Buck's Stories

THE FARM OF THE FUTURE -- AN APOLOGY TO STEVE JOBS -- and A RIF ON BOOK COLLECTING

2011-12-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

Bill Davidow stopped in recently and introduced me to Ko Nishimura. Ko was peddling lettuce and I explained that we already had plenty of lettuce and why did I need his. Ko said it was rather special and I felt a bit like I was being sold magic beans. I was right. I was invited to the farm in Campbell and when I arrived at a nondescript warehouse I stepped into the farm of the future.

Ecopia Farms™ is a tech startup featuring some pretty bright lights such as Bill Davidow, cofounder of Mohr Davidow the venerable VC firm, and Ko who as CEO grew electronic parts supplier, Selectron, from $93 million a year to over $18 billion. Ko was also on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where the Nobel crowd hangs out. Their other co-conspirator is Sam Araki who built satellites for many years as the President of Lockheed Martin Missile and Space Company. So you might be getting the notion that these are not your average farmers or indeed typical startup guys. None of these fellows is exactly a kid but they bring an exuberance to the venture as if it sprung from a dorm room, yet tempered with their daunting collective wisdom.
It is sweetly ironic that Ko and Sam should end up as farmers. As kids their fathers were both farmers who wanted to make sure that their sons weren’t stuck behind the plow, so they went to college and ended up pursuing careers in industry. But here they are - behind the plow. In Japan this is know as “Big Bachi” or the gods reversing your plans by playing a trick on you.

Ko and I agree that our emphasis in this country on food as a commodity as opposed to being a substance we treat with reverence needs to be rethought. Based on income, food is cheaper here than anywhere else in the world but we are losing ground against the interests of agribusiness. Ko says that his grandmother taught him to treat food and life itself as a sacred trust and he feels that he is keeping doing right by her with Ecopia Farms. Sam’s father was an organic agricultural innovator who pioneered the use of bat guano and fishmeal to grow legendary produce. Now they are taking this family heritage and giving it a 21st Century spin. These folks have assembled a powerful team. The COO is Phil Fok who heads up the actual farming. He is turning out both greens and process patents at a prodigious pace.
I have seen several high-rise farming schemes. In fact there is a whole industry devoted to making pretty drawings of 50-story farms that are not remotely practical. Ecopia Farms is different. Using a multi-level growing rack with low-temp high-efficiency controlled-spectrum lights they can make greens stand up and sing. These plants are grown organically in a proprietary soil and they use about 1% of the water of outdoor farming. The installation is part R & D facility and part working farm, shipping to the best restaurants in the Bay Area. They grow tiny micro greens and herbs as well as lettuces, arugula, kale, chard and a host of other items. Many of the whole lettuces are about the size of a rose flower. The first full-scale Ecopia Farms operation is in a 23,000 sq. ft. warehouse (about ½ acre) which produces the equivalent of a traditional 100-acre farm. There is a great deal of unused warehouse space in cities all around the country and Ecopia Farms is gearing up to be the ultimate expression of “locally produced”

By precisely controlling the light, soil and water they take commercially available organic seed and make it produce far more efficiently than can be done outdoors. Naturally one thinks of the electricity used to light all the racks but I’m told that the efficiency is so high that the florescent room lights actually use more power than the grow lights. Add photovoltaics to the roofs and urban farming has come of age.
Some firms in the green space are well intentioned but wholly unworkable. Electric airplanes, viable fuel from algae and self-assembling solar electric farms make nice articles but in the real world are a waste of time. I’ve seen Ecopia Farms and we are now carrying the product. Check our specials menu for a featured salad.
Ecopiafarms.com

Dr. Rodney Perkins Breakfast Special 2.0
Dr. Perkins is a friend of mine and has been since the mid-80s when he was my last client before I went into the restaurant business. Rodney happens to be a world-renowned ear surgeon and an inventor. He has a great many patients and has led the world of hearing by merging innovative software with hearing hardware, not unlike Steve Jobs did at Apple.

The only name we have on any of the menu items (besides my wife’s pork chops) is The Dr. Rodney Perkins Breakfast Special. It has been a staple of our menu for nearly 10 years. Not one to rest on his past culinary success Rodney has devised a new incarnation of this old favorite.

Although Dr. Perkins was a founder of the first company to use collagen injections for wrinkles, the first company to commercialized a medical laser that was developed from scratch to be a surgical laser, the first company to introduce high tech signal processing into the hearing device industry and a founder of multiple successful medical device companies in a wide range of surgical specialties, he is inordinately pleased with his spot on the menu and he should be. It’s a healthy omelet - low in fat and calories and remarkably satisfying.

He tells me he is already working on 3.0.

Sorry Steve
I used to be a general building contractor back in the Pleistocene. My first job was fixing a stuck door in a house in Atherton and three years later I had remodeled the entire 25,000 sq. ft. mansion. Essentially I learned my trade by trial and error on this one house. Then I started job #2.

I went to see a young computer guy in Los Gatos who had bought an unremarkable 1920s tract house that he thought he’d fix up. When we first met he showed me his computer. It was an Apple 2. We sat on the floor in a room devoid of furniture and he explained that he could create a column and a row and by merging the numbers calculate a result. “Big deal,” I thought. I asked him how many employees he had and was startled when he said about 250. Now that impressed me. I had just one, plus my partner and wife, Margaret.

Thus began a year of yet more trial and error. I’ve read the new book about Steve Jobs and I shake my head in wonder that he put up with me for so long. We were actually friends though, and spent a good deal of time together. He and his girlfriend Barbara came up to our house and we frequently went out to dinner. In fact it was Barbara who picked the name for our two-week old second son, Tyler. One day, early in the job, Barbara came home as Steve and I were conferring on the front porch. She was in great distress and said, “John Lennon has been killed.” Steve burst onto tears and we had a group hug. It was a moment of raw humanity with Steve. There was a lot more emotion to come.

The house was a modest one and our aim was to make it a little gem. The problem was I was merely handy and Steve wanted perfection. Building is a skill like any other and to be good at it requires a great deal of experience; experience I didn’t yet have. But beyond that Steve had developed the now well documented notion that even if you think otherwise you can do a lot better than you think you can and that every detail matters.

Once he took me into his basement and pointed out the phone block mounted to a piece of plywood. It had a single wire running across its surface and he asked that we make it straight and evenly space the staples. I just rolled my eyes and argued with him that it didn’t matter. I lost that argument and all of the others. Steve yelled at a lot of people and the reports say he was pretty abusive. He must have cut me some slack because I recall him yelling but it wasn’t memorably vicious.
During the time we were together Apple went public and I now know that he was under a great deal of stress. At work he was fully in command but at home he was less sure. Steve is often pictured sitting on the floor of this house in his profound simplicity and I can report that during the time I knew him he really did sleep on a mattress on the dining room floor and his only furniture was a kitchen table and chairs. The reason he is pictured sitting on the floor is that he could not pick a couch. I know, I went couch shopping with him. I also went car shopping with him. He drove an old Mercedes and after his highly successful IPO at the age of 25 he thought a new car was in order. The very definition of frustrating is car shopping with Steve Jobs. We went to several dealerships and each time the over-choice and flawed design made it impossible for him to pick one and we went home in the old car. Of course he could have just bought them all but Steve was never wired for excess.

One of my last encounters with Steve was when he was holding back payment because of some inadequacies on the job. I was pretty desperate to get paid and early one morning I jumped on him in bed and half-mockingly grabbed him by the neck and told him he better pay me or he was going to be the deadest - youngest - richest self-made man. In the end we worked it out and he paid me.
For many years Steve lived in Woodside but he didn’t feel comfortable coming into Buck’s and I don’t think he ever did. Now that I am older I really appreciate his persnicketyness. Steve wasn’t in a position to teach me my trade, but he was a teacher but if the student isn’t ready…. So Steve, I’m sorry I wasn’t a better craftsman. Now I get it, but alas it’s too late.

My Books – mine, all mine, damnit!
I collect rare books. If you’re a collector you know that it is just crazy to pass some things up so I’m fortunate that there are not a great many books in my nitch or I would be broke. I collect books with things in them. Simply that. Books either one-off or editions that have had things applied to the inside. They could contain letters or even envelops. I recently acquired a fantastic collection of 457 ‘covers.’ These are envelops with pictures on the outside commemorating this or that. This collection is one person’s life’s work. The collection dates from the Civil War through the Spanish American War right through WWI. The collector fancied anti-Confederacy pictures many of which are pretty harsh. Well it was war, right?

Several of these books are on display at Buck’s. One of my favorites is in the bar. It is a collection of cigarette cards pasted in a book from the 1920s. Not wildly rare in itself but surrounding the open book in the frame you will see original, miniature tempera painting of the warships of the world. I have several hundred of these tiny paintings with detail so miniscule that the finest details disappears below view and it must have been done under a huge magnifier with a single hair brush.

In the back hall is another book of cigarette card photos, hand-tinted in Algeria, about a hundred years ago. They are sort of harem women and I have shuffled the cards around to display the more demure ones because most of them are pretty naked. They are actually French prostitutes wearing, or barely wearing, lavish costumes. On the wall opposite that is a collection of fabric samples or more exactly the trim used on lampshades and curtains. There is a French word for this trade but I can’t recall it. Please if you know the term clue me in. These materials were manufactured in New York’s Garment District in the 1920s by the Sig Heller Company and it is a salesman’s sample book. One day a fellow came up to me very excited. “I went to grammar school with Siggy Heller the grandson of this manufacturer.” Nice.

Near the back of the restaurant, mounted on two columns, are pages from the one book I specialize in. I have 7 examples and am always looking for more. I have visited the copies at Stanford and the British Library and but have been unable to locate many others. The book, is called Ancient Coins and was published in 1852. It is a brilliant treatise on coins from their invention to late Roman times. That’s a pretty good run but after nearly 3,000 years coins are about to disappear. The books contain 11 pages of coin replicas. In the mid 19th century a new type of binding was invented to replace stitching called ‘perfect binding’ with a glued edge. It is far from perfect and so these books have generally fallen apart. All but one of mine have been rebound. This alone is an interesting tour through the world of binding.…are you still awake…?

Anyway, please, please, please if anyone can think of a pedantic Greek or Latin phrase I can use to refer to this sort of book I would love to start using it.

2011-04-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

Opps, I misspelled Gabriel, well tough no one reads this anyway. But if they (you) did (do) here it goes...

I’m a member of a cult. It’s true. It’s a non-religious one though and mostly composed of left-wingers but make no mistake, we have cult-like tendencies. This is my annual report on the hijinx in Long Beach at the TED Conference. The name means Technology Entertainment and Design. This year it could well have used the letter ‘A’ as well because there was a heavy emphasis on the arts. Like most topics at TED the arts come freighted with political and social import. Each year there is prizewinner who is given a hundred grand and the platform to make a wish. These wishes don’t include having the Budweiser girls dance at your summer BBQ (Yes I’m talking to you, Kelly) but are more like Jamie Oliver’s wish from last year that “Every child be taught to cook in school.” Of course this is simply ha-larious. Take it from me kids, cooking can only be done by experts in elaborately equipped gigantic factories. Plus you need packaging, trucks, advertising and lawyers. No. Food preparation is not for amateurs.

This year’s prizewinner, JR, had a much more down to earth idea. Go into ghettos and politically charged environments and rumble. JR is a 26-year-old Parisian street artist who gave up the spray can to travel with a small band of outlaws to very troubled cities to shoot people. It’s true. JR favors a very short barrel so he has to creep close to his quarry and from a couple of feet…aims and blam! He has their picture. He then takes these images and blows them up to billboard size and pastes them like wallpaper on the favelas in Rio, or ‘The Wall’ in Palestine or a desperate street in India. The idea is to involve the inhabitants in their neighborhoods and their very lives. He explains it far better than I can but, trust me, this guy has the magic; just look him up. “Stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project & together we’ll turn the world inside out.” This is JR’s wish. 1930’s movie theaters in the Mission in the City and JR’s team has expressed interest in doing a project there. insideoutproject.net

TED is a five-day gab fest with about 70 speakers discussing everything from astrophysics and neuropathology to how very, very wrong that person was who last year promoted that vastly increased video gamesmanship as a way to save society.

Some of the most unlikely characters speak such as Mohamed Nanabhay, head of Al Jazeera, the once reviled Arabic news agency…now, not so. He was as relevant as the CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooya, was ill-advised. She seemed like a perfectly nice person and a capable CEO as she told us about the good works Pepsi is doing to help the disadvantaged. What she didn’t mention was that most of what Pepsi sells is child-blimping sugar water and meatless taco meat. Well no one is perfect but some product lines are less perfect than others.

We saw the stunning pictures of Paul Nicklen, the soft-spoken National Geographic photographer who encountered the extraordinarily vicious leopard seal under the ice in the south polar sea. Leopard seals have been know to crash through several feet of ice to eat people right down to and even including their boots, except this seems to be unsubstantiated. Paul showed us pictures of the encounter he had of the repeated attempts by the toothy 12-foot seal trying to feed him like your granny stuffing you with pabulum (but made out of penguins).

At TED we don’t just sit in comfy chairs like a bunch of smug over-achieving fat cats (OK there is a lot of that) but we also powwow in the social spaces. Myself, I am sometimes mistaken for someone of consequence (a rumor that has got about) to my perennially startled amusement. At one point I was talking about the future of the internet to a fellow who turned out to be the Steven Bratt, the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation at M.I.T. He said he found my ideas compelling and brought over his associate to participate in the conversation. I found myself laying out the future of the WWW to Tim Burners-Lee, the guy who invented it. Yoohoo, people, I sell pancakes…professionally.

Speaking of food, the wacky and wise Nathan Myhrvold (ex-CTO at Microsoft) unveiled his $500 - 50 pound cookbook where he teaches us how to cook an egg in about 4 hours. But that egg is perfect. Nathan built a lab and has dissected the act of food preparation into its most basic components and then puts it all back together. This is an excellent how-to guide for sawing a remarkable amount of cooking equipment into twain to demonstrate the action inside. After sawing down the middle of a commercial convection oven he commented gleefully that the great thing about cutting machines in half is that you’ve got 2, count em, 2 halves. The man is a mad genius.

Deb Roy had a fascinating study on the formation of language. Using the ultimate nannycam he put cameras in every room of his house and taped the first 60,000 hours of the growing up process of his son. Deb was able to record the development of every word his son learned and how it happened. The camera tracked all the kid’s movements as well as those of the rest of the family. Brave New World you say? Well get-a-grip. Privacy is soooo 2003. Really, Deb’s study is quite a revelation but please watch the swearing around the kid will ya?

Morgan Spurlock depressed me with his presentation. Now, Morgan is a documentary film burner who made Super Size Me about his 30-day sentence at McDonalds. He has made a new film titled The Best Movie Money Can Buy. This is the tale of Morgan transparently selling product placement as the sole purpose of his documentary. He was able to get some sponsors though most (like PepsiCo) preferred not to join in. This is because (like the cigarette ads which show the young and pretty 20 somethings laughing and cavorting) they really sell addiction and death. Transparency is … err…hard for some companies. The depressing part of his talk (which will seen by millions) was that the very presentation itself was auctioned to a sponsor and someone bought the naming rights to: Some Damn Co. presents Morgan Spurlock. I actually forgot the name of the firm that bought it but it sold for 7,200 bucks which about what I pay my boat boy to polish the cleats on my yacht for a week.

Long Beach is a strange venue but the town is certainly glad to have us. The downtown looks peppy enough but a couple of blocks off the main drag reveals a business community that reminds me of Detroit but with better weather. The Long Beach airport buildings appear to be made of bolted together trailers and we quaintly wandered across the tarmac and actually climbed up and down stairs from our plane like Richard Nixon visiting Liberia. But Long Beach has its special charms. It is one of the few cities to feature a Seven Eleven with four working oil wells in the parking lot. A hundred years ago this area was the biggest oil producer in the world. It still smells like the whole town is being reroofed.

Bill Gates introduced a man he thinks is pretty hot stuff, Salmon Kahn, who founded the Kahn Academy. Sal is a Bay Area guy who gave up his servitude in the hedge fund mines to present short, simple online videos teaching all sorts of subjects. He started with math but has moved into economics and physics. It is his theory that lectures should be seen at home and that the homework is better being done in class. I think he might do to American education what Netflix did to Blockbuster. He has personally created 2,100 videos with 40,670,660 lessons delivered as of his speech. The Los Altos School Distinct has a pilot project using his teaching tools. Bill says Sal is the most important educator he has ever met.

Most of the talks are 18 minutes but some are just 3 like the one from the guy who told us about being on the jet that landed in the Hudson. He could see the river coming on fast and was sure that it was the end. But it wasn’t. His takeaway was: don’t put anything off because tomorrow can arrive unexpectedly…or not (I must finish Remembrance of Things Past, tonight!)

Some talks come with vivid demonstrations like that of the Handspring Puppet Company. These stage crafters built a lifelike full-sized horse with three actors inside it for a London (coming to New York) play called War Horse. You can see the puppeteers standing below the cane and leather puppet but in an instant you are made to see the horse as real or even more than real.

Reality is blurred once again when you hear about the advances in medicine such as the artificial human bladder the surgeon Anthony Atala printed on a modified dot matrix desktop printer and implanted in a teenage boy. It is still working after several years and the doctor is now printing kidneys, which are in a test phase.

TED is about the strange and transcendent. Strange is the savant Daniel Tammet who you can see a good deal of on youtube. He is best known as having recently recited, from memory, 22,514 digits of pi. Let me try… is it 3.141 or is it 3.414? Daniel also has synesthesia. This is a rare condition where the senses get scrambled. He can hear colors and smell sounds. Hey, I went to Berkeley in the 60’s. We could all do that then.

