[ed. note: I’ve been mulling this post over for a while (I wrote about half of it last week), and it hasn’t quite come together yet (probably because it’s more like two or three posts), but I figure the only way to get it done is to just post it.] This line of thought was […]
Category: thoughts
Douglas Hofstadter at Stanford
Douglas Hofstadter, of Godel Escher Bach fame, gave a lecture at Stanford this evening. I happened to hear about it, and convinced DocBug to go with me (which worked out great when I didn’t allow enough time for traffic because he was able to save me a seat despite a standing-room-only crowd). Hofstadter’s a great […]
Social butterfly
It’s one of those perfect storm social weekends for me. I’m hanging out with an out-of-town friend tomorrow afternoon, and then I’m invited to three parties tomorrow evening, with three completely different social groups. And it got me thinking about my social network. I don’t tend to consider myself a very social person. I’m not […]
Meta-BrainJamming
As mentioned in a post last month (gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been blogging), I co-led a session on “Meta-BrainJamming”, aka “Building a Better BrainJam”. It was interesting to me primarily because there is no “right” way to run one of these things; each of the choices is a design choice. One of […]
Talent in a free agent world
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who is working as a consultant these days. We worked together at Signature, developing research prototypes together. He’s interested in doing similar work as a consultant, but it’s difficult to pull together a good team of research scientists and engineers when there is […]
Incomplete realities
Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!” I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I […]
Three realizations
Last week, after getting back from the work trip to DC, I went to a holiday party hosted by Chris Heuer, organizer of BrainJams. I figured I’d stop by, chat with a few people, and head home. Instead, I ended up in this fascinating conversation with Brian of CivicEvolution (thus meeting the challenge from my […]
BrainJamming
As noted previously, I went to a “BrainJam” on Saturday. It was excellent, everything I had hoped it would be. I met a bunch of interesting people, had some thought-provoking conversations, and was left wanting more, even at the end of a long day (9am-7pm) of talking. In the morning, they started off with essentially […]
Filling in the blanks part 2
I was thinking more about the topic of how our mind fills in the blanks last week during the Messiah concerts, particularly in the “He was despised” aria. I meant to write this up on Sunday or Monday evening, but didn’t get around to it. So, of course, I’m writing it up after a two […]
BrainJam this Saturday
Apparently, the Web2.1 BrainJam was successful enough that the organizers decided to do more of them. The next BrainJam is this Saturday in Menlo Park, and I’m planning to be there. Should be interesting meeting more folks, even if I don’t have any projects of my own to talk about or show off.
