I had the luck of befriending Mr. Ford’s son Eric from my earliest days of youth sports. Back then, I did not know how much the Ford family would be a part of my upbringing, and I sure am lucky they were.

Mr. Ford was always a big supporter of not just me but all of us kids growing up. From the newspaper articles that he’d save and share with me and my parents, to the many rides to various sports practices and events, Mr. Ford was always there. (In some cases, even saving me from being late to school!)

Whenever I’d get into his car, he’d almost always be in an uplifting mood – excited to have me along for the ride, happy to talk about whatever was going on in school, sports or whatever else was top of mind. It almost didn’t matter what the topic was, he was going to be present.

His home was a place of refuge. We didn’t need to go out looking for trouble on a Friday night. And even if we did, we knew if we found too much there was a place to stop on the way home.

At my wedding, I took a moment to thank the many people who helped me get to that point in life. I am grateful that Mr. Ford was in attendance that day. I did not realize at the time that it would be one of my last interactions with him ever. 

I am fortunate to have had Mr. Ford as a positive influence in my life. He was one of the black men I could look up to for how to be a man, a father, and a friend. 

A really good man does not need a lot of words in his remembrance.

His impact is felt in the core of every person he meets.

Those seemingly small actions taken each day shape the outcomes of the next generation.

Easy to take for granted yet unrivaled in impact

Anytime you are in an audience, you are a role model.

Be someone who makes every moment better.

Be like Mr. Ford.

While I’ll carry many memories of him, I wanted to do something in his honor. His love of music and his impact on me in my young age stood out to me. So I’ve made donations to three youth – music nonprofits in his honor: 

• Education Through Music – Nationwide program that partners with under-resourced schools to provide music education as a core subject for all students in the school. Now expanding to provide distance learning music resources for students everywhere.
• Notes For Notes – Nationwide program providing after-school recording studio environments, including instruments and lessons, inside Boys & Girls Clubs and community centers, for free.
• The Roots of Music – New Orleans based program providing  music history and theory as well as instrumental instruction and ensemble performance preparation, serving kids ages 9-14 from low-income households, and providing students with hot meals and round-trip transportation to reduce common barriers to participation.

If you feel so moved, do something in honor of Mr. Ford.

A corollary to this is that fighting automation is a waste of time. If anything, we should support increased automation and move up the stack to harder problems. If we were not so busy fighting intellectualism and instead learning new skills this gap would not be so hard to bridge.

(Note: This applies primarily to America)

I’m currently exploring ways to accelerate research in those two fields.

Disruption of university research and possibly the Ph.D

Some data and perceptions on university research:

• Only 16% of university technology transfer departments make enough money from licensing to be self sufficient. Licensing income across universities exhibits a power law distribution.
• Graduate students spend more time grant writing, teaching, fulfilling research for their PI etc. and less time working on their primary topic, the thing that is intrinsically motivating.
• Top researchers are more actively seeking funding from private organizations to supplement stagnant and increasingly more competitive government grants.
• Many Ph.D programs still lack any formal training on how to run a research lab.

Corporate research is still the driving force of innovation from a spending perspective. However, new organizational models that make technology development and transfer more efficient and remove burdens from researchers might prove more valuable to society.

Body senses 6 through 10 provided by augmented reality

Modern interfaces are heavily reliant on sight, sound, and touch. Cheap sensors enable us to capture and overlay more information – infrared light, magnetic fields, ultra violet levels, air pollutants and more (in 50 years, gravitational waves?). The advances in augmented reality (with VR as a subset) will enable us to superimpose this information on our vision. In the medium term, that information may wire into our nervous system directly.

Media and political self reflection and correction post November 2016

As the mainstream media and political parties try to understand why and how Donald Trump became so popular, they might realize they only have themselves to blame. If Donald Trump wins the presidency, a substantial correction will be due – either to regain trust of the populace through greater substance and less distraction, or to concede and double down on the tactics Trump used to win. The road to the White House is still long for Trump, so he may well lose along the way and we’ll likely learn little from this year’s election cycle.