Stanley McChrystal the commander in the Middle East was with us and he told us what a good soldier he was but failed to mention his ill timed Rolling Stone interview in which he dissed the Commander-in-Chief and got tossed out on his keester. I was sitting right next to Gavan Newsom who diplomatically withheld comment. Julie Taymore was a refreshing contrast to Stanley. She headed up the disastrous Spiderman musical and she made reference to it with grace and humor. Even though this project hasn’t worked out so well she was the creative force behind the Lion King and I expect her to come roaring back in her next chapter.

My favorite presenters are the artists like Eric Whitace. He is a composer and a conductor who gave us Lux Aurumque. Here he assembled 185 singers from 12 countries to sing his choral work, virtually, then cut all them together and mapped each singer’s video on the screen. Since then he has done another video with 2,000 singers revolving slowly in giant spheres. It is spookily like the 22nd century.

22-year-old Sarah Kay brought us back to the present with her a-mazing slam poetry about growing up in New York with street smarts and a good attitude. She was my favorite of all the stage jockeys. You can finder her at http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/18/if-i-should-have-a-daughter-sarah-kay-on-ted-com/
Another artist was Homaro Cantu. He works in food at Moto in Chicago. This is America’s answer to El Bulli, in Spain, so it really isn’t food so much as theatrical gastronomy. I think I know where the other half of Myorvald ’s oven went. Here is a restaurant guy who isn’t concerned with nutrition, price, sustainability or practicality. With all that you still can’t get a reservation. Maybe I should try freezing maple syrup in liquid nitrogen. Help, someone call Jamie Oliver!

There are somber topics with hopeful notes such as the Egyptian Google employee who enabled the first wave of the Egyptian revolution. He told the TED crowd that the most remarkable thing about the uprising was that everyone (and no one) were the leaders.

We saw the first public demo of the Bubbli augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos in a bubble shape. Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a series of pictures with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that ‘bubble’ by holding their own phones in front of them. A frivolous toy? Maybe, but so was Twitter.

Of course there were parties at night and (so unlike high school) I found myself at the cool kids party where I spoke to a couple of guys who told me that their fathers were in a movie together called Don’t Look Back, a long-ago documentary featuring Donovan and Bob Dylan. Oh, man I even have a son named Dylan. Norman Lear showed up; Demi Moore and Aston Kutcher drifted in and it became a real Hollywood scene but with more oil wells in the front yard than you see in Beverly Hills. (Note: They aren’t entirely absent in Beverly Hills by the way. There are producing wells on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. BHHS is floating on it; a fact that is cruelly ironic.)

The TED movement has grown far beyond the confines of Long Beach. In the last couple of years TEDX events have sprung up from Mombasa to Miami. These one-day affairs cost just $100 and follow the same basic format. There are several in the Bay Area throughout the year. Some 1,500 have already happened with another 800 are being planning. There is also a big TED event this summer in Edinburgh Scotland.

People think you have to be invited to go to the main event but this isn’t really the case, though it is generally sold out more then a year in advance. People do get into the French Laundry so you no doubt can come to TED if you are persistent. They let me in and I sell pancakes for a living.

Books Books Books

We have four great books by friends of mine to discuss this month. All these authors have been featured here before with previous books. But because these books don’t have the requisite three-flattering-pages-about-Jamis I don’t actually carry them here but I think, if you are very clever, you can find them.

Overconnected by Bill Davidow (Mohr
Davidow Venture Partners cofounder) is a somewhat depressing look at some of the dark consequences the internet can have on economies and political systems. (well I guess it can’t all be The Bernstein Bears Go to Disneyland) The shape and tenor of our interwoven world has basically come to us a compromised collection of default settings and this self assembly doesn’t come with robust failsafe protections. Bill has seen the internet grow from his insider’s point of view and the book is a cautionary tale in a world where unintended consequences are multiplied by ubiquitous connectivity.

In Next Medicine: The Science and Civics of Health Dr. Walter Bortz tells us that our medical system is essentially backwards. We attempt to fix what breaks verses preventing illness. Dr. Bortz should know a thing or two about health as a gerontologist who has gone deep into the subject. The fact is our medical techniques are the envy of the world but the economics and distribution of resources is slipping fast. It isn’t just some arm-chair gabbing either because Wally has made his own life an example of lifelong fitness. In fact, last time I checked he and his wife Ruth Anne had about 60 marathons between them.

Andy Kessler is a funny writer. Breezy and full of pith and vinegar with his up-in-your-grill gonzo journalism. Andy lays out a new manifesto for unleashing entrepreneurial creativity in Eat People. ”Andy is a recovering Wall Street hedge funder who is for, growth for growth sake guy supporting unfettered marketplaces with an unromantic view of government protections to preserve the status quo of ongoing businesses. If they fail, let em go. Andy makes the dismal science of economics lively and with his hilarious push o the pen it goes down easily.
Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions examines how to promote your brand in a world of vicious competition and ethical conflicts. Richard Branson say, “Guy’s book captures the importance – and the - art of believing in an idea that delivers something entirely unique to the customer. The power of a really good idea to transform the marketplace and individual customer experiences is huge and this book offers a wealth of insights to help business and entrepreneurs tap into that potential.

New England Walkabout, Bill Draper and a whale hits the beach

2010-12-30T13:47:00.000-08:00

New England Walkabout
It was fall and time for a trip to New England. My great friend Craig Harvey and I landed in Boston and things went well at first. We rented some sort of Honda and pushed start but the beast refused to move. We pumped the brake peddle, and whispered incantations; we yelled threats but were finally forced to ask a young fellow in the yard how they could rent us a brand new car that wouldn’t start. He looked at us with kindness and explained that all we had to do was push on the pedal (formerly known as the gas peddle) because it was a hybrid and it was actually on all along.

Ok, Ok, let’s get out of here. So into Boston which glowed invitingly in the distance. My advice - don’t take the 90 into town. Sure it goes to Boston but it has no exits at all in Bean Town so we ended up in Cambridge and had to double back. We were headed for the North End but somehow missed it and after about an hour found ourselves back at the airport. In fact, right in front of the Hertz office. We went inside and asked directions. It turned out that the neighborhood we were headed for was not much more than a long walk, which we considered doing at that point. Finally we parked in town and tried to open the trunk. This turned out to be something of a challenge. It was cold and Craig wanted his jacket. After a careful search and an expletive-filled interval, we uncovered the cleverly camouflaged release button where we were surprised to discover that his bag was back at the Hertz counter. This was starting to get interesting. So, to the Hertz office once more where we grabbed the bag under the suspicious glare of the counterman. Safaris like this are really quite difficult and fraught with peril - so be warned. We went back to Boston but failing to find parking ended up in Cambridge where we had been seemingly days before.

We stopped at a hotel and asked for a room. The desk clerk laughed heartily and when he calmed down explained that it was regatta weekend, the biggest weekend of the year. The Head of The Charles is a boat race where folks from all over the world come to the historied river to row skinny watercraft up and down, all the time being screamed at by some angry little person with a megaphone.

Just before bursting into tears at the prospect of sleeping in the car (me, not Craig) they miraculously scrounged a room they had been saving and we were in. The next morning as we approached our demon car we discovered it was running. It seems the engine charges the battery and comes on from time to time, it you don’t shut the thing down. No matter, it gets great mileage even when it is left running all night.

The race was spectacular. On a clear cool morning from the JFK Bridge, with Harvard as the backdrop, we inspected these clever craft sliding by. It was one of those great Ivy League moments that made us - two Berkeley alums - envious until we remembered that the genius types today often drop out of Harvard and move to our neck of the woods.

Our next stop was Concord. You know, home of the Concord grape. Ok Concord, what else have you done for us? Actually they did quite a bit. Concord was the Palo Alto of its day. The Revolutionary War started there because it was a place was the big thinkers lived. At the Concord Museum they have one of the lanterns on display that were lit in the Old North Church indicating if the Redcoats were coming by land or sea. Now it might be one of lanterns but I’m in the famous artifact business too, so I wonder.

When they weren’t starting wars and inventing grape juice the local intelligencia wrote about nature and self-reliance. Emerson proposed that we have a respect for the natural world as opposed to the popular feeling that we were at odds nature so he is considered by many to be the father of the ecology movement. Louisa M. Alcott promoted women’s rights so the women’s suffrage movement has roots in Concord. And Concord was also the center of the anti-slavery movement in America. Concord was also the center of clock making in America and a country that runs on time is one that prospers.

This area, like so many across New England, is replete with closed factories left over from the Industrial Revolution. Many have been shut since WWII. There was a brief revival as the tech hub in the 60s and 70s around route 128 but we snatched much of the rug from under those enterprises and took it out west.

Craig and I drove across the Massachusetts to Great Barrington to spend the night with Bruce Kelly in his country manse surrounded a forest of trees flaunting their finery of yellow, gold and red, all screaming, “look at me, look at me!”

We then zipped down to Old New York and dropped off the devil car. New York is in a word - Fabulous. It is like landing on the moon but in a hybrid Honda. My son Dylan showed up and we joined the throngs on the sidewalks. On one excursion we spied a really clever alligator purse in a store window. We guessed 5 gs. It was $22,000. I saw a crystal chandler in one shop – a cool 140 grand, plus shipping. In another store they has just sold a 1943 $10,000 Treasury note for $55,000. We were really taken with the idea that there were several stores which sold money.

At one point we found ourselves in a Rolls-Bentley-Lamborghini-Porsche store. There were so many cars at roughly a half million that it was hard to pick just one. And who the heck buys a Rolls off the rack? After all you want the albino crocodile hide luggage to be monogrammed just right don’t you?

One of my aims was to go to Argosy Books to check out their first edition of a Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. This is the book printed in 1840 about California that set the world’s imagination on fire before the Gold Rush. This 5-story bookstore is jammed with books, maps and prints on every imaginable subject. Another store that really grabbed us was Evolution in SoHo. There they specialize in selling the skeletons of all sorts. I really mean all sorts, mostly human fetus bones. Ugh!

We made sure to cruise the art galleries in Chelsea where we had real trouble figuring out the economic model. One gallery held a multi-ton, stainless steel tree-like structure festooned with refrigerator sized human organ-like parts also of metal. It wound throughout the many rooms and had been constructed on site. Not just unsalable but unmovable as well. The most provocative show was by Gottfried Helnweig. This is a major painter and wack job who paints photorealistic portraits of young girls. They are huge canvases and the detail is unparalleled. Many are hauntingly lyrical but a few of the kids are wearing SS uniforms and seem to have been recently gunned down. Might look good in the hall but…

On Broadway we attended a strange and ragged production of Merchant of Venice. I know, who am I to criticize Shakespeare? The one making you lunch that’s who! The recent movie is great but I think the actual story is a mess. Sure, the language is spectacular with its “pound of flesh” and “all that glitters in not gold.” but the story is …ehhhh. The production was either badly or misdirected as it had the feel of a 19th century melodrama with a lot of eye rolling and over acting. At one point I saw a fellow in the audience who looked like the love child of Yahoo Serious and Crusty the Clown. It was the orange haired head of Python, Eric Idle. We made visual contact and rolled our eyes in sync with the actors on stage. A perfect New York experience.

My favorite store was Plaza Watch and Jewelry. It’s near 57th and 7th and had stacks of rather valuable watches in plastic bags piled about a foot deep in the windows. I mean really, all these Rolexes just heaped up like junk. Inside they sold ephemera so obtuse that I was lucky to escape. Obscure baseball cards, dusty animal heads and a tiny bellman’s outfit sized for the midgets they used to employ in that trade. I really wanted it but 15 grand? Yikes! The owner was a man so rotund he couldn’t get between the counters and the floors were strewn with years of trash. And this in the shadow of Carnage Hall.

New York City is completely in love with itself and I can see why. There is a saying that if you, “Stand in front Rockefeller Center long enough and you will eventually see everyone you have ever met.” Sounds about right.

BLUE WHALE ON BEACH
Whales have been tooling around off San Francisco like they own the joint this year in numbers not seen in decades. In a two-hour period this fall at the Farallones we counted at least two dozen humpbacks. For some whales all this swimming about doesn’t work out too well when there is a contest between them and a ship. The ship generally wins and there have been at least six documented whale strikes off our immediate coast this year. It hasn’t been fully confirmed but it is likely that the 80-foot blue whale that washed up on the beach below Pescadero was the victim of one such encounter.

The mother came ashore in early October accompanied by an aborted half-term calf. This forlorn pair drew a crowd but a small one compared to a Justin Bieber sighting. After a couple of weeks there were never more than a handful of folks at the beach to look at the whale. I think this odd considering that the last blue to come ashore was in the 1920s on the Atlantic in Canada. Here is to opportunity to touch the largest animal to walk or swim on this planet since it was formed 4.6 billion years ago on, I believe, a Thursday.

In a month the whale was been reduced by sea and tide to about half its bulk and it will soon be just a few bones left bleaching on the beach. I would dearly love to scrounge a bone but they are not only quite huge but also surrounded by signs warning that to disturb any part of a marine mammal can result in a federal felony rap. I think I‘ll just leave them there.

I do have a narwhal tusk, which I was sent by the president of Iceland but it is still officially on loan and is officially their property. In Iceland they pass these out like pixie sticks and, along with fish, crushing national debt and sadness, are their only exports. Can the troubles in Iceland be the karmic result of their tendency to use whale meat in their tacos? I wonder.

Day of the horse
Every year on the second Saturday in October hundreds of horses descend on Woodside and ride around pretending to obey the commands they have been taught. They way these horses are so lovingly cared for I wonder if it’s the rider or the horse giving the orders. The Day of the Horse is one on which you hear all sorts of unusual expressions like ramuda, belvin and corn liquor.

Woodside is a very old American town by California standards. It used to be a two-fisted Wild West town with saloons, cowboys on horseback and gambling halls (actually with all the venture capital speculating there is still a lot of gambling). I’m told that the town used to be called Whiskey Hill and with 22 saloons at one point that sounds about right. The bordellos have largely disappeared but we still have the horse. In fact Woodside is one of the horsiest towns in the world. Horseback riding today is one of the few pastimes where the participants don’t get laughed at for sporting a funny hat and leather whip…or do they?

We have a hitching post at Buck’s and it isn’t some vestige of the past but is still in daily use. A custom has developed of bringing one’s bridle into Buck’s and draping it over the Statue of Liberty. I know some will say that this is sacrilege but in spite of what you might have heard this is not the real Statue of Liberty but in fact is a rather bad casting made out of Modelo beer cans. But the horses are real enough and the town has enthusiastically welcomed the event.

In 2005 Fentress Hall and Donna Poy thought it would be fun to invite a few riders to come and ride all around the town and have a little horse fair at town hall. Now the ride is in its sixth year and the event has grown to include well over 300riders with many more coming to the fair. There are countless horse events all over the country - jumping, cutting, ride & tie, and thoroughbred racing but the Day of the Horse isn’t any sort of contest. It’s just a day in the sun with your horse and your hat riding along - spitin tabaccie and mumbling, “Gol’ dern, Effie, I can’t wait to get to the general store and get me some a that peppermint candy and sarsaparilla”.

The Buck’s Collection.
Jim Lyons approached me one day and said that he wanted to produce a book documenting all the junk here at Buck’s. I said I was flattered but couldn’t see why he would bother. After all I had just cleaned out my garage and nailed a few bits of flotsam to the walls. It took a bit of convincing but he finally persuaded me to let him loose with his team.

This book is actually the product of several collaborators foremost Jim who is retired physicist. Jeff Thomas took the pictures and there is an iphone app, naturally, which was created by Tom Digrazia. Another key person was, the brains behind Buck’s, Margaret MacNiven. Me, I didn’t do anything but wander around drinking coffee and chatting.

Jim made it easy walking me around having me talk into a tape recorder like some WW I doughboy in an old folks home. Now Jim is a very precise fellow and I think it might be his preference that I stop moving or adding things but the day the book was finished I was installing yet more stuff; so this book is snapshot of the day that it was taken and, like the tattoos on a San Quentin lifer, its bound to evolve from one day to the next.

If you use this book intending to build an exact copy of Buck’s in another town you owe me a license fee like Tokyo Disney. On the other hand just go ahead. I’ll can give you the name of my Moscow space suit guy and he can definitely kick you a suit.

Bill Draper
The Startup Game written by Bill Draper

It has been some time since we have featured two books at Buck’s because we run the risk of losing our distinction as the smallest bookstore in the world when we do. But in this case Bill Draper’s new book represents a milestone in a career and a life that is simply Dazzling.

Bill’s father established the first venture capital firm on the west coast and Bill went on to found Sutter Hill Ventures as well as Draper Richards an early stage VC outfit in San Francisco. I’ll let you discover the facts about him in his own words in the book. Here I’m more concerned about the man.

I am not alone in saying that Bill has long been the most elegant personification of ‘class’ we have seen in these parts. He’s Sean Connery good looking but without the pistol. Bill is the middle generation of a three part (so far) saga of venture folks. Sadly, due to genetic mutation, the third in line, Tim Draper, came out a little strange with his propensity to leap from buildings in a Batman suit beating some helpless Stratocaster half to death but even he can’t dim the lights of this tribe.

In Silicon Valley we think we are pretty hot stuff and have invented modern cool. If you know Bill you will see that this is true. But the real measure of a man isn’t the accomplishments that you can see listed on Wikipedia but is reflected in the eyes of his family and friends and I count myself lucky to call Bill my friend.

The book will be available here in early January.

