human brain uses about 20 watts. What must have happened is before the brain could get larger it had to get some improvements in processing. Values, censors, ideals, taboos. There’s no evidence that any of the earlier mammals can think about what they’ve been thinking recently. It’s a few tricks like that, reflective thinking, that enabled us to use knowledge more efficiency.
What happened AI? There was a DARPA contest recently where a team with 100 miles in a computer-driven vehicle without hitting an obstacle or falling in a ditch. In other words, they can do what every four-legged animal can do. I’ve never seen anybody discuss what I call quantum certainty. Solar systems are not very stable, if something happened to change the orbit of Jupiter a little bit, it would effect the other planets. The planet Pluto is not stable, it will be thrown out of the solar system in about 3 billion years. In the quantum world, nothing ever changes except suddenly, and those changes only happen every few trillion years. The electrons around a hydrogen atom can only be in a certain number of orbits and the probability of being outside that orbit is zero. (That was a tangent and I might not have caught it all correctly, but it sounds like he pretty strongly disagrees with the earlier speakers.)
We developed new ways to think, and learned to hang around older people and learn new ways to think. Think of the brain as 400 little computers which has evolved to do a different thing, and each mental state is what you get when you turn on 50 or 60 or 10.
The critic-selector model of mind: When you fail to achieve a goal and if you can diagnose what went wrong, then you may know some way to change your approach. Analogy, change how you’re describing it, break it into parts, replace it with a simpler one, ask another person for help.
Why do physicists “believe” these strange theories? Physics is based on experimental reality. “The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.” Richard Feynman.
Phisics is based on experiment.
The nature of Reality is absurd.
We don’t know what QM means, but that it is highly testable without discrepancy.
(Sorry I missed most of this, it was very dense (in a good way) and almost impossible to transcribe, best bet would be we waiting for the official video.)
I caught up with John Q. Walker a bit on the break to ask him about where the Disklavier technology is going. John did the demo with the recreated performances that blew everyone in the conference away.
Lets’s compress the time between the sun forming and today into one “day.” Life formed around 05:20. The last hour, dinosaurs became exect at 11:39. In the last minute, neaderthals didn’t come until 11:59:58.1. Here’s the picture of the graph.
Paul said that when he tells people that there are more stars than grains of sand in all the beaches on earth, they go “yeah right” so he did some back of the envelope calculations:
In the decades that ended in the mid 1920s, Scientists did work that resulted in a fundamental understanding of the world like we never could have before.
The contributions of quantum mechanics stand on their own. People don’t understand the basics of quantum mechanics. He showed some examples of “quantum” being misused. He’s going to try and give us the basics of quantum physics.
Here’s how it goes: quantum mechanics is based upon one concept and one imaginative leap. The concept is waves, how they move and interact. Whenever you see data that looks like bright band, dark band, an interference pattern, it tells you that you’re dealing with a wave phenomenon. If you have a bb machine gun and fine it a two slits, the BBs stick in two lines aligned with the two silts. If you fire electrons through the same wall, you see a wave pattern. What does that mean?
There must be some sort of wave associated with particles. But waves of what? These are individual pellets, where could the wave idea come into the story. Here’s the imaginitive leap, mid 1920s, people are struggling with this data. The wave associated with a particle must be a wave of probability. We are used to a reality where things are definite. You can predict what will happen. This introduction into probability into the laws of physics, is a radical departure from any way of thinking about physics or reality.
Why is it so unfamiliar if underlying everything is a probabilistic under bearing to everything around us. For a large object there is a spiky probability curve, you’re 99.999% certain the ball will follow Newton’s law. If you measure an electron you have a spiky probability wave, but an instant after that the location it goes to just becomes a much flatter set of probabilities, until you measure it again.
Every particle in a world has something called spin. Einstein found a “spooky” action, you could measure a particle and if it’s spinning up its mirror particle that could be thousands of miles away the other one will spin down at exactly that moment. A non-local interaction between distant objects.
Quantum computing, people are trying very hard to make use of the spread out nature of quantum mechanics. One particle to do many calculations at the same time. Final thing, if you think that any of this stuff feels esoteric, bear in mind, your personal computer, your cell phone, everything you see around us is based on the integrated circuit, which you wouldn’t have without quantum mechanics. Not only does this change our understanding of the nature of reality.
Right before the performance of Ryan MacEvoy McCullough.
