Month: May 2005

The May 9, 2005 New Yorker magazine contains the final installment of Elizabeth Kolbert’s series of articles on climate change.  The series started off with interesting accounts of scientists at work and people living in the Far North.  It ends with boring government officials negotiating and a prediction that the human race will go extinct due to climate change.  Kolbert’s lack of faith in human adaptability stems perhaps from her not seen Peter Ginter’s show at SlideWest 2005 in which he documented the life of folks living in one of Manila’s flooded ghetto.  The Filipinos in the photos don’t seem to enjoy wading through knee-high water to get from house to house but the cycle of birth, education, marriage, and reproduction seems to continue unabated.  Even if one isn’t despairing for the survival of the species, however, it might not be wise to buy a beach house 10′ above sea level with the expectation that one’s grandchildren will enjoy it…

The good news from the rest of the issue is that a computer programmer makes it into a story as the main character for the first time in memory.  “Along the Highways” by Nick Arvin starts with Graham, a “thin and bald” thirtysomething guy who “studied computer science in college” and is in love with his brother’s widow Lindsey.  Graham is disturbed to find Lindsey riding down the highway in a convertible with a big pudgy guy named Doug.  He pursues them for many hours, punctuated by mobile phone conversations among the parties, and finally the story ends at the side of the road with Lindsey encouraging Doug to beat up our programmer protagonist.  Graham ends up in a heap by the side of the road while Doug and Lindsey drive off.

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The New Yorker magazine’s Web site has the full text of a recent series by Elizabeth Kolbert on climate change.  Highly recommended.

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The main reason for this trip to California was to attend Slide West, a periodic gathering of some of the world’s best photographers at Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio’s house in Napa, California.  Menzel and D’Aluisio are the brains behind the books Material World, Robo Sapiens, and some very interesting new books on food and death.  The event started with an outing to COPIA, the Napa art and culture center, currently showing some large prints of families in 24 different countries, each photographed with a week’s worth of the typical food that they eat.  These were made with the last generation 12 MP Canon EOS-1Ds body and the results are technically beautiful.  They will all be available in September as part of the new book Hungry Planet.

The stars of the unlimited budget annual report world were represented by Peter Ginter from Germany and Louie Psihoyos from Boulder, Colorado (nice photos of Netscape founder Jim Clark’s various yachts and helicopter adventures).  The world of fine art photography showed up in the person of Elizabeth Opalenik (mostly nudes).  Three photojournalists from the San Francisco Chronicle showed slides.  Deanne Fitzmaurice showed the pictures of a 9-year-old injured Iraqi boy who had been treated at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital.  These won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism.  Kurt Rogers showed an amazing set of photos from day-to-day work, also for the Chronicle, around the Bay Area.  My favorite was a clown being frisked by security at SFO.  United Airlines runs a “fantasy flight” program where they load sick kids and parents onto a big jet and fly them on a scenic route down to Monterey with various musicians and clowns on board.  Since September 11, 2001, however, the airline can’t afford the jet fuel so they just load them onto the plane, taxi around SFO, and go back to the terminal.  And since September 11th the dressed-up clowns end up getting special scrutiny by the metal detectors.  The paper never ran the photo, sadly, and it made me think about how much great photography goes to waste because the newspapers don’t use more photos on their Web sites and, when they do, make them available at such puny sizes (maybe filling 1/20th of the latest big LCD monitors).  Biologist Pete Oxford, based in Quito, Ecuador, used photos to tell an interesting story about a Harpy Eagle being tagged with a GPS-equipped radio monitor.

The strangest presentation was by Timonthy Archibald.  He has been going around the country photographing inventors in their suburban homes showing off their “sex machines”, most of which are high-powered rotating motors that convert the rotation into a back-and-forth oscillation.  At the end of the oscillating rod a plastic dildo is attached.  These can sell for $5000 and, supposedly, chicks dig them.  He had some interesting stories to relate…

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The engineering staff at Google threw a big party for Silicon Valley nerds last Thursday night, complete with band and Cinco de Mayo-themed food and drink.  The last time I visited was so long ago that Segways were still cool (Google still has a few but today they gather dust in a corner).  Google has grown up to employ over 3000 people and occupies a campus built for Silicon Graphics (SGI; kids: this was a Unix workstation company that bloomed in the late 1980s and faded as Sun grew).  The center is built around a volleyball court and an endless pool, complete with lifeguard until 9 pm.  The company provides all of the fun things that profitable companies can provide, e.g., haircuts, massages, day care for kids, free meals, etc.

