Converging Minds

The Braincentric Universe

2013-10-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I walked in slightly late for a “Cosmic/Neuronal Slapdown” Saturday at the New York Academy of Medicine. I had never heard of such a thing, but this was an event sponsored by my friends Penny and Thomas (for this AKA the Brandt Jackson Foundation), and the title of the entire day long meeting was “Festival of Medical History and The Arts”, so I prepared myself for a fun morning. It was and it even involved a banjo. Rather than going through the details of the actual slapdown, I will just say that it was an inspiring competition of cosmological, astrophysical and neuronal imaging. Anyone who knows me also knows that these 3 topics, and even the banjo for that matter, are very relevant to my life. It was brilliantly orchestrated by Lawrence Weschler, and doing the slapping via Macs and projection were Carl Schoonover and Michael Benson. It was as remarkable as you could imagine it to be, with images of stained mouse brains on one side, and Europa on the other looking extremely similar as just one example. If someone had not seen these images before they may not know which were of the cosmos and which were of a brain. There were hundreds of these. Each of them were beautiful and revealing as both artistic and scientific imagery and were almost narrative in themselves as synapses and galaxies formed revealing nature on scales that we can only see through enhanced and sophisticated tools. The actual narrative and the final words of the great film editor Walter Murch spoke to these similarities and to the quest of art and science. More importantly it revealed that the slapdown was not one of imagery but instead one of complexity. It was not about which photos, or even which explanations were better or more glorious. It was really about the place of an animal (and even more specifically in the end a human) brain in relation to the universe. Murch, and I would guess that much of the audience, did something that I have noticed a lot in recent years. They point out that despite humanities small place in a vast and possibly infinite universe, this small material of our brains has more complexity than the universe that surrounds it. This counter intuitive idea has gained popularity for fairly good reasons. We have nearly 100 Billion neurons creating more synapse than all of the stars in the known universe. This certainly seems complex.

Walter Murch made a nice comparison not only about complexity as this numbers game, but also about energy output. He points out that in terms of complexity he feels the brain in comparison to the sun is certainly more advanced, as the sun is rather simple in his opinion, regardless of its importance. What he was curious to find though is that when an equal volume of solar mass is compared to the electricity emitted by a human brain it is very small. This is a very cool observation of course, and I completely see what he was getting at. Still, I think there is something going on in this type of discourse that is almost equivalent to the years of resistance to Copernicus and Galileo. Is it smart people (Ptolemy and Aristotle were very smart of course) trying to keep us at the center of the universe? If not at the physical center, at least analogies such as these keep us anchored to a perception of superior complexity and energy density.

Before I refute these ideas, I want to admit that to a large extent I agree with the premise as it relates to our current state of knowledge. This is especially true if you are comparing pictures, as was done on Saturday. Nebula resembled Neurons so much that if all of the information contained in those images were all we knew or were ever to know, we would basically just count, and the brain would win this slapdown as being more complicated. I am saying complicated as a way to distinguish this word from complexity, which I think of differently (despite Google telling that they are indeed synonyms.) This distinction is why the brain’s importance is scientifically arguable to be. I actually wish that the images did tell the whole story as I make instruments for taking images. I want those images to tell a story, and they do. The story they tell is observational and involves imagination however. We also make software for interpretation and classification so that we are not fooled by our eyes. Those are the most important part perhaps, but with being able to scale deduction of these observations we are lost with a simplistic idea that everything that looks complicated is inherently more complex. I have reduced this before, and this is where it gets tricky (or complicated and complex I guess).

Complexity theory is of course a real thing, and involves modeling by some of the most creative computer scientists and statisticians I know. The Santa Fe Institute is dedicated this study, and the sophistication of complexity models used varies from those which we may have an intuitive sense about, to those that are completely non-intuitive. No matter what types of complexity being addressed (agent based modeling, toy models etc.) there are two basic distinctions that are often made up front. It goes back to the late 1940’s with the work of the mathematician Warren Weaver who described Complexity as either being organized, or disorganized. I am not in any way an expert on either, but in the age of big data we can think of disorganized complexity as something that traditionally involved statistical methods for understanding bulk behavior. The farther away we are from direct reduction, the more we rely on the randomness of disorganized systems. In other words we need a lot of data points to make sense of it. Mathematics has made us better at such systems by the adoption of Chaos Theory which is another enormously large discipline in mathematics that attempts to break down the complexity of disorganized systems into predicable components. Many people are familiar with chaos theory in a colloquial sense from the famous butterfly effect, where a single flap of a butterfly changes conditions everywhere. A chaotic and complex is system is dynamic, and the farther we are from detailed observation the more we rely on complex models. An organized system would appear easier to cope with, but it assumes direct correlations. If randomness is eliminated and a new entity is observed, it is said to emerge. Emergence, along with Quantum energy, are two of the most overused and misunderstood concepts in physics. Complexity theorists use emergence in a way that it allows for a new agglomerated data point which can either be used in an organized or disorganized complexity model.

Having said all of that I will propose a narrow definition of complexity, and it is not my complete argument against the Braincentric universe theory that I am describing. The brief understanding of how others describe complexity here is only to say that perhaps the mathematical necessities of disorganization and the observable predicable aspects of others when combined are where complexity really resides. This means that if we are using imaging anything recorded by a sensor has basically equivalent amounts of data (yes sensors can be different, but astrophysicists and neuroscientist use similar sensors and analyze bit values ether way.) So, while I won’t discard the work of the smarter dedicated complexity theorists, I will use my own definitions, which somehow fall between a disorganized and organized system as I think most do. Rather than talk about the brain specifically though, I will propose some basic axioms, which I know borders on pretentious to do, but I think is necessary to understand my point.

a) The ability to predict patterns of a given system is equivalent to its complexity. Therefore:

b) The smaller a single organized object in relation to larger disorganized objects within the same space is more complex as:

c) The potential for location within that larger space is far greater

d) Any aggregation of smaller objects results in reduced complexity

This may seem both very easy to understand, and very wrong at the same time, but I want to point out just two examples, neither of which jump straight to the brain and the universe, which I am sorry for. Instead they come from Experimental Physics, which is at least closer to my field. They do take in to account the Murch et al. idea of complexity as being about large numbers and energy.

a) One bit of science I have worked on is putting nanoparticles in polymers. This seems like a strange thing to do, but there are great practical reasons for such an experiment. In the case of what I and my colleagues have done it was to look at how many of these nanoparticles you could put into the polymer matrix in order to achieve certain “complex” behaviors. Coincidentally (or not) we were looking for ways to generate electricity, and material strength. The results are that if you put a small amount of the nanoparticle in a polymer it is very hard to deal with. There are laws of thermodynamics, polymer entanglements, week polymer-filler bonds etc, which make the location and the control of these particles very difficult to predict. So I call this complex. What we were after was something complex, but this level of complexity put the “mind” of the particle out of our control, so we needed to add more. As a bit of a sidenote, we did not think of this, we were just the first to experiment with it. The theory was that there was a near perfect amount of complexity by which we could achieve. This is called percolation, and refers to a theoretically loading level where flow between particles can occur. In this case the flow of electricity actually takes place without direct contact, but through quantum tunneling. So the goal was to fill with as little of the particles as possible, but allow for percolation to occur. This provides a good idea of complexity which reaches a level (the percolation point) at which the system becomes less complex with additional loading. So this is again an example of increased simplicity with greater numbers, and more energy.

b) My second example of complexity, is something I am much less knowledgeable about, but still more knowledgeable about than neuroscience (which I know is supposed to be the point of my whole essay, but still..) This week I had two Walter Murch experiences, the first one being early in the week when I saw the brilliant, thought provoking and personally moving film “Particle Fever” at the New York Film Festival. Walter edited this film, and since it contained footage taken over 7 years, his contribution to it must have been profound. “Particle Fever” is an almost existential journey into the lives of a few scientists involved with the LHC discovery of the Higgs Boson. Readers here have certainly followed this highly publicized discovery, and the multibillion dollar project that produced it. It was the largest experiment in history, with a primary aim of observing the presence of something very small and very import. The Higgs is a key discovery in unifying the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and even now, with it found, the implications remain truly complex. This is to say that with all of the resources of the world physics community, and a very large device (the LHC itself), the particle is more complex than the instrumentation or even the people that it took to produce it.

So after all of this my point is actually incredibly simple (not complex at all). The human brain is tightly packed. There are a lot of relatively small things. Billions as we are reminded. These things are bounded within a very small area. This essentially makes the brain predictable as we can theoretically map all of these points. The brain is not infinite in any direction. We can also use a very old way of placing each brain into a disorganized system, by taking the organization of each brain as an emergent system. When we do this then and compare the small population of earth to the galaxies alone, which move through a potentially infinite space it is impossible to consider a single brain to be more complex. Again we find ourselves small and simple.

Notes on Correlation (my new solo recording)

2013-09-01T11:04:00.002-07:00

Finding cohesion and even subject when creating a recording or a work of music has a long tradition. As someone who improvises, there are times when finding meaning before a session or performance is exactly what I try to avoid. Life is rarely lived in the moment, and for me at least, music is an exception. This however does not mean that there is not a greater unity to the music I play. It is after all a reflection of that time and place, and often only in retrospect do I see how the pieces relate to each other and to the other experiences in my life as a whole. The name “Correlation” is meant to be taken literally. I don’t need to spell out the meaning of each track, as the listener can certainly do that, if there is indeed meaning at all. For a scientist this same process happens. I run experiments and only later analyze them to see if the experiment showed anything useful. I, and most scientists, use a variety of statistical models for this. If there is statistical significance that one test relates to another we see a correlation. This recording has a perfect correlation to my life, and as a group these pieces fit into the narrative and emotions of my life in that moment that they were created.

I don’t mean this to be a puzzle for you as listeners, as I would prefer that you just enjoy the music as it fills your life in some ways. If you are however interested in some factors that contribute to the correlation, there are several subtleties. I play in 5 different keys throughout the recordings, but in all of them I am anchored around an A natural, even when that note is not a natural fit in the chosen key. When it is anchored throughout the work however, my hope is that it is not a shock to the ear, but rather like a hidden tonic. It is a home base, even when home may be a different key.

All of this is rather intellectual, while the creation of this music was not. Whatever meaning any of us bring to it now, my hope is that the emotional response is not lost. Also, as with art in general, the correlation is not fixed. All of our perceptions and responses will change in time. The curve fit of will morph as our experiences do, and I hope that we can all rediscover it and ourselves as that happens.

To download this music you can go to I-Tunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/correlation/id695404126

Reduction on a Summer Day

2013-07-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

I was walking from Pioneer Works in Red Hook to my apartment in nearby Cobble Hill talking with the fashion designer turned futurist developer Mari Kussman on a very hot Friday. Though roasting, and with the smell of rotting fish from the nearby Brooklyn docks in the air, we were overlapping each other in our general optimism for the place we were. We had just come from Pioneer Works, this dynamic transformed factory which is now an art hub where I have been working with the owners and board to make a nano lab and science initiative which will help realize founder Dustin Yellin’s goal of a true combined innovation space. So we had walked through the Ernesto Caivano exposition, played on the piano, toured the set of a film I am involved with that is directed by Alexis Gambis, and seen the beautiful precision work of those constructing the actual space where our high tech lab will go. There was very little to complain about as there wasn’t a better place where two new friends exploring creative and scientific interests could engage with that morning. In fact this brief tour was kind of a wrap up of a week which was enlightening and somehow still left questions in my mind. They were more existential in nature, or at least existential in a not completely paradoxical, yet strange way. The question was how the combination of pockets of insight could be re and de-constructed in such a way that we could feel both creative and rational. For many years I have thought these things were not at odds, which is one reason I am so attracted to Pioneer Works and all of these various seemingly unrelated activities. Still there is a philosophical emptiness that comes with reconciliation of these vast worlds of expression and thought. So while dangerous in that I stand to misrepresent events that even though recent are polluted by my own moods and preconceptions they may have some resonance. Or perhaps you can participate in the puzzle which has been the 3 year journey of these essays in “Converging Minds.” As a scientist I recognize the metrics as Karl Popper defined them. Progress is made through falsifiable discoveries. That is, it isn’t even real science yet until it has the ability to be proven incomplete. Yet we mark our lives like the papers we write. They are completions for publications that still leave a nagging sense of the incompleteness.

I had only met Mari the week before, and even though we sat across from each other the table discourse was not one which allowed people to have real intimate conversation. This is normal with a group of 12, and this 12 was even more unique, as everyone came prepared with such well-defined and well-reasoned ideas on any discussion that was begun that it took on the feel of a seminar with Korean food and beer. The dinner was organized in order to welcome the economist and prolific writer, Professor Robin Hanson to New York, and the conversation was at such a dynamically high level of pure reductionist philosophy that Spock himself would have had trouble keeping up. If there is a belief, which I actually do have, that a dinner with people smarter than you is a better dinner, then this was a feast for me. A large part of the discussion was unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, which is how to teach rationality. The nuances of rationality, critical thinking and probabilistic reasoning were ones I hadn’t fully realized when I made two simplistic statements. I had said that teaching rationality could be done in two ways. The first is by teaching statistics to children in primary school. This was not something that this group would disagree with, though outside of that table I have had many arguments about this, including with my daughter’s own teacher. Never the less this makes some sense. Statistics gives perspective, and therefore it becomes more intuitive to notice outliers in daily life. Belief in ghosts, being attacked by terrorists and a personal God become less likely by learning some specialized math. The second point I made was one that I heard Mari appealing to, which was a call for artistic expression as a way to gain empathy, and empathy in itself when properly understood as a neural mechanism was actually very rational. This was the glue of the discussion that could not dry in such a short time, but did continue even that night via Facebook chats. I had recounted the same story I have told hundreds of times about seeing the Beckett play “End Game” at 14 and realizing that I had been irrational my whole life. This was shocking and terrifying actually, but set me on the course of trying to understand the world differently, not through faith but through experimentation. Is this reductionist though, if an art experiment (a play, composition or video etc) is rarely understood scientifically even by the artist let alone the viewer in the way that a scientific experiment can? Is art falsifiable?