The dream of listeners everywhere is to be there for a live performance, it’s the ultimate experience . Zenph Studios wants to separate performance and recording. He’s about to play the 1955 version live. They digitize 70+ factors of every note. The Yamaha Disklavier piano just performed Gordon Gould performing two of the Goldberg Variations. It was amazing.
Step by step, music will be turned into data. Audio came very late because our ears are so hard to fool. Not bits, but the data behind how the music was created.
The future is: Music = data + algorithims.
Right now recordings are frozen. In the future it’s going to be user controlled, you can break down music into the data and suit it to your personal moods and tastes. The elements of the music become like building blocks, a buffet where you can pick and choose what you like.
Now doing an Art Tatum recording. Will be a re-release of his album Piano Starts Here. Another great recreated performance. (I want one!)
Was a writer for 20 years, and a business guy for 12. CEO of Audible.com. We rarely find time to talk about what the new technology nad media culture actually means. Media is the sum of discruptive inventions that have changed the status quo. Audible continues the oral tradition that predated books. The paperback book was fought off for 25 years.
The movie industry said it wanted to stop two things: the video recorder, and cable and paid TV. He was at Rolling Stone when they saw MTV form around them. They weren’t able to make the transitions. Cable took 15 years, DVDs took 6 to reach 85% of homes. It’s going to be similar to the political and social disruptions of the late 60s. You are what happens to you at a particular point in time. I went to the Rolling Stone magazine reunion of everyone who worked there in the first 10 years. He was struck by how lucky he was to be young in those years. I knew everyone who was a professional non-fiction storyteller who had a house, it was a difficult business.
The second event that touched me was the death of Normal Mailer. He was a writer with a capital W. He did a piece called “Why are we at war?” which was an early attack on Iraq. He’s accused of not being a patriot. He lives in a nation that affords him time to think, and time to write, and that’s the best thing in the world.
Part of the reason he stopped writing was people just didn’t have enough time to read. He hears it from renowned intellectuals, even last night. A WSJ were stressed out by their lack of time than for their lack of money. He had taking an advance from Random House to do a “you are there” type of story about the digital revolution, but he couldn’t find what to right about. He discovered how compressible the spoken word was as opposed to other types of media. 93 million American works drove to work alone. What if that time could be filled with spoken words? I also loved the oral culture, wasn’t one of those writers who tried to separate them.
In the beginning attacked him in the literary cultures, he was not only abandoning writing, he was abandoning text. The substance what matters, how it gets into people’s heads shouldn’t be a religious issue.
Since starting the company, I only get time to think on airplanes. Spend more time with people whose tombstones will read “I provide liquidity.” He worries about the way culture is going, reaction videos. I got myself in trouble with the early podcasting community because he said Audible was excited because it would provide a farm club for them to cherry-pick great talent. Because if you want to have a job being creative someone has to pay you: the consumer, the advertiser, or a patron. People with less time on their hands than the early podcasters would decide that. He was called the “Bill Gates of digital audio.”
“If you’re going to give an upbeat technological talk, don’t come after Andrew Keen.”
We need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don’t do that we’re going to get the generation we deserve. I grew up in a television generation, the closest I could get to TV was knowing someone who was in the Wonderama audience once. I remember the first feeling of participation was in cryptographer class and the professor said here are some problems, and if you have any trouble here’s my home number.
What did the Getty carve in stone? It was the hand prints of the people who helped build this place. In the garden: “Ever present never twice the same, ever changing, never less than whole.” Carved in stone at the Boston Public Library: “Free to All.” We have the opportunity to one-up the Greeks, they were able to build the Library of Alexandria. Universal Access to All Knowledge is within our grasp.
Books. The largest print library is the Library of Congress, 26 million volumes. About 26 terabytes of data. That storage would cost about $60,000, so for the cost of a parking space in LA you could have the entire library of Congress spinning on Linux disks. There are different ways for reading books online: PDF, booklike formats.
Brewster likes the physical book. They made a BookMobile, with a satellite dish, and it downloads, prints, and bind a book. It costs about 3 dollars per book. He wants to put books back in your hand. There are some other bookmobiles. If we can make this technology work in rural Uganda, they’d have something. They got some funding from World Bank, and it worked! What we found out was that we didn’t have the right books.
We have a print-on-demand machine, the Expresso book machine. He’s excited about the $100 laptop. 200 dpi is enough that you can put scanned books in there and they look pretty good. They sent 100,00 books to India with people and scanners. If you care about your books — scan your own. Especially if they’re old or fragile. They picked the price point of 10 cents a page, if it’s the same cost as Xeroxing, you can change the game. If we have mars rovers, you think you could turn pages, but it’s really hard.