Turkey Lebanon Syria Jordan

2010-05-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

Ever since I discovered the long lost Archimedes Codex I have been fascinated by Byzantium and felt it was high time I went to Constantinople to see what was left of the joint. People rave about Istanbul and they tell you it’s a fantastic place but frankly Istanbul was a bit dull even though we still had a great time because I conned my cousin Will Milne (local home builder here in Woodside) and his son Gary as well as my son Tyler to accompany me. A retinue, just like in old Byzantium.

Will found us a great hotel with a commanding view of the Bosporus and I was in awe of so many ships going back and forth. Coal barges, freighters,lumber ships, container vessels, ferries, tugs, fishing boats and tanker after tanker. At times I could count over a 125 large ships at once.
Turkey is surprisingly expensive and let me tell you the food is on a par with San Francisco in cost and Russia in execution. Fortunately our hotel had a spectacular breakfast and convivial staff with fun guests even if several turned out to be Buck’s customers so it was like being here but with more hummus.

The thing about Istanbul is that it is paved with mosques. I have seen plenty of mosques but the original big dog, Hagia Sophia, from the 6th century is impressive. People profess to love it but it does have a heavy, dumped from the sky appearance though it is cheered up a bit by Minute Man Missile looking minarets. It was originally a Byzantine Church and was later converted to a mosque. It set the domed style you see all over the Moslem world. In fact, it was copied several times full size in Istanbul such as Blue Mosque right next door from the 11th century which is almost identical. Several others just as big and countless smaller ones fill the town for the five times daily battle of the bands, or more properly the singing of prayers which seems to be a calling back and forth from tower to tower. The Hagia Sophia is now desanctified and is a museum. We were going in and the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel
was coming out. She seemed nice if in a bit of hurry with a few dozen
security and about bazillion press folks mobbing her.

I had always wanted to see the Golden Horn. Did you know that John C. Freemont named the Golden Gate after Constantinople’s Gold Horn? This inlet was famously the port of the eastern Roman Empire’s fleet. It was protected by an iron chain that stretched across the mouth. The dynamics of chain sag make this difficult to imagine but at one Ottoman castle they had what was purported to be a piece of it. I tried to buy it but they would not sell. Tyler located MiniTurk a village of miniatures of the great buildings in Turkey which we accessed by boat across the Horn.

At one point we were crossing the Horn in a small open boat, ably skippered by a man unaccountably named Murray. or His face was wrapped in a cheerful smile if not exactly backed by an excess of teeth. Murray might have been Charon’s brother piloting us over the River Styx to Hell as in Greek mythology for all the condoms and cow heads in the water. The luster of gold had definitely moved to another part of town. Later we went out on the much larger and cleaner Bosporus for a cruise along the shore. Here we saw the mansions of the super rich. It seems that Istanbul has the 4th most billionaires of any major city, somewhat behind greater Palo Alto but still, Istanbul. They don’t seem to value privacy much because the pools and yards were there for all the tourists to see. They have some fine yachts too. One was the Savarona a 408 footer from the U.S. built in 1931 by the granddaughter of the guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge. The yacht was bought by Turkey and given to Kermal Ataturk the revered founder who brought Turkey into the modern world.

We were repeatedly advised not to make fun of the revered founder. He kicked the clerics out of government and made the people adopt western dress, science and education. He got rid of the cumbersome Arabic alphabet and he gave women rights. He basically remade the entire place after kicking out the Europeans and the Ottomans. The man dated Zsa Zsa Gabor. Not the wizened old cop-slapper but the hot international 1930s Zsa Zsa. He had the world’s largest palace, the largest yacht and everyone’s respect. He died of excess partying. Why we would think of making fun of him is beyond me. Of course since they mentioned it I was always just an inch away from screaming some pretty coarse indictment of the man but I didn’t want to end up in a Turkish prison.

Did someone say Turkish prison? Well, who doesn’t recall the delightful travelogue The Midnight Express the semi accurate tale of a young American who was smuggling hash and got tossed in prison in Istanbul. He was not pleased with the prison experience, especially after serving many years and then having his sentence extended to life. “Hey, this is America you can’t do…oh right.” Anywho, this book and movie really made the Turk’s heads explode and this was another thing we were asked not to bring up. In fact we were warned about not stealing towels and to avoid earthquakes. The prison in the story was a few steps from our hotel and is now a Four Seasons so at least the food there is better.

I love all the odd stuff about a country. Down on the waterfront we found a brisk trade in fish sandwiches. Hundreds of folks simply crazy for these fresh looking sandwiches. Tyler and Gary gamely shorted a couple of them, bite by bite. They were made of mackerel and smelled like cat food. It was right by these fishwives that we found about a dozen nightclubs devoted to colorful beanbag chairs. These clubs were located on a bridge across the Horn and each had hundreds of vinyl beanbags. It is exceedingly difficult to look elegant in a contraption like this especially with the thousands of fishing lines overhead as fishermen with huge piles of bait try their luck from the bridge. As far as I could see none had caught a dern thing but they sure had a pantload of bait. No, it seems the fish they were catching were 4” sardines. In that same area was a fellow doing a brisk trade in weighing people on a bathroom scale for about a dime. Will was a little amazed and had himself weighed and insisted I do it even though the scale was clearly broken.

Sure we saw classy things in the berg like the archeological museum.

The Greek and Roman marble was better than any collection I have ever seen. They had on loan The Discus Thrower from The Louvre. This is famous as being both exquisite and for the fact that that an ancient head repairer got the head on backwards. The marble sarcophagi of the ancient Romans were the finest marble works imaginable. I wish I could be a dead Roman sometimes as they made it look so much fun.

Of course the main highlight in Istanbul was the Obama cat. This is cat that lives in the Hagia Sophi. When Obama came a couple of years back he was photographed with this cat and ever since it has been preening for photo opps.

One final thing is that everyone smokes. Kids, old ladies and every man. But on TV they can’t show smoking. We watched the movie Dick Tracy in the hotel and they put little animated birds, dolphins and cats over the cigarettes and these little animations remade the film in the best way and really made us want to smoke.

Of course we could be in Turkistan. There you are only allowed to smoke inside building so the restaurants are full of smoke but the streets are clear. The great leader there is definitely nuts. He has prohibited seatbelts as encouraging reckless driving. I have got to go there.

Lebanon

Gary and Will had to return home so Tyler and I flew to Beirut in Lebanon. They call this pile the Paris of the Mediterranean but I’ve been to Paris and they must be thinking of a different Paris. It looked great from the air but on the ground you can see they have a management problem. I have some suggestions. Stop letting open sewers run onto the beach where you want folks to swim. Patch the bullet holes. I know it looks macho but really the war is over and 50 million machine gun holes makes they place look a little unkempt. The whole country is actually on high alert. Many street corners have tanks with real cannons and a guy sitting at the ready. Tens of thousands of soldiers infect the streets, all with machine guns and more sitting at 50 calibers hunkered behind sandbags in blown out buildings.

Here’s the amazing thing. They are completely ignored. The place is also clogged with Ferrari dealers, Gucci stores and more Mercedes dealers then anywhere else in the world. I saw as many as two Benz stores in one block and this was out in the country. There are four jobs in Lebanon. Cab driver, soldier, car dealer and plastic surgeon. The place is quite prosperous but it hasn’t translated to elegance. The hills are crammed with a skelter of apartment buildings as high as 12 stories on the tops of the overbuilt hills. The beaches are where the poor folks or even squatters live.

Tyler and I rolled into our beachfront hotel. I asked for a room with a view of the ocean. “No we can’t, high season.” Later we discovered there were about 3 of 100 rooms occupied and we got a view of the construction site. Well, I guess it was high season. We walked all over the city. It is one massive block of concrete. The citizens love to brag about the vibrant nightlife. This means drinking, sex and waving your Rolex in the air. I checked this out with some locals and after feigning insult they agreed. This doesn’t mean that the people are unpleasant. Far from it. The Lebanese are very hospitable (except at our hotel where they told Tyler he couldn’t play the grand piano in the lobby but to their credit they were right. He couldn’t, because it was a fake) The Lebanese will admit that there are a lot of bejeweled posers showing off. But they will insist on putting you up in their home, buying you dinner and probably giving you the Rolex. A generous and warm people while being self absorbed and wildly proud of their concrete playground.

Outside of town we went to Grotte de Jeita.
This is a cavern of such heartbreaking beauty that their campaign to have it listed as one of the 7 natural wonders of the world is an effort we will support. Our cab driver, Michael, had suggested we go there and he was so right to tell us. Later we asked him why he was taking us in the wrong direction. In halting English (they speak Arabic and French with a good deal of English) that he said we should come to home and meet his wife over tea. Snap, Michael, another good call and there we were on his veranda looking at pictures of his kids and eating baklava. “Hey Mike, can I have your watch?”

Our preferred mode of travel was the people’s bus. Cheap, and you meet great folks. One ride was with an entire bus of soldiers. All stern faced until Tyler loosed then up with a Beatles song. We drove through Biblos (where the alphabet was invented) to Tripoli. I liked this seaside city. Crazy with bullet holes but no tourists except us and a vibrant market with funny, happy store keepers. From there we took a white knuckler into the mountains to Bcharre. This looks almost like an Italian town with its terraces and olive groves. It’s a ski resort though the snow was nearly gone. This is the birthplace and grave of Kahil Gibran. To some hippies from the 60s this is a big deal. Like Pirsig and Castaneda, Gibran was a minor writer appealing to drug addled hedonists.

In fact many people in the Middle East are hedonists in the best possible sense. A young man in Jordon was lamenting how much he hated his country. He said the people have no ambition, no imagination. “All they want to do is make love to their wives and eat.” Ha! This struck us as highly evolved.

So with a great sushi dinner in Beirut (our last American food for a while) we headed to the old part of the country, the Bekka Valley and the city of Baalbek a Roman
stronghold and religious center.
The ruins of the temples are among the finest from ancient Rome. Some of the columns are 60 feet tall and have never fallen. These granite columns came from Egypt across the sea, over the mountains and through the desert and the biggest temple took about 200 years to erect. This take-your-time attitude is still the way they build all over this region. Houses now are of cast concrete and are one to four stories with the rebar projecting from the roof. The upper floors are usually unfinished waiting for the next generation to complete. This gives much of the Middle East a tentative look when it’s just that they are in no hurry.

It was in Baalbek where we had a superb meal, maybe the best of our trip at a tourist place in front of the ruins. It was Good Friday and as we were served dinner outside a procession of Roman soldiers came down the street whipping a guy dressed as Christ carrying a cross. True dinner theater. We ate with the troubled son of the owner. He was about 22 and with impeccable English told how he crashed his car and got busted for driving on drugs but his father paid the cops and got him off. He was dressed as a hip-hop American but he was local lad in the middle of nowhere except his town happens to be the Hezbollah stronghold. At one point they took a few rockets in the village and the kid told us he took a handful of Xanex and ran through the streets yelling that life was a joke as they were under fire. He also informed us that Tom and Jerry cartoons are very popular in the Middle East. When I asked him why, he said that Hanna or was it Barbarra, the creators, was Lebanese. You really do see Tom and Jerry a lot on TV there and you can buy the comics in any small town. I looked them up: Irish and Italian. But hey, let them dream.

People advise you everywhere not to discuss religion and politics just before they lay into these issues. They are all experts but with very biased points of view. I am well versed on the Mexican-American War and the conquest of California and so I will stick to that. If you want my opinion on religion and politics in the Middle East I plead ignorance. I wish all sides peace and good health.

Syria

Now Syria is not a country most folks just stroll on into. We had to send to the embassy in DC to get a visa and swear we had never been to “occupied Palestine.” Where the heck is that?...oh Israel. But when we got to the border the lines were 8 hours long so we ditched our cab and walked behind buses and vans through 4 checkpoints without being stopped. We figured that we had a visa and the worst case was several years in prison but they never actually saw us so there we were on the road to Damascus.

Ahhh, Damascus at Easter. We knew some Christians in the old city and they told us that Easter was a huge deal and the place was full with revelers. Hum… well, there are a few Christians. Very few, and the city was bustling, but Easter is not a big Moslem holiday. From a hilltop at night we could see the city the mosques lit up in green and the churches in blue. Very little blue.

The women in Syria and Jordan have to keep their heads covered except for tourists and the few Christians. Many have to wear long robes and then there are all the variations. Some women are completely covered in black with a little fly screen to see out. I don’t think the bug problem is really that bad. To us it seems a kind of insanity to punish a woman by putting her in a black body tent in the desert. Arabs make all sorts of excuses, like the women have really sexy clothes underneath but there is no question that this is geared to reducing a woman’s humanity.

We soon discovered why they are not big drinkers in the Arab world. The drinkers have all been killed crossing the street. It is truly a life threatening adventure to do this. It was the only time we felt at all unsafe.

The old marketplace, the Souk, is the stuff of legends. Roman gates flank the market which has been in the same place for at least 3,500 years and possibly twice that long. Here you see heaps of spices and gadgets, vegetables, meat, and clothes from the full black burqa to rhinestone underwear worn by hookers or hooker wannabes. This place is fully authentic.

We hung out with some locals and their hospitality was lavish and generous. We went to one restaurant billed as the best in the city and it was indeed grand. It was a rooftop garden with trays overflowing with Arabic food. Three of us ate like caliphs and the bill was about $35. Syria is a bargain.

We took a three-hour drive to Palmyra,
a city as remote in Roman times as now. It consists of a mile long paved road flanked by temples, theaters and endless rows of columns (Romans were simply nuts for columns). This place made its fortune as a trading center but we were hard pressed to imagine how such wealth could accumulate in the desert. I guess we have Vegas but back then it was so hard move stuff. Before ships went to the orient the trade route was surging with camel trains bringing the wealth of the east in trade for the gold of the west. Palmyra was basically a port of call in this sea of sand. The Roman ruins in the East are far more complete than in Italy because of they are so remote.

One of our goals was to go to the Damascus Gate restaurant billed as the largest in the world. 6014 seats, staff of 1800, 40 million dollars, 400,000 sq ft. We got there and a real nice fellow took us on the grand tour. It looked like a stage set from a Bollywood film but built by inept children. Bad stucco and colored lights, plastic chairs and a few palm trees. In the whole place there might have been 2,500 seats and there were only about 30 customers. To us the joint next door looked far bigger and a lot nicer. There were huge billboards proclaiming its Guinness recordness but it had obviously been tarted up for the pictures and all the good furniture had been repossessed. The center piece of the restaurant is a meteorite about the size of toaster. We absolutely loved this place.

South of Damascus was Bosra a Roman stronghold featuring the finest intact amphitheater from ancient times. It looked exactly like a stadium of today with nearly every stone block is still in place. The town surrounding it is so complete that people continue to occupy the Roman buildings.

Jordan
Then it was time to bid this friendly country adios and cross the boarder to Jordan. We found a cabman who promised to take us over for $8 for 15 miles which was expensive but we did pass through 4 checkpoints in Syria, to get out, and 9 in Jordan to enter. The Jordanians took our pictures, taped our voices, made us fill out papers and fingerprinted us. The main grilling was transacted over a counter which came up to our chests. The agents at the desks behind could not see over it when seated and the shorter people could not see them so business was conducted with a screaming pantomime of hands waving over across this counterproductive installation. We were about to roll up our sleeves for a blood test when a guy with a gun called us into his office. “Sit,” he insisted darkly as he waved us onto a battered couch. He perused at our papers glumly and glared over his glasses at us. He was looking for sweating drug mules (possible) or perhaps American terrorists (unlikely). Seeing no sweat or bulges he broke into a big smile and said “Welcome to Jordan! Obama good!” This was so typical of many places we went. In many countries the common folk are friendly enough but the guys with pistolays are a bit dickish. In the Middle East you learn to not mind a guy in a uniform even when he waves an AK47 in your face with one hand and shakes one of yours with another. In Mexico I have been robbed by uniformed police twice but in Jordan the cops hold open the door for you.

Crossing the border everything looked different. The sexy underwear in the shops windows was even nastier and the homes were more prosperous with sloping roofs indicating they were actually finished. We passed lush fields and the crazy driving ceased (except for the curious habit of spending a good deal of time on the wrong side of the road). We went through speed traps every 5 miles or so and police roadblocks every 10 so it looked like there had either been a major prison break or it was just business as usual in the Middle East.

Amman was a surprise. It isn’t old at all. This place sprung up in the last 100 years and most in the last 30 so the city crawls over steep hills and looks much like San Francisco Amman’s newest sister city. The ancients didn’t build up steep hills but cars changed all that. We first went to the Russian embassy where they were their typically hostile selves. I love Russia; the rudest damn people on earth. Anyway Tyler wanted to go see a friend in Moscow but they wouldn’t give him a visa. Just before going there we were making copies for the visa and found ourselves in the 250 foot long lobby in a schmancy hotel featuring a 40-foot shark tank with 12, we counted em, 12 large sharks and about 2 million bucks in couches and knickknacks. This is where the diplomats stay. They wanted about $800 a night so we found a nice hotel a few blocks away with no sharks but included a very nice lobby cat for about $40.

That night in Amman we met street vendors who musically yell out in Arabic “we got fressssh fish here, we got riiiiipe tomatoes!” All singing out at once which is quite something. We liked Amman; modern, but not fancy. Friendly and fast without the feeling of being hustled. There are pictures of the king everywhere and he is smiling while dressed in the desert camo, with bands of bullets and the ever present curved knife. In the morning we snagged a bus to Petra in the south. We just loved the busses. 2 or 3 dollars for up to two hours with working people. On-off, on-off, a continual parade. In Petra we met the first high density of tourists on the trip. There is town next to this ancient city which it is all hotels and restaurants. A good many day trippers come by bus but leave in the early afternoon making the place eerily quiet.