The conversation may have briefly ended but the thought continued. That Saturday I hosted an artist salon for Dominick Talvacchio . Dominick is an understated polymath, as his actual mathematics have been pursued privately and as a teacher rather than in academia. He is also a playwright, a web app developer, a former semi pro baseball catcher and a champion backgammon player, almost none of which I knew before this week. His art though is a distillation of much of this, often taking on meticulous and sometimes minimal form. The party was mostly informal talking and drinking (old school gin cocktails, though that has absolutely nothing to do with this conversation), but we did have a few minutes for me and others to ask Dominick some questions. One that he explored in some detail was the creation of a silk screen (to the left), which is a large reduction of rectangles by individual pixels. As you can see though, this seemly pure mathematical exercise becomes a sea of waves which ignites the imagination as much as any great master work of art. A few of us went to my back garden to continue to talk about the piece while Dominick himself stayed above. One observer pointed out that the universe is not only ordered but also chaotic, for which I took to mean irreducible. For this reason he liked that the waves emerged more than the reduction of the rectangles. It is of course only through the rectangles that the waves emerged, and though creating waves directly is artistic enough, it wasn’t this work.

I thought about that conversation when Mari and I arrived back at my home from our trip to Pioneer Works. I was about to have a dinner where Dominick would show yet another of his skills as an Italian American chef. I made a coffee for Mari and gave it to her in my favorite Star Trek mug. She looked at the mug and asked who my favorite character was. I said Captain Kirk, likely out of my own desire to be so cool and confidant as Kirk always was. She, the artist, the designer, the promoter of empathy said immediately that Spock was her favorite character. I looked up at the wall where Dominick’s painting still hung and thought about the week. What she was saying was what Dominick’s piece was also saying, and which I couldn’t put into words. It is honorable and even right to reduce. It is essential. Still, even when we do this we remain humanly attached to the result of the reduction not the reduction itself. You can start in either place with art or science, but in the end it reduces to the logical without losing its beauty. Perhaps this is also why I write “Converging Minds”, even though the only mind is this one limited mind. The more I reduce it, the more I understand what it is capable of creating. Perhaps this is what we all do.

On Fast and Slow Failure and Success

2013-04-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

I knew only the most basic business strategy of Tech Pro. This was a company that my parens started in 1983 that much later I owned with them and my cousin. The reason I knew so little was that I was only 9 years old. The reason I knew any at all was that I didn’t have to go far that year to learn about Tech Pro. The room, formally a playroom of sorts, had become the “Tech Pro Room”, as it was home to a new dedicated telephone line, a computer with 64k of RAM and surprisingly a modem to order parts. Our garage was a workshop where my father took in the first of a series of old instruments from shuttered factories, with the purpose of restoring and computerizing them. The kitchen table was not only where I ate my breakfast, but where I worked on my first start-up job, doing Quality Control testing of Tech Pro instruments. The company was financed through seed money from my parents and a small loan from my grandfather. My parents have pointed out that while this seed money was not a lot of money, it was all of the money they had. This money went directly to buy these old instruments. Within the first year of business the company was modestly profitable. Within the first 5 years, the business was comfortably supporting my family, and had managed to computerize a small industry. Tech Pro was never large, but Tech Pro was international. It employed a great group of talented engineers, many who did not have college degrees but did have creativity and dedication. Tech Pro took me and my family around the world, and introduced us to most of our friends for 25 years. We then sold the company in 2008.

All of this is likely of little interest to you, as Tech Pro is not Hewlett Packer, Apple or Google. It was just a family business that was able to see technological trends early, and create a thriving business based on them. What is interesting to me is to try to understand why this model is not a particularly common one anymore, and where it falls in the spectrum of “expert” advice from tech industry gurus. My friend and fellow board director of our new company (Nanotronics Imaging) Gerry Ohrstrom, trying to describe our new business and me in particular said something like “Matthew is a bottom up guy mostly, but also kind of a top down guy too”, which he of course knows. By bottom up he meant that the company was funded initially by us and through revenue like Tech Pro was. My father is again my partner. We did follow a bit of the Tech Pro example, but this time I felt that we should bring in outside investors (Gerry included), hence being top down too. It is too early to tell, but this seems to be a nice mix, though not as clear as the one my parents used with Tech Pro. The goals for the new venture are much larger, and therefore the perceived risk and the cost are greater. At least this story provides me with a good justification for being bottom up and top down. I have though been wondering if this is at all common anymore. It used to be. HP, GE, Intel and most early Silicon Valley companies worked in somewhat this fashion. I told the story of BF Goodrich here, where a man with an idea, some patents, a little money and some helpful investors started a 19^th Century business that would become global and very large. The corporate histories of DuPont, Monsanto and countless others of that era are very similar. Despite the overwhelming odds, these companies are still in existence. So why is this model now not considered normal?

I was recently invited to a lunch to discuss an idea a friend has for a science business. I wasn’t the only one invited, but it was clear why I was, since I am the CEO of a science business, not too dissimilar from what the friend wanted to start. The problem with these kinds of meetings that involve any form of advice is that I am in the middle of the process myself and therefore it is very difficult to have a prospective from the outside, even if it is about someone else’s idea. I have extreme myopia, which I break best from when I am talking about businesses that are completely unrelated to mine. That said, I tried to remember common wisdom about launching a business, which isn’t terribly difficult to do at this moment as I am in the midst of this myself. I consider my bottom up and top down approach somehow very old fashioned, and yet very uncommon at the same time. It is not documented as neatly as other models by most contemporary start-up strategists that I have read (though I don’t read all for sure.). I first assume the things everyone assumes. That is the validity of the disruptive idea (yes, despite saying that I don’t get my advice from gurus, I did read and liked very much the Clayton Christiansen books), the inventions themselves, the basic competitive landscape and all else that seems common sense now.

There is though a view exemplified by the almost cliché concept that since it is not as expensive to start a business as it used to be, due mainly to cloud servers and rapid open source development platforms, everyone should do it. (As a bit of a side note, this is really only true for certain companies. It is still expensive to start companies that make complicated "stuff" rather than those that rely on internet resources only). As the risk is small, the thought is that there is very little downside to trying. Also, because of this a young person can try many ideas in one lifetime, as failure is less risky. Though he may not have been the first to say it, the blogger and prolific book author Seth Godin famously wrote “fail fast and fail cheap. Fail in a way that doesn’t kill you.” This advice was repeated in a recent conversation between Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman, where Taleb stresses this as a fundamental strength of Silicon Valley start-up culture. He was, I believe, thinking of this as a risk mitigation plan. From the Taleb perspective this makes perfect sense. It is true that most businesses fail, and even if the odds were better it would be unlikely that the odds would be so good as to eliminate luck playing a critical role in the success or failure of a business. He is right in this very rational way, and if I wasn’t looking at this from a lifetime on the inside of start-ups, I would take the same rational view. The problem though is not one of expectations from the outside but the one from the inside. It is that position my parents were in in 1983 and that I am in now. It is also the position that more young people ever in technology are in, and from that perspective, every day that we wake up and think about failing fast, or even failing cheap we are failing in a much more profound way than Godin or even Taleb are suggesting. We are failing to risk what we should be risking. For every customer who buys a product that might become obsolete from our failures our failure as a business is a failure to them. This is true for every employee, no matter how much the employee knows she is taking a risk by working for a start-up. We are also failing the investors, even if those investors expect that they may lose the money.

When I think about the cheap part of Godin’s statement, I am reminded by the how little Tech Pro cost to start. Still, it never felt to me like failure was even a mildly uncomfortable option. It seemed dire. Even though my father had excellent career opportunities if Tech Pro did fail, it is hard for me to imagine him thinking about this much as he installed instruments that his customers were relying on. The stakes were too high. Though this is a very personal thing to recall, and may very well have lead me to large enough psychotherapy bills over the years to finance a start-up itself, I remember my mother’s panic the Christmas that Tech Pro was started. They gave me my dream present, an Atari 2600 video console, but not without instilling a feeling of dread which hung over the machine. Mom said “I hope you enjoy this, because Dad just quit his job to start Tech Pro. We may not be able to buy you such a nice gift again.” This comment was not a joke, as her tears were not tears of laughter, but rather it was a statement of commitment. She wasn’t saying this because she felt that Tech Pro would fail. If Tech Pro failed fast and failed cheaply my father would have gotten another job right away, and the following Christmas I would have had another nice gift. Instead the passion became an innovation, the innovation became a company, the company became a responsibility and ultimately that responsibility became success and created far more for far more people than just more Christmas presents for me.

So as I write this I wonder if there is any point of disagreement with contemporary common wisdom. What I come up with is that failure is of course a strong possibility, and that possibility should not stop someone from starting a business. That same failure though, no matter how cheap it appears can never be thought of in those terms. There is a ripple effect in all of the lives we touch when starting a business. That ripple can capsize boats, or guide them like an explorer’s ship to new lands. There is nothing more exciting, but if done right it is both slow and expensive. It is a lifetime that we are lucky enough to likely fail at.

A Cautiously Optimistic View from the Summit

2013-04-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

I have struggled with ways to describe the rewards and frustrations of having a technology company located in a small town in Ohio. I have written about my home town of Akron, which was once a center of American innovation and in my experience still has some of the most under-appreciated and talented engineers I have come across. There are however at least a few times per month when I find myself fighting an uphill battle against political complacency, class stagnation, and delusion that can all be poisonous. The struggle is not so much about how I feel, as this is fairly clear. The facts can be found anywhere. Akron, and the even smaller town of Cuyahoga Falls where Nanotronics Imaging (the tech company I am CEO of) is actually located, has had a declining population for my entire adult life. Large industries once sustained it not only as a manufacturing hub, but also with research centers for companies like Goodyear, Firestone, BF Goodrich, ABB, Timken, Lockheed Martin and many more. As the population got smaller so did the opportunities for those scientists and those skilled workers, leaving in its place the support structure of universities, hospitals, stores and excessive real estate inventory. Though I live in New York, I have long recognized this as an opportunity. Where there were great engineering jobs, there are still great engineers. Where there are Science and Engineering programs in universities, there are students graduating who already know the region. This must be the story of much of rust belt America and the European counterparts to it. Detroit is even a more famous example, but I have never worked or lived in Detroit, so I will keep my comments to Northeast Ohio, where my company and my emotions are still so tied. Even with these feeling of the obvious advantages, I have been unable to fully understand why other tech companies don’t see this. I now realize that it is harder than I had expected for reasons that economists and sociologists have understood for centuries.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) , the first political economist, understood the Akron issue before Akron was an issue to be had. Most importantly to this point, Smith assumed that a society thrives by access to technology and the ability to trade it. A contemporary book by Matt Ridley called “The Rational Optimist”, gives an encouraging and sensitive account of how communities can thrive, and of the pitfalls to avoid that can lead to death. Ridley speaks about the long history of Tasmania, which went through a nearly 7000 year regression in technological ability, and therefore in longevity, starvation and vulnerabilities to the elements, which are indeed huge problems to deal with in the absence of good tools. The Tasmanians, until 10,000 BC were connected with the world, where large populations of different backgrounds could learn from each other and help each other to develop new tools, and even inspire art. The reason for this may seem a bit cynical, but it is more romantic to me than the words will first appear. The reason why it was possible to create new specialty tools was because the market for those tools was large enough. There is the purely commercial aspect of course, but also the fact that creation and invention is meaningless in isolation. With a world to share with, there is a world who will share with you, and therefore there is a vibrant technological economy. The 7000 year regression only occurred when removal from a growing active cross culture trade was cut off.

This technological age is one of early agriculture, not one of industrialization, and certainly not one where mass international social networks connect the planet through small devices that can be carried around. Still the "Tasmania Problem" (as Ridley describes it in his book) serves as somewhat of an analogy and even a warning for Ohio and places like it. While I don’t hold out our technology company as being transformative to a region, the idea of it could be. Ohio needs to do everything in its power to avoid Tasmania style regression, and the way that countless cases in history have shown is that technology, inclusion and collaboration with others outside of the village, city, state or country are crucial. This also means collaboration outside of the discipline of expertise in a specific community.

There are many times when I seem to be in rather bad taste in my criticism of Summit County, the Ohio County that encompasses Akron and the smaller town of Cuyahoga Falls where Nanotronics lives. I have considered doing a whole series on these as a defensive vindication of my positions, by including Hume, Jefferson, Paine, Tocqueville, Voltaire, and maybe even the Dali Lama to throw people off a little, but just by mentioning these names here, I am being pretentious enough. It is not just what these other people say, but how the community is feeling. More important to this blog though is how I am feeling, which is that the efforts made by some in the region to be international, are lost in the blind and even dangerous religion of a new type of community based spirituality which could be defined as hyperlocality. I made that word up and it may not be a good one, but involves the well-meaning, extremely diligent hard work of a community that has been in decline. This group is trying to redefine itself by local businesses that appeal to other locals. This by its nature is circular. In the case of Summit County this means businesses, organizations and individuals who support the only remaining industries, which are also support businesses. More specifically I will propose two stories, both of which won’t use specific companies’ names, and are not 100% “based on a true story”, but are very close. They are as least as true as I understand, and have been represented to me. As you will see with my titles, and descriptions (I tell these in the first person though neither are meant to be a retelling of my own history), neither are meant as attacks, as I respect people and organizations that are following both of these. You will also see that I think however that despite my respect for the intentions of both, I find one of these stories highly flawed and bad for the county (and counties like Summit around the world).

Story of Summit County #1 – a story a of organic sustainability

Though the tire companies have left, the city of Akron has never looked nicer, and we are doing everything we can to keep it that way. When I grew up Akron was a dirty place. Pollution was rampant. I used to have carbon black that came from tire company smoke stacks on my wind shield. That said my family worked for those companies, and that is why I could afford a college education. Those tire companies leaving was hard for a while, and many people moved out of Summit County as the jobs left. Luckily for us in the wake of that exodus were 2 very good hospitals and within 50 miles 10 good Universities. Really though I don’t need to look 50 miles out to see how my generation is benefiting from a renewed Summit County. The university grounds are cleaner and nicer than ever, and professors are still living in our city. The hospitals are also still very good. What I and my friends are doing is making sure that we are taking this now ecofriendly city (since the industry pollution is long gone), and creating local businesses that are sustainable and attractive. We have organic farms that use no biotech. We sell these in local specialty stores. We have recycling programs. We oppose fracking and believe that we can have a nicer life through conservation. Though I know that I buy from places that are not local, my goal is to support these local businesses, and to create local businesses that will be supported by the others.

Story of Summit County #2- International Technology Incubator

There is enormous opportunity since the tire companies left our county, even though they were so good to our county for so many generations. The benefit has all to do with human capital, and regional legacy. Both of these things will come in handy. A far as people, we have smart, talented engineers from those businesses that left, who would still like to stay in this nice region. We also have great lawyers, doctors, and even university partners if we need them. The population is declining in numbers, which is a bad thing no matter how you look at it. The upside is that in a global economy we are no longer dependent on the growth of our own county to spur the success of our county. We can leverage the talent to create intellectual property and manufacture products and software that are not just the envy of the world, but more importantly allow us to be integral players in the world. By doing this more people may very well move to Summit County as the jobs here will not be made up only of support businesses and businesses to support the support businesses.(The latter of which I find to be putting the cart before the horse). Why do we need expensive organic food stores, which ultimately deplete wealth, (and let’s be frank, they pay wages that are only slightly better off than working at Walmart.) I look at West Orange and Menlo Park New Jersey, the two business homes of Thomas Edison that cared little about those communities’ directly, but by creating the electric light, the phonograph, the motion picture and 2000 other things, made the entire world healthier and wealthier, including those smaller towns in New Jersey. I look at San Jose, where Silicon Valley was born. The modern computer era that we all enjoy was not for the benefit of a region, and had nothing to do with thinking locally. It had to do with invention and the proliferation of those inventions. Now Silicon Valley is richer, but so are all of us, in so many ways, which are not just financial. Summit County should do the same.

As you can probably guess, I strongly support the second story. There are some in our area that are doing these things. John West, my friend and the former Director of Kent State’s Liquid Crystal Institute has helped us and many other companies with grand and successful national and international ambitions. There are others too of course. A rumor is that the area is courting biotech companies, which is one reason for me writing this piece now. Just as these two well-meaning people in the stories above are doing what they are claiming, part of that is a debate over biotech. This is one example where intentions are not everything. If the Organic Sustainability Akronite described above were to win, we will have more low paying, low impact organic food stores, and less lifesaving high paying biotech.

This is much more of a rant than my typical essays, and I apologize if it seems judgmental. It is making a call that I think is rational. It is not however questioning the ideals of those in story one. Well maybe some come to mind that should be called out, such as University Presidents and politicians, but that will be for another rant. Next blog will be back to science, philosophy and free jazz…

Find Your Inner Vulcan

2013-02-24T18:36:00.001-08:00

There is a famous Vulcan puzzle that has a purpose described by Voyager Lieutenant Tuvok as restoring the "structure of harmony". This game is used for the aim of going beyond Zen style Buddhist disembodiment, and instead allows Vulcans to focus on being rational and devoid of harmful emotions. The blocks have a variety of 3 dimensional geometries, that when stacked can easily tumble like a house of cards. Vulcans have the ability to go without sleep for up to 5 earth days, which it sometimes takes for them to complete the task. Other times it is done in a matter of minutes. The interesting thing about this puzzle is that there is no predefined form. It is assembled differently each time. So, despite the rather machine-like construction of these blocks, the outcome is creative. It is a humanoid’s attempt to be a machine, and his embrace of the outcome, that it is not merely a repetitive form, but something unique to that moment.

As I look at these fictional characters trying to cope with the always present annoyance of emotion, I wonder if this quality the Vulcan is finding in this exercise is not merely mechanistic. What is it about creating unique forms based on that particular moment that makes a Vulcan easier for us as Trekkies to relate to? For some reason the one important human characteristic that I always think of as crucial in our ability to both improve ourselves and thrive as a species is empathy. The Wikipedia definition of empathy states: “Empathy is the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another sentient or fictional being”. At first glance this definition does not seem to apply to a solitary act, but I would argue that in a very important way it does. The entire purpose of combining rationality with creativity is an applied discipline. When a meditation that results in variations depending on personal interactions of the day is completed, it is assumed that those interactions play an important role. Therefore to complete the task effectively the Vulcan must possess empathy. While this may be a stretch, it is allowed to be, as we are talking about characters in a TV space drama. The analogies that this suggests however, I think are transferable to us actual humans, not just pointy eared aliens.

This apparent contradiction between the logical mechanistic mode, and the creative empathetic one, is not only one to consider when assembly a starship crew, but also in a technology company, or even an artificial intelligence. I was attending a salon that the social scientist, and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt was a guest speaker for. The group was a libertarian organization called ReasonFoundation, whose name Haidt seemed to suggest, (based on his in-depth research), explains libertarians fairly well. It seems that empathy and rational decision making ability are inversely proportional. Libertarians seem to be the Vulcans of the political ideals spectrum (my words not his). This is in a way similar to very high functioning individuals with autism, such as many people with Asperger’s syndrome, who populate some of the best computer science departments and silicon value development labs. Haidt implies a mutually exclusive tendency between libertarian logical rigor, and a lack of empathy. While he certainly has a lot of research, there may very well be something more fundamental about the nature of humanity that he is missing.

Though I hate to jump around between fictional characters, real people, and robots I am going to do it anyway. Many people, who I promise you, are not all nuts, are considering the programming parameters for creating human-like artificial intelligence. I and many others think that computer technology is accelerating at such a rate that we will be faced with both practical and ethical questions about what and who these future highly intelligence machines should be. The former Singularity Institute, now known as MIRI, has been working on this very issue with full time researchers, and yearly conferences.

Perhaps there is a something to the dichotomy of empathy and reason that we should consider when allowing our machines to become sentient. You notice I use allow, as I have decided to take a rather libertarian approach to artificial intelligence. As an analogy, humans have programming which is encoded in our DNA. A good generalized AI algorithm also has the equivalent, perhaps not written in ATCG base pairs on a biopolymer, but rather in binary logic, written in C++ and eventually printed onto silicon. We know how to create learning algorithms already. The IBM computer Watson, and most Google products, as well as thousands of others do it. These are machines that start as newborns with pre-programmed tools for learning and as they age get smarter. In some ways current AI does better than humans, and in some ways humans do better than computers.

This is old stuff (well Watson was 2 years ago. I guess that is old in modern tech terms), and easy to understand. What we don’t know about human genomics, and equally don’t know how to do in computer science, is to find, or program that fundamental structure so that pure logical thinking, and empathy can co-exist. The reason that they should co-exist in AI may seem obvious. We would want machines that inherently have superior abilities, such as perfect memories, but also have the heart of an empath, or at the very least the heart of a libertarian Vulcan.

Paper and Pixels

2013-01-15T08:42:00.001-08:00

I walked into the Poets House in Battery Park for the first time in December, and realized that I wanted to spend more time there. At first glance I thought that Poets House was beautiful, but also I didn't think there was much to do there. This was the instinctual response of 21st century over-stimulation. There was actually a near infinity to discover in that very non-technological world of books. I went last week and read a translation of a Euripides play I had loved in college. I can’t wait to go back.

I am a techno- optimist, but am also conflicted when it comes to my rather nostalgic attraction to books and my passion for technological progress. I would not want to live in any other time. In fact I am one of the 1% of the population who feels that life in the future will be significantly better than the past. In terms of literature, I write poems on anything that is around, whether it is a napkin, a notebook, my laptop or even if I really can’t find anything else, my I-Phone. The tech and the poetry seem unrelated. I was a very early adopter of the Amazon Kindle, and have owned every generation. At a conference I met one of the founders of E-Ink, and I sincerely told him how e-reading has changed my life. Strangely though, I think I haven’t been completely honest with myself. I didn't realize this until I read this quote by the Technology oracle Tim O’Reilly (who has a blog and podcast that i really like) in a Wired Magazine interview where he said,

“I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn't Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.”

His facts about the age of the novel are right of course, but a counter argument could be made that the novel is much older than computers, the internet or the cell phone. Would he have the same dismissive feelings towards Turing, or Jobs, or Berners Lee? Would the comment

“I don’t give a shit if computers die. They are only 50 years old, and it is elitist anyway, as poor people can’t buy them.”

This is rather extreme of course, but progress can be measured in slow motion adaption like evolution, or in rapid frame leaps of insight like Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. These two things do not need to exclude each other, and I am not the only technology minded guy who feels this way of course. I am not certain that O’Reilly has such a complete lack of interest in a nuanced view of progress through knowledge, regardless of how it is gathered. He said in Edge.org just this week:

“Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being "a Ciceronian" rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism.”

This analogy could be used for a society who does not read Moby Dick for instance, as we could enter a kind of Dark Age of societal and introspective reflection.

The computer pioneer Danny Hillis made an interesting remark to this point when writing about search tools. In the near future, and to some extent now, what we read is guided by Google. Hillis warns that

“In the past, meaning was only in the minds of humans. Now, it is also in the minds of tools that bring us information. From now on, search engines will have an editorial point of view, and search results will reflect that viewpoint. We can no longer ignore the assumptions behind the results.”

Perhaps what he is saying applies to literature as well. If an advertising company becomes powerful enough to influence meaning, it can even more easily influence what we read. It is possible that literature can become buried in the abyss of pages with no hyperlinks, and even when it is discovered it is remastered by algorithmic editorial.

One of the best sci-fi novels of recent years is Rainbow’ End by Vernor Vinge. A friend who knows Vinge feels that he is one of the best at predictive fiction. In many cases this is actually a positive thing, as the near future of Vinge can be very exciting. In Rainbows End however there is a bit of a warning when it comes to mass digitization. Vinge does not point a finger at the non-destructive means by which Google creates the largest on-line library, but instead talks of a fictional corporation that uses a technique to digitize which involves shredding library books in order to preserve the content. At first thought this would not be so bad. Cloud servers are backed up, and in a way contain a perfection that the decaying paper which books are printed on don’t. The problem however is that a corporation doing the cataloging is making money some way, and if they are anything like Google or Facebook, advertising is a large part of this money making exercise. We might wonder how this is different than traditional ownership rights by traditional publishing houses, but it is not the same. A publisher and a book store sell a book, and a library loans books, or lets you read them. I saw this funny cartoon about Facebook which makes the same point about being led advertising companies.

I may very well seem old fashioned, especially as I was going through the stacks at Poets house reading bits of Eliot, and poems of Auden. It was a beautiful day, and when I opened those books, it could have been any year in American history. Yet there was a difference in my experience. I realized that everyone visiting Poets House that morning, including me, had our laptops open, and were using the free WIFI they provide. Though I can’t speak for everyone else, I wasn’t on Facebook, or checking Twitter, or even reading the news. I was instead looking up biographical information on the writers I was reading. I wanted to know what the authors were doing at the time they wrote specific poems. I wanted to know where they lived, or are living in the case of contemporary authors. I even wanted to find out how to contact those living writers to see if they wanted to have a coffee. I did all of these things, which without Google, Wikipedia and other online resources would be impossible. These are of course some of the same companies that may very well be making the print books I was enjoying obsolete. If I take this further, I can imagine 1 or 2 years from now having the same WIFI access, but not having to even leave the stacks to learn more. I could use augmented reality glasses or contacts, and do searches on the spot, as i guess i could already do on my I-Phone. As I will do this the work that O’Reilly considers to be irrelevant to modern life may actually be more relevant personally than it ever was before. Moby Dick will not only be a grand story and allegory of beautiful prose, but technology will be nearly instantaneously creating a context for it, making it more powerful and personal than it ever would have been before. Most importantly though, it won’t be the changing world of on-line content that I will be experiencing. It will instead be yellowing bound sheets a paper, with all of the fixed words and romantic imagery that they bring to mind.

Hugo's Repentir

2013-01-06T17:59:00.000-08:00

I lived just a few blocks away from the Victor Hugo’s home on Place des Vosges in Paris, which is now a public museum. If you haven’t been to Place des Vosges you are missing out on one of the more beautiful places in Paris. It is one of the most spectacular parks to take your kids to play on grass, have a glass of wine, or go to an art gallery. If there is one square in all of Paris I miss most it is the Place des Vosges, and one of the things I miss about it is walking through the home of Victor Hugo. This home is not a miserable one for sure. It is large, with beautiful views, a stunning library, an art collection, and a piano where Hugo himself studied for a short time with Liszt (though there is evidence that after only a few lessons Liszt declared his friend Hugo a lost cause). I of course look at the Maison de Victor Hugo as a man who lived in New York during the reign of the musical “Les Miserables”, over 100 years after Hugo himself departed Place des Vosges for a burial site in the Pantheon. I loved the musical, even after I became snobbish enough to realize that the music wasn’t exactly Stravinsky, and the adaptation lacking in some of the most important ideas of Hugo’s successful novel. When I first saw the preview for the new film adaptation, I wept in the theatre with excitement, and of course from the general anguish that comes with seeing so many miserable people in two minutes on a large movie screen. I still felt this way after seeing the movie, which was stunning and passionately moving in so many ways.

Over these last few days since I have seen “Les Miserables”, I have not only had those songs in my head, but also the memories of that Paris house, and my recollections of the book that it was based on. In some ways I think I should hate the movie despite my powerful emotional response to it. I recently wrote on a Facebook post of someone complaining about the movie saying “you are cynical”, which was unfair of me. There are a few, and maybe more, reasons why this movie shouldn’t be someone’s only journey into mid 19^th century Paris, or into the world of Victor Hugo. Hugo said himself “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” This may mean I should be silent here. But neither Hugo nor myself (two names never uttered in the same sentence) remain silent about much. Though it doesn’t need to take away from the enjoyment of the movie, there are some problems with the adaption for stage and screen which bother me, and I think would bother Hugo as well (as I am of course so qualified to speak on his behalf).

Jean Valjean was not meant to be Victor Hugo. Likely it was meant to be the man Hugo wanted to be. Valjean is a brave and selfless revolutionary. Hugo became somewhat the same, living in exile, taking care of the poor and changing his monarchical sympathies for republican ideals. Of course a big difference exists in the two, and Hugo clearly knew this. Valjean and Hugo both became wealthy, but Valjean had to live his life as a shadow even in the heart of Paris. Hugo by contrast was the most famous writer in the world, and he seemed to love this fame. The great novelist Gustave Flaubert, who was his contemporary and is now considered my many people to be the better writer, felt that Hugo was completely out of touch with common struggles. He though that the language and characters of “Les Miserables” were ludicrous. He said of that the characters of “Les Miserables” "speak very well – but all in the same way". Emile Zola, who was the real grit naturalistic writer of Parisian poverty during that era, and the poet Baudelaire also criticized the book for much the same reason. I get that point, and can imagine that only the cockney accents of the thieves and whores would help change their views of the film. Mostly though Valjean’s perfection and the difference between a romanticized character and a real person are hinted at with Hugo’s own words “the greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves”. Even more telling is this quote: “Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved”. So Hugo was both not without ego, and unlike the Valjean of the film who post redemption cared only about loving others, wanted desperately to be loved himself. The book has a much more profound ending than the musical and film adaption. In the novel Valjean is buried in an unmarked grave, not from poverty, but because he died a wanted criminal. There would be no Pantheon and parade as there was for Hugo, yet it doesn’t seem to be a sad ending either. Perhaps Hugo wished, like so many of us, that we cared less about legacy, as Hugo himself cared so much for it.

The ending of the musical/ movie not only lacks this existential juxtaposition with human nature, it becomes a Christian fantasy. I know that I tend to be so anti-religion that I criticize everything that hints at God. I really don’t mean to do this with “Les Miserables”, which clearly has plenty of very passionate theistic aspects. Instead I think that the makers of the musical/movie miss an opportunity to see the possibility of redemption as a purely altruistic and beautifully human rather than supernatural event. Victor Hugo was like most of us. He had a spiritual journey which for him started with being a staunch Catholic and ended with being a deist, which was about as close to agnostic as contemporary views allowed. He wrote “Les Miserables” in the middle of this transformation, and I would say that this is in many ways Hugo’s own redemption. It was during his time in exile that he completed almost 20 years of writing “Les Miserable”. He said in the year of its publication, “hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly”. This sounds much more like Richard Dawkins than a Pope.

It was in exile in Guernsey that he began living a more Valjeanesque existence by starting schools and caring for the poor. One of my favorite things in the Maison de Victor Hugo is a desk with ink wells, personal items and signatures donated by many of the most famous French writers of the era (Georges Sand, La Martine,Dumas and Hugo himself). He put this up for sale at a charity auction to help pay for new schools. When it didn’t sell, he purchased it himself. He said wisely “he who opens a school door, closes a prison.” When we look at both Hugo’s life at this period when he became a Republican, philanthropist and deist, we see the all-important redemption of Jean Valjean in a very different way than it is depicted in the musical/movie. In both the book and the movie, nothing is more powerful and more profoundly inspiring than when Bishop Myriel gives Valjean both his dignity and his silver, and sets him on a path to be a great man. This is touching because it is a man giving this, not because God is giving it. This could be a secular call that it is possible to be saint-like without being a saint. Instead Valjean spends much of movie in a devotion to God and the promise of heaven. The book realizes a heaven on earth, through the love Valjean finds in Cosette, and the ability to forgive Javert.

Writing even this brief description of my feelings makes me aware of how unequipped I am as a literary historian or critic. I better stick to microscopes, and drinking in parks. I respond to these works of art through the lens of a modern American, who loved spending days looking through Victor Hugo’s windows onto a Paris that brought me and my family so much pleasure. Perhaps this is also why “Les Miserables” in all its incarnations remains so powerful. I also realize that I have spent too much time since I first saw the musical on Broadway, until writing this this blog contemplating one mans vision, and many others interpretations. Being rational, being analytical and just feeling sometimes is enough. Also as Hugo himself said “Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.”

Filling The Gaps

2012-12-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

Crammed into this past week I was lucky enough to be in several situations that had me contemplating the greatest fragility and complexity of life from a variety of viewpoints. The first was a debate at Intelligence Squared with the topic being “Science Refutes God” (see it here). Truthfully after the greatest debater of our time Christopher Hitchens passed away, this topic is one that I have stopped watching, as no one could do it better. Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer being on the pro-side though did convince me that it would be an entertaining evening, which it was. And from the polling the atheists won, which wasn't very surprising to me. Sitting next to me a friend said in regards to the religious side arguing for supernatural interference, and the holy word of the ancient Hebrews, “is this really 2012?”, to which I shrugged. It did seem like a debate that David Hume or Spinoza would have had with some religious leaders in another century. Still the main point remains, and was brought home through a very astute question to both sides: “What would make you change your position on this topic?” The Christians said basically nothing could. It was a matter of faith. Krauss on the other hand made the point that science follows the evidence, and our views as scientists are always changing. If, he said, he walked out of the debate and the stars spelled “you are wrong” in Aramaic, he would indeed be moved by this. The religious side used a very old tactic of explaining that many, in fact most, people have spiritual experiences, as a sort of proof that a consensus makes a truth. This is a bizarre assertion in light of our understanding of science, as people have illusions, old genetic predispositions, hallucinations and many other misleading feelings. Shermer points all of this out nicely. The argument is also intertwined in people’s minds with a moral one, where God is needed for ethics. I find this absurd, as my morals and ethics are strong I think, and those of most of my friends are, and those of secular societies (eg Sweden) are as well. So God really isn't needed to keep us from being bad. Even if the concept of God did make us more moral, it becomes immoral to lie about scientific evidence in order to achieve this. Deception in the name of civility neither works for long, nor is intellectually or ethically acceptable.

Something I think may be newer came up recently as well. It is newer to me at least, as I am only a casual observer of the very disciplined and complicated field of philosophy. In October a group of scientists and philosophers all got together to discuss the topic of “Moving Naturalism Forward.” I was not invited, as the group was especially esteemed, and I am not especially esteemed and would have not contributed anything useful. Physicist Sean Carroll organized it, and wasn't the only scientist present. Janna Levin, Richard Dawkins, Simon DeDeo, Jerry Coyne, Noble laureate Steven Weinberg and others were there as well. Though the entire thing is 15 hours long, and I haven’t watched all that much of it yet, the sections I did watch seemed especially philosophy focused. This is not surprising as the topics were big ones in the history and present work of philosophy including free-will, morality and meaning. While there were many brilliant philosophical arguments made (I am a big fan of some in the room, especially Rebecca Goldstein), two things surprised me. First was that it seemed decided that scientists need philosophers for some big questions. That may be true, but in a way it is a shame, as scientists should be able to ask their own philosophical questions. This was true of Einstein, Newton, Darwin and just about every other famous scientist we can think of. The philosophers even invoked those names as examples of scientists doing good philosophy, but pointed out that many scientists do not, which is fair enough. Sean Carroll said that he would like philosophers to help understand the implications of Quantum Mechanics, and wishes that they would have done so earlier. That was generous of him I thought, and while I get his point that a new paradigm needs some deep probing, there is no topic more misunderstood by philosophers (at least many) than Quantum Mechanics, so I would in a way prefer that Sean, Janna and the rest of us who use QM, also seek meaning rather than waiting for the philosophical community to weigh in. Actually I think we do, even if that meaning is confined within a specific area of research.

The more upsetting point of these conversations was regarding scientific and philosophical ethical responsibility. Even many of the scientists were swayed by the arguments of Daniel Dennett and others about Free-Will. I have exhausted the topic in this blog before, so I won’t again, other than to say that as a pure materialist I find that since the rules of everything in the universe are governed by physical reality, so too should humans, including the issue of free-will. Actually most of the attendees agreed to some extent, though the philosophical argument is nuanced and confusing to a layman of philosophy such as me. The troubling thing was not the ideas of determinism or choice, but that it seemed to me that the agreement was that society could not handle the absence of free –will, whether it was scientifically accurate or not. Dennett and others sited some experiments where people lose a sense of right and wrong when they feel that they have no choice. Coyne disputed these studies, saying that over the long term he would imagine that there is not this effect. Still, there was near consensus that because we do at least feel we have choice, it is better to ignore, or at least put off the scientific possibility that we don’t. This sounds to me a lot like the God argument regarding morals. The suggestion is that morals don’t fall away when we abandon God for a scientific view of the universe based on reason, logic and experiment, but they do if we abandon free-will. I find this insulting to humanity, and an underestimation in the power of knowledge.

The debate and watching this summit were the bookends of my week- long journey into the understanding of life. In the middle was something very different, and actually had nothing to do with materialism and logic, but rather just about the joy of being alive. It was a Poets House and American Museum of Natural History event which was a conversation between one of my favorite naturalists E.O. Wilson (see a blog I wrote about him here) and the poet Robert Hass, who I had the pleasure of getting to hear and read for the first time, despite his many years of literary fame and success. I immediately wanted to write a blog about the night, but I thought better of it, and instead wrote poetry (some of my poems here. The are admittedly not Hass quality). It seemed that abstraction and metaphor expressed my thoughts better than I could with normal description.

There is one idea that brings this all together for me. It is the title of one of the poems I wrote, and the title of this blog. It is “filling the gaps”. The God of The Gaps is an old expression which is still relevant in many ways. Humans invoke god to fill in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. For some these are also filled by philosophy. For others of us we look to science to fill as many as it possibly can with the understanding that it will certainly fail to fill them all. Rather than creating myths, or even from formalized speculation in the way of logical deductions made by philosophy, I fill these gaps by observing and creating art. Poetry, music, painting and sculpture don’t give concrete answers, but they provide a way to inspire contemplation, learn about ourselves, and visualize aspects of the universe that is still incomprehensible. I will still read philosophy because it is so challenging and can be enlightening, and I will still do science. What I can’t forget though is what fills those gaps, which is humanities ability to create pictures of truth that we cannot explain any other way.

A New Resolution

2012-11-29T12:42:00.000-08:00

My new TV arrived yesterday. Like most modern Americans the arrival of a new TV for me is an exciting moment. The last one, while only 4 years old and having an LCD display, seems like a relic from from a television era in the distant past. At the time I spent around $2000 on the thing, but it now has ghost images, no LED backlight and poor resolution. So spending less than half of that price I got a new Samsung, with all of the features to bring my household up to date. The first thing I watched was the ending of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” with my daughter, as watching a Technicolor favorite of mine would be a way to overwhelm both of us with the brilliance of the color depth and all around qualities of the new TV. We were happy enough with what we saw, but it was different. I have seen this movie so many times that I can’t count them, but I had never seen it like this. The experience actually made me a little bit uncomfortable. The image looked less glamorous and less cinematic. It looked more real. Wasn’t this a good thing? Hadn’t I written about how Edison’s invention of the motion picture was as much a science and anthropological record of human behavior as it was an art? Hadn’t I been a producer of an early digital film, because of its naturalistic potential? I had of course, so I guessed that this response was simply nostalgia for a film that I had seen in movie theatres and on poorer quality TV screens. I then watched an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager”. It looked to me like someone had filmed it with a camcorder on a garage set. There was also the issue that every movement of the camera was observable, which distracted me from the experience. I still thought that I had just become habituated to inferior technology. Then my wife came home. She is the ultimate early adopter, having used the internet before anyone in the French city of Bordeaux (maybe an exaggeration, but not by much), and she said the same thing. I played around with settings and I think I have the imagine de-resolved enough to make us both happy, but the jury is still out. We might send it back to buy a lesser television that makes us feel better.

This is where generalization about cultural and technological advances can be overly simplistic. When I first heard that the best TVs allowed you to see individual blades of grass on a football field, and every eye movement of a pitcher on a baseball mound I thought that this was a natural progression from Edison’s boxer films (see below). We would experience more, and future viewers would know how 21rst century athletes behaved with near perfection. This is where science, art and pleasure seem to diverge. This already happened for me with video games, where graphics became so crisp and life like that play was no longer play. I retreated from a lifelong love of video gaming to a chess board, the most ancient form of gaming. Was technology taking away the great love I have for watching movies at home?

As someone who makes imaging software and microscopes, my goal is not only to resolve as well as the eye, but to do much better. It is to see the world the way it is, on a deeper level than our limitations allow us to. This is a good thing when it comes to creating nanotechnology and understanding nature. This lets us progress. Art however has for the last 150 years moved in the opposite direction. That is until very recently apparently. The impressionists changed the world by de-resolving, and leaving it to our minds to reconstruct, and our emotions to feel. Abstract expressionism went beyond this, and let meaning become a personal connection with otherwise chaotic or at least nonfigurative bursts. Live theatre went through a similar evolution, towards minimalism, especially in my favorite of 20^th century works such as absurdist plays. It is not the realism of the sets or even the dialogue of “Waiting For Godot” that makes it so powerful. Instead it is the truth that is constructed in our imagination with the guidance into another world by Beckett.

As I contemplate all of this, and how to deal with my TV situation, I think that ultimately it is not about the viewer and consumer but instead it is about the artist. With these new tools it is important to remember what makes movies and TV shows artistic at all. It is not that they are direct mirrors of reality, but that they are constructed and painted versions of reality. It is not then the TVs fault, but rather a new challenge to film and television directors to recognize that naturalism requires an impressionist and expressionist eye. I am certain that this is already happening. For the moment though I must figure out a way to resolve the issue of resolution, and again have a TV watching experience that transports my imagination.

Historically Making the Future

2012-10-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago my daughter and I went to the World Maker Faire in Queens New York, for what was a great day of inventors showing cool new products of “stuff”. “Stuff” is the new digital and for a guy who has always worked at the intersection of digital and physical, I love this. Soon after we went through the rain and long line to enter we entered into the first tent where projects for kids and adults were being led by enthusiastic 20 somethings in geek chic attire (more geek I must say than chic). A woman asked Juliette (my 7 year old daughter) if she knew which president of the United States was an inventor. Being arrogant (though not 7 as I sounded), I jumped in with the response saying “several were inventors.” The woman handed us a card with a picture of a president on one side and a description on the other. She then corrected me by saying that it was only Abraham Lincoln who held a patent (a rather obscure one actually, but not as obscure as my own patents. Read of his here). That was interesting to me, as with so many other makers like myself it is not Lincoln we look to in American history as a politician/innovator combo, but rather President Thomas Jefferson, and founding father Benjamin Franklin. According to most accounts both of these would have been more at home running a booth at the Maker Faire than representing the country in tax policy. Upon further reflection there is actually a dichotomy that we are now facing, where we again look to these unpatented inventors at the dawn of our nation to see where politics, bureaucratic stiffing, piracy and invention collide. I think my surprise over Lincoln was not so much that he had a patent, but that someone at the ideologically open source Maker Faire was sharing this with pride. For me, someone who has authored 6 patents, I am always defending what is perceived, lately especially, as being an old convention that limits innovation rather than encourages it. The villainous Patent Troll must be a popular Halloween costume in Silicon Valley this year for example. What do we think of Lincoln then, and what would Lincoln and the founding founders say to each other and to entrepreneurs and inventors in 2012?

Here is the contradiction. The patent system is built into our constitution, and for good reason. The discussion of Patent protection and intellectual property was a part of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and the movement proposed by James Madison was "to secure to authors exclusive rights for a limited time". It was adopted with very little dissent as a part of the commerce clause. All of this makes sense. Patents were a way for the new country to protect the inventions of its citizens while at the same time making sure that those inventions can be replicated and not lost to secrets once the inventor is no longer alive. This is one reason I like patents. While it does create a short term monopoly it also allows for long term free use. Until very recently my thought was that inventors, and companies who have inventions coming out of them, were faced with either creating a patent or keeping things as trade secrets. A mix of these two things is used by nearly everyone in technology businesses including the company I am CEO of Nanotronics Imaging. The idea of open source lives somewhere outside of these two choices that most of us face, but it did not start with Linus Torvalds or Wikipedia, but rather has its roots as far back in the United States as Benjamin Franklin and indeed our 3^rd President.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1813 said this of ideas:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

This in itself doesn't speak to patents, but judging by the fact that he never applied or received one we can assume that he didn't think much of them, even if he had not oppose the inclusion of US patent law into the constitution. Similarly Franklin said of his inventions "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

The question that I have always had was whether these ideas were scalable, as neither man needed patent royalties for personal wealth or the survival of a business. Nor did they, as brilliant as they were, provide an economic solution to open sourcing. Perhaps this is why patent law remained, even with these grand gestures of two of the nations preeminent founders and inventors. Maybe they could not think of how the romantic notions of open source could create a nation of leading innovations.

Chris Anderson (of Wired Magazine, not TED, fame) comments on the power of Makers both in numerous Wired articles and his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. Anderson speaks both as a prophet and the messiah of Makers, and he is in a great position to do so. Not only is he the Chief Editor at Wired, but he has two start-ups that very much grew up in the style of the Maker/DIY movement. Most importantly they use micro-controllers called Arduino, which have taken a rather old kit concept and made a powerful electronics tool. The way this is possible, as my father (a Maker not only now but of the 70’s and 80’s Homebrew Computer Club era) claims is the internet. The internet has of course allowed for rapid creation of social networks, searching, and democratized publishing (I am actually publishing these thoughts just because I want to), DIY commerce and DIY products. Arduino and 3-D printers are just two examples that use Wikipedia style collaboration to enable the creation of stuff. In addition to patents and trade secrets, Nanotronics Imaging also uses Arduino and other open source tools happily and more often every day.

Anderson starts out his new book with a wonderful story about his grandfather who was a towering influence in his life. His grandfather had invented a sprinkler system that was patented. Though he received royalties on that patent, they never made him a rich man. He was not an entrepreneur who created a company, but just a smart guy with an idea. This was how a tinkerer became an inventor most of the time. Anderson, in honor of his Grandfather, set out to create a sprinkler system in a Maker Movement way. He open sourced the idea, and created a terrific product that might turn out to be a thriving company. This is inspiring to many of us who dream about a lot of ideas, know we can’t do everything alone, and don’t want to hand it over to a bigger company. It is also something that Jefferson and Franklin would have very much liked.

Despite being the original American Makers, Jefferson and Franklin were not Thomas Edison. This is obvious, but they did create a world for Edison to be the most vigorous defender, and largest owner of patents in American history. So while Jefferson and Franklin were inventing in as open source of a manner as was conceivable in 18^th and early 19^th Century America, they were not creating large, sustainable businesses from those inventions. They were diplomats, journalists, scientists and politicians, but they did not spark a wave of industrialization through inventions. Can it be thought of that DIY is for hobbiests and small business but unrealistic for creating large businesses? Maybe. It would be hard to find a DIY tech business in the Fortune 500. Without the trade secret of Google’s search, ad and mapping algorithms, Google would not be a giant tech employer, and enabler of technologies and ideas for us all. If Apple hadn't patented those highly touchy screens, they would be less successful. If GE hadn't patented their medical imaging devices, they wouldn’t have spent the huge amounts of money to develop them. So our wealthy founding fathers who were incredible, being Utopian by night working on inventions that they would freely share, and pragmatic during the day when they approved the commerce clause.

So we are in the luckier place than our heroes and technological founding fathers, even though there remains many similarities. Our tool kits are better, not just because Arduinos and 3-D printers are in them, but because with those items are a world of collaborators available to share and participate in making our ideas better than they were when they were just our ideas. Ultimately this may very well work. My guess, and my own leaning are a mix of libertarian euphoria, communal comfort and boring old pragmatism. That is what our tools are, the libertarian Open Maker, the communal sharing limited monopoly of patents, and the boring old practical way to protect ideas through secrecy. I think that in 2012 this is where we are. In 2050 I would guess that things will look a little different. There will be less boring secrets. As we all know keeping secrets with anything now is very hard. The mix of patenting and open sourcing may move in the direction of the open source, but only if other regulations than just patent law change. There is less friction than ever to open a small business in some areas. Opening a website for just about anything or creating an app is practically something anyone can try. There are however much larger barriers for entry into the world word of making stuff, even if actually putting them together gets cheap. Think of those Edison inventions for instance. Creating the incandescent light was not about just creating the bulb itself. It involved huge political hurdles, and infrastructural issues to become practical. When those changes occurred they were the start of what would become General Electric, a company creating enormous wealth, and employing 500,000 and more people at any given time. Moving ahead 100 years just within that one company GE invented an MRI imaging machine that is used in hospitals around the world. It also created wealth and jobs, but it required FDA approval, and years of Hospital buy-in. These two inventions, it could be argued, would never have had a commercial viability as open source projects, and therefore would never have been funded. They would never have created so many jobs, and have enabled technological revolutions that far exceed our ideas of technological disruptions.

Juliette gave me the Abraham Lincoln card about his invention that was handed to us at the Maker Faire. It sits on my desk as a reminder to balance my responsibilities. I think that no matter how many great new inventions we saw at the Maker Faire it was this card that has the largest impact on me.

The Birth of Bohemian Technologists

2012-09-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

In 1862 the artist Paul Cezanne sat on the stairs of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in confusion and despair as he read the results of his entrance exam. This man, who many artists and art historians consider the founder of modern art, had just failed his entrance exam to the school, which at the time was considered the only secure way in France of achieving a career as a painter. He certainly didn’t fail because he wasn’t good enough, but because he was too different. Without that diploma a painter became an independent, living a bohemian life of struggle. With a diploma from The Beaux-Art he could gain a patron upon graduation, and live a comfortable life as a painter. There were several things in Cezanne’s favor though, which could have cheered him up that day. Firstly he had been practicing art in a small atelier in Monmartre with three other artists who were also not educated at the Beaux Arts, but who shared a desire to learn, while at the same time break with convention in order to represent the world around them in a unique way. These artists were Monet, Renoir and the mentor figure to them all Camille Pissarro, who at the age of 34 was older and in some ways wiser than the rest. Pissarro had traveled, experienced poverty, but had also experienced that wonderful sense of freedom that comes with having a work of art recognized and appreciated as being of an original vision. Together, and with other similar groups in music and theatre, the art world in Paris was transformed from one which required a formal diploma, to one in which training involved periods of apprenticeship, self-education, friendship of peers and a society that was beginning, like the artist, to see things differently.

Last year I was asked to be a mentor for the Thiel 20 under 20 program, which the entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel started with a group of highly interesting and intelligent people to challenge the common wisdom of today. This wisdom is not initially about being an artist, but about something we hold as much more obvious, which is the need for engineers and scientists to receive degrees. I admire Peter, and was honored to be asked to be a mentor, but more than anything, I was surprised. I am an entrepreneur, and have been since I was a teenager having started a DJ company, then producing plays and movies, musical events and finally tech companies. That was a long time ago though for many of those efforts, and most people, including myself had forgotten that. By the time I was approached by the Thiel Foundation I had a Ph.D. myself for many years, and was not only a CEO of start-up, but also a Research Professor at Columbia University, one of the oldest Ivy League establishment universities in the country. I had become in some ways the scientific equivalent of the Beaux-Art teacher rather than the bohemian. That is until I thought about it more. In reality my peers were not just professors, but were hackers, makers and designers with only the smallest amount of formal education. I loved being comfortable in both environments, but was at my best sketching out an idea over coffee, and that wasn’t always at the university. It was often at Starbucks, or on trains and planes. It was sometime in lobbies waiting to pitch a VC who no doubt wouldn’t see my sketch in the same way I would. I worked a lot with my Dad, and still do. He is college educated with a degree in mathmatics, but as he would admit, trained not at school but on the job of building technology companies.

It was when I accepted to be a mentor that I also accepted that employment as an engineer, scientist and entrepreneur is much like the employment of the impressionists. It was that new realization that not only made me think of the Thiel Foundation and universities differently, but about the possibility of a creative revolution in science and engineering that may now be just starting to occur.

As any of you who have read my writing before know, I am a serious guy about science, and not so impressed with the latest app or social network, no matter how cool it is. That is because it is just cool. Instead I am more interested in enabling major technological changes, which are indeed cool, but also lead to life extension and better health care, better and more reliable power, space travel, efficient urbanization, complimentary Artificial Intelligence and contemporary scalable manufacturing which doesn’t exploit workers but rather challenges and engages them. I have been impressed with the early DIY movements in biology and 3-D printing which I am many others have already written about.The reason though that I talk about 20 under 20, is that I think that the world needs a real, physical atelier of young innovators, who are too impatient to go through the system, but instead want to reach out and try things. This program does this. This is also what I want to accomplish at Nanotronics, the imaging company that I started (with my Dad by the way). I want to mix Ph.D.s, and seasoned engineers without advanced degrees with creative 19 year olds, knowing that it is likely that the 19 year old will teach the elder doctor as much as the reverse. I also want, as Peter does, to put people together as a group to face this new challenge of not having a guaranteed patron, the way that Pissarro, and others put artists together in 19^th Century France.

The artists I mentioned here were responsible for a lot that we consider important and modern in art. They reduced the reliance on line and traditional perspective. They blurred backgrounds. They used contemporary knowledge of optics to force the viewer to blend colors, creating a complete experience that was different than before. They did this because the Beaux Art didn’t welcome that style, and because they wanted to make a living immediately. Many also didn’t have the resources to wait. Our university system can be much the same. It is expensive and takes a long time to for a student to graduate. This is not to say that I don’t love traditional research and even teaching at a university. I do, and grow from it as I hope my students do as well. It is also terrific and where basic research is done. I also have this feeling however that the impressionists of our time, and the bohemians have the intellectual abilty to innovate in big and important ways don’t have to be from the University. I think that like the advancement of color theory in the 19h century, knowledge of scientific advancements is available to anyone. There are two things that those artists had though that is still rare, that anyone not going through the system must also have. That is a great talent, and a great deal of courage.

Perhaps when we look back at this period in technological innovation Peter Thiel will not be remembered as a founder of Pay Pal or the first investor in Facebook. Instead he will be remembered the way Pissarro is remembered in art.; as an enabler of change.

Ambien Consciousness

2012-09-17T14:23:00.002-07:00

This is a blog which was published last year for the Singularity Summit. Since the Summit is over, I decided to post it here for anyone interested who did not read it before.

This is a guest post from Matthew Putman. If you would like to submit a guest post proposal for possible inclusion, please emailadmin@singinst.org.

~~~

The first of the big Ambien stories occurred in 2006 when Congressman Kennedy crashed his car while driving throughout Washington DC in the middle of the night. At first glance, the excuse upon his arrest, that he was driving recklessly due to the fact that he was not awake while driving, seemed absurd. As experts started appearing as well as other people who had strange experiences on Ambien, they realized that this was a possibility. It was possible to be completely asleep at the wheel. It was also around this time that I heard about a young man who had been in a vegetative state for years, who was woken up by Ambien. As long as he took his Ambien, he would be awake. What was the amazing power of this common sleeping pill?When I heard these stories it made me do two things; take Ambien to see what it was like, and to think more deeply about consciousness. What the reports were dealing with was not as simple as being awake or asleep, instead it spoke to a much larger issue, which is the biggest question asked in Philosophy; what triggers consciousness. While consciousness means different things to different philosophers, the layman like myself, thinks of it as the small part of our brains that are making us think we are in control. It is the bit that is associated with choice. That part our brain is not the most active, even if we don't know where it is. We can doze off, and our metabolism keeps working. The only thing we don't do is choose. The Ambien research puts that in the forefront of my consciousness. I realized that if I could do things as complicated as drive a car without this traditional type of conscious wakefulness, then perhaps consciousness wasn’t as complex of an evolutionary trait as we thought. Or as an evolutionary trait, it may be easier to pinpoint the reasons than we previously thought.

This has to do with one aspect of Singularity, which is finding the consciousness trigger for the possibility of a neural upload. Personally, as a technologist, I have always found this option more appealing than other life extension ideas, such as stopping cell aging. The reason is purely statistical. That is, the body will someday be destroyed no matter what. Hurricanes even come to New York these days, and disasters of all kinds will persist despite the reversal of cell aging. The difference is that the death of a 200 year old will be perceived as the death of child is perceived now. It will be a larger tragedy as the potential for a still longer life is larger. Still in cosmic terms the extended lifespan will still be insignificant. Upload is much different. In upload the person is embedded in silicon or another crystal. These crystals were formed billions of years ago. If our minds remained embedded in crystals for the next billion years that is significant. The big question though always becomes whether it is us who are embedded, or just a biography of us.

This is where the Ambien, consciousness thoughts come into play. If by us we mean the conscious us, then I would say the recreation of consciousness should be the easiest part of the extremely complicated upload problem. The ease by which Ambien can toggle consciousness and unconsciousness, and sometimes even blur the two can provide clues to engineers about what part of the human machine is responsible for why we consider ourselves to be human. The neuro receptors that Ambien acts upon have counterparts to other properties of existence not related to consiousness. This is where the engineer needs to take an existentially humbling move. That move is to follow the lead of neuroscience, and naturalism where research shows that it is highly probable that choice is an illusion. If there is no choice, and counter causal free-will does not exist, then the consciousness problem for uploaded human systems can be solved. It is simply a matter of programming commands, which are similar to what evolution has programmed into our genomes that say you are now choosing. That means having the ability to move, but have a regression that is active enough to always be able to place that movement in only one direction, at one time. In other, words program the illusion of freewill, and you will have programmed consciousness into an otherwise perfectly well uploaded unconscious human brain.

None of this is yet possible of course, but we can experiment a bit with AI on consciousness, by comparing an Ambien type action without awareness to a completely alert awareness, and place it in terms of choice. The human problem is the enormity of the data. The variables to create a regression analysis to know the next move are just too many to handle for the moment. It would also take the fun out of it all to be able to look at any future point on the regression to see what “choices” you have made. What is more possible is starting with blank slate situations, and evolving them to the point of consciousness. Consider an AI program to drive a car, like Rep. Kennedy. What would be the the algorithmic approach to distinguishing the difference between the Ambien induced driving and the awake driving? It would only be that the awake driver understands at least a series of potential outcomes, where the Ambien driver does not. Both may result in the same thing. The real, or artificial Rep. Kennedy may drive from home to Capital Hill, but only the awake one will know that he is doing it.

Does this shed any light on the possibilities of uploading the human brain or understanding one of the largest questions in philosophy? Most likely not much, but it does get me thinking of the toggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, and how little the difference between the two is. This is a problem as big and as interesting as any for engineers interested in Singularity solutions to pursue.

Putman is an Applied physicist who is both a researcher and lecturer at Columbia University and the CEO of Nanotronics Imaging,. He is also a musician, poet and blogger. For more on Matthew go to www.matthewcputman.com.

The New Local

2012-08-24T02:54:00.000-07:00

(disclaimer. This blog was typed from Germany on a German keyboard. I am sorry for any errors)

I remember the first time that I was asked where I was from and got confused. It was 2004 at a conference in Koln Germany. You wouldn't think that this would be a tough question to answer, but I found that my difficulty to answer said something incredibly promising about the world we lived in. Here was the confusion. I was married, and my wife lived full time in New York. I worked for my family business called Tech Pro which was located in Summit County Ohio, so I spent part of the week there (where I rented a house) and part of the week in New York (where I rented an apartment). We employed up to 50 people in Ohio. I also was a co-owner of a new company that worked with Tech Pro in a German town called Bruggen. I spent one week out of every five there, and had taken a lot of time, and some pride in starting this with my partner Peter Day. My family business also had sales offices in 13 other countries that I visited often. For the first time in my life I truly felt like the cliched, but relevant “citizen of the world”. I loved this, as it showed that internationalism was no longer an artistic construct, or economist ideal as it was in the early 20th century, but was rather a reality of life.

Now times have again changed and we live in the most hyper globalized world in history, but with a strange reactionary tendency which seems to be at odds with the “citizen of the world” ideals which I so much cared about. We live in a Facebook and Google world, where we communicate globally. Strangely, however, there is a paradox, that we seem to be communicating about the importance of being local rather than global. This is seen in a number of places.

The first is in the buy local movement. While I see nothing wrong with buying local, and actually love the idea of supporting local businesses, the more formal movement does have the unfortunate quality of blinding many people to the value of international commerce. It is global trade, not local, which brings prices down, which makes the world more prosperous as a whole, and encourages technology. There are things that are just better when we collaborate globally, such as certain types of manufacturing, sharing of customs and work principles (think of the Toyota Lean manufacturing model which was Japanese), sharing of natural resources, macro and micro economic experimentation and much more. Even for those who support “buy local” for environmental reasons this can often be misleading as local for most of the United States is considered to be anything within 150 miles. To truck small amounts of goods this distance can often have a worse environmental impact than flying large quantities from other countries. As a solution to this, I do propose urban farming which is as hyperlocal as you can get. So you can see that I don't think everything should be removed from a tight community. In fact one of the greatest things about life now is the rapid rate of increase in urbanization which is better for everyone than rural or suburban living.

The other major place where being global has become controversial is in the recent US Presidential campaign. Talk of Bain Capital and the outsourcing of jobs has basically been a standard lie for both parties. Neither want to discuss the reality, taking instead the less substantive approach of avoiding the real issue. The reality is that we need to discuss the importance of a company's survival and when outsourcing is a good idea. We need to see when it has worked, and just as importantly when it has failed. What Romney should say, and actually Obama should agree with, is that there is not a one solution answer to where to place jobs. They should not always be local. That is a reality for a company's survival and ultimately in providing good jobs both in the United States and abroad. Both Romney and Obama know this, but it is politically incorrect to say it. What could be a politically correct and accurate follow up is that often experiments with outsourcing were not the best solution, and that companies are bringing jobs back to the United States when the conditions work out well.

This brings me back to my own identity. Where am I local to now? I live in Brooklyn, New York, and have a new business in Summit County Ohio that employees people who on average make over 50% more than the state average. That company also sells more internationally than in the United States. So to me I am a proud citizen of New York where I live and contribute by being a Dad and Professor, and to Ohio where I contribute by choosing to have a company and hire wonderful people there. I am still in my mind a “citizen of the world” though, even if that title is not en vogue. Something last night surprised me though. I have been giving TEDx talks in various places around the world. But I never considered, nor do i think TED would want, them to be considered local events in the way that only local topics, and a very small definition of local population would speak. Still there is a TEDx Akron coming up, which is in the same county where I grew up, and owned 2 businesses, including the current rapidly growing technology one. I was told by a friend when I asked about speaking at it, that she believed it was for locals. I said, rudely and defensively, that I am a local. (I did this from Germany and by e-mail by the way) I bring the coolest and best paid new jobs to the area. I use local banks, local patent lawyers, local accountants and our growing staff and I frequent local restaurants, stores and bars. We use local hotels constantly as well, because we are global. If I have to pick a place I am local to, Akron must be a contender, and certainly a place that should ask me to speak at a TEDx Akron. To be completely fair to my wonderful friend she is really great. She even worked with and advises our company (another example of us buying local) and she has helped change the landscape of the community. For me to talk about myself was as it sounds; selfish. She is nominated, rightly so, to speak at TEDx Akron. My worry however is not that I won't speak, which is absolutely fine. What worries me is that others like me, who have homes in New York or other places will not embrace my hometown (Akron) for starting businesses if they are perceived as outsiders, even by the very global TED community. I also worry that Akronites will see themselves as Akronites as a main definer of identity, which will prevent them from embracing globalization. I want everyone to eventually be citizens of the world. The world is too wonderful not to want that. This is not specific to Akron, but general to the ideas I mentioned before. We act more globally every day, but often seem to wish we were not. This is a shame, and should be acknowledged by communities and politicians, so that we can fully achieve the dreams that I had thought I had achieved for myself in 2004.

On the Shoulders of Geeks

2012-08-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

I was waiting in the school yard for my daughter last year when I asked a friend and fellow father what he was working on. He told me in confidence that he was ghost writing a book. I asked who he was writing for, knowing that a ghost writer never tells until years later when he bitterly takes rightful credit at every dinner party. Still I was able to put some clues together. To my horror he was writing a book for an intelligent acquaintance of mine. Why this was a surprise showed a certain naiveté on my part. Since then I have learned that nonfiction books appearing on the New York Times best seller list are 70% or so written by ghost writers. It is not surprising that Sarah Palin had a ghost writer, but my brilliant acquaintance? That was a shock. It wasn’t until I really thought deeply about this situation that I gave up condemning the academic, and instead looking in the mirror and wondering how much metaphorical ghost writing I have had done.

I must say, none of these words in my blogs, or books are written by anyone else. (I know it may be obvious. Who would have a ghost writer write a free blog that is this scattered in content and style or write academic or poetry books, neither of which gross the author much more than $10.) I remember well when Christopher Hitchens dragged himself out of bed, feeling week and sick from cancer and chemo to write 1000+ publishable words a day. To me that was an example of a true professional. Until I started thinking a little more compassionately Hitch made the ghost writing of books of professors or businessmen seem inexcusable. My sympathy for the credit hoarding intellectual came from the realization that as a technologist and CEO of a small company I often use the tech equivalent of ghost writers. That is, I don’t write much code myself anymore, or engineer many products. Instead I raise money and seek customers by taking a lot of the credit for the ideas, which were, like the academics who hired the ghost writer, at least to a valid extent mine in the first place. I don’t really love this. I like coding and making things. I write about how important it is to do so, but it is also important to delegate to others who do these things better than me, and have the time to devote to them. I call this world a geekaucracy. That is, like any bureaucracy, it is a structure that has a level of people who do more delegating and structuring than operating. In this case the operating is the profession of being a geek. A geek to me is not just a programmer, ut can involve a community of people within a group or company that make technology happen by actually doing the technology themselves.

I am a geek who has become a Geekaucrat. Is this excusable? Maybe it is, as it is necessary in order for the company to flourish. Is it the same as the intellectual with a ghost writer? Well, maybe, but I am not willing to go that far. While my name is associated with the company I don’t take away from others by leaving their names off, or their contributions unrecognized. On the other hand it is a cautionary tale for me, and also one that deserves some self-reflection. Can I or anyone remain a geek while running a geekaucracy?

An Apple a Day Should Keep the Student Away

2012-08-09T23:37:00.001-07:00

Several years ago we were looking for a school for our daughter in New York. For any of you that don’t live in New York I don’t mean to belittle your choices, but to be honest I can’t imagine any place in the country quite as confusing where schooling is concerned as New York. There are a range of religious schools, but for many reasons these are out of the question for me. More reasonable, yet mind-blowingly expensive, are the myriad of private schools, and even free public schools, which are not in any way created equally. For instance my 7-year-old goes to a public school where half of the day is taught in French. There were many memorable visits, but the school I was most impressed with was an Upper West Side private school that was very nice. It had high student to teacher ratios (which I no longer care about by the way), nice carpeting, smart boards, musical instruments for everyone, and something that I was impressed with at the time; a laptop for every child. What better way to be in touch with 21rst century education than with having a laptop in the hands of every child? Then my wife made a wonderful point that I couldn’t believe a lifetime PC user like me didn’t notice. She said “they are all Macbooks. The school is training kids to be users and consumers, not creators”. She was completely right. There is nothing wrong with an Apple product, but they are designed to put the user interface of an application ahead of creativity itself. This is even truer of IPADS which are all about buying then using, rather than content creation. If this concerns you it is another reason to read the book Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff which I recommend several times in these blogs.

I don’t know the answer for what should be provided, but the Negroponte one laptop per child is a much better solution, as using a scripting language is a key feature. For students with these laptops, logic is more important than application. What did occur to me is that computers have become somewhat mysterious so that many of the basic functions of them are not understood by many of us. I touched on this in my blog here, but there is a larger societal issue beyond just technological literacy at play. It is about the ability to comprehend then use our technology to understand the global network that we are all a part of. An easy example of this to imagine is a high schooler who has a Gmail account. How much thought does that teenager give to what is stored on his device versus what is stored in the cloud? And even if he does realize that the Cloud is where most of the important information of his life exists, is there any understanding of how bits are distributed and reconfigured at various server farms? If there is, which I highly doubt, then is there an understanding of the economics behind those corporations and the financial goal of having control over all of that information? This is all without even discussing coding and creation of content, but let’s make the crazy assumption that the teenager does know the financial model of Google, the distribution channels of e-mails, and the location of the servers where that information is stored. If that well informed kid wants to change the system in any way, even just for himself he then needs to know a little bit about programming. Let’s say the kid doesn’t mind that system, and accepts it for most things. Then let’s say he wants to create videos that are cloud-based and created through an open source community. What if he doesn’t have the money to buy the Apple product called Final Cut Pro, or just doesn’t want to, and I-Movie that comes with the laptop just doesn’t do enough. He could use open source free software. If he really has ideas, in addition to using he can both create his videos and then actually learn enough programming to contribute to the open source project that he has been lucky enough to utilize. He has now taken the first step to becoming a programmer. Even if he decides that the open source movement is not the most efficient way to create software or value, he can do it on his own, and create products himself. He will be one of his generation to make things better, rather than just accept what is already there.

Would any of this story be true in the fancy private school with the free Macbooks? It all could be, but I don’t think it would be. The bundled Mac, with I-Movie, I-tunes and Garage Band make it all too tempting for all of us to benefit from the great design of the present. There is nothing wrong with this, except that education is meant to inspire critical thinkers who will design the future. Even if this fictional kid did go outside of the Apple universe and do those things with his Macbook, he wouldn’t be able to go much further, with no room for microcontrollers, expansion etc. Apple has always had a reputation for locking in the user. Let’s make sure we don’t lock in our kids.

To Copy and Improv

2012-08-07T14:19:00.001-07:00

This morning my daughter asked me to play with her, which of course I love. What she wanted to do though seemed completely boring and uncreative to me, but due to my traveling and in general being too busy, I was willing to do whatever she wanted. She wanted to use translucent tracing paper to trace and then color images from books at my in-laws house. I found a book of Van Gogh paintings and sketched one and then colored it with colored pencils while still having the sketching paper on the image. The process of doing this surprised me completely. Instead of being rote art forgery, it gave me a certain insight into Van Gogh’s choices which I didn’t have before. I had never realized how similar the colors on the single painting were for example. Greens, nearly identical, were used for sky, farmhouses and grass. At the same time he interweaved yellows, reds and browns in such a subtle way that it was hard to reproduce. It was the brushstrokes and the shading, and of course that famous bold outline of the features that distinguished things even further. I could have figured this out by studying the painting, but I wouldn’t have understood it in the same visceral way.

Around 2008 I stopped trying to play classical music or even standards from the score as I had done since the age of 5 and throughout music conservatory and beyond. I did this because it seemed completely uncreative to me. Also both Ornette Coleman and Daniel Carter encouraged me to throw away the music, in their own way. Daniel did say something though which now comes back to me, which was that all of my conservatory training was the fuel for my ideas. We also had an editing session that lasted all night on a recording we did for 577 Records called “The Gowanus Recordings”. Daniel was so precise about what he wanted that he seemed less the improviser and more the perfectionist. He also said something to the effect that he wished someone would transcribe the music, because there was more going on in it than any of us realized. This was a powerful statement from one of the greats of free jazz, but one that made me not completely discount those people who had Art Tatum transcriptions that they tried to play in exact detail. Perhaps this study told them something useful about what was behind the sound, just as the Van Gogh sketches did for me.

I am an impatient guy, but I am wondering how much of this applies beyond the arts. There is a book called Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future which is the equivalent of the tracing project or the Art Tatum transcriptions. It lets you in on some important algorithms including Google’s search algorithm and some other artificial Intelligence, which is something that is very useful to me. I found that reading it did everything but sap my creativity. It fueled it, the way Daniel said my conservatory training did for my playing.

All of this may be obvious, as our education is about learning what was done before, but it needs to be balanced very carefully. Foolish playing, painting or inventing in the dark can produce masterpieces. Perhaps like so much in life it is the mélange of technique and chance.

The Beastie Boys for Technologists

2012-08-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Dan Le Roy wrote a book recently chronicling the making of the Beastie Boys’ Album “Paul’s Boutique” in 1989, which I just read. The Beastie Boys’ are not my favorite of musical groups, or even my favorite rap band, but I have a certain fascination and respect for them as a middle class New York group who helped define something very critical to my generation. Strangely, though I was deeply embedded in hip hop at the time as a DJ myself (of no success in Akron Ohio), I soon after turned to the older generation for identification, even the father of Beastie Boys’ member Adam Horovitz, the playwright Israel Horovitz who I worked with and became friends with. As my life moved from free-lance DJ to producer, to entrepreneur to physicist, I somehow lost track of what made my generation’s contributions possible, and how they ultimately affected me.

The story of “Paul’s Boutique” is a biography about how a new technological emergence and art form combined with the right talent to create an album would help define a unique generational voice. What isn’t spelled out as clearly is how that very same movement, that of mixes, overlays and samplings is actually the musical equivalent of technological convergence that I and others in my generation have embraced. Perhaps this is a stretch, but I don’t think so.

The key to making rap more than rhymes and simple rhythms lies in a complex looping and sampling of a wide array of existing musical tracks, precisely controlled by the engineer or DJ to provide the textures for rhythm and rhyme. This isn’t uniquely an invention of rap, as sampling goes back to Bach and before. What makes this different is the ability for technology to allow for control of more elements than were ever possible before. The synth and sync were like Bach’s organs for the Beastie Boys and their partners in the making of “Paul’s Boutique”. Within just two years the top 10 were full of music in this vein. On a bit of a side note, sampling still exists in major commercial releases but it has largely been replaced by something more generic which are songs that all sound the bloody same. Like so many other things DJing and sampling have now been elevated to a high art, meant for a smaller but respectful audience. DJSpooky (Paul Miller) for example has sampled everything from musical tracks to the cracking of the icecaps in Antarctica. He has even written books published by MIT Press. So my generation, which Paul is a part of, is no longer seen as drinking partiers, but as innovators and artists. (who do coincidentally like to drink and party).

It is not my goal to promote my own company or inventions, but since I understand them a little bit better than other people’s inventions I have to use them here. I am sorry for any appearance of self-promotion as I hate when people do this. My blogs are not advertisements. Still I have this little company that is growing, and enjoining doing something that my generation was cut out to do. We make microscopes that have qualities that other microscopes don’t, mainly due to the many software features that we have invented. When I say invented, this is only part of it. I mostly say we invent and we converge. That is we use the most interesting hardware available, and even existing coding languages to make something completely unique. This is called convergence in technology, but it could be called mixing just as easily. What the Beastie Boys were doing in a studio with new machines and old albums, along with unique voices we are doing in small labs and on computers. Perhaps this type of mixing is why my generation can innovate in a world of steep competition from younger innovators, who in so many ways have the technological advantage of growing up with tools already in place.

So next time I listen to the songs of my adolescence I won’t listen only with nostalgia, but with an eye towards the future. I will look for inspiration, not to create a rap record, but to create something, whether it be a new type of Artificial Intelligence, a space ship or just a better microscope.

To Love in Wilson's World

2012-08-03T01:18:00.001-07:00

Many years ago a mentor and friend told me something long before I had children. She was already a grandmother. She told me that unconditional love is largely an illusion. She stressed that there were two major exceptions which were unidirectional. That is we love our children and our grandchildren unconditionally, and no one else. She said this in a non-selfish, but rather self-aware moment just after her mother had passed away. She had a realization that no one would ever love her unconditionally again. At the time I had no idea if she were correct. I loved my parents and grandparents after all. She assured me that love for a parent is not unconditional as love for a child is. Now many years later I do understand her point, as the depth of sacrifice I would make for my children is so unquestionable that it is unique, despite all of the many loves in my life.

I have had the pleasure of having several incredible conversations with the great octogenarian biologist E.O. Wilson. Perhaps the last of a certain kind of field naturalist, Wilson has been respected in his role as Harvard Professor, scientist and popularizer. And as much as any of this, he is such a nice guy. This is why those of us who are not biologists were surprised this last year by the complete attack of Wilson over a paper he co-published with two Harvard mathematicians challenging a fixture in modern biology that he himself had helped to form. That is something known as Kin Selection. If you are interested in understanding the theory in any profound way look into it from a biologist not applied physicists like myself, but I think I get the very basics of the concept. The idea is that altruism is apparent in many, or perhaps most creatures. What Wilson's students and he had conjectured more than 40 years ago, and has become the accepted view popularized by the Richard Dawkins book “The Selfish Gene” in 1979 is that self-sacrifice is the way in which natural selection works to spread the genes of the family. Therefore altruism is not really selfless, or doesn’t really exist in the way we think of it. Instead an animal may alert a kin to danger by sacrificing himself. Darwin himself never came to this conclusion, instead claiming that it was a problem that was too complicated to fit into the theory. Wilson, Dawkins and others felt that understanding of genetics allowed them to realize what had eluded Darwin.

So until last year all of this was accepted. That is until Wilson and the Mathematicians challenged this with a new theory of group selection. It was published in Nature, and immediately attacked by Dawkins and most of the biology community. The idea is that altruism does actually exist outside of kin relations. Sacrifice for a group, in order to strengthen the group rather than an individual family line was occurring. The mathematicians used models to identify this, something that biologists are not as used to as we are in physics. The original idea of group selection was articulated by the Maynard Smith who described what he called the "Haystack Model" which indeed considers statistical ramifications of altruism. This can be visualized by picturing a group of animals that grow up together in a haystack. They mix randomly in the haystack as well as emerge from the original haystack to form groups in new haystacks. From this, traits that benefit the group may result in altruistic acts at the sacrifice of the individual. In essence Wilson is saying that the haystack model more resembles the norm than traditional Kin Selection.

In June Wilson addressed a group at the World Science Festival to discuss the requirement to change views with evidence. His bravery is profound, as shaking up the world of evolutionary biology at 81 is not a completely pleasant affair. I spoke to him about this and he had the most rational response I have ever heard. I am paraphrasing but he basically told me that he would be failing as a scientist if he didn’t report this, because this is what he and his colleagues were observing in nature. That is what made him love nature and science. It is also what makes me love him. What he said officially is this “I think that’d be a pretty poor scientist, who couldn’t reverse his view from new evidence.”

I couldn’t figure out why there was such anger about his paper. There are debates and disagreements all of the time. This is good and important for progress in science. But this wasn’t like Wilson had claimed that evolution was not occurring. It was basically a revision to something that was observed but still not confirmed in a way that I would consider definitive. I have no idea who is right about this issue, but I was shocked by the response. Then I remembered the conversation with my friend about unconditional love, and also another experience I had with E.O Wilson. I was taking my 6 year old daughter to California for a family reunion, and by great luck we were sitting across the row from Wilson and his friend. (see picture above;)) Wilson is most famous for his work with ants, and I told my daughter Juliette this, and the four of us talked ants. It was incredible that my little girl was discussing ants with the world’s foremost ant expert. What I loved most though was not Wilson as terrific as he was. I loved Juliette. I was so happy for her. I was in love with her, as she was gaining a memorable experience. Looking back I realized that I loved Juliette more than anyone in the world. I realized that I loved her and her alone unconditionally. I would sacrifice my life for her. Was this Kin Selection? Was I genetically programmed to carrying on my genes by protecting her, and caring more for her than anyone else? I have a son now too and I feel the same for him. Perhaps this is why Dawkins and the rest take Wilson's challenge to Kin Selection as such a profound and threatening concept to them. Are they afraid that their own love of family, and the love that their parents gave them is being reduced? This may not be it at all, but I could understand how that could happen.

With all of this said, WiIson, myself, Dawkins and all of the others are scientists. Emotion is the magician of science, always making things feel certain even when they are unresolved. Wilson has more emotion than most, and a personal tie to Kin Selection but instead he collaborated with mathematicians to see if Kin Selection was an illusion. What he claims to have found, altruism in group selection, may or may not be correct, but it is the most admirable and hardest thing for person in science to do. By doing this Wilson has elevated science, and given us all reason to contemplate if indeed we can love and be loved by more than just our ancestors.

Making The New Writer

2012-07-31T04:58:00.000-07:00

Oscar Wilde said “ No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” Science writers are now artists rather than journalists for the most part, so perhaps this applies. This is also the reason that one of my favorite science writers is so artistically good. The first thing I read this morning was that the writer Jonah Lehrer had resigned from the New Yorker due to false quotes about Bob Dylan and others that he had put in his book “Imagine”. I have several feelings about this, all of which seem strangely personal. The first is that I quote Lehrer many times in my blogs, and now feel that perhaps my own writing has been compromised. Secondly I feel bad for Jonah. I sympathize with him. He is young, and ascended rather quickly as an important writer of science based books, a blog and as a journalist for the New Yorker and Wired. While that is an enviable position, it is also hard to keep up with expectations. This is unfortunately a modern day pressure for popular success in almost any intellectual field. The polymath is touted, and not merely for the polymathic abilities he possesses but for the ability to communicate those ideas clearly to a mass public who in general are not so intellectual themselves. Finally though Jonah is representative of something that seems to be just appearing in the public consciousness, which is that few people know as much as they claim.

Before I even read the news of Jonah’s fall from the Mount Olympus of science popularization (that was my attempt to sound smart by blending pseudo knowledge of ancient Greece, with bland witticism for example) , I was listening to a new Podcast called “You Are Not So Smart”. The podcast is exactly the counter to the Jonah Lehrer problem, which is to point out that while even product descriptions use insane techno babble, most everyone can’t actually do much of anything anymore, or even explain how things are done. Who understands the way a microwave works for instance? Or how an airplane flies? On a side note my friend Paul Roossin pointed out to me that even though I thought I knew why a plane has lift I was wrong. It is the wing design that makes up most of the lift not the fabled Bernoulli principle So even though I am a physics professor I didn’t know the basic physics of aviation. What about making things? How many of us who work in the computer industry could assemble a computer? In the 1980s we all could.

But I refuse to be a cynical old man, and luckily I don’t need to. We are starting to see the reemergence of a time where doing is cooler than babbling. There are large movements such as the maker movement, which is as it sounds. It is exemplified by a series of Maker Faires where inventors and small companies show crafted devices made with new tools such as 3D printers and micro controllers called Arduino which allows for control of everything from motors to LEDS. This movement extends to biology, where companies such as Genspace have a make shift lab doing important research that even pharma and biotech are not doing. Actually if you look at an old building in Brooklyn called 33 Flatbush, the entire place is made up of doers such as roboticists, urban farmers, filmmakers and architects. My company Nanotronics is full of makers, and most encouragingly some young ones including Dylan Fashbaugh who started early in life as a rocket builder and moved through differential equations at rocket speed , and now makes things for us including controllers. And he is still in college with us as an co-op.

I am sentimental towards the maker as my dad is a classic maker, having built a testing lab with his uncle, cousin and parents from used parts. I am also sentimental towards the intellectual, as I am not a good maker. I read and write, and rarely get my hands dirty. I am not proud of this, but it is the sad truth. Lucky for me I think that we are in a time where even a clumsy guy like me can build things. I can write code. I can program and I can use a 3D printer. If I do these things with my background .maybe I and so many others like me can actually write articles and books without the need to make up stories, because instead of stories we have made designs and products.

Darwian Empathy

2012-07-26T03:23:00.000-07:00

I left a funeral for my dear friend Aaron Nero, and then boarded a plane for France, where my family is vacationing. I had worked and traveled hard for weeks, and in the midst of this exhaustion faced the agonizing reality of Aaron’s death. It came to me over and over throughout the day and in the middle of the night. Aaron’s father asked me to write a eulogy which I was honored to do, but I faced a blank page for a week every time I tried to write. It was too hard, and too fresh to write about my friend of 36 years, who worked with me, lived with me, and was so giving to me. This, and the circumstances of his death, which were in the end a life of an anxious and tortured soul turned to drinking. He is not the first person to face this kind of death, but it is harder to imagine a kinder person who has. During his Eulogy I spoke of a race of people in Star Trek called Empaths. Empaths were capable of absorbing the pain of others, without the ability to deflect it from themselves. This was Aaron. A kind Empath, who absorbed the pain of others, while making us laugh. I didn’t stick around long, as I had to leave, and was too sad to talk more anyway. With the eulogy went a part of myself that will forever be left with Aaron.

(for full disclosure sake I will admit that the next two hours I went with friends of Aaron’s to see the ridiculous film “Ted”, in order to laugh. It was actually a good choice for the occasion).

Once I reached the airport I put on my headphones and listened to podcasts while I waited for my plane. The first one was “The Freakonomics Podcast” which is not generally my favorite, but since I had so much travel to do I decided to start from the top of my unheard list. The topic was a great counter to what I had just been through -the funeral, not “Ted”). It was entitled “Legacy of Jerk”. The topic of course was the opposite of Aaron, but it did resemble someone else who I knew, a theatre Producer, and very close friend Phil Osterman who died several years ago. Unlike Aaron, Phil was not an Empath, but instead borderline sadistic. He called dancers fat in ways I would rather not mention, he used us as slaves, and humiliated us in public. After his death, the New York Times gave him an Obit that I actually considered a bad review. It was slightly unfair to Phil, as I liked him despite his problems, making the point that Freakonomics was trying to make, that people are too complex for an obit alone. The Podcast was not bout Phil, but abut people like Phil, and how legacy for most people treats them well, but for some, reputations live on. The main example in the Podcast was the baseball legend Ty Cobb. Cobb is generally recognized as a genius of the game, but a racist, murdering child abuser in his off the field life. The program said that this may not be entirely true, but the image has stuck. This brought on a deeper inquiry into the meaning of success. For instance, if you are financially, or even culturally, or philanthropically successful, but were not good to your family, were you successful? There are instances where the questions are obvious. Killing people, whether successful in business or baseball, probably rules out success. The example given which was trickier was that of Steve Jobs who was successful in so many ways, but in the end regretted not spending much time with his family.

What the show didn’t mention, which of course came to my mind is the success of the Empath. In my view Aaron’s deep empathy made him a success even though it made him so deeply unhappy. That is a tough thing to say. I started my eulogy for Aaron with a Darwin quote about friendships being a true measure of success. The quote could have been by anyone, but I thought that it was perfect that it came from the discoverer of survival of the fittest. At first look the Empath who dies young from the burden of others’ pain and his own must certainly be the least fit. Perhaps as an individual that is true. It is nearly impossible to live this way. What is more complicated though is how we survive as humans because of the Empaths among us. It is perhaps empathy that brings about the kinds of compassion that make us more likely to build great things together, and to refrain from violence that would destroy us. Does the successful businessman who lives to be 100 always have that? Likely not, but maybe sometimes.

When I arrived in France I was Ty Cobb not Aaron. My wife pointed out to me, rightly so how rude I was being. At one point I screamed that “I hate fucking low tide!” My seven-year-old turned to me and said “Daddy Don’t blame Maman, blame the moon.” Ah, how stupid Daddy can be. I wasn’t being a jerk on purpose, but I think I saw those pictures of Aaron and thought “What does being so nice get you?”

A mutual friend of Aaron and I came to me after the service and said “the goal is that I want to be more like Aaron.” I didn’t disagree, but did brush it aside. In that moment being like Aaron looked pretty awful. The more I think about it though this friend was right. We should be all be Empaths. The balance will come in how to deflect some of that pain away from ourselves so that we live longer to give more.

Light Truth and Illusion

2012-07-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

The talk I gave yesterday at the MPA Nanotech conference had plenty of normal attributes to criticize and then even some more. Mainly I was speaking about regenerative medicine, which is something I didn’t even know existed last year at this time. I admitted this the second I started talking as way to disarm the attendees from shooting it back at me later. I talked about what I know with some authority. When I spoke about new topics I became like a child discovering the wonders of the sea his first time at the beach. In this case those are new body parts made of silly putty, which I must admit sounds even more childish than I mean it to. When questions came around I got one which was completely different, and to me must have come out of a philosophical wing of the nanotech community that I didn’t know of. The question surrounds some images I had taken at high resolution of the surface of a pig’s stomach called ECM, and of a piece of rubber (this is the silly putty). These are two kinds of scaffolds that can be used to regenerate organs. The man, who I later learned was not a philosopher at all but rather a material scientist at a Polish technical university, asked me “how do you know those images are real?” I was certain that this was a language issue, so I spoke slowly to him in a condescending way that I try to avoid in complicated technical talks with people who come from different linguistic origins. I told him that I used a highly repeatable microscope and special image recognition software that my company actually made, and that indeed I could assure him that the images were in fact real. That wasn’t the question he was asking exactly however. He wanted to know how I could trust imaging for evaluating nanoporosity, which was what I was showing. This was far deeper, and I became defensive, telling him with even more superiority than before that light had been well established for a long time as a reality of physics. “But they are just grey pixel values. You should use other methods such as absorption of nanoparticles to verify your findings” he told me. The fight went on for some time with the rest of the room joining the debate with a surprising number, I thought, agreeing with the Polish scientist. I had truly entered a debate about what type of physics was more real. Was a photon less real than a carbon particle? Were pixels more removed from direct observation than weight measurements after absorbing nanoparticles? I didn’t agree with his argument, but appreciated it all the same.

Right after I sat down from the debate I started thinking about something my wife Marine had shown me. She is a speech and language pathologist. She showed me an example of something called the McGurk effect. (see video below)This is an illusion of sorts. A man repeats a sound and we watch him. We then see him with a different mouth movement than the word uses. We hear a change in sound, even though he has not changed the sound at all. This is because our visual sensation over powers our auditory sensation. This is verified when we close our eyes, and the sounds are clearly perceived as being the same. Marine works with children with autism and told me that with autism the McGurk effect is not always present, which is a fascinating look at the symptoms of the different neural structures of people.

So what does the McGurk effect have to do with my experience at the conference? Maybe nothing. Maybe it is as simple as Polish material scientists view the world differently than American physicists. That however is only part of it. It is true that different disciplines in science see things differently. We are trained differently and it makes us skeptical of other approaches. Looking at it this way both he and I were objectively wrong. We should have realized that it was just a matter of perception. From another perceptive however it could be like the other aspect of the McGurk effect, and that is not the difference between autistic and non-autistic observation, but rather the accuracy of the autistic observation. It is likely that the McGurk effect points to an important survival skill. Perhaps vision is a more urgent sense to rely on. What the McGurk effect shows however is that the non-autistic sense is not as accurate as the autistic perception. So both views of the world have a subjective truth, but only the autistic view is actually the objective truth.

So what about using microscopes with sensors and image processing rather than weighing nanoparticles after absorption? Is one more objectively real than the other? Perhaps the Polish scientist is right in one way. We are programming our computers and designing our sensors with our human minds. These are the same minds that survive well due to the misinformation as shown in the McGurk effect. But science is more of an autistic style endeavor in some respects. We avoid human variability whenever possible in order to see what is really going on. The answer still remains unclear to me however. When working in domains such as the nanoscale, we are forced to create information using algorithms. We make an artificial vision of the invisible. We use computers to model what we expect is happening on a scale we can see with our eyes. When creating these models, more and more we use a form of AI which tries to learn as we do, taking into account variability and disregarding what is not important. In essence we are programing a McGurk effect style response into our machines, and those machines then tell us about a reality which is similar to the subjective one we experience. We don’t often even admit to ourselves that this is what we are doing, but it really is. Maybe this is the point of the Polish scientist, but if it was he is also missing the McGurk style effect in his own measurements which are also designed by humans, and involve several steps of extrapolation where we are likely blinded by our own errors the way that we are when viewing McGurk.

All of this leads to an important point though. Science must aim to observe as independently as possible, or when not, to acknowledge what it is doing. Bio mimicry for example is a technological human activity which embraces and acknowledges perception as the basis for creating AI. The problem is that we remain stuck in a loop of thought on this topic. We have our always compensating brains deciding what to do, even when we allow our machines to learn.

Nanotech by the Sea

2012-07-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

For father’s day my seven year old gave me a great gift, which is the gift to explore within the borders of her creation. That sounds a bit grand for what it was, which was ten pieces of pure white paper, with borders that included two styles of drawings, one of a microscope, and the other of wrapped candy. They were tied in string. She said that I could: 1. Draw abstracts, 2 Write poems, 3. Invent things, by which she mean do patent drawings, like the ones on my office wall. She understood me so well. These three would be hard to choose from, and together they make up elements of me, even to the point by which my own little girl would understand. She left me with an impossible choice, so like in life I will fill those pages with a mixture of her three suggestions.

Today I am in Alvor Portugal for a very academic conference on Nanotechology called the MPA, which like so many European organized conferences happens in one of the most beautiful settings imaginable. I even went to a tire conference in Cannes, France one time, which shows just how committed Europeans are to scenic locations for meetings. This always tests the attendees’ dedication to the topic at hand, as the sea and sangria wait just outside of the conference room walls. Today though the blend of international and interdisciplinary speakers kept me in that windowless room for 8 hours, as talks about everything nanotechnology related were discussed and debated.

Nanotechnology attracts and requires a diversity of expertise not usually present at academic conferences. This is obvious when a physicist (myself for instance) presents a paper, and the chemists and biologists react strongly with other approaches. This can seem confrontational, but for me it is a wonderful relief. So many of my efforts to get people of difference backgrounds talking ends so politely that it becomes clear to me that despite mutual respect no new science will emerge, as the languages spoken are just too different. Here, and in nanotechnology in general, there is a forced tension as none of us will succeed without the other.

This struggle of ideas and focus is not just among departments, countries and companies in nanotechnology, but for us technologists working in this field it can often be like the father’s day present my daughter gave me. It can have defined borders with empty pages that need filling in. What to choose from to create is infinitely large. Today I spoke about regenerative medicine. Tomorrow I will work on semiconductors. The schizophrenic nature of this requires a different sort of discipline that is more associated with movie making than with science. A filmmaker must master cinematography, editing and acting, while a nanotechnologist must master biology, chemistry and physics. Our goal is to become auteurs of the molecular.

So tonight I will write of the sea and sole in verse, draw fullerenes and nano silver particles interacting in strange abstract forms, and claim an idea for a new material patent on those candy and microscope bordered pages. All the while I will recognize that creating a future of technological progress requires long conferences, the sun and some encouragement from my little girl.

Flying with Ray

2012-06-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

I have been listening to a lot of NPR over the last few days since I have been driving so much to visit customers. I should be forced to do this more often (as I am sure I will be), as I get to catch up on all of those things I have become uninterested in due to time, and annoyance, such as politics. I was recently at book party with a friend who is an astrophysicist, and the writer of the book was speaking about the political landscape during this pre-presidential election period. This friend seemed to not be paying much attention. I asked her what she thought about the writer’s ideas, to which she responded “Oh I am sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. I am not so interested in local politics, and by local I mean the earth.” She should coin this quote, but I will leave it to her to accept or deny. I loved this, and actually I have always obsessed over politics, but truthfully without much real interest, just frustration, so I have turned to other things to occupy my obsessions. So, most of NPR was politics, but there was something that happened yesterday that extended beyond the local of my physicist friend, and that is the death of Ray Bradbury, who while of this planet was a sci-fi writer that looked far beyond. There was a great quote that someone mentioned of Bradbury’s which may be the best thing I heard all day. Once Bradbury was asked about how to do something really important, and he said “jump off of a high cliff, then build your wings on the way down.” It gave me a bit of a chill because it struck me not as a poetic piece of advice from of writer, but also something that we have been living with our company Nanotronics Imaging. We took a leap about a year ago, and are flying now, though perhaps not as high as we would like yet. This seems like obvious advice for an entrepreneur, and it is one that is getting popular with Eric Ries's ideas on the Lean Start-up, but traditionally this not how things have been done. Usually a product is built, refined and released. We don’t do things that way. We jump, and build wings. This means that we partner with customer, give them what we have and improve on that daily. It means constant iterations. It means improving until we have the best products on the market, and then still not being happy until we are better.. This is constant beta mode, agile development, but as Bradbury points out it also involves many moments of free-fall, which we all are in from time to time (ok almost daily).

So, this is just a short thank you to the now late Bradbury for not only creating great fiction, but also entering into the realm of business inspiration for me. Though he considered himself a writer of fantasy, his ideas are becoming scientific reality thanks to his own jumping, and flying.

Illumination in Five Years

2012-06-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

This week has been the 5th annual World Science Festival, and one way to look at 5 years of science festivals is to look at what has changed in science in the last five years. This is so much harder than for a technology conference, because in general science moves slowly, but thinking back those 5 years a lot has happened. The LHC, Genetic-based cancer therapy, discovery of thousands of exoplanets and my favorite “something from nothing”, though again we will get into the debate of whether that discovery is really indeed nothing. But I have one story that I was a witness to from the first year, which serves as a nice vindication for a very enthusiastic Columbia University Scientist Dickson Despommier.

The first WSF five years ago started with an event which has not been repeated, which was the World Science Summit. This was held at Columbia, and was a very high level interdisciplinary discourse among top scientists. I was of course just an observer, and was involved in the planning. Those on the panels however included 12 Nobel Laureates. This was a humbling room to be in for anyone. The panels were on a range of topics from climate change to cosmology. The panel that I remembered today when I entered a talk by Professor Despommier, was one regarding the future of agriculture. Despommier is the author of “The Vertical Farm”, published 3 years after that Summit, but that he was already teaching and consulting about. It was a form of hyper-local food, which would be grown in city center buildings using hydroponics and other technologies. His ideas were exciting and wild. Some involved the concept of beautiful buildings constructed by Frank Gehry or IM Pei, others were the use of old warehouses and factories, and still others were the use of vast basements lit by LEDs where produce could be grown. It seemed like one of these great futuristic ideas to me, especially as I have never bought into the Michael Pollan version of local organic farming which I find wasteful and deceptive, even though the food is tasty. Despommier once said on a panel with Pollan that he loved food from Michael’s garden, but that he harvested it only once per year. It is not likely to feed India, or even Scranton, or something to that extent. So this idea seemed great, and even though I already had a Ph.D. in Applied Physics, I saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea. That was until we sat down to lunch where I picked the most Nobel prized packed table in the building. Though I won’t mention many names, I will say that the consensus at the table amongst the group was that Despommier’s ideas, especially concerning LEDs were physically wrong. One name that I will mention was the now Energy Security in the Obama administration Steven Chu. Chu is brilliant, and I knew this not only because of the Nobel. So I deferred on the debate and rather sadly dismissed the idea that the future would be filled with vertical farms.

Well Dr. Chu, and the rest were wrong to my delight. Five years later Despommier reported back with a presentation today about several incredibly successful vertical farms. It is not surprising I guess considering Chu’s current role that they are not located in the United States, but rather in Korea, Sweden, Singapore and Japan. That is just a start though. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel who is of course no longer running the White House, but instead running Chicago, loves Vertical Farming, and has led the effort to convert old slaughterhouses into Urban farms. They are set to open soon. Brooklyn will be next to follow, as well as Milwaukee.

So while science moves slowly, and cynicism can slow things down even more, advances do occur when they are ready. I realized something about myself too in those five years. That is that I should have spoken up. I was more cowardly than undereducated. These days I have a company that does among other things LED inspection. From the first meeting I had with a potential LED customer I realized how wrong Chu et al. were, and how I could have made an argument as a physicist even then.

Stuart Firestein has a new book called “Ignorance”, about embracing and challenging those things on the fringes of our knowledge. LEDs were not an expertise of mine, but materials were. I did understand enough to “ignorantly challenge” these guys. So I look forward to yet another meeting of minds more refined, and recognized than my own, where I can stand up rather than sit back, whether it is for a brighter future, or just one where a tomato is grown downstairs.