Haunted by Blackberry Buzz

The incessant noise follows me everywhere--computer speakers, conference
room phones, even my car radio--like the constant whine of a
mosquito buzzing around my ears, except you can't swat
it. Turning down the speaker volume doesn't help. Moving the damned thing
several feet away is equally ineffective--you've got to actually hurl
it into another room.

RIM's only apparent fix for the problem has been to harden the case so
it doesn't break when I throw it (both a plus and a minus). Perhaps an exorcist would help.

The silver lining: in conference rooms with a speakerphone, the
horrible buzz forces blackberry users to turn off their devices and focus on the meeting.

A Sky Spectacle

I don't know precisely where I am, except that I'm roughly six miles from the Earth and heading west. Several miles to the north, and perhaps 2 miles beneath, a brilliant electrical storm illuminates a cloud formation. The sparks fly at the surprising rate of one or two every second, as the light strobes in fiery spectacle.

I had thought this morning that the day couldn't get any better, tickled as I was to be golfing the legendary Augusta National course. The Georgia air was a balmy 70, the fairways greener than Al Gore, and my new, used woods from eBay swinging smooth. (Still, Jim "800-Flowers" McCann bested me by a stroke.) The setting was pastoral and glorious, but Nature's outdoing herself tonight with a fireworks display that barely resembles my normally grounded view of lightning.

It's humbling that physicists today know little more than Ben Franklin did as to the root cause of this thunderous phenomenon. (According to my favorite prevailing theory, Earth-bound solar winds carry starry particles that ignite the atmospheric explosions.) I recall that Ben Franklin's son had assisted his father with his daredevil experiment (don't try this at home--stormy kite-flying is not a good family activity), which reminds me of a conversation I had with my own 7 year old several months back as we drifted off to sleep in his room.

I had just answered--to the best of my ability--his question about what options people have for fuel sources. I thought that my list had sedated him for the night, but after some silence he asked me whether lightning can be a fuel source. Good idea, I said, but you can't harvest the power in lightning because you don't know where it will strike. But aren't there places, he asked, where you're likely to get much more than average? I supposed that there are, but I also reasoned confidently that the power is too bursty for any equipment to safely capture in a sustainable way. Okay, he said, but couldn't you attach a lightning rod to a bunch of other rods that branch out further and further, until the current spreads out enough to safely collect?

Yikes, I had no clue. But his idea's intriguing--at least as feasible as some of the technologies I assess for investment. (Action item: I must introduce him to my Cleantech partner Justin, just as soon as the boy graduates from second grade.) In my final moments watching the sparks flash through the clouds, they suddenly resemble the charged, frenetic neurons of a 7 year old mind.

I still don't know precisely where I am, but I do know exactly where I want to be.

Goodbye Kurt. So it goes.

On Thursday, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of my favorite authors, died at the age of 84.

Vonnegut had succeeded Isaac Asimov (my other favorite) as Honorary President of the American Humanists Association. Like Asimov. Vonnegut mastered the communication of complex ideas through simple prose. When Vonnegut eulogized Asimov, he joked that Asimov is up in Heaven now.

If you haven't read Vonnegut's books, it's time to start! Sirens of Titan was a personal favorite, but Slaughterhouse Five is the book he's most famous for (and the literary reference behind "So it goes"); it's a fictional derivative of his experience as a World War II prisoner of war in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing. In his last book, Man Without a Country, Vonnegut laments the lack of direction and leadership in our nation, decrying our government's religious crusades and eco-terrorism with the grumpiness of an old man who just no longer gives a shit. But if you have an issue with commitment, start with the short stories in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse.

I think that looking back on his death, Vonnegut would be pleased that the cause of his expiration was a head injury from falling. Even thirty years before he published God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, he had written that his sister's dying words, "No pain," was a recurring theme of his works.

Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Crashed Your Car in Bay Area?

I always saw the dings and scratches on our minivan as a badge of honor. But despite my stingy inclinations, Nathalie decided that after 6 years of heavy industrial abuse, our Honda Odyssey deserved a facelift. Though I expected to be ripped off as usual, we had such a good experience this time that I had to blog it, for the benefit of all those reckless drivers like us who collect streaks of paint on their vehicles.

Now if you only like to pay dealers for service, you may not wish to hire Louis, because he doesn't even have a garage. BUT, Louis makes house calls from his well equipped van, repairing your car over several days right in your driveway. And without the overhead, he charges what you think an auto body mechanic should actually charge. In our case, Louis replaced the entire rear of our van (including the brake and signal lights) and a side mirror, and he banged out and painted all the dents on the sides and front for $1300.

Louis obviously has no office telephone or email, but you can reach him on his cell at 408.230.5440.

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Yoggie: Silly Name, Serious Protection

If you're the family IT guy, I recommend you install a Yoggie Gatekeeper. This credit-card-sized gizmo (designed for mobile protection of road warrior laptops) can be inserted between your router and LAN switch to protect all downstream PCs in your home from just about any kind of attack. You don't have to install security software at each PC, and you can set the security settings for each PC centrally, so your 7-year old can't bypass the filters (don't get me started). By vesting the security functions in a separate processor the way that enterprises do, your network is much safer from exploits (in fact Yoggie won the Innovation Station competition at RSA this year). But more importantly, the out-of-box experience is iPod-like, and the whole installation takes less than 5 minutes unless you gawk for too long.