Larry Page, one of the founders, gave an inspiring talk about what a great time this is to be an engineer.  He recalled how at one point Google had five employees and two million customers.  Outside of Internet applications it is tough to imagine where that would be possible.  Page also talked about the enjoyment of launching something, getting feedback from users, and refining the service on the fly.  The Google speakers made a persuasive case that there is no better place to be a programmer.  No startup company is going to have a 5000-machine cluster available to launch a new service or a guaranteed first day audience of 100 million people.  Financially it might also make much more sense to work at Google as opposed to a startup.  For teams of engineers who create a lot of value for Google the company is able to hand out $millions or tens of $millions in bonuses, to be shared among a group of 5-10 programmers.  That is admittedly a small percentage of the new advertising reveue that Google earns from a new service but it is in absolute terms more than someone is likely to make creating the same service at a startup, where hardly anyone is likely to find out about it and use it.

One of the anecdotes that Page related was about an experienced Silicon Valley executive who told him, several years ago, “in the long run, every company is led by either marketing or sales; you just have to choose which it is going to be in Google’s case.”  This prophecy does indeed seem to be true for the big tech companies.  Microsoft never does anything because an engineer thinks it is fun or cool; they wait for the marketing department to notice a new product from a competitor and then go to work.  Oracle seems to be led by their sales organization.  They add features if customers are telling the sales people “this is what I need to make it worth buying the next release.”  Google remains an engineering-led company.  They launch Google Maps with satellite imagery because they can.

As I wandered through the party and through the offices I kept noticing more and more familiar faces and the names of former students whom I remembered as among the smartest and nicest.  They will, of course, need all of those smart people if they are to deliver on their long-term goals.  Doing search right will eventually require machine understanding of natural language, i.e., full artificial intelligence.

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Sitting around with a couple of friends at breakfast in Santa Clara, the question of how to spend $100 million on charity came up.  As these folks had been working at Google for a few years this was not mere idle speculation.  Giving money to U.S. universities was ruled out in advance; they are too rich and too inefficient.  Going to the other side of the wealth spectrum helping Africa had also been previously nixed; hundreds of $billions are already being pumped into that continent with negligible results.  The rest of the world of possibilities was open for discussion.

My personal suggestion #1 is to support online education.  People almost everywhere in the world have computers with Internet access but there is precious little online content that will enable them to improve themselves.

My personal suggestion #2 is to use the money as a seed for a bank-financed real estate development, modeled after towns in Mexico, Peru, and the rest of Latin America.  Americans are rich but lonely and not nearly as happy statistically as Mexicans.  I think one big reason is that most Americans live in sprawl-land where it is difficult to meet friends and interact with neighbors.  There are plenty of 1000-house real estate developments being built right now in the Southwest.  Why not build one around a central plaza like a Mexican or Chilean town?  Offer very low rent to vital shops such as a supermarket, a hardware store, etc., so that it doesn’t turn into a travesty like Disney’s Celebration near Orlando, Florida.  Include one of the “small high schools” that Bill Gates likes to talk about (private, presumably).  And then hire sociologists to come in and figure out if people are in fact happier in such a community.

My personal suggestion #3 is to fund open-source software.  A tremendous amount of benefit has been delivered to people around the world by free and open-source software.  Aside from Web applications it is in fact tough to think of things that can be built by just a handful of people that touch the lives of millions.  Yet traditional foundations don’t think software is interesting and the U.S. Government spends its time and effort suing Microsoft instead of paying programmers to improve the GNU tools and Linux.

Who has some better ideas than these?

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http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/01/news/fortune500/buffett_talks/index.htm?cnn=yes summarizes Warren Buffett and Charles Munger’s address to shareholders.  My favorite line:

Some people seem to think there’s no trouble [with Ford and GM] just because it hasn’t happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you’re still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a serious problem.

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