Next popular wearable sensor location

It seems the wrist is going to tap out of useful sensors fairly soon. PPG and GSR might well be as good as it gets. The next best location for wearables is where the most successful wearable technologies were before they were called “wearable”: the ear. There’s much to learn from hearing aids and cochlear implants that can be translated to consumer devices in the near future. Wearables embedded into clothing (and then our bodies) will be the endgame, but we’re still a few product cycles away from that taking off.

The next sub $1,000 portable brain monitoring technology

EEG is cheap and works. But good mainstream EEG form factors are evasive due to the need for direct contact. Technologies like conductive foam are making EEG headsets more comfortable, but it is hard to be bullish on a generalizable form factor being figured out (however, if everyone is wearing a bulky virtual reality headset, EEG fits in quite well). So what brain monitoring technology will be next? fNIRS? Neural dust? Most methods seem completely impractical (fMRI) or quite far away from any consumer or even human testing.

Identifying what is information in the brain

A trend in neuroscience is to go beyond simple matching of stimulus X leads to response Y in the brain, and to start considering how information is passed within the brain – and what that information is. This is worth expanding on in a later post, but for now check this out. It is commonly mentioned that understanding how a single neuron functions does not explain how a group of neurons interact, and we see that currently. This fundamental, deeper level of understanding may unlock answers to numerous other biological systems.

Is there any shortcut to space, and what else can we learn about the universe?

Recent consumption: The Martian (book), Seveneves (book), Interstellar (movie), and a lot of articles on space and the detection of gravitational waves. Overall, the combination of what exists, and how our consciousness enables us to recognize what exists, need to be reconciled. Thinking about anything beyond Earth makes most our differences seem trivial. However, as Seveneves nails, humans still have egos and make terrible, horrible, decisions, even if in space.

Leaving Earth is still too hard, and limited. No propulsion method beats the speed of light, and so visiting anything beyond our immediate solar system neighbors isn’t happening soon. That is, unless we learn more about how to traverse spacetime :-). So it is not likely that we’ll gain much knowledge soon by running experiments on other atmospheres

Whatever else I’m missing

There are interesting trends happening everywhere. Send me a note with what else I should be looking forward to! Referrals/intros welcome as well.

Bugs – It’s what’s for dinner.

I’m not really picky about food, if it tastes good and won’t kill me I’ll try it. I’m forever grateful to not have any food allergies, because it allows me to experiment with foods without caution.

So I randomly looked into eating bugs, and searched for restaurants that serve them. I’ve long been sold on how bugs are way more sustainable than most sources of animal protein, so I welcomed the experience.

I found a few places near my in Oakland – a Korean place that serves silk worm soup, and an upscale Mexican place that allows a side of crickets with an order of guacamole. However, by chance I went to the Ferry Building, where I knew that Don Bugito packaged bugs were sold. The kind lady at the stand let me try about 5 different varieties, from chocolate covered ones where it might as well be a grain of rice inside to spicy flavors where there is no hiding that you are eating a worm, or cricket.

I found the bug varieties to be serviceable, but nothing spectacular. If the only food I had was a bit of roasted bugs, I’d have no hesitation in getting some protein. But I’m not going out of my way for any entomophagy anytime soon – especially not until the cost comes down.

Super Bowl City

It’s Super Bowl Week in San Francisco and downtown San Francisco is a zoo. Market St. is closed down and the corporate flea market known as Super Bowl City has arrived. As someone who played football through college, I like the sport of football for the strategy. I could do without all of the media noise, faux gang affiliations (Cowboys Nation, etc.) and profiteering. So suffice it to say I was underwhelmed by walking through the festival.

A Debate in a Humanist Church

The East Bay Transhumanist group held an event where they held Oxford-style debates on basic living income, open borders (for all immigrants). The event ended with a panel on the timing of the Singularity.