The ancient city is known to many as the one depicted in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is a city built in the depths of a red sandstone canyon miles from any vegetation. It was a famous place for tombs and once again a trading center. The unbelievable part is that most of what is left is carved from living rock. This means that many of the structures, some 140 feet high, are carved in place. To enter the city you walk down a natural stone canyon past carvings of camel caravans and gods of all sorts. The canyon is at times only 15 feet wide and becomes ever deeper until the cliffs are couple of hundred feet high. After about a half a mile you emerge to face an immense ceremonial building and as you walk ever lower into the valley it widens out and the tombs cut in the hills become more numerous. The carvings are primarily Roman but other cultures left their marks including the Aramaic speaking Nabateans. You can almost hear the faint voices of Cleopatra, Herod and Trajan in this desolate outpost.

After about 2 miles and dropping perhaps 1,200 feet we found a mile long flight of stairs to the very top of the ridge. The Bedouins call this place The End of The World and we could see for miles all round. There we found Bedouins in traditional bandoleer and dagger festooned outfits selling tea and cokes. Like all the other locals we met they were not at all weary of visitors and were unfailingly gracious. The Bedouins live all over this region and are the desert nomads still living in black goat hair tents in the searing dessert or on impossible mountain redoubts.

Petra is the single most interesting place, ancient or modern, I have ever seen. We simply could not leave. They tell you to be out of the ancient city before sunset but there were no patrols and we were there well after dark.
That night after an excellent dinner we were awakened to the sound of the prayers resonating between the stone walls of the valley…at 4am. I came to like this plaintive wailing. I liked it just a bit less when they started up just 30 minutes later for another full set. Still Petra, with its echoing prayers and high speed internet seriously rocks! As we left town we met four intrepid Dutch fellows driving from Europe to South Africa for the World Cup. They had their names and blood types stenciled on the truck's body. “You never know,” said one grimly.

And on we pushed to the Wadi Rum,
an even more desolate desert region yet further south. OK the whole place is a desert but this is where Lawrence in both the movie and in the fact worked his magic. The real and the Peter O’Toole Lawrence are held in high regard in the Wadi and we stood right where much of the movie was made and the trains real and cinematic were blown up in the war with the Turks.

We took a jeep out to an oasis and as we crossed the sand saw a man sitting in the middle of a pile of rocks laughing and waving a sandwich at us. On our way back he was still there and still laughing and shaking his sandwich. Just another man driven mad by the desert no doubt.

We caught a cab (and keep in mind we are now 40 miles from a town and cabs jsimply spring up from nowhere) and drove to Aqaba. This is the town that Lawrence surprised by crossing the Nafud Desert in summer. It locals said this was impossible at that time of year. We found ourselves on the spot called the Sun’s Anvil but it wasn’t so bad. Of course it was 65 outside and we went by car.

From Aqaba we went to the Dead Sea and man it is a most desolate place. Tyler had booked us online into a resort for $150 and we passed through the iron-gated security into the lavish lobby. Field weary and Petra-dusted we inquired about our room accompanied by a stunning woman at the grand piano. A Savile Row suited manager was distressed when he couldn’t find our reservation. Meanwhile the help plied us with fruit drinks and nut trays while Savile Row hoped we wouldn’t freak out as seemed common there judging by the Russian heavies snorting and bulging all over the lobby. One guy was paying his bill with stack of hundreds the size of a small dog.

I thought we were getting a heck of deal and went looking for the shark tank.
Eventually it emerged that were at the wrong hotel. The sign on the hotel next door sure looked like it was in front of this one and the now relieved and apologizing manager gave us a driver to take us next door. You could see that he was used to some pretty tough customers. Our driver told us rooms started around $600 and went up to $15,000 a night (plus minibar no doubt). Now our hotel would have been great but it looked like a dump after going to the Kampinski. Dern and dreck! The next day we tootled on down to the famous shore where people float around holding magazines showing how dry they are staying. ¬

The Dead Sea is far niftier than I would have guessed. First, it separates Israel from Jordan and there are no boats on the perfect sailing venue. Ahhh… well, they discourage boating as it generally ends up in gunplay. It really is salty. 8 times more than the ocean and you float like the dickens. It takes no effort to stay on the surface and you could swim to the Israeli side except your skin would fall off and you would probably be shot.

Finally back to Amman and to the airport. Our last hotel was like a prison in an open field surrounded by a fence with sentries at the gate. We decided to go for a walk and see the sunset. The hotel guard wanted to see our passports and check our visas before we could walk off the compound. Tyler soothed him by singing Happy Birthday in Arabic and he lets us free.

As the sun set over the ancient hills we agreed that we would miss these happy people with their mixed up currencies, taxis patched with plywood and high-fiving school children. Connecting out of Heathrow our plane flew over Iceland. Do I smell smoke? A few hours later they closed Europe.

TED 2010

2010-05-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

TED (technology-entertainment-design) has been running 26 years but in the last couple of years it has morphed from a conference to a movement. Like Burning Man there are those in attendance and those wishing they were there. Unlike Burning Man there are many ways to participate other than going to the physical location. Two-way live webcast venues have sprung up all over the world from a packed theater in London from which the prime ministerial candidate of Britain, Robert Cameron, gave the opening speech to a parking lot in South Africa with a tremulous connection powered by a car battery.

What characterizes this movement? It’s liberal for sure. It’s intellectual. It’s save the worldly. And it’s elitist in the best Obama sense. Many of the attendees are the leaders of industry and education and several are post political such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton. George Bush was not at TED because he was the keynote at the United Grocers Convention in Las Vegas at the same time. Nothing wrong with groceries but really, GB.

Over four days there are about 100 speakers who speak for 3 to 18 minutes on topics ranging from Lego fantasies to the sweet song of Robert Gupta’s violin (youngest ever member of the LA Philharmonic) to Bill Gate’s giving us the lowdown on his latest passion: TerraPower, a subterranean nuclear candle that once buried is never opened and runs for 60 years consuming it’s own waste as it generates power.

So much has been written about this gathering that I, like Blaze Pascal, who famously said, “If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”, will hit a few points that stood out for me and give you a sense of what it’s like but my real message is that you go online and see the videos of the presentations. ted.com

A lot of what goes on a TED is challenge to this grim reaper fellow we have heard so much about. Microbiologists, antislavery activists, farmers and ecologists tell of their very clever tools to beat cancer, social injustice, environmental degradation and boredom. Temple Graydon spoke eloquently about her campaign to create more humane slaughterhouses. I know, oxymoronic, but these enterprises do exist and this woman’s autism has made it possible for her to see things from the animals’ perspective. Her redesigns are now the industry standard.

A few of the presenters are crackpots and present completely unworkable ideas. Take Nathan Myhrvold’s bug zapper. This Gyro Gearloosian inventor demonstrated a laser cannon engineered to analyze every bug that passes a perimeter for bee or not beeness then incinerates just the malaria carrying female mosquito. Yes, it can tell the sex (must be the high heels). He delighted in showing us a slow-mo film of the little buggers being sent sizzling to their makers as he talked about plans to deploy this in Africa. This possible nutter is the ex chief scientist at Microsoft. They called Einstein crazy…well they actually didn’t but Myhrvold’s idea is probably unworkable. Still, he is still rightly called a genius. And speaking of Einstein, Stephen Wolfram is running for that position. The mathematician has a large and probably appropriately sized ego with his creation of Mathmatica and Wolfram Alpha. One of my interests is studying the history of mathematicians and this guy is the real thing. He claims to have invented a whole new kind of science and I for one believe him.

TED is held in the Long Beach Convention Center and for a week owns the town. Poor Long Beach, this is no Vegas but it sure feels great with us TEdsters spread out all over the lawns, in pavilions and scattered about the hotels and restaurants. We must have looked like the Eloi from H. G. Wells Time Machine but make no mistake the Morlocks are riding fast horses as many doomsayers at the conference remind.

Ironically, we fly in, flip on the lights and discuss alternative energy. We enter the lavish hall settling into the cushy seats and discuss poverty. We eat hamburgers while discussing the methane contribution of cattle and guzzle water as we lament the plastic in the oceans. Sure the cynical possibilities are endless at TED, but one could be motoring on Steven Forbes yacht Highlander with Glenn Beck. Instead, many at TED are putting themselves literally on the line by committing their lives to making the world a more graceful and just place.

No one typifies this better than Ken Robinson. This international thinker/educator laments the plight of education, his wife’s bizarre cooking and the unexplainable propensity of people to download videos of him. Delivered with humor Ken’s message is serious as he feels that we are educating the creativity out of children. On one hand he asks how it is that in ultracompetitive pre-K schools in the U.S. three-year olds show up with no resumes (“Is this all you have? You’ve had 36 months and you have done nothing!”), while in other places school’s not even an option. But TED is more than just the ivory tower observations of a bunch of fuzzyheaded intellectuals. Most folks who speak up at TED bring solutions.

One fellow, a lawyer, is vigorously trying to simplify insurance, tax, credit card and all sorts of official forms. Practical good stuff we all agree on. Nearly all, except for the lobbyists who strangle progress because many in business feel the best way to conduct business is to trick the customer. Glenn loves this idea, he does this for a living. Much of modern commercial life is based on sleight of hand. Supersizing, opt out instead of in, and deceptive marketplace herding.

TED is a patrician population peopled by protagonists. It is a multi-act play with thousands of key players. At one point I saw Meg Ryan talking to Ariana Huffington flanked by Al Gore and Matt Groening.

The movie star thing at TED is a really interesting. At one point I was in the on campus bookstore when Will Smith walked by. Now my son Tyler was in a critical scene in Pursuit of Happiness and I felt comfortable bringing up the connection. Smith is a very gracious guy and we had a nice exchange. Later I was hanging with a dance troop who had just performed. This team of dancers was the highlight. LXD, The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (you might have seen them on the Academy Award show) redefined dance for me. I am not a fan of ballet or modern or the twist, but these folks have something new with inspiration from classic, modern dance, street, break and gymnastics. The choreographer also does the show Glee and some of the cast members came on the last day. As we were talking Will Smith walked by and I said you should go say hi to Will. They were instantly shy so I called “Will, come say hi to these great people.” He came over and introduced himself, effusive with goodwill. As he left he cuffed me on the shoulder like we were old friends. At another point I found myself at a party. It was the cool kids’ party. I never got to go to the cool kids’ party in high school but here I was speaking to Larry Page. I told him I really liked his map system. He told me he likes my crab sandwich.

Sergi Brin told about Google’s travails with China. He said that Google pulled out because the situation had been getting worse. It seems there is a booming cottage industry hacking Google from China. That, and the censorship became untenable. He did speak about the future with the hope that things might turn around.

Jane McGonigal had an interesting take on the games we play. She directs game R & D with The Institute for The Future on Sand Hill. She claims that games make the players better people; that they go on epic journeys and with their urgent optimism they experience blissful productivity. These happy people have been playing World of WarCraft for over three million collective years so far and ahhh well, the truth probably lies somewhere between a spiral-eyed army of brain fried zombies and blissful nirvana.

Blaise Aruera y Arcas brought us virtual telepresence a few years back with Sea Dragon. Now he has laid AR on top of that and mashed it with maps to the edge of time. Makes sense right? No? No wonder. His presentation is simply mind-bending. You have to see it. Go to TED.com. There he takes us zooming to planet earth. We have all done it. As you enter Seattle you see the 3D buildings pop up, then they morph into street view but with real photos. Old news right? But then he takes you inside the Pike Street Fish Market with a 360x360 interior with the tagged photos all scraped from the internet laid on the previously banked photographics. During his talk Blaze phoned some friends who were videoing the interior of the market and this was merged, live, into the static collection of shots. This is AR or Augmented Reality. Then he zoomed out the back door and skyward rushing into outer space with MS’s World Wide Telescope and took us to the edge of the mapped universe. Over to you Google.

At TED there are two Chris Anderson’s. One is the imminent curator who has taken TED from an interesting conference and made it a kind of international university accessible to anyone with a connection. Then there is Chris Anderson the editor of Wired Magazine. Chris of Wired told us of his delight in envisioning the reduction of his print edition by, perhaps, 10-fold in the near future. He envisions the print version as a lush, tactile and collectable production for those of us who treasure such things as well as a computerized edition with embedded vid, elegant search and providing all the wiz that we expect from Wired. A mile deep, a mile wide and with a very long tale/tail.

Being on the scene at TED allows one to ask major players questions and get answers. I had read that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, anonymously bought the 10th Century Archimedes Codex (not to be confused with the Leonardo Codex). So I asked him. He said he had not. Cool. “…Hey, Bill did you buy…?”

This year’s TED Prizewinner was Jamie Oliver. This energetic chef has a scheme to teach food awareness and cooking to young children. I would hate to be a kid today trying to get healthy food to eat. The packaged stuff is so-o-o tasty! There are people in white coats staying up late to trick kids into liking food that is clearly going to kill them. Jamie says that nutrition classes are ineffective but actually putting the good food in young hands is key. His approach gives many kids their first opportunity to hold unprepared food. Simple, inexpensive and an idea that can change the world.

Michael Spector discussed aspects of his new book Denialism. He says that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but no one is entitled to his own facts. And we heard from Mandelbrot and Sarah Silverman; David Byrne, James Cameron and Svitak Adora. Have you heard her name? Well if not there is a lot about this remarkable girl online. She is a many times published author from poetry to pets. She speaks with authority and humor on many subjects and shows once again that each year the geniuses are getting younger. She’s 12.

At TED we discussed the issues big and smaller and ways to make the world more interesting; more beautiful and, in the end, even possible. From sea life to life on other planets and everything in between, TED is a good place to pick a passion. Ted.com

Archimedes, one first name like Cher

2010-02-15T15:21:00.001-08:00

Eureka is Greek for “I have found it” (the California State motto). Archimedes was a 3rd century BC mathematician who was said to have run through the streets naked from his bath after he came up with the solution to a sticky problem the king of the small Greek state of Syracuse in Sicily presented him with. It seemed that the king was worried that his gold crown had been cut with silver and there was no way of finding out without melting the crown down. Archimedes came up with the idea that he could submerge the crown in water and by calculating the displacement discrepancies between the metals, he could come up with the answer. He measured the crown and found it had been adulterated. This story is almost certainly not true except for the fact that Archimedes did discover the physical laws of displacement and the three-dimensional mathematics of nature where previously we had only Euclid’s two-dimensional geometry. Archimedes didn’t have benefit of zero or negative numbers for his calculations and indeed the Greek numbering system was only slightly better for calculation than Roman numerals so he wrote his math as prose problems with diagrams. This most revered mathematician of the ancient world dealt with concepts of infinity, calculated pi to 4 places and told us that given a place to stand “I can move the world.”

Archimedes wrote of his discovery in hundreds perhaps thousands of letters and published a few books. Yes, 2300 years ago they did have books, all be it handwritten but they looked like modern bound books. The pages were of parchment (treated mammal skin) and there were few pages but the value when transmitting ideas to other places in space and time is incalculable.
But then in the Middle Ages teaching and learning fell away and most everything written that had been accumulated for nearly 2,000 years disappeared. Books were burned for heat, fed to goats or erased and scavenged for the paper or parchment. By the 10th Century it was hard to find the great works of old and by the 14th perhaps 1% was left. But it was in the 10th Century that one of the rare pockets of learning flourished. This was in the reformulated Easter Roman Empire called Byzantium. Headquartered in Constantinople (now Istanbul) there was for centuries in the Dark Ages near universal education and this was conducted in Greek. In schools they used the ancient Greek and even Roman texts to practice grammar and even penmanship. There was a strange conflict between the love of the Greek masters and the Christian doctrine holding sway at the time. In fact most of what we have of Archimedes was eventually funneled through one man, a Byzantine called Leo the Mathematician (about a thousand years ago). But for this fellow who gathered all he could of the Archimedean texts we might have had to discover the laws all over again.

In time all of Archimedes books in Greek were lost and what comes down to us are less than precise reiterations histories if his work further blurred by Latin translations. But then from a shrouded past surfaced a certain Christian eucharist in Istanbul in 1906. It was a 13th Century palimpsest of a much earlier work. A palimpsest is a book that has been washed or scraped of ink and written over for another purpose. But when the Christian words were washed away there remained a faint online of a book determined to be the work of Archimedes. It was a 10th century compellation of several lost Archimedean texts and his greatest work, On Floating Bodies. Even this work was at least a 4th generation copy but notably it was in Greek. archimedespalimpsest.org

A British historian tried to borrow the book from Istanbul in 1907 but they wouldn’t let it out of the country so he went there and photographed much of the book. Shorty thereafter The Ottoman’s morphed into the Turks and the book was lost.

Then in the late 1990’s the remaining pages (very badly damaged by mold in the 20th century) showed up for auction in New York. A legal battle raged with Turkey claiming it and a French family trying to sell it. In the end the family prevailed and an unnamed billionaire bought it for a mere two million. He then sent the pages to various labs around the world including SLAC here at Stanford to tease out every bit of this tiny thread of history.

The squandering of our historic riches in the Middle Ages is shocking, no? But I wonder if the next age will look back on our wonton ways and feel that the people of this time were far more irresponsible than feeding Euripides to farm animals with our desecration of the jungles and driving in cars that get 18mpg. We can well ask ourselves which is the greater crime.

2010-02-15T15:14:00.002-08:00

airshipventures.com
Hey, who wants to fly into inner outer space for a few minutes for $200,000 and feel that great 8g rush on reentry? Humm…no not me. Well, how about drifting at a thousand feet over your neighborhood? Or over the ocean where you might see great whites and even shipwrecks in the shallows. Cruise past the Golden Gate Bridge and spot sailboats racing on a broad reach as you sail overhead. This is the effect from the Zeppelin Eureka, a dirigible based at Moffett Field.

