Stay Hungry, Don’t Worry, Go Placidly, and Always Wear Sunscreen

The death of Steve Jobs yesterday was a chance for many to reflect on how the tech titan had directly impacted their everyday lives. Though I had not used an Apple product since my parents traded in our TI-99/4A for an Apple IIc in the mid-1980s, even an i-curmudgeon like myself felt a sense of loss.  For me the impact was from his famous inspirational speech to Stanford Graduates in 2005.

If you have not read it in its entirety, I highly recommend – read it here -. For me, among this particular category of inspiring, insightful, and downright useful advice, it is one of the best.

Certainly it fits in well with other inspiring messages including Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (“Do not worry”), Desiderata by MaxEhrmann (“Go Placidly among the noise and haste”), and the much more lighthearted, but no less useful, Wear Sunscreen by Mary Schmich.

Steve’s summation of his message to graduates? He admits in borrowing it from the Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” but the speech is sprinkled with beauty and insightful nuggets throughout including one of my favorites:

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.*

Which to me sounded similar to the last page of Shel Silverstein’s posthumous, recently-released poems in Everything On It:

When I am gone what will you do? / Who will write and who will draw for you? / Someone smarter, someone new, someone better? / Maybe you?

I do hope the world produces more Steve Jobs and Shel Silversteins, I miss them both.

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* A great Steve Jobs quote that demonstrates this viewpoint is ”When Apple first started out, people couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.” (Walt Mossberg, All Things Digital, May 28, 2003)

On the Dangers of Unskeptical Googling

Fifteen years into this whole internet fad, I had gotten so accustomed to looking for (and readily believing) information I found on the internet that it unfortunately took a rather extreme example to reawaken a healthy skepticism and my perception of facts. 

I was curious about the ratings of the C-SPAN channels and how they compare to other cable channels so I Googled: “C-SPAN nielsen ratings”

The C-SPAN Dancers

And innocently clicked on the first promising result of “C-SPAN Ratings Up …”  I was halfway through an article on how C-SPAN’s addition of the “The House Of Representatives Dancers” had markedly increased their ratings before I eventually realized that I was on the parody site “The Onion (full article here).”

I then began to wonder how many other times I had read complete nonsense on the internet and just didn’t realize it because it wasn’t on an obvious comedy website.

Oh well, just a well-needed reminder to be incredulous of anything found on the internet.  Also a reminder that as information becomes more centralized, it becomes easier to distort – and not always to comedic effect as in the case of The Onion.   

Incidentally the ratings services do not rate C-SPAN (mentioned by Brian Lamb here in an interview in 1996).  Which is good, because what show would want to be beaten in the ratings by BookTV?

Say You Like Turkeys!

(Assume a haughty posture and say condescendingly) “Back when I went to school…“  the only piece of paper I remember ever getting sent back home to a parent was a report card. 

My, how times have changed.  The modern parent is subjected to a daily deluge of school papers that seems to imply a misguided belief that education can be achieved by mere dead tree sacrifice alone.  No Child Left Behind seemed to bring this educational fad to a fever pitch, but only exacerbated the existing problem.  My unscientific signal to noise ratio estimate of these papers would be about 1 marginally meaningful paper to 10 unuseful ones. 

But occasionally one does find a rare gem in the mineshaft.  As happened recently when I saw an assignment to make an “Acrostic (a related phrase for each letter)” out of the word “Thanksgiving.”  I should explain that ”Thanksgiving” is a rather long word to a 2nd grader so some themes may get repeated.  For instance:  ”I (heart) turkeys,” ” No vechtables,” and the rather authoritarian: “Say you like turkeys!”  But see for yourself:

Say You Like Turkeys

Making Social Media Roles Model Real Life

Facebook released new content sharing/filtering rules today and it got me to wondering why these social network sites make such a fundamental thing as modeling roles and relationships so difficult.

It seems in real life you have a version of (or role for) yourself that you expose to these general groups:

• You
• Family
• Close friends (usually less than 10)
• Coworkers
• Schoolmates
• Acquaintances (usually less than 100)
• Special Interest/Group/Club/Hobby Members
• General Public

So I have always been baffled why social content sites don’t use a similar model and let you simply check off which of these groups/roles you wish to publish/expose your content to. 

