Jon Udell

A couple of years ago, when I needed to call someone, my phone wasn’t where I thought I’d left it. This was a problem. Back then I often called this person but I had no idea what his phone number was. Why would I? Remembering numbers is a job I delegate to my phone.

And finding my phone when I forget where I left it is a job I delegate to other phones. But when I reached for my cordless office phone it wasn’t where I thought I’d left it either. No problem. Finding my cordless when I forget where I left it is a job I delegate to its base station which is tethered and can’t wander.

So I walked over to the base station, paged the cordless, found it under a pile of papers, used it to call my cellphone, found it under another pile of papers, and used it to call my friend. Then I paused to reflect on technological augmentation.

Now don’t get me wrong, augmentation is a wonderful thing. Even fish, we have recently learned, use tools. I love delegating mental chores to devices and to the cloud. I am not a Luddite. But I am starting to think more about when not to delegate, and why not.

My mom is almost 90. She’s always known the numbers of the friends she often calls, and she still does. That’s a good thing because macular degeneration makes it impossible to read the numbers in her phone’s directory and difficult even to read the numbers she’s printed extra-large in her address book.

I’m not planning to memorize phone numbers. But I am exploring ways to usefully exercise the memory muscle. Just because I can look everything up doesn’t mean that I always must. Some kinds of things are worth keeping in the cache. But which?

In Behind the Dream Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King’s lawyer and adviser, writes:

What amazed me was that there was absolutely no reference material for Martin to draw upon. There he was [in the Birmingham jail] pulling quote after quote from thin air. The Bible, yes, as might be expected from a Baptist minister, but also British prime minister William Gladstone, Mahatma Gandhi, William Shakespeare, and St. Augustine.

If there’d been a web in 1963, and if MLK could access it from that jail, would the Letter from a Birmingham Jail have turned out differently? Would the differences have mattered? I’m not sure. It’s interesting to note that the quotes Clarence Jones seems to recall being in the letter aren’t all there. I don’t find Gladstone, Gandhi, or Shakespeare. I do find, along with St. Augustine, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, T.S. Eliot and others. Does the discrepancy matter? Not really. What Jones remembers, and what I will now remember, is that MLK could remember, not precisely what he did remember.

Clarence Jones continues:

I have often said the sheer processing power of Martin’s mind left me awestruck. His dexterity with memory and words ran along the lines of the cut-and-paste function in today’s computer programs. The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” showed his recall for the written material of others; his gruelling schedule of speeches illuminated his ability to do the same for his own words. Martin could remember exact phrases from several of his unrelated speeches and discover a new way of linking them together as if they were all parts of a singular ever-evolving speech. And he could do it on the fly.

Jones tells us that it was he who wrote the draft of I Have a Dream speech. And that Martin Luther King began to deliver it more or less as written. Then Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell ‘em about the Dream, Martin.” So he did. He set aside the text that Jones had written, and that he had edited the night before, and gave an impromptu speech for the ages. Among many factors that conspired to make that possible were the processing and memory powers that Jones describes.

As our relationship to devices and the cloud reorganizes our brains, those powers are changing. But we’re not just passively experiencing these changes. We are actively co-creating the powers of our individual brains and of the collective brain we’re becoming.

When I was a kid I used to memorize poetry. A couple of years ago I was feeling no need to do anything like that ever again. But now I find myself wanting to exercise the memory muscle. I’ve decided that certain kinds of things belong in the unaugmented part of my brain. Among them, for me, right now, are fingerstyle guitar arrangements. My repertoire has grown slowly over the years, and it’s been a challenge to learn new arrangements. Lately I’ve been working to improve my ability to memorize them, though, and the effort feels intrinsically rewarding.

I’ve also noticed that one of the best talks I’ve ever given was the product of careful memorization. I think I see now why Ignite talks and Moth stories are done live without notes. I love having an outboard brain. But until we get the implants, we’ll want to keep the onboard one humming.

When I left the pageview business I walked away from an engine that had, for many years, manufactured an audience for my writing. Four years on I’m still adjusting to the change. I always used to cringe when publishers talked about using content to drive traffic. Of course when the traffic was being herded my way I loved the attention. And when it wasn’t I felt — still feel — its absence.

There are plenty of things I don’t miss, though. Among them is the obligation to be an aggressive early adopter of (and opinionator on) every new tech fad. Now I can hang back, wait for the fads to spread beyond the geek echo chamber, and watch how my civilian friends, family and acquaintances react to them. Since none of the civilians I know have moved to Google+, I can’t gauge their reactions yet. While waiting for some of them to jump into the pool I’ve dipped a toe in the water, considered my own reaction to the New Thing, and compared it to the collective reactions of the geek tribe.