How in the heck did this come to pass? Well you can credit Brian Hall and his wife Alexandra. Alex is the past director of the Chabot Space and Science Center and Brian founded and still has the helm of the successful software firm Mark/Space. One ride aboard the Zeppelin NT in Germany made Brian a believer. (from their website) “Designed exclusively for passenger operations, the Zeppelin NT (“New Technology”) is unlike any other airship in the world. Engineered with the best in German technology, the airship's precise handling, and quiet, spacious cabin with oversized windows and restroom were designed for luxurious passenger operations. Realizing that there was no experience like this, and no airship technology like this in the U.S., Brian immediately embarked on his next business venture.” Alex grew up in England near the dirigible hangers at Cardington and all her life she wanted to be an astronaut. She would have made a good one but it turned out she wasn’t quit tall enough so with the airship she says she has had to have an altitude adjustment.

California has a deep history of lighter than air because it was at Moffett filed that the Airship Macon was based in the huge Hanger Number 1, which is still there. In the 1930’s airships represented the wave of the future and the people of Sunnyvale voted to sell the land that is Moffett to the federal government for $1 if they would locate the ship there. The program was not a success but the tiny air station grew and around it prospered early avionics firms such as Fairchild Raytheon and Varian. It can be contended that one of the reasons we have Silicon Valley as we know it today is because of the Macon program.
The Eureka is a 246 long dirigible. It is made by the Zeppelin Luftschifftechnika 100+ year old firm that has been involved with aircraft and engine manufacturing for over a century. It is true that the Hindenburg was a Zeppelin but it used flammable hydrogen for lift where modern ships use inert helium. What makes it a dirigible is the internal skeleton as opposed to a blimp that is a big balloon. The skeleton allows the envelop to hold a very low pressure, just over 1 psi so if (a nearly impossible to conceive of) breech the helium would take hours to escape. The ride in this ship is similar to a hot air balloon but one you can drive at up to 70 mph and basically cruse where you wish.

I went recently with a group of friends and it was nothing short of magical. It is equal parts modern aviation with 1930’s pizzazz yielding a singular experience so visceral as to make it hard to describe. As you coast over the land it is staggering to see the amount of stuff we have built and when you coast over the estates from Saratoga to Woodside the grandeur is awe inspiring. You see dogs running for Frisbees, countless folks waving and lines of cars and rapid transit snaking in all directions. Over the mountains you see running deer and hikers stopping to look up at you. Over the ocean you see the silt roiling down from the creeks and if you are lucky enough to go over Anno Nuevo you see the Elephant seals in the multitude looking at you in curious wonder. One of life’s great thrills is to gaze down upon the fabled Golden Gate and see the majesty and unique character of San Francisco. You can see clearly the cable cars and the vital pulse of the city. But mostly you see folks looking up wishing they were where you are.

It isn’t all just sightseeing with the folks at Airship Ventures. In fact this summer there is a whale survey planned for the San Juan Islands around Seattle. The ship will make the first trip of a Zeppelin from Southern California to Canada. Alex and Brian have the youthful exuberance of the barnstormers who popularized aviation a hundred years ago (but with an appropriate eye toward safety). So they want to make it interesting by taking voyages to the fun places like Catalina and Hearst Castle.

The ship will be spending some time in the LA area each month in the first half of 2010, and will back here otherwise. You can even buy a ticket for that very special longer cruise along the coast - 8 hours to or from LA isn’t fast, but route 1 from the air must be tremendous fun!

In spite of the recession they have been getting solid bookings, including many private charters for parties, corporate events, and even a wedding! I had seen the ship flying around for several months before going aboard. I now wonder why I waited because I see the Bay Area in a whole new way; a more intimate and grander place.

Don’t think you’ll get around to it sometime or when you finally decide to fly there might be a year long waiting list like they have in Germany! You need to have this on your New Years Resolution list! My advice is go to the website airshipventures.com and book now.

Alwayson 3rd annual VC conference

2010-02-15T15:14:00.001-08:00

Alwayson 3rd annual VC conference

The socially mediated wireless Chinese cloud. This about sums up the tech industry today. Run, run at full speed and if you stop to tie your shoe you end up at the back of the pack. Dern!

Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Venture Partners, was the keynote speaker at the AlwaysOn venture summit and he looked out over the crowd and said, in essence, that up to half of the venture firms will be folding in the next little while and that little while is a very little in this new rat race. Oh heck, just when I thought I was winning the rat race they brought in faster rats!

The reason for this was not obvious to me until he explained the Yale Model of institutional investing. It seems that the endowments of some of the powerhouse universities and other institutions saw fat profits in what has been called “alternative investments” these being the illiquid ones from timber and real estate to venture funds. Then came the crash in values all around the world and the endowments were stuck with assets they couldn’t sell or had to dump at a huge loss. In fact, Harvard has been one of the hardest hit (11 billion down from 26 billion) and they have had to cut back on some of the ivy covering the buildings. This is quite true as there is a multibillion-dollar science building that has been halted in mid construction. Ouch.

And some entrepreneurs are looking for funding from places other than venture firms for funding. Because it takes less capital to launch a firm today than it did ten years ago the angel investor is pretty busy. Not only that but there is funding from large corporations who are becoming more vertical like Cisco and even the CIA, as they fund projects that can benefit them. It doesn’t’ stop there. HP is doing it but, get this, so is Best Buy and Proctor and Gamble. This makes some sense but it is strange to think that you can go to a Best Buy and pick up much of the gear to launch your startup and they will pay you to take the stuff.

I met the top brand manager at Proctor and Gamble back in early 2000 when Tim Koogle and Jerry Yang had the bizarre notion that I would make an ideal keynote speaker at a national Yahoo conference where brand managers would come from all over and explore how they could be part of the Internet revolution. Tech companies were side by side with Taco Bell. How do you put a taco online you ask? The answer is you couldn’t then but now they can with the new social tools like maps and Twitter. P and G actually opened an office on Sand Hill in 1999 but soon closed it. Now they are back and their cash is the old fashioned kind, large and liquid.

I see the venture industry as having followed the same path as the motion picture industry in the last century. Early on there were a smattering of small studios and then bam, a gold rush. But most studios lost money and closed, leaving a few big operations and a lot of small independents. Like the film business the venture business had always been about home runs and as in baseball most pitches do not score points.

David Cowan at Bessemer Venture Partners said that one thing limiting his ability to uncover and fund new ideas is that the top VC’s are overloaded with inventory and sitting on all the boards as well as providing the guidance that they have been brought aboard to do takes a tremendous amount of time. Leave the nest already! And since new deals are slower in arriving it becomes hard to justify bringing more folks in into the venture firm.

David raised another interesting point that in the current climate there are a great number of clean tech companies being funded and unlike software they are building tangible products that take a lot more money to build. If you extend the capital requirement graph of all the clean tech firms you will see a monster delta between the amount of possible capital and the need. So most of these firms are just not sustainable. Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners brought up the fact that it takes 9 years from inception to an exit. During this period follow on capital and VC expertise has to be continually pumped into the startup.

Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson Venture Partners talked about one of his favorite subjects, China. Tim is the ultimate free trader and he and his partners were an early investor in Baidu, the Chinese search engine and the only one that gives Google a run for its money. Where a lot of American business folks approach the Chinese dragon with trepidation, Tim respects them as fearless, confident and tough. He feels that we have in them worthy partners that will make us better if we stand up in the marketplace with the same attitude.

But with all this, the mood is one of cautious optimism. Back at the beginning of the decade the VC and techfolk in the Valley seemed a bit depressed and even though it has picked up some in the last few years it is still very hard to make money in the VC game. This is because the upside is not realized until there is a way to fully capitalize the company. In the real world most everything is about showing up but in the VC world it’s about the exit. There has to be a stock offering or the firm has to be sold before there is dime one to the VCs and these events are far less common than 10 years ago. Sometimes neither strategy is possible and the firm is held as private equity with a much slower trickle of profits from operating income. Of course the worst scenario is that the firm folds and generally all is lost at that point.
In The Valley you hear a lot of talk about failures being celebrated. You hear people actually saying it is good to fail that it teaches valuable lessons and so on. This is crap. Sure you can learn from failure like if you slam our fingers in a door you learn not to do it but believe me the better lessons are from success. It is far better to be like the founders of Google. Succeed at the first thing you try. Now that’s a lesson!

Back at the AlwaysOn conference I found myself surrounded by biz school types. Now I feel about advanced degrees for business about like I view cooking school for chefs. The real world has far more to teach than business school. But if you have time to kill by all means hang out in school. If you have an MBA and you write about business and you are full of hot air people will think you’re an idiot. But if you haven’t got an MBA and you run a restaurant and you write about business you are merely considered colorful.

So what’s with these VC types anyway? Are they a bunch of wealthy geniuses who have offered up the capital to bring us a new age, an age as significant as when Gutenberg pulled his first page from the press but muuuuch faster? Well yes, that’s about it.

In fact a little history is warranted. Gutenberg was a failed mirror polisher back in the 1540’s. His idea was to manufacture and sell penitent mirrors (a small polished metal disc on a stick) which were taken to witness a holy relic and, like a nonworking camera, the pilgrim brought the image back to his village. Even the limited mind of a Dark Ages plowman wouldn’t fall for that and the business tanked worse than Microsoft Vista. But his second invention was combining a wine press, easily replicable lead type, oil based ink and a grand vision for a new Bible. He went to angel investors for the research money and in 18 months produced his first page. In short order he printed the most valuable book of all time and everything changed. Venture money made this possible so if you sometimes think that angels and VCs are as useless as shower curtain-ring salesmen just think about how long it will be till you next pick up a device that has been made possible by the quick wits of the entrepreneur and the swashbuckling risk takers on Sand Hill Road.

So today there are reduced expectations and the VCs job is harder. The parties at the end of these conferences are sober, dignified affairs and VC’s look almost dull compared to the old days. I well recall back in the 90’s when angel investor extraordinaire Ron Conway held a charity auction and one item, golf with Tiger Woods with Warren Buffet as the caddy, went for over $720,000. Ahhhh the fun we had.
alwayson.goingon.com to see the conf. video

The Happy Body and The Village Doctor

2009-08-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek live with their 4-year-old daughter Natalie in a Zen garden in a modest redwood sheathed house in the Glens in Woodside. Creeks and waterfalls cascade from all corners and small buildings peak out from under the trees. It is an oasis in already tranquil neighborhood.

In about 7 months I lost 78 lbs and achieved a level of fitness that, when factored with my age, is actually the fittest I have ever been. I have been stronger and fleeter but I have never been as integrated as I am today. Like many of us I tried a number of different techniques to get off the couch and to eat less. I kept losing my way because I repeatedly saw the process as just that, a process, something to be endured. I now see that the exact techniques are secondary and success comes not from a short-term set of practices but simply the commitment to become the person you think you want to be. What I mean is that many of the techniques for weight loss work and there are any number of exercise routines that will make you fit but they really only make a long term difference if you surrender to the idea that this is the way you are going to run you life and not something just tacked on as an expedient. A critical element is that exercise and diet are all of a part. Diet plans that don’t integrate exercise, and the reverse, rarely have much effect. I say it isn’t about technique but at The Happy Body there is certainly technique and it very specific.

Most people go because they want to lose weight but if you think that you will just be given a diet program you will soon be disabused of that. When I first showed up Jerzy took a look at me and it was pretty obvious I need a remodel. But why would I listen to him? On my arrival I saw a rather gorgeous woman leaving. “Who is that I asked, she can’t be a client she looks way to fantastic.” Oh, she is a client and if you do exactly what I tell you, I guarantee others will be saying that about you.”

People go to THB and for many reasons. Some need help with arthritis, others are just feeling old and some are accomplished athletes who want to be at peak fitness. My long time friend Jim went to increase his muscle mass. He has never had a weight problem. He is ramrod straight and he has an excellent diet. With this training Jim felt that he could perform later into life with a higher level of general fitness and here is someone who knows a great deal about the subject having been a driving force in the senior fitness movement for many years. He is approaching 80 and he looks to the future with optimism and enthusiasm. We used to jog together but I was to slow for him. I still am.

Barry is bit more typical. He needed to pull back 50 lbs and did it as planned. He shares with me the practice of working out regularly and keeping his eye on the scale. He and I discovered the same thing. Food wasn’t the enemy. In fact, quite the opposite.

I recently had lunch with Roger and Betty (he had the Caesar salad with chicken, dressing on the side, she the stuffed artichoke) both very active folks about my age and they had been down a similar path as me with regard to trying all sorts of different programs. Betty tried Jenny Craig, Nutrasystems and the gym scene. All this proved to be ineffective and one day Betty ran into a friend who was in the “you look terrific phase” so she signed up and soon her husband was in going too. A couple going through the Happy Body program is ideal of course. Roger and Betty are financial advisors and so quite often are desk bound but Roger is also a lacrosse referee and can now run enthusiastically back and forth for 50 games a year with his newfound fitness. They have a certain glow, which is once again plain old optimism about the future.

If you have a dramatic weight loss the reactions are predictable from: “Hey, you look good” to “Wow, you look terrific!” to “Whoa, are you dying?” Many of us have known people who were losing weight due to a serious illness and when half the people think you are one of them then you know you have your ideal weight. I am not kidding. When you are heavier and maybe 30 or 35% body fat, your face is fuller but get down to 10 or 15% and all the lines show up like cracks in a dry creek. They say that when you hit 40 you can pick your face or your ass but let me tell you at 60 you get neither so you had better focus on muscle, blood pressure and cholesterol.

The Gregorek’s have a new book coming out titled The Happy Body: The Simple Science of Nutrition, Exercise and Relaxation about how they deliver the goods. They tell you all about how they have become the dynamos that they are. Their personal goal is to be at the highest level of fitness for their entire lives and so far they are right on track. They are glad to share their path and the book will be available here as soon as it is printed. In it they tell you all about their exact strategy to become and stay fit and I can tell you if you follow the book it is guaranteed to work. But who really does what they tell you to do in books? The fact is that the human touch is what we all need and that’s why attending their program is where the fat hits the fire.

At THB they stress above all youthfulness. Youthfulness is an attitude not an age. I can honestly say that two years ago I felt as if I was nearly used up. Today I see no horizon at all and am eagerly looking for the next engrossing project.

Jerzy and Aniela happen to compete on a world stage in Olympic weightlifting so naturally they love this path and many of the exercises they give you are based on their this discipline. I have modified some of the exercises but building on the core instruction I have found my way to a work out I now do for 50 minutes a day, six days a week. I use dumbbells, a rubber tube, straight bar and let gravity do its derndest. I never thought I would like crunches and sit-ups but I do a wide variety of them as well. I used to work out in a gym for years but it always seemed like an obligation, something to get through like a kid forced to chew through a pile of spinach. Until I was introduced to the gradual increasing approach at THB I generally resented working out. But ever the contrarians Aniela and Jerzy use some techniques that a few coaches object to. Their work out doesn’t involve much sweating, hyperventilating or any endurance at all. Object if you will but look at them; they positively radiate fitness. In the end the best workout is the one that you will do day-in-day-out so if you like the marshal arts or yoga or running I say, terrific.

My friend Ilona has a great take on her time at THB. She has always been quite fit but twenty pounds beyond ideal. She felt that the workout she was doing didn’t make her happy and much of the food she ate wasn’t fulfilling. She heard that Jerzy and Aniela were telling people that they could tune you up to peak performance so she went. Now years after her last session she tells me that she credits much of her physical and mental integrity from her participation there. As she become healthier and more confident her daughter took notice. This 13 year old had a less then happy body image with a weight problem that bothered her. Ilona didn’t want to push her but the girl’s food choices were leading her down a dark path. Based on her mother’ success her daughter decided to go to THB and as a result she was able to reach for the brass ring and today is self posed 17 year old who likes the way she looks and how she feels.

So think of the things you did in the past and try to recall if your trainer ever said to you “Just do exactly as I tell you and you will get the body that you imagine for yourself. You will earn it, you will own it and (baring illness) you can keep it all the way to the finish line.” At The Happy Body this can happen to you.

If you think this is too good to be true or is some sort of advertisement, well it isn’t. I know some folks will go there will not succeed. But I tried a number of ways to come to peace with my body and it worked for me.

Village Doctor
If you picture a kindly old sawbones with a stethoscope in one hand and a lollypop in the other dispensing tried and true homilies about common sense and good health under a chestnut tree on the village green you might want to swing that around to 2009 where you will find instead a small focused practice where good common sense is dispensed for sure, but tempered with the latest advances in both science and service. Behold, the concierge practice that is the Village Doctor. villagedoctor.com.

First a note on how this works. Retainer fee or concierge medical practice is basically an agreement between a doctor and a patient whereby the doctor sees fewer patients and the patient pays more for the basic office services. Frankly some will say it is too expensive for them and others will see it as appropriately priced. The fact is that the annual fee is not covered by insurance. But with the decoupling of insurance, the physician and the patient are freed from the hustle that has become a part of medicine and which can (not necessarily will, but can) create an adversarial relationship between a patient and a doctor.

The three doctors include the founder, Dr. Eric L. Weiss, a long time emergency room doctor who is also a medicine travel specialist. At one point he was the doctor for the San Francisco International Airport. As a result The Village Doctor is recognized as a top travel clinic for the nation. Dr. Prerana Sangani is an internist with a public health background and Dr. Raquel Burgos has an extensive background in pediatrics. The other staff members ensure that scheduled visits start on time and route you to your doctor at any time for emergencies. There is a lot of talk about wellness as opposed to treatment but let’s face it, unless there is time to actuate the specifics then it becomes just more jibber jabber.