The Ben Franklin adage that you should “not do anything you don’t want to read about in tomorrow’s paper” is particularly apt in the social media world.  Especially given the number of stories about folks who were fired because coworkers or others saw inappropriate content intended only for close friends (advice on avoiding this here).  So for me personally, I have little interest in most social media until they can get the roles and relationships aspect right. 

To me, Flickr always seemed like the best/easiest site for doing this, but is nonetheless still somewhat restrictive because it only provides 4 role categories: private (you), friend, family, public (I think if they added a coworker category it would be a fairly complete and simple to use model).

Can I be Your Friend?

One of the problems with translating this simple model into the social-media world is that 2 people don’t always have the same view of a relationship.  Unlike your own private consciousness where you can define someone’s role and meaning to you without them knowing, in the social media world, people often know the role that you have assigned them.  You might be afraid that calling someone an “Acquaintance” rather than a “Friend” might hurt their feelings.  Or over time as relationships change, a “Friend” might become an “Acquaintance” and then eventually someone you hardly know at all.  “Demoting” these people from “Friend” to “Acquaintance” might also cause hurt feelings. 

The simple solution to this problem is to simply not let people know what you think their role is; this setting should be kept private and known only to you.  One again, the real world provides a compelling solution to even this dilemma.  The real world – now there is a concept for the Facebook generation.

Fahrenheit (Encryption Key) 451

Available as "Kindle"-ling

A really perceptive article in today’s CS Monitor: Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought.

Until reading, I had not seen the great irony in the unfortunate naming of Amazon’s “Kindle” device and the title and subject matter of Ray Bradbury’s famous book. 

Some really thought provoking and sensible arguments in the article include:

That we are trading ownership for access – access that requires the pre-authorization of a corporation and “thingamajig.”

Well-established principles of Fair Use and First Sale are being marginalized and sweep away.

“…What the Kindle should be igniting is serious debate on the fundamental, inalienable right to property in a digital age – and clarifying what’s yours, mine, and ours.”

The article’s author (also a librarian) also includes a great Ray Bradbury quote on how ”You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them.”  (or he might have added- just convince them to stop thinking they own them).

Happy ‘Buy Nothing Day’

Buy Nothing Day from AdBusters

No doubt completely lost in news of Christmas sales and Black Friday specials is the news that today is in fact “Buy Nothing Day.”   Little wonder if you have never heard of it, no major media outlet ever built a successful ad-revenue-based business model by encouraging people not to buy things.  But nonetheless, the idea that happiness is not derived from consumption and consumerism is an idea whose time hopefully has finally come to the general population. 

Amongst all of the bad economic news we frequently hear, the US has been in an unprecedented period of economic growth for about the last 25 years (since 1982).  Yet bigger houses, more cars, and bunches of more “stuff” have done very little to change or improve our daily lives.   A McMansion is just a house, a big, expensive TV is just a TV, an iPod is just a record/cassette player and a gas-guzzling SUV is just a car.  So perhaps it is finally time to abandon the naïve notions pimped by manufacturers, advertisers, and the associated culture of consumerism.

Sure, it may be as ineffective as the “Great American Smokeout,” but “Buy Nothing Day” is certainly a step in the right direction.  And the first step to a cure is always to first acknowledge that you have a problem to begin with. 

Go ahead and spend a day cleaning your house and not buying more stuff.   Spend some time with friends and loved ones and reflect how maintaining those relationships will return far greater value than buying yet another sweater or purse.  Afraid that if you don’t buy that gift sweater that it may in fact hurt those relationships?  That is a valid concern, but there are plenty of alternate gift ideas that can be very personal and meaningful that don’t involve much spending.  These include such things as a family tree, a framed photo, an address book (with friends/family contact info already filled in), a self-assembled food basket, and many other things limited only by your creativity.

So, Happy Buy Nothing Day – now wasn’t that much more satisfying (not to mention warmer and safer) than camping in front of Best Buy all night – and your basement and/or garage may just be cleaner for it.

