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Derek Miller at Gnomedex

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Before Gnomedex recedes too far, I wanted to post about what was by far the standout experience of the conference for me and, I imagine, many others present.

Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger who lives in Vancouver. I encountered his writing at Penmachine several years ago the way bloggers often discover one another — he’d linked to a post of mine, I saw the referrer, I checked his site out and liked it. I’ve followed Miller’s blog sporadically over the years but hadn’t read it in a good while, and so I missed his news earlier this year: he’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Since then he has written with honesty and openness about his ordeal. He’s using his blog at once to keep his community of friends and relatives up to date and to give a wider audience a little window onto the nature of this experience, which in our culture frequently gets hidden from view.

Apparently he’d been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he’s still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn’t in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it’s been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-conferencing hiccups (a few stuttering images and such), it was an electrifying talk.

This wasn’t about peddling a new product or handicapping startups or any of the usual conference fodder. It was a moment for everyone present to think about mortality, strength in the face of adversity, and the ways that resourceful people find to forge strong human connections with our little technological tools.

(I haven’t been able to find a posted video of the event, but if I do, or if someone posts a link in comments, I’ll add it!)
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, derek miller[/tags]

Good reads: Journal interview with Thomas Lee

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Lee Gomes interviewed Stanford engineering professor Thomas Lee in the Wall Street Journal yesterday; the subject was the history of microchips — but Lee uses that material to offer some trenchant observations on the nature of creativity.

For instance, he says, the transistor was invented in the 1940s by a group led by William Shockley — but not in cliched “eureka!” fashion. Instead, it was “something they stumbled on while they were trying to diagnose their earlier failures to invent a transistor.”

Gomes asks Lee how we got from transistors to integrated circuits:

Because of a somewhat bored and nervous new hire at Texas Instruments, a young kid named Jack Kilby, who eventually won the Nobel Prize. He had been hired in the summer of 1958 and given a project that left him unenthusiastic. He was hired just before the entire company went on a two-week vacation. Rather than just goofing off for the two weeks, he decided to come up with an alternative to his assigned project, so he wouldn’t be seen as just a complainer. So during those two weeks, he invented the integrated-circuit concept.

Failures, accidents, things stumbled upon, stuff people do on the side: that’s how the world moves forward.

Lee’s moral? “You shouldn’t feel bad about being in a state of ignorance; if you are an enlightened person, you should be in a perpetual state of ignorance. And be very suspicious of linear histories, because it means either that the author had an ax to grind, or he hasn’t done his homework, and there are lots of side stories left to be uncovered.”

Read the whole interview.
[tags]wall street journal, transistors, microchips, integrated circuits, history, creativity, thomas lee, lee gomes[/tags]

The reader is the writer’s collaborator

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Here’s a wonderful quotation from Zadie Smith about reading as a collaborative act (from Michael Leddy via Boingboing):

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

And, in a comic riff on a similar theme, here’s Josh Kornbluth:

Reading is the best, because it allows/forces you to imagine an entire world. Radio is very good, because it only gives you the sounds, leaving you to supply the visuals for yourself. Television and film: well, at least they let you imagine touch and smell. But life, as we experience it, unmediated by media, leaves nothing — nothing — to the imagination.

You call that entertainment!?

Bonus Link: Steven Johnson’s great post from last year about why blogging and writing books are antithetical.
[tags]reading, writing, Zadie Smith, Josh Kornbluth, Steven Johnson[/tags]

Fagles’ cadence

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Earlier this week I got a big kick out of Charles McGrath’s Times piece about Robert Fagles, translator of ancient epics. Fagles has just completed his classical trifecta, adding the Aeneid to his celebrated Iliad and Odyssey.

The other challenge was to keep the whole thing going for 12 books and some 12,000 lines. “You can’t let it sag,” Mr. Fagles said. “Cadence is everything, and that takes a lot of lung, a lot of nerve, a lot of luck.”

Cadence is everything, indeed! That’s a sentence spoken by someone who has so long been shaping the form of language to match the content that the two just spring forth entwined.

Another gem:

“Some days are very Iliadic,” he said. “You’re in a war. And some days it’s all about getting home; you’re like Odysseus. It all depends on what side of the bed you get up on.”

[tags]homer, vergil, iliad, odyssey, robert fagles, aeneid[/tags]

Outliners then and now

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I am addicted to outlining as a means of organizing my work and life. (And no, the outliner in MSWord does not count, it’s a clumsy, kludgy horror that has probably turned off millions to the value of outlining.) I still use Ecco Pro — a long-orphaned Windows outliner — every day. (This old post has links to some of my writing on the topic.) I used Ecco to compile the research for my book, and I use it, GTD-style, to keep the spheres of my life moving in harmony.

Ecco is a fascinating hybrid of the pure outliner that Dave Winer pioneered in the 1980s and the free-form personal database exemplified by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus Agenda, which let you recategorize and invent new categories for your information on the fly. (Today’s tagging phenomenon is a latter-day version of the idea.) Chandler, the product whose development my book Dreaming in Code chronicles, started with the ambition of bringing some of these ideas into the present, though it has since evolved in different directions.

I was reminded of this complex software genealogy recently as I read a page that Winer recently linked to — a detailed chronicle, written in 1988, of how his once-popular outliners (ThinkTank and More) came to be developed. (I found it because Winer linked to it from another page about thinking about the Internet as an idea processor — which is also food for thought.)