In addition to the regular practice The Village Doctor has taken the wellness formula and rolled out The Wellness Studio that is open to the whole community and is separate from the medical practice. This from their website: “Incorporating selected complementary alternative medical (CAM) therapies and successful fitness programs, The Village Doctor now offers a truly integrative approach to wellness. Specialists are able to work independently or collaborate in creating a highly comprehensive personal healthcare program. The Village Doctor Wellness Studio, a newly remodeled eco-friendly studio, is conveniently located off 280 in Woodside. Patients of The Village Doctor Concierge Medical Practice receive the unique benefit of their primary care physician’s inclusion and oversight of their individualized wellness programs; however, the Wellness Studio is very much open to the public.” wellnessstudio.com The Center provides classes in Yoga, Contour and Pilates. There is acupuncture, physical therapy, massage and nutrition counseling. Hummm, I feel better already. Dr. Weiss has also included a healthy item on the Buck’s kids’ menu. A kid’s chef salad. Check it out.

I made a commitment to try the practice for a year and see what happened. I am now 60 years old and for the last three years I have been a patient of The Village Doctor. I’m not there a great deal but I have come to see it a bit like a traveler crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. The actual time I’m on it is not that much but it is a great way to get where I’m going and I have been going two places. First I have needed to be sent to specialists in a couple of areas focused around injuries. It is a typical and not very interesting story.

The second thing and this has been the really vital (vital is such the perfect word here as I means “related to or the characteristics of life”) Dr. Weiss took my vitals during the first checkup and said, “Hey, you fat slug. Get fit or die.” Actually he didn’t say this but this was the message I heard. He let me know in his gentle way what I already was pretty sure of, being way overweight and staring at the universe from my vantage point on the couch was a life threatening reaction to a long-term problem.

So what to do? He suggested that I give The Happy Body folks a call. Now I had done that already about a year before and got some fellow on the phone who sounded a bit scary. He basically said to come see him if I was through being fat and lazy…well I wasn’t. And, unlike Dr. Weiss, he really was that direct.

Anyway Eric said I should probably go see them and I did. But that’s another story. Now when I go in for my check up I am happy with my vitals. My numbers are in the normal range and my blood pressure is actually low. It turns out that a guy in his younger years celebrates great biceps and abs. As he get older it’s more about good knees and a solid back and as he, and of course she, gets up there, it’s blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose that become very interesting to you.

So there may be no spreading chestnut tree but there is good medicine at The Village Doctor.

TED 2009

2009-02-21T17:09:00.000-08:00

First a definition. TED is real, virtual, exclusive, inclusionary, site specific and global. TED started 25 years ago as a convocation of explorers examining the universe of Technology, Entertainment and Design. Today it is still about all this and more. TED is quickly becoming a big part of the world brain. I have attended for several years and TED has grown, as have I. Much like a space probe using the gravitation of the planets they pass to slingshot for more speed I am using TED as a pivotal point for my own life as I move forward to the challenges ahead.
In fact it was at TED in 2008 that I made a commitment to myself to whip myself into the best shape of my life. Happily I stuck to it. My commitment to myself for this coming year is to…well, you will have to watch this space same time next year.

TED has two major aspects, the formal stage presentations and the socializing during the intervals. At one point I found myself chatting with Bill Gates, Al Gore and Robin Williams. Robin asked me, “Aren’t you the Buck’s guy?” I admitted I was and Al said, “I go there.” I realized that Bill was a Buck’s customer as well. Just like you.

The generally serious academic presentations are broken up with dance troupes, piano jockeys, comedians, singers and even a live, remote youth orchestra from Venezuela. We have all heard youth orchestras and they are generally enthusiastic but a little raw. José Antonio Abreu’s (a TED prize winner) Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra draws from 250,000 young musicians, many from impoverished areas and it was, to my ear, the equal of any big city orchestra. These kids made me feel that the future was in very capable hands. Much of the conference is about the future, transcending shorter term problems like the economy. Where are we going as a people on this beautiful blue ball? Big notions and individual personal achievements are presented like the man who walked, not skied or sledded, to the South Pole. We swooped with Uli Gegenschatz the inventor of the winged flying suit as he showed us a film of him zooming through the Alps. He is actually working on a new suit where he jumps, flies and lands without a parachute.

Bill Gates filled us in on his world plan for fighting disease and his teacher training programs. At one point he pretended to release malaria infected mosquitoes into the crowd from a small jar saying, “Why should the poor be the only ones who get malaria?” When the anticipated laugh line didn’t materialize he added that the mosquitoes really didn't have malaria. For some reason this was interpreted by the press as dangerous or the rich had it coming and other unkind kind things. Hey, press folks, it was a joke! In fact Bill has a very good sense of humor and if you don't believe it, look up his retirement video on line. Chris Anderson, the Curator and host of TED, said as the pretend mosquitoes flew off that here was Bill releasing more bugs into the world (a line that did get the laugh). Bill Gates is a hero for the ages and to be in his presence is a tremendous honor. Later in the week I stepped into an elevator which held him and a service person with a cart on which rested a fruit plate. Behind the waiter’s back I mugged a snatch at the fruit. Bill gave me a conspiratorially permissive wink and I grabbed a strawberry. A small exchange, and for me indicative of the good will and mutual respect the very famous show the less so at the conference.

On TED.com you can see all the talks so I will mention a very few of them. P. W. Singer updated us on the burgeoning world of remote warfare. Combat robots in the water, on the ground and in the air. Compassionless killing machines. Very cinematic stuff and not in a good way. This was followed by a group of vocalists called Natural 7 who have taken hip-hop, jazz, R & B and rock and come up with a truly original sound using voice and electronic modulation to rock the house.
At one point I found myself at a table with a small group of Tedsters both typical and extraordinary. We were discussing the survival of the oceans with Silvia Earl the eminent oceanographer who was one of the winners of the TED prize. Next to me was the director of Stanford’s design school, Banny Banerjee. Next to him was Ram Shriram and his wife Vijay. Ram was an early investor in Netscape and helped launch Google. There was also Glenn Close and her husband the biotech exec David Shaw. I am a bit conflicted about Hollywood celebrities. We know who they are and they don't necessarily know us. This imbalance can make striking up a conversation strained. There are those of them who exhibit a kind of a grace that says, “It’s OK, you can talk to me” and Glenn one of these people. She was not wearing makeup, exhibited no movie star spin and she looked you in the eye. I was bold enough to ask her about her current TV show and she was very happy to talk about it. Well, I don't mind discussing my work and so why should she? Folks are cool at TED and even I forbore from blazing away with my camera. Also at the table was Dan McClellan who is completing Oceans, which we had seen rushes of earlier in the day. I have never seen such an intimate look at the lives of ocean creatures. Easily the most costly and possibly the grandest documentary to date.

Tim Berners-Lee led the audience in a chant, "raw data now!" After singlehandedly inventing the World Wide Web Tim now wants to have free flowing raw data which he sees as more like human thought than the gigantic encyclopedia the Internet has become. Ray Anderson invented the mundane seeming carpet tile. But here is a manufacturer who isn't content to just make a product. His company is approaching a zero % carbon footprint. This segued into a presentation about the mummies of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, Sicily. There we were looking inside an Italian tomb which spoke to culture, religion and taxidermy over the last four centuries. I have for many years been a big fan of the Capuchins who had the curious habit of turning the bones of their followers into furniture.

Willie Smits is Dutch Indonesian and he was a tremendous hit. Willie was in a village marketplace one day and found a sick orangutan dying in a trash heap. He nursed it back to health, gathered more of them and eventually established a sanctuary where there are now over a 1,000, but this isn't the whole story. From his husbandry of the apes he found creative ways to reforest vast stretches of jungle which have been laid to waste. Now years later his Masarang Foundation has reestablished agricultural people living in harmony with the natural environment.

Margaret Wertheim enchanted us with an unlikely topic. She crochets coral reefs. Margaret observed that coral, cactus and many other living creatures grow with hyperbolic geometry. This potato chip shape yields high surface areas. She began crocheting in wool a representation of a coral because of her passion for traditional female handcraft combined with a love of natural physics and concern for the threatened reefs. Hundreds heard her message and contributed wool coral for a vast exhibition presently on exhibit in L.A. I learned a fact that had thus far escaped me. Coral reefs grow atop extinct volcanoes at the same rate as the volcano’s cone degrades into the sea. A delicate balance indeed. Margaret and her sister Christine have established The Institute for Figuring to celebrate this and other arts. The reef is part AID’s quilt, part Bayeux Tapestry with shades of general relativity and sitting at Grandma’s knee.

Another presenter, Dale Chihuly, has made a reef too with his sexy, scintillating glass art; opposite yet complimentary to crocheted wool. Another expression is the monumental architecture of Daniel Libeskind. His controversial (could it have been any other way?) design for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center is all angles and sharp corners. In fierce opposition to the work of Frank Ghery. Daniel wants to struggle against improbabilities and sees his designs as a triumph of optimism over pessimism. A bold vocabulary for big ideas.

Shai Agassi presented his Better World electric car program. He wants to provide all the new cars for entire countries with replaceable batteries and projects a 2 cent a mile future. A charismatic speaker with a big following, but his numbers don’t add up even as his investors get in line to prove the critics wrong. Thank heavens for the big thinkers even those with unlikely ideas. They said man couldn’t fly too. At least one speaker was just plain wrong. Take respected Columbia professor Dickson Despommier’s scheme to build practical food farms in 30 story buildings in places like midtown Manhattan. I am very familiar with the costs and problems inherant in tall buildings and I can find no way into this idea. He gets very good press but like other technical schemes with crippling debilities the desire to make it so is not enough.

Jill founder of SETI was another TED prize winner. She and her team are scrubbing the cosmos for signs of life. Intended or unintended she is pursuing global harmony. A simple formula. Find intelligent life elsewhere and we feel as one here on Earth. Bonnie Bassler talked about bacterial communication. Those little buggers are communicating using a system called quorum sensing. They chemically twitter each other and we are beginning to understand their language. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT brought out his little green laptop that was a twinkly eye mote 3 years ago and now accounts for about half the laptops in the world. Talk about an idea worth spreading.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat Pray Love to huge acclaim and asked us to ponder what it might be like to be a creative person who might have her best work behind her. Elizabeth, no way kid! Jay Walker sang the phrases of the very flexible English language and showed us a video of 5,000 Chinese students learning to speak it in a single gigantic classroom. Scary and lovely. Other presenters included Sarah Jones who with her 14 NYC characters had us dying with laughter.

Small ideas, big ones, bigger ones and 1300 of my close friends. This is TED to me.

Newt Gingrich

2008-11-06T14:22:00.001-08:00

Newt was visiting here in The Valley as he does from time to time. I asked to see his driver’s license and when I looked at it I asked him how we were supposed to believe a man who lies about his weight?

More noise on Green no one will read

2008-11-06T14:21:00.000-08:00

IT ISN’T EASY BEING GREEN
“OK we’ve been peeing in the pool long enough. When it was just a few kids it was one thing but now that we are north of 7 billion we need to knock it off or the pool will be closed!”
Back in the 60s, hippies were preaching that we were wrecking the environment and there was a movement called going “back to the land”, as if had actually ever lived on the ‘land” in some previous life and not the suburbs most of us had actually grown up in. But they had their hearts in the right place even if raising goats for profit was really not going to pan out. My wife Margaret and I were a couple of those dreamy idealists. We moved to the country and put up a barn. We installed solar panels and composted everything is site. Margaret recycled when it was very hard to do. Our wooden-sided Morris Minor went 63 mph, got 38 mpg and we heated the house with wood and dogs (we still do). Fortunately we bought our land in the mountains overlooking Silicon Valley and not some backwater in eastern Idaho. Our scheme to raise buffalo (for what, hides?) didn’t exactly pan out. It seems they really do roam like the song says. So we got real jobs and here we are today.
Now the green revolution has caught up to where we were 35 years ago and everyone blinks with dilated eyes thinking its something new. It isn’t new but now it is more then a lifestyle. It’s necessary for life itself.
I just read an article by a leading editorialist, Paul Johnson, in Forbes. (I read Forbes because I want to see how old people think). Paul talks about the bogus global warming scam and he laments seeing newfangled power generating windmills wrecking his view. He discredits them as a medieval invention and not to be taken seriously. Of course printing was a medieval invention so maybe everything from that era isn’t so bad. It is simply beyond my ability to understand how some folks can complain that others are trying to tidy up the planet.
A big question many people wrestle with is: do people cause detrimental environment effects and if so how much? The answer is irrelevant. Slothful, pollution spewing lifestyles are not supportable on a personal or a societal level. Whether we are actually ruining the climate or not our lives are made less sustainable and ultimately less fun if we continue to pile up more patio furniture, appliances and all sorts of things that clutter out lives instead of making it more graceful. Will cleaning up the environment fix that? Not directly but decoupling from the couch and doing something more real than watching Dancing With The Stars might make a person more content.
Nearly everyone I talk to says TV is evil but they are in its grip and therefore, powerless. How did this devolve to a discussion of TV? Well TV is perfect example of an unsustainable model. It uses electricity to take control of one’s brain to stop one from experiencing actual life. TV makes you eat more and consume products you see advertised that until that point you didn’t even want (this isn’t you of course but, you know a guy who knows a guy who has three TVs or even five in a single home).
Today it seems that every topic (certainly when discussing the green movement) circles back to the economy. Who is responsible for our current state? We can blame the bankers. We can blame Wall Street or we can level our guns at the politicians. But the real culprit is much closer to home. Like Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy and it is us. “Let me say that by no means am I preaching. I am as much a part of the problem as any of us but I do recognize that we individuals, in concert with classic good ol’ American Capitalism, have created an untenable situation. We are both victims and beneficiaries of all the genetic evolution and cultural predispositions to acquire stuff. Once again TV is a perfect metaphor to see how stuff is driving us crazy. It is not uncommon to see three four or even five controllers on someone’s coffee table (perhaps we should call them control centers). Each of these controllers has dozens of buttons which open ever more screens giving us options for our viewing pleasure. This array of controllers give us hundreds of options. Couple this with all the other devices like cell phones, computers, cameras, cars, kitchens and we have hundreds of buttons we can push to control…what? Well just a few functions really. We have hundreds of buttons we never use and so many choices that there is no way to make the best one. Try picking the best digital camera from the hundreds of choices. Confront an unfamiliar microwave and it will stop you dead. In a commercial kitchen where intense cooking takes place a microwave doesn’t even have a start button just a dial with a minute hand. How did we get to the point where all out cool stuff is actually anti us? The free market is merely satisfying out desire to amass stuff, a normal human response. Instead of gathering more spear points and fur blankets we surround ourselves with more horsepower and ever more complicated gizmos that seem to be complex for the pleasure of the manufacturer trying to fool us with shiny buttons. Is it any wonder that folks take home loans that they can’t pay in the future? They are just trying to find shelter.
So am I against an unfettered free market? You bet I am. The free market gave us the great tobacco conspiracy where we were free to believe the great lie from the 40s and 50’s that doctors recommended cigarettes. Or car companies that fought the seat belt and airbag laws. Exactly were we put the pin in the map to establish the rules is the job of government but without serious punishment for lying and corrupting the information the process is crippled.
To a large extent it is the borrowing from our future that has gotten us a fix. If the future continues to be more lucrative than the past you can borrow today and pay back with more plentiful money later. But if the future turns out to not be bigger but the same size, or horrors, smaller then you have basically ate yer cookies up on day one of a four day camping trip.
It is impossible to separate the perpetrators and victims. We are locked in a tarantella of capitalism and desire and there is no clear path out of this crazy dance. We enjoy a society where the market is free to sell us things we really don’t want, bundled with the things we do. A large grocery store has as many as 10,000 things to eat. Most of the things are heavily processed foods because that’s the profitable and tasty stuff. Much of it is not good for the body and a lot of it really isn’t food but extracts of food with chemicals added to change the color, texture, taste and is, in fact, artificial food. The food industry is at war with us.
How can we get out of the forest of over-choice and over-consumption and find a way to sort out the beneficial from the harmful? Well, we actually have to march counter to our genetic imperative of gathering ever more stuff. Everyone seems to agree that more things don’t deliver more happiness yet we seem to keep piling it on. Just like watching your diet and exercise we need to ask ourselves if that next thing will bring us more joy or more anxiety. We have always been told that our economy must grow, that our piece of the action should get ever larger. Growth for growth sake! But is this really true? What if we just grow to full size - and live?