This is not a plug for a Bessemer portfolio company, but I do happen to know the CEO Shlomo Touboul, because he founded Finjan. In fact, years after Shlomo first left Finjan, I recruited him back as CEO. (Contrary to what some bloggers tell you, not all VC's want to get rid of the founders.)

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My TED Highlights

I had a blast at the Technology Entertainment Design conference of 2007. Four days of brain camp with the most remarkable people. There were great scientists, like Murray Gell-mann, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Widom, E.O. Wilson, Paul Ewald, and Carolyn Porco from NASA’s Cassini Probe team, who brought photos of Titan’s landscape. Bill Clinton was there to solicit help for his foundation work in Rwanda. (He still has great speechwriters: “The terrorists in London were home-grown citizens who valued their differences from other British citizens more than their common humanity,” said the President. “That’s the central psychological plague of humanity in the 21st century.”) Kareem Abdul Jabaar talked to us about growing up in Harlem (but why did all 7 feet and two inches of Kareem have to sit in the front row)? Dean Kamen shared his development of a prosthetic arm for Iraqi veterans that has 14 degrees of freedom, temperature sensing, and fine motor movements. BMW unveiled their Hydrogen 7 car at a lunch where the water was served in bottles labeled EXHAUST (but they evaded the tough questions on hydrogen extraction and distribution), and I got to test drive a prototype of the 2008 Lexus hybrid LS600 (smooth). Thomas Dolby, Paul Simon and Tracy Chapman all performed (Peter Gabriel just listened), as did a great R&B vocalist/guitarist named Raul Midon. Microsoft architects showed off Virtual Earth, and another mapping tool that actually links photos on the web based on the content, with the intelligence to stitch them together into landscapes. (Think of the thousand photos one might find online of the Eiffel Tower—this software synthesizes those photos into a 3D rendering of the tower, where you can zoom into the detail of any one of the photos.) Still, Google won the day by serving free coffee, drinks and snacks throughout the week. Meg Ryan, Goldie Hawn, and Forrest Whitaker represented the thespian crowd. The Disney Imagineering team brought a pimped out Segway driven by muppets who elicited laughs at my expense when their contraption spritzed me. We heard from Jok Church the children’s science writer, Emily Oster the Harvard economist, Jamie Nachtwey the war photographer, and Lost writer JJ Abrams. Silicon Valley was represented by Alan Kay, Kevin Lynch, Bill Gross, Jeff Skoll, Lawrence Lessig, Sergey and Larry (with a retinue of friends and family), John Doerr and a herd of other VC’s. I had lunch with Saul Hansell (I recommend it--New York Times makes him pick up the tab), and I hung out for an hour with the great James Randi, as he wowed us with his conjuring. During his talk, Randi wondered why the cold readers who channel the dead always seem to find our loved ones in Heaven—why aren’t any of them ever in Hell? He tested homeopathy by downing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. We saw two robotic demonstrations, both of which featured evolutionary learning (the beach dweller on the right, powered by wind, uses wind and water sensors to avoid drowning). Richard Branson shared renderings of his tourism space craft. It was designed by Philippe Starck, who started his presentation by summing up what the rest of us felt: compared to the speakers he just heard, “I feel like a shit.”

TED TED2007 Clinton randi pinker jabaar lessig
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Follow-Up for TEDizens

As promised, here are the resources I recommended in today's TED course on Raising Children Without God:

Online Materials

Richard Dawkins' letter to his 10-year-old daughter on "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing."

Video of Richard Dawkins' talk at Kepler's Bookstore (with my introduction).

Atheist Advisements for review and collaboration.

Background on Time Banks USA, whose member communities are popping up everywhere as a nexus for people to pool their time and assistance.

Reading for Grownups (with links to Kepler's Bookstore for online ordering)

Why People Believe Weird Things
by Michael Shermer

This book helped me understand my mind's vulnerabilities to infection by superstition and scams.

A Devil's Chaplain
by Richard Dawkins

A series of clearly written essays for the layman on the theory of evolution, intelligent design, evolutionary psychology and parasitic, religious memes.

God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

A no-holds-barred deconstruction of faith. Chapter 7 exposes some barbaric Biblical passages that my rabbis forgot to mention.

Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris

A concise and compelling call to action. No other bathroom read will provoke you to change the world like this one.

Skeptic Magazine

A monthly dose of superstition debunked, featuring columnist James Randi.

Reading for Kids (with links to Skeptics Society Store)

Skeptic Jr. Magazine

Each issue tackles a paranormal phenomenon, and shows where the thinking went wrong.

Maybe Yes, Maybe No
by Dan Barker

Adventures of Andrea, a skeptic. Cartoon strip style. How to check out extraordinary claims.

Sasquatches from Outer Space
by Tim Yule

Covers Astrology, bigfoot, the Bermuda triangle, ESP, corp circles, Loch Ness Monster,Vampires, and UFOs and aliens. A “Try This” section encourages critical thinking skills. (Ages 10-15)

The Magic Detectives
by Joe Nickell

30 mysteries encourages readers to think for themselves before the solution is offered. (Ages 9-14)

Mythbusters
by Mary Packard

Borrowing from their Discovery Channel TV show, Adam and Jamie evaluate and test claims, with lots of hands on fun for the reader.

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