The humanist church itself was just and interesting venue. A large old wooden building with a purple interior with yellow trim all around.

I went hoping to be exposed to some new ideas and ideally have my mind changed on some positions. But that didn’t really happen.

This week there was no hit, that is part of the risk of doing something like New52. On to next week!

Note: New52 is a series where I try something new every week. Read about the reasons and join the fun.

Enter /gn to get positive news on any topic. There are a few easter eggs in their too.

Chatbots are interesting to me for a number of reasons – most important is that they get to the point (I like text UIs). I had a few ideas in mind for one to develop and settled on Posibot, which is available on Telegram. This bot is very simple – You ask it for good news on a given topic, and it responds with a related article. I wanted something I could do in a weekend, and this was it. I had greater ambitions for the bot, and time permitting I’ll add some more commands and features in the future.

At work we use Heroku in our development stack, and it saves a ton of time. I never really got Heroku’s utility until I joined ApplePie, and now I don’t want to start projects without it.  I immediately looked to use that (instead of a self hosted virtual machine) to host the app. Environment variable management aside, things went fairly smoothly.

The next step with Posibot would be to add a more fluid conversational interface. Fully conversational chat interfaces still require humans, and that’s not something I can keep up with while at work during the day or pay any other people to do. If you would like to volunteering to have positive conversations with people, let me know.

Note: New52 is a series where I try something new every week. Read about the reasons and join the fun.

The theme for the evening was “Brain and Body”, which was right up my alley. I had some exciting conversations with a UCSF professor and his grad students. They were working some of the demo tables containing real brains, foods to show physiological response to spicy foods and herbs, and more. The insights into their research were as much fun as touring the museum itself. Example tidbit: when you eat spicy food, your body’s physiological response is the same as how it reacts to you going outside in hot sun. The same effect happens with consuming (lots of) mint and being cold.

There was a brief lecture by a researcher who is using extracts from other animals to help develop tools to make cancerous cells illuminate, making it easier for brain cancer surgeons to excise the correct tissue. There’s some really cool stuff going on in research, and it only makes me want to be more involved in some way.

The museum itself is an example of how to integrate modernity into nature – the solar panels and living roof are stunning. I did not take many photos, but you can see plenty at their website.

Note: New52 is a series where I try something new every week. Read about the reasons and join the fun.

There were are few firsts on this trip, besides simply arriving at Ensenada:

• Rode a bus into Mexico and between Mexican cities
• Visited a mescaleria & tequileria
• Used Uber internationally
• Ate food from cool one man booths
• Learned how to properly pronounce Oaxaca, despite my years of Spanish classes (wa-ha-ka)

Overall, it was a good time. The town is fairly sleepy by the port when there’s not a cruise ship (but there seems to be one daily). Delicious food – particularly the ceviche, and great drinks. Learned a lot about mezcal, the trendy liquor that is native to Mexico, well at least Oaxaca.

And it isn’t Mexico without the cheap prescription drugs, which are peddled everywhere. When I visited Tijuana last year, our favorite ad was for “Viagra Soup”. This time the Super Viagra mascot outside of a drug store took the crown.

There was a lot more to do in Ensenada that we had time to cover. I’d go back, particularly to return to region gastronomica, a hidden gem where we had an outstanding local dinner.

Note: New52 is a series where I try something new every week. Read about the reasons and join the fun.

I enjoyed the combination of physical and mental challenge. Rock climbing is also a pretty clear incentive to lose weight – it is much easier to get up a wall when there’s less of me to lug around. All in all it was a good time. The people there commented on how I stuck around much longer than most people who take the intro class – I took it as a compliment, it was just so much fun. It was a welcome change of pace from the daily workouts I do – it was totally worth my forearms being sore for days afterward.

A while later I watched a few YouTube videos on technique. I clearly have a lot to learn about climbing, but it’s definitely something I would do again!

Note: New52 is a series where I try something new every week. Read about the reasons and join the fun.