GOING GREEN

Tony Perkins played host to about 600 green entrepreneurs and venture types at the new Cavallo Center on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Here is an old military base having been beaten into plowshares in the form a resort run by the estimable Post Ranch folks. It is very nice, in a Marin precious sort of way. The repurposed barracks with the broad lawn sweeping to the sea and the incoming sea is grand.
Chuck Reed the progressive mayor of San Jose told us about his big plans green up his city like no other city. He wants to do much more than be carbon neutral and his plan was well articulated when he spoke at Going Green. It is well worth a look. You can go to the web site and see the entire program and Chuck’s plan in particular. Chuck is so green he’s getting black and blue trying to find the money to put his proposals into action.
The conference brought folks from all corners of the green movement, except ironically the hippies who have either moved deep into woods or morphed into real people. What constitutes green anyway? Well, in the Sept 11th issue of Time Magazine Scot Case with TerraChoice surveyed products in an unnamed big box store that claimed a green component. From Time, “The results were startling: of the 1,018 products they surveyed, all but one failed to live up fully to their green boasts. Words like nontoxic were used in meaninglessly vague ways. Terms like Energy Star Certified were in fact not backed up by certification. And the list of bogus claims went on. This is one small corner of the green movement and it illustrates the unregulated atmosphere we see today.”
There is both a great deal of duplication with overlapping technologies coupled with uncertainty in the markets in the green movement. Many of the green companies are hardware and personnel intense. Focusing on solar electric gives a good illustration. Making solar equipment is a long term play. Firms need at least four years of financial support and in the case of large solar arrays as much as 10 years. The solar entrepreneurs are hoping for at least part of the subsidies that the fossil fuel and nuclear industry have gotten over the years but even though the long awaited federal tax credits have been renewed it is a slim lifeline for these vital solutions.
Because so many of energy systems are large infrastructure plays it is essential that there be a floor below which energy pricing cannot fall or the companies will not mature. In the 70’s there was a solar movement. There were actually solar panels on the White House installed by Carter but Reagan laughed them off the roof and that made sense in the cheap oil era. Without a price floor, solar electric companies are reluctance to invest the money necessary to launch large array plants. As a result this business has moved to other countries. Germany and Japan are not known as particularly sunny spots but these countries along with Australia and Israel are running hard to bring ever increasing solar electric power on line.
It is unfathomable why politicians don’t get behind solar unless they are subject to skin cancer and actually hate the sun. Some folks are big behind renewing the nuclear option blindly forgetting that we never solved the disposal or dispersal problem. To pick life-killing gamma rays over life-giving visible light rays is environmentally, socially and economically inexpedient, unless you are in the pocket of these concerns. The actual cost of fuel must be totaled by adding cost of extraction, pollution and sustainability. Fossil fuels are limited, polluting, and will run out. Biofuels take tremendous amounts of machinery, land, water and processing. Wave power is very limited and has serious hardware problems. Wind is a good option but it involves big equipment with many moving parts and ever increasing environments problems of its own. Some of these mills are being designed with 400 foot blades that make a good deal of noise and don’t seem to turn when on the hottest days when peak power is required Only solar, and large desert array solar, has the potential to free us from the problems of the fuels above. Few moving parts, proven technology and free fuel forever when it is needed on the hottest days.

Bill Clinton lamented on the John Stewart show recently that if we had had the imagination seven years ago to go solar we would have a great deal less incentive to keep the oil producing in clover. We could have halved our oil imports, slashed our outflow of currency, created jobs and cleaned up the pool.
Co hosting the Going Green conference was none other than Scientific American. I was able to spend time with an old friend and one time next door neighbor from the Upper West side in NYC Bruce Brandfon who was then a reporter for Mother Jones Magazine and now is the publisher of Scientific American.
Scientific American has a new magazine to go with their 165 year old one. It’s called Earth 3.0 and is all over the green topic. It brings the gravity of the SA crew to this relatively new topic. Hummm maybe Paul Johnson will consider writing a column.
Solar and large array solar is a particular area of interest to me. Scientific American had a cover story in January where there was a good rundown on the notion that we could replace all the electricity we generate from fossil fuel with solar collectors. The authors proposed that we store energy as pressurized air underground to be used to run turbines at night. In fact there are many different large array schemes which use everything from concentrating mirrors to boil water to run turbines to parabolic concentrators powering high temp photovoltaic. Different systems answer different climate considerations but one thing is sure, the best places to put the systems is in high sun areas. The problem is we don’t have extra grid capacity to ship the power. It is practical to send power high voltages from thousands of miles but we need the wires to do it. Around 700 billion might pretty much cover this…oh gosh we just spent that. Darn, just missed it. Well since we are using the “T” word we have to ask ourselves and our politicians if we really believe in the future and if the answer is yes the obvious solution is solar.
John O’Donnell most recently of Ausra a large array solar firm that is building a PG&E plant near in Southern California) brought the muscle of Kleiner Perkins to bear on this problem by securing financing from Vinod Kosla, also a speaker at the conference. John and I were recently lamenting the state of energy development and commiserating on how far we have to go to get on a sustainable energy footing. He is working on projects that will lower the sea level from its rising future. John’s figure for how much land is needed to install an array that would power the entire U.S. grid is 92 sq miles of land (a trivial amount of desert land available in America).
John makes the point that changing light bulbs is a small act and many small acts will add up to a lot of small changes. We need big changes so perhaps we should focus on changing politicians not light bulbs.
I think that it is tragically misguided that we are trying to beat the price of gasoline back. We need high gasoline prices to encourage multiple car passengers. But won’t just the rich be able to drive? Well take Europe where the cars are tiny and the people seem happy enough.
For a full account of how we can fix our economy, get out of oil jail and create millions of jobs check out Van Johnson’s new book The Greencoller Economy.

TED 2008 .

2008-04-18T16:46:00.001-07:00

I had the great privilege of attending the TED conference again this year. TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design. This singular event brings together great thinkers from all over the world…and me. The text is a three and a half day conference where charismatic speakers, artists and all sorts of optimists, skeptics, believers and off the chartists come to the stage all day long and tell about their passions.

Jill Bolter Taylor is a neurologist who, in the style of a research doctor crossed with a revival preacher, told us about her harrowing experience with a brain aneurism. She was both doctor and patient and her delivery was at once chilling and uplifting. She was a standout in an outstanding crowd.

The theme this year was Big Questions like What Is Life? Who better to discuss this than Craig Venter, the genome guy. Craig both thrilled and alarmed a good many of us. He is attempting to create artificial life and some feel that his alchemy may lead to chaotic outcomes that are the stuff of horror films. Myself, I feel his defense a bit dubious when asked how he would keep microbes under control. He more or less said, just to trust him. Some, though, see him as the possible savior of mankind by developing microbes that sequester carbon or offer beneficial pharmaceuticals or new biofuels. Look him up online and you will see why he is at the center of Big Ideas.

Thomas Kerns of the Guggenheim showed us ambitious plans to put a Guggenheim Museum in every garage, that is if it is a Middle Eastern garage. There are several new museums with that brand around the world and many more planned. Who would have imagined that? Where will all the art come from…hum I guess we will just have to make more art. That sounds like a good idea for all concerned.

Several physicists were displaying their wares. Garrett Lisi being one of them. He is working on a grand unified field theory while surfing the great beaches around the world. Since much of this work is thought experiments this is actually doable. In the April issue of Scientific American Lisi is alternately called a genius and a crackpot and that by biggies in the field. Much fun to play witness to. Well, someone is probably going to crack that Big Idea and it would be great if it is the surfing physicist.

Neil Turok is a physicist of a different stripe who holds the mathematical chair in physics at Cambridge. He’s a cosmologist concerned with the inflationary period after the Big Bang. Neil is a multiverse man. If I understand him correctly he postulates that the BB was a result of two universes colliding and instead of coming from nothing came from a whole lot of something. Neil was a TED prize winner for his promotion of science curriculum in Africa. The study of physicists (I think this would be called physicistology) who put forward these grand ideas about the nature of reality is a particular interest of mine. There are so many theories bumping into one another and we must not forget that of all the competing theories of reality only one, at most, can be right. I certainly can’t tell you which one but we have seen ideas nailed in place by Aristotle, Newton and Einstein come loose over time. As the quantum and celestial mechanics toil under the hood of the big machine we seem to lean toward righter then wronger though.

As you can see there was some pretty detailed science at TED. Robert Lang brought us back to earth then shattered our understating of a different kind of space-time continuum. He is an origami artist who, using a computer program, can take a simple sheet of paper and turn it into a near living piece of sculpture. I half imagined he was just using magic and I had to ice my brain to follow along with him. He was followed by John Knoll (the programmer of Photoshop) of Industrial Light and Magic. He showed how the marvelous special effects in the movies today are made possible using tools he is developing.

Isaac Mizrahi the clothing designer/lounge act gave a funny scattered talk about his funny scattered life. I heard one person comment that they found it strange that this fellow was at such a highbrow event. (I’ll bet they say that about me) but I find him very now, urban and highly amusing. He’s a sort of a Judy Garland crooked-smile talent but with less tragedy.

David Griffin and Wade Davis of National Geographic projected large images of this nifty planet we call home. When you see nature photography made big it has a lasting impact and brings home the fact that this is the planet, this one right under our feet, is the one we are all concerned with keeping clean.

Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic but he is much more than a conductor. In fact, he is a force of nature. Here we are at TED where one of the mandates is to explore how to save the world while celebrating culture. Zander gave a riveting talk about the relevance of music and then tossed out handfuls of the words to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the 9th, to the audience. He insisted everyone sing along and, like a patient teacher, made us start over five times until, we got it right. This coincidently (perhaps) is the theme music from Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange which basically put paid to the modern world. A rich, rollicking and memorable experience.

Then Al Gore. Here is a towing figure of our time. Articulate, funny and looking like a central casting image of a world leader. We simultaneously celebrate him and lament what might have been had they been able to count the votes in Florida. He is a TED regular and his message sharpens every time he points out our clear folly with regard to our stewardship of the Big Blue Marble. Unlike some political figures Al Gore’s image seems to purify over time and hearing him is real pleasure.

Harvard astronomer Roy Gould and Microsoft’s Curtis Wong announced for the first time the World Wide Telescope. Fly through the galaxies and zoom to the edge of the universe. Bloglidite Robert Scoble said it made him cry when he first saw it. Hey, don’t get it on the keyboard, Bob! Now we have for the heavens what Google did for the Earth.

It isn’t all serious at TED although there are messages in everything. Nellie McKay is a singer who strolled onto the stage with an air of confusion, her tiny self dressed like a nice mom on her way to a baby shower. She stepped up to the grand piano and proceeded to thrash it within an inch of the wood pile as she belted, crooned, and purred her provocative, sexy and, to some, offensive lyrics (go Nellie). She wowed me but I know a couple of people who felt put upon when she skewered women’s lib. Sacred cows taste best. Well this is what makes TED what it is. Generally I am not fond of is being a fan. Bandwagons, team spirit and even yelling at kid’s soccer makes me feel uneasy but at TED I am a fan, a participant and I feel lucky to be able to be there.

Thomas Dolby heads up the house band and they play between the speakers. Other musicians and comedians are layered in as well. This offers a way to change direction and keep the synapses firing on all 8 cylinders or maybe four with battery back up.

Chris Jordan is a photographer who I first met at sea when he had the helm of a 120 foot schooner off the coast of Maine. We were sailing in the Penobscot Bay with a group of environmentalists and we were disheartened by the fact that the fisheries had been so devastated in that area. The Grand Banks had been the richest fishery in the world and now the only thing taken commercially is the lobster. Ironically this great delicacy is a kind of marine cockroach which subsists on garbage. Chris is a photographer who highlights the plight of the planet with his pictures of the material world. He takes a snippet of time, say an hour or a day and produces huge composite prints of how many plastic bags are used in a minute or how many airplane con trails would fill the skies in a given time. His work left a deep impression in my forehead.

The TED stage was decorated , festooned even with some of the cultural artifacts collected by Jay Walker (founder of Priceline). These included a page from a Gutenberg Bible, a real sputnik and various Paleolithic skulls. As you can see if you look around Buck’s I am a great believer in stuff. “Hey, Jay I’ll trade you a Soviet Space suit for your space toilet”.

The road to TED after 24 years will make a great movie one day. It was founded by a Richard Saul Wurman, a wild man who is reputedly both a loveable and an unrepentant rascal. After nearly 20 years he gave up the reigns and Chris Anderson (formerly of Woodside and founder of Business 2.0) became the curator of the event and it seems there was a falling out over some issue that left Richard feeling bruised. In a grand and heartfelt segment he came back and was warmly embraced in every respect by Chris and the gathering, including a few who had been there at the very beginning. TED is about inclusion and participation. One of the parts I found the most compelling was a simple question and answer segment about the shape of TED in the future. People had elaborate ideas on where they thought the conference should head and you could tell that the participants felt deeply connected.

After the long days with all the various breakout opportunities there is of course a party or ten each night. There were stars from The Valley as well as real movie stars (there goes the neighborhood). I was chatting with Forrest Whitaker about a new movie he is making and I think the Hollywood folk felt comfortable as no one had the bad taste to pose them for photos (much as I wanted to).

Bob Ballard the deep sea explorer (found the Titanic, PT 109 and many more) is the Galileo of underwater exploration and he took around the Big Below in his deep sea rovers. After diving to depth we spent some time in the trees with an arboreal explorer Richard Preston who spends days at a time in the tops of redwoods 40 stories in the air including climbing Hyperion the tallest living thing. He described to us the ancient ecology in these tress but he is really up in the branches because, like so many presenters at TED, he finds that his passion plugs him directly into the vibrant grid of life.

Nissim Taleb brought us his strangely compelling but annoying idea that cataclysmic events are solely the result of cataclysmic events beyond our ability to predict and that all people (except for himself) are …more or less, fools. I read his book the Black Swan and am not convinced but he persuades many and his bravado is fun to watch.

At one point there was a panel of luminaries assembled to discuss “the new media.” It was to be broadcast live by the BBC but there was a technical problem so the group just sat on the stage in front of about 1,000 people waiting for the uplink. Then someone started heckling from the audience in a heavy Scottish accent. Everyone turned to see Robin Williams giving the stage-bound panel a hard time. Up he sprung and filled the void with an buzzsaw of quick cuts that left us in tears like ‘we are here with a live debate that is not being televised, much like the last 6 years in this country”.

For me the most important presentation of the event was a surprise from the noted MIT musician/composer Tod Machover. Death and the Powers is an opera scheduled to premiere in Monaco in 2009 that Tod has composed about a rich guy who downloads himself into a computer with the idea of living forever. The staging of the opera includes a luminous library of moving, glowing books and robots running about the stage. It is a relevant topic about the near future. It is ironic that when Machover isn’t developing his opera he is working on communication tools with Dan Ellsey who is profoundly handicapped and is locked in a body with only a glowing light stick attached to his head for communication which he uses to point to his computer. With this tool he is able to compose and perform music which he did for the TED audience. So here is opera about downloading a person into a computer and in real life Tod is working on behalf of a man who he is up loading from a damaged body into life. Here they all were on stage with machinery and several people all to the benefit of a single man brought out with great difficulty by special airplane from the east. I have always wondered at the social ramifications of a great deal of effort to the benefit of a single handicapped person. Then it struck me that it wasn’t just about Dan. In fact it was about all those involved on stage, those back at home, others - who might dream about being freed from all sorts of limitations and even about me. It was a grand opera to see Dan enjoying his ability to perform for this group of interested people. So I have a new and much less judgmental view of this process.

Over the years I have been lucky enough to have been a participant in Love-ins in the 60’s and later antiwar marches, Burning Man, Esalen and TED. These are all hotbeds of learning and compassion and amazingly none of these offer any diplomas. So after attending 23 elementary schools, two high schools and five colleges and universities the only diploma I have is from Perfect Paws a dog training school. Heck I’ll never be able to get a job.

(In the pictures for search: Bill Joy, Pierre Omidyar, Larry page, Gino Yu, David Blaine, Max Levchin, Dean Kamen, Zem and James Joaquin)

new thoughts

2008-02-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

I Sing The Tech Virtual

Peter Friess, the director who brought the Tech Museum of San Jose back from the brink has just wrapped the four month Body World’s exhibition which brought nearly 300,000 visitors to the museum. This was a great opportunity for the people to see the old museum because it is changing and evolving into...well, we shall see. The Tech has launched an innovative new program called thetechvirtual headed up by the amazing Nina Simon. Nina and her staff using the environment developed by SL founder Phillip Rosedale (and now a member of the Tech Board of Directors) have created a virtual Tech Museum. Maybe you were busy watching Desperate Housewives when you should have been trolling the Internet so you might not know that Second Life is a virtual community with real people represented by on screen avatars. These are essentially 3 D models of one’s fantasy self. There you interact with others in an environment that is part Sim City, part video game environment and a large slice of Burning Man. It is not just a playground. IBM has one of the largest populations of peoploids there. Many folks meet in SL to have business meetings and some of these are taking place at the virtual Buck’s just like they do here in the real restaurant. What, you have still not been there? Give it a whirl. Second Life now has voice and embedded videos so you can make your virtual space look just like home… sort of.

Hundreds of thinkers and designers are creating exhibitions for the virtual museum and the best ones are going to be built in the real museum. Imagine an open source competition for the design of a museum dedicated to technological innovation. From the website, “Rather than relying on in-house designers to conceptualize and create exhibits, The Tech has launched a collaborative online platform to support a diverse community of designers, artists, scientists, and interested folk conceptualizing and prototyping exhibits. Projects are proposed and teams formed on the web at thetechvirtual .org and then proto-typed in Second Life. The Tech is offering exhibit design tutorials, design reviews by museum professionals, and the chance to see your virtual ideas become real exhibits. The Tech intends to design all future exhibitions in this way, working with outside individuals to bring their unique creative vision and expertise to the museum to create unusual, extraordinary exhibitions. The Tech launched this project in Dec 2007, and is piloting with an exhibition (to be mounted in RL in June 2008) on technology in art, film, and music. Ten virtual exhibit prototypes will be selected for development in the RL exhibition, and their creators will be invited to San Jose for an awards ceremony and exhibition opening in June 2008.” Exhibit designers are working all over the world on this project.”

One university in Australia is even using the competition as a curriculum for their design students. Another team includes a well established physicist and an 18 year old computer wiz. The physicist had been working out design parameters respecting certain of the ‘laws” like gravity and magnetism. But these are not laws in Second Life but rather dial settings it takes a kid to teach the new rules. Human emotions stay the same but all the rest of reality is pretty much customizable.

Peter believes that this will be the way the museum of the future will be designed and as we see, everything (except maybe Apple products) is heading this way. Many millions have been raised from foundation grants for this project.

One thing about SL is that every avatar has a real person running in real time. But as shops and exhibitions develop there will be robotic virtual you’s possible. If it sounds like you have fallen through the looking glass, it’s true.

WORLD’S LAST LARGE
SHARK CAUGHT
If nothing changes in the next 10 years this is a likely headline.