Fighting for the Redneck Vote

As if the Obama campaign have not received enough free advertising from the quarterly mailing of 401K and 529 statements (credit to George F. Will for this point), the Obama campaign is getting yet more free publicity from the folks who are showing up to Palin (whose name fittingly enough in Ancient Greek means “backward,” ”repeating,” and “again”) rallies.  

Just a few samples from a single rally in Johnstown, PA:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4515218n http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHrExRHZnm0

Which made it to one of the top stories this week in Digg:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Obama_monkey_video_that_CBS_didn_t_show(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUovpF9LWU)

As I’m sure George McGovern can attest, statistically speaking you are going to have at least a few idiots show up to any public gathering and one has no control over this.  What is controllable however, is whether the campaigns encourage and mimic their tone.  But so far, Palin hasn’t acted much better than the drunken Joe-Sixpack idiot fringe she champions.

Mystery Solved

I always wondered how the daughter was able to successfully put hats, glasses, and you-name-it on our pet dog, when the second I tried to touch or place any object on our dog’s head, she would thrash violently until the foreign object was dislodged and summarily disposed of. 

The secret, as it turns out, as in all endeavors, is persistence.  Just keep doing it again and again (say for fifteen very gleeful and entertaining minutes to a child) and resistence apparently gives way.  At that point, the dog resigns to her fate as a dress-up model and will submit to almost anything (well, OK, even at that point, the dresses apparently are still a challenge).

The Whatifs and Other Monsters Under the Bed

The other night while I was lying awake worrying about something that I can no longer even remember, I came to notice my daughter lying on the floor beside the bed (a frightening shadowy apparition in itself until you learn to expect such behavior).  Eventually she presumably found the uncarpeted floor less hospitable than her own bed and returned there.

The next day I asked her why she was there and I got the standard kid answer for such nighttime behaviors: because of “Monsters under the Bed.”

I then wondered what I in the heck I was doing up at that time myself and realized it was pretty much the same thing: going to some cold, hard, dark place and worrying about my own “Monsters under the Bed.”  Those both irrational and rational fears we have when the din of the outside world quiets and we are left alone with our own unique thoughts and concerns.

This is a time and mood captured perfectly by the Shel Silverstein poem Whatif:

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
and pranced and partied all night long
and sang their same old Whatif song…

…Everything seems well, and then
the nighttime Whatifs strike again!

Shel and I just need to keep telling ourselves: those nighttime Whatifs and Monsters under the Bed aren’t real, they’re just illusions of our overactive imaginations and worst fears.  Even our most rational fears only very seldom come to pass and as wittily told in Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen):

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday

So go back to your own bed.  Turn on a flashlight or shine some hope and optimism into your worried mind and let those Whatifs and Monsters under the Bed fade away and melt back into the shadows.  4PM on some idle Tuesday will no doubt come soon enough, so for now appreciate and be grateful for the day you just had and look forward to and be hopeful for those yet to come.

Current Generation HK’s on Display at the Air & Space Museum

Hunter-Killer(HK) UAV Aircraft

Looking up from the ground floor of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, it is a bit creepy to see the southwest wing’s display of mostly armed UAV Aircraft (UAV = Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).  One cannot help but feel like he or she is suddenly transported to the year 2029 and is accompanying Reese from the movie The Terminator as he tries to evade the autonomous Hunter-Killers (HKs). 

It is interesting that in 1949 George Orwell envisioned a future 35 years in the future (1984) where world-wide totalitarian regimes enslaved their people (using mostly intimidation and propaganda).  Yet, when the year 1984 eventually rolled around, the movie The Terminator envisioned an even grimmer future (this time 45 years in the future) where machines enslave and try to annihilate the entire human race. 

If Darwinism is indeed correct, that may yet come to pass.  But nifty machines like these first crude UAVs may serve an intermediate step and bridge the gap between both of these dystopic visions.  A future in which totalitarian regimes can manufacture an entire robot army to subjugate humans at will (propaganda no longer required). 

Today’s generation still sees these machines as mostly non-threatening and neat.  But who knows? HKs may soon be coming to a neighborhood near you - and this time they may be a little more threatening than a Roomba?