They now do people-powered page turning and colleges. To do the entire LoC it would be about 750 million dollars, but a million books would be about a 30 million dollars, which isn’t undoable. The Getty is moving their books to UCLA and scanning their out-of-copyright books. They’re looking for funding to get the progress going. They’ve scanned about 200,000, they’re doing about 15,000 books a month. They’re moving from out-of-copyright, to the out-of-print world. He hopes they can meet Amazon in the middle between in-print and out-of-print.
Books are within our grasp, we can take it all on without that big a deal. One-time shot and we have the history of printed literature. We can get the whole darn thing.
How about Audio? There are about 2-3 million discs published, it costs about 10 dollars a piece to take a disc and put it online. But the rights issues are pretty thorny. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free. The rock and rollers had a tradition of sharing as long as no one made any money. They get 2-3 bands a day signing up, 40-50 concerts a day. Everything the Grateful Dead ever did. 200,000 audio items so far.
Moving Images. There’s about 150,000-200,000 theatrical releases ever, about half were Indian! There are only about a thousand that are out of copyright. There are lots of movies that have never seen the light of day.
TV is harder. They’re recording 20 channels, 24 hours a day. They only put one week up, the 9/11 week. Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable. TV is in our grasp, $15 per video hour. About 100,000 videos online.
Software, only about 50,000 titles available.
We’re best known for the WWW. We’ve been archiving the web since 1996, pioneered by Alexa which donates this collection to the Internet Archive. We make a Wayback Machine that shows you websites the way they were.
One thing to learn from the Library of Alexandria — burning! They’re now making multiple copies, one at the new Library of Alexandra. A copy in Amsterdam. What’s the role of public vs private goin forward. Is it proprietary. Universal access to all knowledge could be one of our greatest achievements of mankind.
Carved above the Carnegie Library, “Free to the People.”
Excellent talk!
For me, media is about the distribution of high quality information and entertainment. It’s about the exchange of money for that entertainment. That’s the media economy. He thinks the media economy is in “deep sh**.” Recently Radiohead tried to figure out a new business model for online, they should allow people to set their own price. 65-70% of people “stole” Radiohead’s music and didn’t pay anything. (I thought that figure was debunked?)
If I’m the anti-christ of Silicon Valley, who are the Christ figures? I won’t name names, but some have beards and some are here. Something has profoundly changed in media, what has changed is technology. Technology has enabled all of us to become authors, to distribute our content online, to become broadcasters.
Medias is being presented as liberating human beings, of making the world a more moral place. Just as Christ was trying to make man moral, the technology media evangelists are trying to make media into the engine of profoundly good social change. Last week I had a debate with Charlie Ledbetter. He said the internet and the digital revolution was good because we will become more equal, liberate ourselves, nad create better community. The premise is that we will all become more creative, our ability to become Hitchcock.
These are not business ideas, they’re moral ideas. They’re about liberation of self. It’s rooted in libertarian culture. Today’s internet reflects a climax in the way in which these libertarian idealists want to change the world. In the world this means the blogosphere, in Second Life. Priests invented a concept of heaven, but never figured out how to monetize it. The Second Life guys did. Anyone can create or recreate themselves online. The internet is a digital form of Christianity, we can reinvent ourselves independent from the physical world.
We’re using the internet to self-broadcast ourselves, as a battering ram against authority. Professionals aren’t born, they’re simply people that are more practiced and disciplined. The internet is trying to turn traditional media was never fair. It’s about finding talent, polishing talent, distributing, and selling that talent. You’re telling 95% of people that they’re not worthy. The internet tells us we’re all equal in our ability to distribute our ideas.
Some people say that’s the essence of democracy, it’s a “Christian democracy” and it’s not an idea he’s keen on. Real media, with concrete product, that is in big trouble, because the only company making money in this new economy are the vehicles of this self-made content. The traditional carriers of content, the carriers that selected talent, that published it and distributed it, are in great crisis. Music, newspaper business. The future of the media biz is dire. We need to reestablish the credibility of authority. We can’t be seduced by the cult of the amateur, the cult of the ignorant. We need to maintain the professional standards of media, remind the public that the traditional media ecosystem of fact checkers et al are essential to democracy.
If we do away with the credibility