I’ve never understood why outliners never found wider adoption. Is it just the curse of Word (once Microsoft “included” outlining in Word, however poorly, the market evaporated)? Is it that people associate outlining with boring work they had to do in high school composition class? Is it that the number of people who like to organize their thoughts in collapsible hierarchies is just not very high? But the alternative model of idea-organization tools, which provides you with more of a 2D or 3D space to place and link words and concepts (cf. The Brain and other “mind-mappers“) has never caught on in a big way, either. Maybe the vast majority of people are still too busy figuring out how to wrestle their computers into submission to concern themselves with trying to use them as (in Howard Rheingold’s phrase) “brain amplifiers.”

Many contemporary outliners (like Shadowplan) feel more like checklist organizers than tools for organizing large amounts of text. With the more sophisticated programs, one problem I have (I’m thinking here of tools like Zoot and InfoSelect) is that they are built like e-mail clients with separate panes — a pane on the left where you expand and collapse nodes, and then a pane on the right where you read the text associated with the node that’s highlighted at the left. This separates the “thing itself” from the “relationships between things.” That’s not the way my mind works: I want to see the things and their relationships — all at once!

In Ecco, as in More, you’ve got the full text of each node right in front of you, in place in the outline hierarchy. This allows you to use the tool — as I understand Dave Winer does — as a primary writing environment; it also allows you to dump huge amounts of information into the outline efficiently, move big pieces around easily, and swoop quickly from a top-level overview to the finer details.

Today Mac users can adopt OmniOutliner, which has a feature called “inline notes” that begins to move it toward the model I prefer. If I were using a Mac every day I’d also check out Eastgate’s Tinderbox, Circus Ponies Notebook and VoodooPad. Windows users can still get Ecco for free. In the new world of web-based apps, there’s not a lot of activity yet — though there is a rudimentary AJAX-based outliner called Sproutliner. 37 Signals, the “small is beautiful” web app company, has a lightweight listmaker called Tada List, along with another product that’s sort of a free-form personal info manager called Backpack. And then of course we come full circle back to Dave Winer, who has created the Web-based outline format OPML (the OPML editor is here) for constructing and sharing Web-based outlines.

I don’t know if outlining software will ever take off, but to me it feels like a natural way to use a computer. I will keep using Ecco until they invent a version of Windows that won’t run it, and I suspect I will outline until the day I die.

POSTSCRIPT: Doc Searls’ technography from Bloggercon IV is a good example of outlining in action. He wrote about it here.
[tags]outliners, pims[/tags]

Again dangerous visions

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I don’t have as low an opinion of Edge in general as Dave Pollard does, and I found the site’s annual Q&A intriguing as always: this year, John Brockman asked his assembled literati, digerati and cognoscenti to answer the question, “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I enjoyed skimming the answers, but also enjoyed Pollard’s rejoinder of his own list. Two of my favorites from the latter:

  The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You’ll be astonished.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Read the whole thing.

Storyville

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Earlier this year I ripped out a clip from the Times that I meant to quote. It’s economist Robert Frank, writing about teaching economics by asking students to apply the abstract principles they’re learning to some specific interesting question they’ve personally encountered in daily life.

It’s also a great piece about why we spend so much energy writing stories and telling tales.

  The initiative was inspired by the discovery that there is no better way to master an idea than to write about it. Although the human brain is remarkably flexible, learning theorists now recognize that it is far better able to absorb information in some forms than others. Thus, according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, children “turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection.” He went on, “If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.” Even well into adulthood, we find it easier to process information in narrative form than in more abstract forms like equations and graphs. Most effective of all are narratives that we construct ourselves.

If this is true — and, based on my own experience, I believe it is — then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

Crunch, fuzz, twang

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I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.

I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.

Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”

I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.

In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:

  The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there.

Alan Kay: “Generate enormous dissatisfaction”

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I am entering the final sprint of completing a first draft of my book between now and Thanksgiving or so, so pardon my general bloggy sluggishness. My plan is to resume somewhat more active blogging in December and return in full blast by January.

In the meantime, here’s something that caught my eye:

One of the computing pioneers whose work I’ve had the pleasure of digging into for my book is Alan Kay. In the course of my research I had occasion to read Kay’s epic account of The Early History of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is the object-oriented programming language Kay created in the early 1970s at Xerox PARC (while he was also inventing much of the rest of modern computing). The paper is full of interesting stuff, but this observation near the end, about how to motivate yourself to tackle difficult challenges, jumped out at me:

  A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth — otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

“Generate enormous dissatisfaction” with one’s work — well, gee, that’s something most ambitious people know how to do, one way or another. But such dissatisfaction quickly blossoms into neurotic self-doubt. Ergo Kay’s careful recommendation to “decouple the dissatisfaction from self-worth”: that’s genius. And, I might add, really, really helpful to anyone laboring over a big project like, say, a book.

Of course, this means that you have to figure out other bases for self-worth than the work one has generated enormous dissatisfaction with!

Book of Jobs

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“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. “

Steve Jobs’ recent commencement speech is really worth reading in full. It gets about as close to the bone, and the truth, as we could expect from a technology CEO, or anyone else.

I find it very hard to reconcile the awareness contained in these words with the reality of the executive pettiness that Jobs’ Apple keeps displaying (suing bloggers, banning publishers from its stores, and so on). But then smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications.