That other sort of café

I’m in the office trying to get stuff sorted for a work trip to Amsterdam and I stumbled upon this (while trying to find a decent map). I thought it was hilarious.

In the 17th Century Catholics and Protestants discovered that they were living side by side in Amsterdam, and in a very surprising development for the time, they didn’t slaughter each other. This seemed to work out well, so they developed a concept that they called ‘tolerance’, so that nowadays the Dutch don’t care if you are gay, foreign, or even if you eat mayonnaise with your fried potatoes (the latter of course is strictly speaking illegal, but the police turn a blind eye).

As you are probably aware, Amsterdam also has a policy of tolerating the sale and use of soft drugs. This activity is centred around so-called smoking cafes or “Coffeeshops” as the Dutch euphemistically call them. Whether you wish to avoid them or patronise them, they are easy to recognise: they are usually dark, have a characteristic smell, and tend to use words like free, high, happy, dreams, and space in the name of the cafe. They typically have a menu of the products they have on sale.

The Man Watching

I’m at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and we’re about 1 day in. There will be more ETech related content over the next couple of posts. Unfortunately, I’ve not been as efficient with the conference blogging as I’d like. My brain (and fingers) can’t process information in a legible and intelligent way in that amount of time but I’ll do what I can.

In the meantime, I’m leaving you with a poem titled “The Man Watching” by Rainer Maria Rilke, which Tim O’Reilly shared during his keynote address, “Why I Love Hackers”. I like the gung-ho-ness of this poem. Winning isn’t everything and there is a lot of be learnt just by participating in the fight (and even in defeat).

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

What is as elegant as a tree?

From William McDonough’s 2005 presentation at TED:

“Imagine this design assignment:  Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro climates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates.”

Searchability and serendipity

A gem of a quote from the inimitable Erin McKean from this year’s TED.

“Online dictionaries replicate all the problems of print but for searchability. And when you improve the searchability, you take away one of the advantages of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you were looking for is so damn difficult.”

It makes me wonder if the same can be said about “the meaning of life”. Maybe it’s time to stop searching for it about letting it serendipitously fall into our laps? *hopeful look*

By the way, the 2007 Oxford word of the year is “Locavore”.

The lemming effect

I like the word “lemmings” (it just sounds funny!) and use it on a fairly regular basis. Lemmings have all the usual trappings of cuteness (furry & round) and it turns out that some of my interest in lemmings is the result of myths about mass lemming suicides!

“While many people believe that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, this is not the case. Driven by strong biological urges, they will migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. On occasion, and particularly in the case of the Norway lemmings in Scandinavia, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to exhaustion and death. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore.”

So anyway, lemmings became a metaphor for people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. And at a talk on technology clusters yesterday, I learnt that it can be extended to the term “The Lemming Effect” (the act of following the crowd into an investment that will inevitably head for disaster). It is the idea that in the dot.com boom, the VCs would invest in 25 startups with each expecting 25% market share.

Ye-ah. The lemming effect.

(Does anyone else think this is hilarious?! )

Climate change scientists and doctors

I attended a talk by Richard Somerville yesterday. I got to say that his presentation was a touch dry (but at least he was self aware and humorous about how communication skills weren’t the expertise of the climate change scientists).

Anyway, he drew the analogy between climate change scientists and doctors. If your doctor says, you better reduce your cholesterol levels otherwise you are going to get a heart attack, you don’t ask him/her for the precise date you are going to get the heart attack. You just hop on the treadmill and eat like a rabbit for a while. I thought it made an excellent point that all this debate about when the world is going to overheat and implode and whose predictions are right seem a little irrelevant. We, as policy makers, should just do whatever we need to do to make things better.

Robert Boroffice : Nigerian Space Agency

Robert Boroffice, head of the Nigerian Space Agency, came on stage and told us that 1 in every 5 Africans was a Nigerian. Therefore, 1 in every 5 scam letters received was from a Nigerian but that he did not have any money to transfer (which got a few laughs from the audience).

Boroffice was there to tell us about the Nigerian space program. Initially, I was rather skeptical. I couldn’t figure out the relevance of space technology to Nigeria (which actually says a lot about my ignorance). But Boroffice presented a convincing case for the Nigerian space program as a tool for socio-economic development. The main reason for their space program seems to be to generate geospatial information for national development. He argues that Africa has resources but it is mismanaged and that satellites provide critical information for decision making. This in turn enables the government to address many environmental problems, like soil erosion and deforestation. Other applications range from healthcare to education.

It was all very interesting but I do have one last question – Couldn’t they have just used Google Maps?

Kelly Joe Phelps

He doesn’t have the best voice in the world but there is something about the effortless fusion between voice and instrument. I could definitely listen to Kelly Joe Phelps for hours and hours. His style is a mixture of folk, delta blues and jazz (some of my favourite genres of music). He plays the notes on his guitar in a wonderfully comforting yet pensive way. It made me think about a glass of warm milk, a chocolate chip cookie and the pitter-patter of raindrops outside. Like coming home.

(It is probably obvious that he played at Pop!Tech. The posted video is a awesome one of him on the slide guitar.)

Cary Fowler : The common heritage of mankind

Andrew Zolli introduces the segment of Pop!Tech on “Sustaining Tomorrow” as the things that “comic books are made of”. And Cary Fowler’s Artic Seed Vault definitely seems like it would fit comfortably into an epic tale of heroes and villains.

Fowler is the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the world’s seed banker. He starts by explaining what biodiversity really means. It is the biological foundation of agriculture and losing biodiversity is extinction. It means losing important genetic traits and options for the future. And with climate change and food security issues, there is pressure on agriculture to do many more things. The question is do we modify the environment to suit the crops or modify the crops to suit the environment? And if the latter, don’t we need biodiversity?

This is where seed banks come in. And the mother of all seed banks must surely be the Artic Seed Vault. It is a sort of a Noah’s Ark concept – taking a sampling of what you want to preserve and protecting it from impending doom. A global resource to ensure continuity in human existence.

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or the Doomsday Vault as the media have nicknamed it, will be the ultimate safety net for the world’s most important natural resource… The seed vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity, and in fact the idea for such a facility dates back to the 1980s. However, it was only with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, and an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity, that the seed vault became a practical possibility.

The vault is being dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Construction is due to be completed in September 2007. Svalbard is a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. Remote by any standards, Svalbard’s airport is in fact the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total darkness. It is here that the Norwegian government is building the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to provide this ultimate safety net for the world’s seeds.

Permafrost and thick rock will ensure that even without electricity, the samples will remain frozen. The vault’s construction will be funded and managed by the Norwegian government as a service to the world community. The Global Crop Diversity Trust considers the vault an essential component of a rational and secure global system for conserving the genetic diversity of all our crops. The Trust is therefore committed to supporting ongoing operational costs, and will assist developing countries with preparing, packaging and transporting their representative seeds to the Arctic.”

All I can say is kudos to those who dare to dream!

Paul Shuper & Jeff Fisher : Live Windows

Jeff Fisher heads the University of Connecticut’s Centre for Health Intervention and Prevention. CHIP tries to understand the dynamics of unhealthy behaviour to develop interventionist measures to positively change behaviour. Risky behaviour is a function of 3 factors: weak information; weak motivation; and, weak behavioural skills. By understanding these factors, we are better able to remediate risky behaviour.

Paul Shuper developed an exciting tool called “Live Windows”, which CHIP hopes to adapt it to help Zinhle Thabethe & Krista Dong out in the their fight against AIDS. It is an interactive video system that educates patients on the HIV virus and explains the ARVs are helping them and the importance of compliance. It also tries to understand the patient’s lifestyle to develop a more effective treatment strategy for each individual. There are even videos where other people struggling with HIV speak candidly about their experiences and what works for them. The idea is to overcome the human resource constraints to achieve higher rates of ARV compliance and ultimately better HIV treatment.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of content development before the software can be used in an African context but I do think it is a great idea. I guess anything that helps people get the treatment they need is fantastic in my book. But I do feel a tinge of sadness that the only one who can help you is a computer and your support group is virtual.

What happens when you just need a hug?