I'm not a blogger. I'm fairly sure I'm not. And just to prove to myself that I'm not, I will start off this blog with a blog I wrote from another time. When life was different, when not everybody was blogging about something. It is 2007. I was invited to Google, along with a number of people from all walks of life, to a thing called "SciFoo". On day one, this is what I wrote. There is no editing. This is what I wrote then, into a MS Word document, which I'm sure nobody ever read. The point is, just a few people were blogging then. I think.
"If I wanted to, I could touch her hair. Martha Stewart is
sitting almost right in front of me. To my left is Jeff Hawkins, founder of
Palm and Handspring, and I’ve been talking to him for the last half hour. As
Tim O’ Reilly, of, well, O’ Reilly, reminded us just after singing “I Feel
Good”, is that this isn’t your average scientific conference."
The bus taking us back from the Googleplex to the Wild Palms
Hotel just pulled in. It is 12:23 am, but there is really no point in trying to
go to sleep: my room is right next to the patio of the Hotel, and everybody is
gathered there to discuss and digest the evening. So, instead, I do what
probably ten percent of the SciFoo attendees are doing: I blog.
This is, as anyone can imagine, a fairly interesting experience.
We were picked up from the Hotel at around 5:30 pm, and arrived at the
Googleplex 30 minutes later. As we pulled in, a strange vehicular contraption,
piloted by about fifteen men and women, pedaling in an indescribable way (as
they were arranged in a circle around the contraption) crossed the path of the
bus. None of us had ever seen anything like that, and some speculated that this
was arranged. But, instead, I think the Googleplex is perhaps more like the
television series “Eureka”. We check in. As at every conference around the
world, I get a badge with a string. But unlike at other conferences, I also get
a piece of paper on which I am to describe what I do in five words or sentence
fragments, and nominate five people that I think should be at next year’s
installment. Among the five, I nominate Al Gore, and a certain developmental biologist who knows Python. Then they take your picture, and then you get the
SWAG. I’ve never gotten anything interesting at conferences before. (Well, when
I ran Alife 6, we had California sunglasses). But here, I get:
A t-shirt
An MP3 player with a podcast of a tour of the Googleplex
A DNA puzzle
A piece of crystal (heavy!) with one of four themes engraved
in them. I choose the “Kepler spheres”, since I have the same already as a 3D
metal prototype by Bathsheba Grossman. I could have selected a map of the star
systems of the universe. As one of the Google staffers put it: if you are
abducted by Aliens, this is your map home. Google Maps or Google Earth or Google Mars ain’t gonna help you
there.
A “Google”-engraved leather notebook. Of four colors, I
chose black.
Then it’s off to dinner, buffet style. I sit at the table
with Paul Ginsparg (who came up with lanl.gov, or arxiv.org, as it is called
now), Steve Benner, who makes enough money on royalties that he founded his own
institute, and who I’ve known for the last three years, and Chris Wiggins of
Columbia University, who I’m roping in to help us with modularity measures. He
promises any support he can give. During dinner I’m looking around if I can
spot anyone I know. I see Pam Silver, Erik Winfree, say hi to Drew Endy, and go
back to discussing Martin Nowak and the Templeton Foundation with Benner and
the Opinions Editor of Nature Magazine. She is constantly quizzing me about
Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute. I don’t know why.
After dinner, we congregate to do two things: introduce
ourselves, and then determine how we are going to spend the next two days by
putting talks into the slots of a giant matrix we are to fill with colored
markers. That’s the idea of SciFoo: we set the agenda, we decide who gives
talks. There are about 6 different rooms available, each with a one hour
timeslot. But the rooms have different capacity. You can put down your name for
a talk/discussion between, say, 9:30-10:30am for a room holding 5 people, or
150 people. Depends on the size of your ego, I suppose.
During introductions, we are to say who we are, and say
THREE WORDS about what describes our passion. Because we are 250 people. I’m
thinking: how many are able to do that? I describe myself as: Evolution,
information theory, and quantum physics, not all at the same time. This turn of
phrase becomes quite popular, when people describe their three phrases, but
insist, instead “at the same time”. A number of people are incapable of
restraining their self-descriptions. A gong is instituted to cut them off. It
doesn’t matter how famous you are.
I want to talk more to Jeff Hawkins (remember, he’s sitting
just to my left). Frankly, I can’t believe my luck. When the time comes for
people to sign up for talks, I just tell Jeff that I’m going to sign him up. It
helps that I was reading his book on the plane (Thanks Dimitris!) Jeff is a
little timid. I encourage him: “Go sign up!”-- “You think I should?” –“I’ll
sign you up if you don’t!”.
I boldly go to the big white board that the masses have
congregated around, grab a marker, and write “Jeff Hawkins: How to make
intelligent machines” into the 9:30 slot of a 120 people room. I figure that he
can fill it. After that, I stand in front of the boards for a long time,
wondering whether I should talk about something. I look at what other people
are suggesting. In the end, I take a slot for a room of 15 people (that is the
size of most rooms, but it goes down to 5), to talk about using evolution for
design and discovery. I don’t have a prepared talk or anything, I’ll just open
my mouth and begin. If you know me, you know that I can do that.
After this exercise is finished, there are a number of short
planned talks. Drew Endy is the first, and he gives a version of a talk I heard
him give several times. Always fun, but not new to me. After an interesting
talk about the basics of energy household on the Earth (we consume 18 Terawatts
of energy per day, but tidal energy only produces 3.7, so forget about trying
to use that, etc. Also, energy from waves: just 3 Terawatts. Forget it.)
Charles Simonyi, who used to work on Microsoft Office, talks about how he spent
his summer vacation. On the ISS.
You know, the International Space Station. It’s called “Charles in Space”. The
man is genuinely moved about his experience; there is a long Q&A period
after, where he talks about what this was like, how it used to cost $25 million,
but now the price tag is more like $35 million. And how Martha Stewart prepared
the banquet they had in space. Really, I’m not kidding. When it comes to space
food, he defers to her. (They are dating, don’t you know?) She wanted to design
the whole menu, but found out that NASA takes a long time to approve new foods
for the Space station, and she had to grudgingly accept that French chef AlainDucasse already had designed foods that met NASA approval, and was reduced
to prepare a banquet based on those. Oh, and Charles Simonyi doesn’t like fish.
After this talk, we walk to the main hall, where a bunch of
tents have been erected, and the bar is set up. You have to understand. The
original O’Reilly Foo Camp was a real camp. People sleep in tents. And Foo,
here, stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”.
They wanted to have a bar, just so that they could have a
foobar.
If you understand that, well, welcome!
I walk back with Jeff Hawkins. He tells me that he wants to
get back so that he can prepare the talk I signed him up for. Instead, I talk to
him for almost another hour. We talk about his Redwood Neuroscience Research
Center, and about Numenta, his new company that implements the neuroscience he
learned. I talk about my project evolving controllers for robots. Basically, we
talk about trying to get something novel done when the rest of the world
doesn’t think you can do it. This is great. I can sense the same passion in him
that drives him to understand, but he is a totally different type of human
being. He is at home in the world of technology ventures, and realizes that
progress is so much faster in a company as opposed to academia. Yet, we both
are driven by the same motives. Jeff tells me that he has given up control of
the Redwood Neuroscience Research Center, and focuses fully on managing Numenta,
that implements the ideas of his research. Anyone want to buy stock in that
company? Not once did I think about the fact that this guy is probably worth a
couple of hundreds of millions. ‘Cause he’s just another curious misunderstood
guy to me.
After midnight, the last bus leaves the Googleplex, and I am
stuck sitting next to an “inventor” on the bus back to the Hotel. I’m
explaining evolution to her. How we use evolution to come up with things the
human brain cannot come up with. But I don’t think she understands. She yawns a
lot and slurs her speech. I, on the other hand, am alert, but wish I had a
better seat mate.
But now it is 1:25 am, and we start again early this
morning. Who knows what that day will hold. But I’m optimistic. Sergey Brin is
there with his wife and his father. He’s got what, 4 billions? I need to talk
to him.
[Note: links added recently]
