“future”
85 posts under this tag.
William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled bookAM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.
It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.
I enjoyed a birriaWP orgy this Sunday at El Chololo, a popular restaurant near ChapalaWP, and just as I was entering the bathroom two brown, impossibly small indian kids were chasing each other out of it. The (slightly) bigger one yelled to his mate: ”Kevin, ‘perame!” (“Kevin, wait for me!”).
I think it was a moment to amber, because surprised as I was of the Irish name having found its way into this beautiful brown boy, beacon of a brown new world, my surprise was really at how Mexican it sounded, how accustomed I had become to hearing such Anglo-Saxon names (Celtic Brian is very popular too) in young Mexican children.
Education doesn’t make you happy, and nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free—if we are; or because we’ve been educated—if we have; but because education may be the means by which we realise we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears… tells us where delights are lurking…
Iris Murdoch character in Richard Eyre’s IrisIMDB script
I can’t believe how silly happy I am some days. And then when I remember the world, and its great treasons, and the billions of un-happy, in-war, un-healthy, un-eating, un-knowing (of so much beauty!), still-mortal people in the world I can’t stall work any longer—but, you know, despite and impudently in front of it all, it just makes me happy to be so happy.
Yesterday’s postELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).
Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies BrandeisWP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).
1 While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.
So get over it and swallow.
I will one day build a Fortune Global 500WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.
Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…
I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..
..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.
This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..
It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.
But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.
Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:
Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.
I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.
...and this is one of the best.
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs..
I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, ”How not to make a mess of it,” has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.
For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won’t do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about.. The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.
Edsger W. DijkstraWP, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.
Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.
Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.comWHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. DomburiWP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad ThaiWP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).
The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with  .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,
I don’t want reality, I want magic.
seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.
But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:
Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)
Main Goal: Make Domburi IE and Opera compatible.
Punctuality Premium: If I do finish with the above task, I get to buy Getting Real, the book.
End of 1st Week—5 August
Main Goal: Add Yahoo! & Flickr to the list of Domburi engines and do interesting things like split screens and such with them.
End of 2nd Week—12 August
Main Goal: Implement Bento & Disjoint (Cool Domburi surprise features—you’ll see!). Begin writing copy (presentation, FAQ, help, requirements).
End of 3rd Week—19 August
Main Goal: Polishing, beta-testing, polishing. Rinse and repeat. Special attention to things like responsiveness, interaction, smoothness, design, performance, stability. Finish writing copy.
End of 4th Week—23 August
Main Goal: Publicity, more polishing, and more publicity. The hope here is a mention from
TechCrunch.
Tentative Finish—29 August
Project Domburi would be successfully finished now if the website had attained 10 thousand visitors per day, for more than 3 days (not necessarily in a row). If the challenge’s met I earn the Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep promoting and polishing the website fulltime.
Punctuality Premium: Read Replay, Machinery of Freedom, Artful Sentences and the week’s Economist—all told, my idea of nirvana.
End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September
The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.
Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.
End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September
Domburi really should have had at least five 10,000-visitors days by now, but if it doesn’t I’ll move (shamefully) to the next project…
Start of Project Maki!—10 September
As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)
This is one of the many things I ended up pasting on my wall last week. Since it’s something of an important breakthrough for me, let me try to explain what I mean with it.
I have always marveled at rich people, particularly at how one could get rich, and it always seemed impossible to the verge of immoral how a single person could earn on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per month. There were very few things I could think of for me to do in an hour that would be worth the hundreds of dollars I would need.
That is completely the wrong way to go about it. There really are few such one-hour isolated things that will get you a couple hundred dollars and most of them involve decades of poorly paid specialization. There is a better, more productive way to think of the problem, and that’s what the equation above serves as a reminder of: If you get one thousand people to give you fifty dollars per month, you’ll make fifty thousand dollars per month.
Yes, I know it’s mind-numbingly stupid, but it’s true. And fifty dollars aren’t really that much money, and a month is quite a big chunk of time, and a thousand people doesn’t seem as much to me now as it used to—that’s about the daily traffic of Imagery a couple of weeks ago (and yes, I know the comparison is worth squat, but it still was a landmark in my life to realize how easily I could interest and benefit and touch thousands of people).
Of course that getting-people-to-give-you-money part is not at all about mind-washing or extortion, it’s about creating more than fifty dollars of wealth in a month for over a thousand people. And doesn’t it seem exciting and achievable put this way? At any rate, it has my mind reeling, because a couple of days ago I finally crystallized an idea of a website that could do just that and much more (codename: maki). And it promises to be a lot of work, and to be the greatest challenge I’ve yet undertaken, and it will take me out to the real world every day, and I’d meet thousands of people, and it’d get me walking, and… well, time’ll tell, won’t it?
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