Around 100 million sharks are caught annually worldwide. Nearly all have their fins chopped off after which their bodies are tossed overboard. The fins sell for an average price in China of over $100 a pound and are used for shark fin soup. This soup is served at fancy functions as a status symbol.

Most Chinese have no idea that sharks are being wiped out across the planet in order to provide them with the ingredient for what they know as “fish wing soup” and the people behind this awful trade have no incentive to tell them. We all love tigers, polar bears, rhinos and many other endangered species but unlike sharks these animals have vigorous support and there is a great international pressure to preserve them.

Most shark fisheries are unregulated. Only three shark species are protected but in the open ocean when fishermen are faced with a single fin from a whale shark having a street value of perhaps $6,000 it is no wonder that these fins can be seen in shops in China. Because the Chinese are becoming much wealthier, there is an ever great demand. If we can alert the Chinese to the fact that sharks are actually the apex of the fragile ocean food chain then they will be better equipped to change this practice before it’s too late. Leveraging millions of dollars of pro bono media support, San Francisco based WildAid has mounted the largest ever awareness program of its kind routinely reaching hundreds of millions of Chinese through hard hitting messages featuring prominent Chinese including Yao Ming as well international Olympians.

I have been hovering over so many good causes and have dabbled in some but I have always worried that my effort either would be insignificant or off topic from my interests. Now I can combine my love of the oceans with an awareness program that has a profound cost benefit ratio. I am convinced that we can help change a cultural viewpoint with WildAid’s campaign during the Olympics. WildAid.org

A Bookstore Curiously Devoid of Books
At this time Buck’s “the smallest bookstore in the world” has no book for sale which meets the criteria of being written by a local author and having three flattering pages about me. That is if you don’t count that tired old wad of paper actually written by me, (Breakfast at Buck’s, you can buy it here but you can get on it Amazon. [that’s where I buy them myself] for as low as $1.22 in like new and even brand new condition (ouch!). Right now I’m the 1,096,475th most popular but if you buy a book I can shave a few points. At least I beat 16 Great Fondue Parties - a real hit I’ll bet in 1957. By this time everyone has read this tired old saw so it’s time to pick up a snappy new book. The one I recommend is Two Years Before The Mast (Amazon used $2.37 ). Well, not so new but still one of the reel gud bux. Written in the 1830’s by Richard Henry Dana it tells the true tale of a lad who was a freshman at Harvard when he convinced his parents that his eyes were tired (typical kid move) and they needed a rest so he signed on as an able bodied (but green as the grass) seaman and shipped “before the mast” from Boston to California. The book is a tale of innocence and a story of one young man coming of age in the rough, cruel and lovely place that was early California.
Many of you will have read it in school (trust me Moby Dick is still great too) but it is high time that you split the spine of this one again. Before the Gold Rush, California was known as hard service and it stretches one’s mind to take in the incredibly difficult work the seamen of that era were expected to perform. Hauling cargo through the surf, going barefoot because shoes don’t heal like feet and subsisting on a dog’s diet. The ships that plied the coast traded the goods of the east and Far East primarily for cow hides which were shipped to New England to be made into saddles and boots which came back to be traded for more hides. Early California was built on blood and bone. Down the Peninsula at that time in Woodside there was a single saw mill and a few Spanish and Portuguese farmers. The Indians had skedaddled a generation earlier and it would be a long time until all the Aston Martins showed up.

The only real action was on the coast and the happening spot was the first capital, Monterey. Many of the buildings from the early 1800’s are still there. San Diego was just a small farming community. In San Francisco there was the Mission and one ranch and LA was miles from the coast where the downtown is today.

Dana writes in dramatic writerly prose about life at sea and the rhythm of the ship. He says that “a ship is like a ladies watch, in constant need of repair.” Imagine that just moving about required all that sail trimming and anchor setting. Each vessel was like a little country and the captain was the lawgiver. Flogging was common and in heavy weather there was no rest unless you were washed overboard or fell from the rigging. It seems amazing today that anyone could endure the life but they did because even though they were driven hard it was a large way to be, a vigorous and manly life. Until about the last hundred years young men have yearned for the sea since the first boats. Alas, since the close of the age of sail this is no longer the case.

Dana tells us the sailors were mighty homesick and mail was sent both ways. Because there was no postal system it could take months or years to get a letter and some letters chased about the seas until they became dust. Today we can Skype for free but back then one had to write a letter in long hand, then you went down to the wharf and gave it to a ship that was headed to the ocean that your sailor had shipped out for. Ships generally “spoke” to (hailed) all the ships they passed and by and by triangulated on the recipient. An amazing amount of mail found its mark. Not unlike the light from a distant star the words were frozen in time and they might finally reach the right ship to find the sailor has died. The seas hold a great many fish, and secrets.

Two Years Before the Mast puts the reader into the very rigging for a big blow of a tale. I’m not stocking it here but if you snag a copy make sure that you get the one with an afterward written by Dana when he came back in 1869. His was the only voice about what things were like in California before gold was discovered and he gets a good deal of credit for popularizing the West.
A Note on Wikipedia. In looking up a few details of the book on Wikipedia I clicked through to gutenburg.org. I had heard about it but never been there. Here are thousands of books available as text or audio read by real people or even machines. All in the public domain. So you can get Dana’s book for free with a few keystrokes.

2007-10-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Betty Monroe runs into her Father at Buck’s

My new friend Betty Monroe came into Buck’s a little while back. She sat next to a photograph on the wall and there she saw her father looking back from a picture taken in 1918 when he was mule skinner (archaic term for a mule wagon driver) for the army. On Nov. 11th, 1918 he with 30,000 of his comrades posed in the shape of the U.S. Emblem for a photo at Camp Custer in Battle Creek Michigan. Thomas Mole shot a series of ten photos all on patriotic themes using the ten’s of thousands of soldiers who were about to be sent to the European theater. On the day the Emblem was shot the shooting stopped in Europe. All ten are available from the Library of Congress. They were posed with artificial foreshortening in that there a few dozen men in the first rows and progressively more to the back making it look as if it was shot from a much higher place than the actual 70 foot tower Mole used.

The crowd at Ft. Custer was the largest in the series and it is in this picture that Betty saw her father. She says she can locate him because he is right next to one fellow who was goofing with his hat as are many if you look closely. Very like in high school when a few of the fellows are always trying to ruin the group photo. That makes sense. Most of these young men were just out of high school.

Betty and I looked at some of the letters her father wrote telling of the Great Influenza Epidemic which swept through the military camp in Georgia where her father did his basic training. After the war fizzled Betty’s father returned to farming, married and raised a family. His daughter became a nurse and married her grade school sweetheart who eventually ended up In Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th 1941 “A day that will live in infamy forever” according to President Roosevelt. Betty’s husband was on the Oklahoma, a ship that was bombed so completely that it quickly rolled over. Her husband was on an upper deck at the time and was thrown into the water, from there swimming to shore. Betty said that the survivors were allowed to send two postcards home telling their families they were alive. She still has hers. Some 30 years later the Oklahoma was raised and some of the seamen’s lockers were opened. There they found Seaman Monroe’s locker and in it a well preserved photo of Betty’s at her high school graduation.

Today Betty’s a spry and engaging resident of Mt. View and after retiring from nursing tells me that she reinvented herself as a painter and world traveler. She has painted many hundreds of stunning paintings and been to 57 countries, so far.

AlwaysOn and On On On

2007-10-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

In 1993 Tony Perkins launched the Red Herring Magazine with Jaron Lanier on the first cover. It is particularly fitting that at the recent AlwaysOn conference at Stanford Jaron was a featured panelist with a host of other big thinkers. Much that transpires in The Valley is a result of the folks who regularly attend and present at the many conferences hosted by Tony Perkins. These gatherings grew out of the Red Herring conferences that are now the stuff of legend. I fondly recall standing with Ron Conway at The Chateau Marmot in LA asking Pamela Lee Anderson why she was at an Internet party and she said, “Honey, I own the Internet.” In 1998 this was actually true as she was one of the first online megahits.

Well you can feel the pages fall off the calendar like in an Orson Wells movie as we zip into 2007 and all anyone seems to be talking about is how to save this creaky ol’ planet (with the unsaid subtext of continuing to make ungodly piles of money). Me, I think we ought to just deep freeze our heads until we figure out the planet saving but short of that I guess we will have to buckle down and do the hard work. Through these conferences we get to tackle some of the big issues.
But first: Entertainment, with the OnHollywood conference. Yippee! We get to hang out with movie stars. Let’s face it, much of life is entertainment. Who isn’t crazy about sitting in front of the flat god and absorbing mind numbing canned laughter and zipping back and forth on Tivo between Curb Your Enthusiasm and The View (I know that you only watch PBS and are exempt but trust me someone is watching). One thing about Hollywood is that it is completely American and so far it can’t be knocked off in a Chinese chop shop. We own Britney (for good and bad) and if you, Ms. International Consumer, want her you have to pay us. Of course even Hollywood is slipping off its slimy pedestal and getting all conscious n’ stuff. Jeff Skoll and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sparked many to action followed by Thank You for Smoking and Fast Food nation. Hey, I want Key-rap from Hollywood! If I wanted a lecture I’d give it myself. Entertainment is supposed to be like those 8% real fruit juice drinks and these new, evolved moguls are diluting our water with more juice, darn them!

On the strictly business side the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit deals more with technology issues although we did take political timeout for a keynote from Senator John McCain.

Misc notes on the candidates in 2007
McCain is running hard for President and although I think his politics are wrong headed the man is a towering figure in a field of candidates many of whom would be hard to bring home mama. Ron Paul is just bizarre. He is so far off the chart that even the Libertarians won’t have him and even though Dennis Kucinich makes sense on paper, he is scary in a lives-to-close-to-the freeway-fumes sort of way. Fred Thomson is amusing as the sleepwalking “nominate me if you run out good ideas” candidate who tells the religious right he is too busy (sleeping) to go to church. And Mitt Romney? I love the question as to whether we should elect a Mormon. Statistically (and I say statistically, metaphorically) at least a third of the candidates are atheists and are lying about their spiritual beliefs. But not Mike Huckabee who told an NRA convention that “angels guided my bullet into the head of the antelope” and “I’m sure there is duck hunting in heaven.” Maybe he was kidding, but still. Giuliani is the prochoice, progay, prodivorce, guncontroling big city Democrat ahhh Republican. Barak Obama was famously criticized for not being “black enough” at the same time being criticized for pushing his way onto the national stage too soon in our racial maturity because he might be “too black.” So far it seems likely that Hilary Clinton will be elected. In fact it has to happen. Look, we elected Reagan because he was folksy, Schwarzenegger because he was a famous, smack talking, movie star and now we will elect Hilary because she was the First Lady and that’s just damned odd and odd is what we do.
The Stanford Summit is a three ring affair with CEO pitches in one room all day long. Every few minutes a presenter gets up and gives a five minute rundown about their companies. What I find interesting is how much solid effort is behind sometimes small, nitchy applications proving my old axiom that, “It takes a lot of effort to do stuff.” On the main stage panels discussed the latest buzzly sizzle like: collaborative filtering, the disintermediation of social friction, swarm publishing, interactive advertising, and disambiguating signal to noise. Humm, maybe we know where the missing bees are.

Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners is always hanging ten on the wave of the latest international trends and he reminded us that Moore’s Law drove the last 40 years of innovation and that globalization will drive the next 40. An old Indian scout once told me that to see the trail you have to look to the horizon because it is vanishingly faint but our new scout, Joe, tells us to look right at our feet. He said that those of us who remember disco (my words) are just getting comfortable with Mega, Giga and Tera but the kids are living in a Peta, Exa, Zetta and Yoto world and that one in eight new couples met online up from about zero ten years ago. Joe loves to remind us that we are ripping forward at warp speed and he always makes it sound like fun.
Phillip Rosedale demonstrated Second Life and we say that is still a bit hard to use when even he had a little trouble with the controls. As most folks around here know Second Life is the virtual world where boys will boys and more, and girls can be dragons or screaming hot bartenders in taverns, where the alcohol is digital and the pick up lines are literally typed lines of text. Social issues in SL include civility, honesty, productivity, aesthetics and all the issues we face in real life but, of course, it isn’t real. Or is it? In another virtual world Craig Sherman, CEO, Gaia Online told us about a teenager who wanted to buy a virtual hat but his mother wouldn’t give him the money at the time. Later the lad was at a real trade fair and found the Gaia booth where they had cloth versions of the virtual hat. He was heard to remark as he bought the cloth hat (with no hint of irony) that he wasn’t able to buy the real virtual hat but he had a real fake one. The emerging virtual worlds and the weird turn video viewing and producing is taking are blending business and entertainment. Like an Escher print we are producing and consuming at the same time following such Yoda-like characters as Lanier, Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil.

At Tony’s GoingGreen conference in Davis, Zem Joaquin introduced Bill McDonough as the keynote speaker. Many of us met Bill for the first time at the TED conference in Monterey a few years ago. McDonough is a soft spoken optimist about the future of society seen through his architect eyes. His ideas are so profound that sometimes you have to rewind to make sure you heard correctly. If you don’t know this man’s work check out his speech and I believe you will be stopped in your tracks. alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/18864. And scroll around in this and some of the other conferences. Join AlwaysOn. It’s free and you become an instant Silicon Valley insider. You really can attend the conferences virtually or virtually go in person or ahhhghhh!... you figure it out.

Forget Saving the Earth

2007-08-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

There has been a great deal written about, spoken about and screamed about with regard to saving the Earth. But what do you think the Earth feels about it. Let’s look at the situation from the Earth’s point of view for a mo. If you buy the theory that the planet is about 4.5 billion years old (as opposed to the theory that it is 6008 years old and was build in six days) then we have a span which, by most measures, is on the longish side. For about a billion years the place looked like hell, I mean the Old Testament Hell, all fire and lack of amenities. The the surface was molten and oxygen could not attempt to be a gas yet. Talk about global warming! As soon as a crust formed, volcanoes started popping up like a puppy on a griddle with much the same result.

Eventually continents formed but they moved around a bunch -- beach front became mountain tops, became deserts became ice bound and this kept on until today and it’s still going on. As time stretches back things become vague but we are pretty sure that in the Permian Epoch (about a quarter of a billion years ago) either a meteor hit or someone spilled a really big latte and 90% of the species turned to compost. Nature did its thing until 85 million years ago in the Cretaceous period (many think it was the Jurassic but that was movie magic) and this time 75% or so of the species got wacked.
Today many folks are worried about a tiger here a whale there. Back in the 90’s when small pox was almost eradicated there was actually an advocacy for keeping some of the microbes alive for biodiversity sake. This either makes perfect sense or is completely crazy. You can make the point both ways, nay? Anyway, to even question some enthusiastic citizens pressing need to raise condor chicks with $50,000 puppet parents or fly injured monkeys 5,000 miles to monkey repair shops is considered insensitive. If you suggest that ½ million dollar heart/lung transplants for newborn babies might be a questionable use of resources you are considered a cad. But some people profess that Man is some sort of divine creature and we should spare no expense for glory except for cell research which is the Devil’s Tool for subverting the human race. Sometimes I wonder, if man is so special why are there so many bugs? And if Man is the last word wouldn’t we be better engineered. What’s with the nail on the little toe? It’s hard to cut and, at it’s best, is not that good for climbing trees.
So we have ol’ Planet Earth in one corner and tiny toe-nailed Man in the other. Some folks subscribe to the Gaia Theory that the planet is a living creature in danger of Man killing it. Well there really is a gulf between biology and geology so unless you are an American Indian or maybe a Buddhist it really is a hunk of slowly cooling rock. One thing is sure though, Man is poisoning the air, water and land. We bury radioactive waste which will not cool for 100,000 years and we lament that we are destroying the planet. Well we aren’t. The planet if anything is amused at our grand notion and it doesn’t give a rat’s potootie about how we manage our little span of time. The planet is actually doing quite well but our tenure can be made quite unpleasant if we act like a bunch of frat boys on Spring break shooting out the TV and stuffing all the towels into the toilet of this Motel 6 we call home. We should change the slogan from Save The Planet” to “Save Ourselves.” We need short term solutions to our short term problem. Heresy, insanity or at best politically incorrect suicide? Well the fact is we should become very selfish. We should clean our rooms and not for the next 4.5 billion years or for the future of The Human Race but for ourselves, in this lifetime, for our children in theirs and for our fellow revelers all around the world.

Editorial
So often I hear that the planet isn’t supposed to be messed up. In fact things are working out exactly as they should because of the simple fact that they have worked out like this. We can nudge the future but it is a pretty big ship to turn in new direction. If we want to affect change we need to realize that spoilers like Ralph Nader are good place to nudge. Ralph Nader thinks he’s funny by making himself the impossible choice and subverting the last election by urging his hollow headed supporters to vote for him. His point was that it makes no difference who is president. Reeellly? Trust me it does because we need to look at the SHORT term. Forget what the distant future holds. We need to save ourselves now and by now I mean the next four years.
As inflection points go, the tragic war in Iraq is a pretty minor one, unless it touches you personally which being in the here and now it certainly can. We do hit inflection points and go backwards now and then. I don’t think we are actually going backwards right now so much as stopped from making progress for a time (this is hard to define unless you take a longer view). Some big retreats include the Dark Ages and a smaller one could be WWII. But for sheer catastrophe try a gigantic one like the potential of global warming. Some of the things that set us back like rocks from space blotting out the sun are plain old bad luck. Others like the sacking of Alexandria (if the library had not burned we might not have lost 1,000 years of progress) was a political inevitability combined with a fragile intellectual infrastructure. But this new danger is perhaps the biggest challenge yet. Wouldn’t it be nice if Ralph worked on this one.