Mine seems atypical: I’ve reached into a corner of my closet, pulled out the RSS reader I left there, and used it to find nourishment that online social networking seems no longer to provide. Last night’s 17-course meal was a selection of recent essays by Gardner Campbell, Brian Dear, Lorianne DiSabato, John Faughnan, Paul Ford, Cliff Gerrish, Ned Gulley, Eugene Eric Kim, Adina Levin, Hugh McGuire, Cameron Neylon, John Quimby, Antonio Rodriguez, Scott Rosenberg, Doc Searls, Ed Vielmetti, and Ethan Zuckerman.

These writers are among many who write because they want to and because they can. They write in their own online spaces which I follow in my RSS reader. When I seek nourishment from them I can go directly to their spaces. No business models drive me there. Often, to be sure, I have been led there by way of a comment on one or another of the social networks. That had become so common that I came to accept a lot of distracting chatter as the price of discovering things to read. But Google+ seems to be the camel’s-back-breaking straw. The price has gone too high. So I’m rediscovering what made the blog network so thrilling to me a decade ago: unmediated access to people writing for the love of it in their own online spaces. Distracting chatter has its uses. But it’s optional.

Guy Sorman’s The End of Green Ideology begins:

The meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant has sent political aftershocks racing around the globe. More often than not, however, the shocks have been ideological, with no basis in science.

I’ve been reexamining the case for nuclear power for a while now. I still think we’ll probably need to keep developing it, improving it, and including it in the mix. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise and I’ll watch Germany’s forthcoming nuclear exit with great interest. In any case, I agree with Guy Sorman: let’s make sure our energy future is based on science not ideology.

So I was puzzled to find this assertion in the middle of his critique of green ideology:

If California were to rely on solar power for its electricity consumption, the entire state would have to be covered with photovoltaic cells.

Really? That seems wrong. According to an infographic called Surface Area Required to Power the World (with zero carbon emissions and with solar alone), assumptions and methodology here, it looks like a California of solar panels could more than power the world.

For reasons Sorman alludes to — cost, environmental impact — it probably wouldn’t make sense to build a California of solar capacity, regardless of how it’s distributed around the world. But let’s just focus on the assertion that California would need all of itself to keep the lights on using solar photovoltaics. Is that really wrong? If so, how wrong? What’s the right answer? And how can we find out?

Before the advent of WolframAlpha I would sometimes idly speculate about these kinds of questions, but I wasn’t able to effectively analyze them. Now I can. From various sources, I think I know that a PV panel can produce on the order of 10 watts per square foot. So we can ask WA directly:

area of california in square feet * 10 watts per square foot = 45.64 TW

How can we think about 45 terawatts? I recall from Saul Griffith’s Climate Change Recalculated that the whole world runs on about 16TW. This confirms what I gleaned by eyeballing the infographic: Solar California could more than power the world.

But where does Saul’s 16 TW number come from? Can we cross-check it? The infographic assumes that we were running at 500 quadrillion BTU in 2008, projected to rise to around 680 quadrillion BTU in 2030. The US Energy Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2010 cites similar numbers. I’m not good at unit conversions, but WA is:

500 quadrillion btu in watt years / 1 year = 16.73 TW

This matches so closely that I wonder about the provenance of the number. Do all these analyses use the same source, or are there independent estimates that converge? But anyway, let’s assume that 16 TW is in the ballpark. How much electricity does California use? (Recall that this was the quantity of energy Guy Sorman thinks would require a California-sized solar panel to produce.) A couple of sources say that California uses about a quarter million gigawatt hours of electricity in a year. How much is that? WA provides useful comparisons:

a quarter million gigawatt hours = 1/15 total production of electrical energy in US in 2001 = 2 * electricity consumption of Norway in 1998 = 28 * daily electric energy production of all nuclear power plants

a quarter million gigawatt hours / 1 year 2000 hours = 28.5 125 GW

45 TW is about 1600 360 times more than that, so I think that’s how wrong Sorman’s claim is.

If a California-sized solar panel could produce 45 TW, then how much of California would be needed to produce 28.5 125 GW? Let’s ask:

area of California / 1600 360 = 102 455 square miles = 1/15 1/3 area of Rhode Island = 2.2 * area of Walt Disney World 1.1 * land area of Hong Kong

As with other essays in my energy literacy series I am mainly interested here in how tools like WolframAlpha can help us reason our way through a thicket of quantities and unit conversions. Hundreds of people liked Guy Sorman’s essay on Facebook. Dozens tweeted it and the one comment I can retrieve calls it a “balanced and scientific assessment of world’s current and future energy outlook.”

I don’t know enough to agree nor disagree with Guy Sorman’s conclusion:

Future energy supplies will most likely rely more and more on miniaturized nuclear plants and shale gas — a mix capable of responding to a rapidly urbanizing world population’s growing demand for electricity.

But I do know that we need to be able to verify and reproduce analyses that purport to be scientific. WolframAlpha has become the View Source button that helps me do that.

This National Geographic video about 3D printing exemplifies the worst kind of gee-whiz reporting. Just scan a crescent wrench, print it, and bingo, you’ve copied a real tool with moving parts!

Not.

A commenter notes differences between the copy and the original and concludes:

If the real wrench was simply scanned, this would not have happened. A human has built the design data.

3d printing is cool, why do they feel they have to lie about the input method?

The input method is, of course, 3D CAD. From the product brochure for the printer:

Z Corp.’s 3D printing technology leverages 3D source data, which often takes the form of computer-aided design (CAD) models.

Gee-whiz reporting insults our intelligence and trivializes its subject matter. It’s fun to imagine a magic replicator, but it’s more interesting to know about the human/computer interaction that makes real replication possible.

Once I wrote a review of a dozen 3D CAD programs for BYTE Magazine. The benchmark was a model that I commissioned an architect to design. We called it the BYTE Pantheon and it looked like this:

My job was to construct that model in each of the dozen CAD programs. It was hard! That was partly because I had no prior experience with CAD software. But it was also because each program had its own way of using 2D gestures to manipulate 3D objects. That was my main takeaway from the project. There wasn’t (and I think still isn’t) a standard suite of gestures. Even if there were, and even (I suspect) when you can use 3D gestures, it would still be hard because you are making a precise description of a complex object. Wikipedia calls CAD an “industrial art” for good reason. Models with the same functional qualities can differ in terms of style and sophistication. Those differences come into play when the model is shared and modified. Or so I imagine, anyway. I’m not a 3D modeler but I understand 3D modeling to be a process akin to programming.

A friend of mine, Gary Spykman, describes himself as a designer, furniture maker, and artisan. He has also become a 3D modeler, and uses SketchUp to explore his designs and render them for clients. A couple of years ago, Gary designed and built what he calls his cabana. Here it is as designed in SketchUp, and as built in Gary’s back yard.

When I saw what Gary was doing in SketchUp I was inspired to try using the program for some simple needs of my own — to visualize my geodesic tomato suspension dome, and more ambitiously to visualize a remodeling of our kitchen. And you know what? It was just as hard as I remembered! If you do this stuff for a living, as Gary does, then it becomes second nature. But if you only do it occasionally, like me, you’ll be impressed every time with the level of skill required to precisely describe an object or a scene.

Like the commenter on YouTube I have to ask: why lie about this? National Geographic’s gee-whiz reporting doesn’t just fail to inform. It also fails to celebrate the synergy between computational power and human skill that makes 3D modeling so fascinating.

Last week I made my own modest contribution to the growing literature on how to prepare for an Ignite talk. Now the talk is up on YouTube. It’s about barefoot running and whether we really need an app for that.

Delicious has been part of my life for a long time. I first wrote about it back in August of 2004. I know this because Delicious helped me remember. The link has gone stale because I wrote the article for an online publisher, which turns out to be a good way to get published but a lousy way to stay published. Thankfully Wayback remembers what InfoWorld forgot:

Pub/sub, tags, and human filters

In 2002, InfoWorld gave a Technology of the Year award to “publish/subscribe” technology. In the writeup I mentioned Kenamea, KnowNow, and the Flash Communications Server. The del.icio.us bookmarking system has some of the pub/sub flavor of those systems, as well as some of the blogging flavor.

In the blog network, you publish to a personal identity (your own), and you subscribe to other people’s identities. In systems like KnowNow and Kenamea, people (and also applications) publish to, and subscribe to, topics.

Consider the del.icio.us tag e4x, which I created today to help me keep track of this article on a subject I expect to learn more about soon. At the moment, my e4x page and the systemwide e4x page are the same: mine is the one and only use of that tag.

Even if I’m the only one to collect e4x references by means of that tag, it will have value. I’ll be able to access a set of bookmarks from anywhere, and easily share them. Things could get more interesting if other people’s e4x references start to show up when I visit (or subscribe to) the tag. Whether del.icio.us (or an analogous service) will reach a scale that makes that likely, for specialized as well as common terms, is an interesting question.

Once a tag does reach critical mass, another interesting question arises. Do you monitor the global view or do you rely on one or more user-filtered views? I guess the answer is both, at different times. When a tag is new and receives little traffic, watch the whole thing. If traffic grows too heavy or too noisy, interpose trusted human filters.

Looking back I can see what attracted me to Delicious. It embodies what I’ve come to know as ways of thinking like the web.

I am now working on a service that invites people to learn and apply web thinking in order to systematically inform one another about things. My web service uses Delicious as a partner service. One reason is that I am virtuously lazy. I would much rather use a service than create one. The elmcity project only cares about one thing: calendar syndication. If it can partner with a service like Delicious for other things — managing lists of feeds, configuring hubs — then I can focus on trying to do the one thing that really matters to my project.

But there’s another reason. I believe that people who use Delicious in the way that elmcity curators do are learning to apply some key principles of web thinking. Things like informal contracts, information chemistry, the pub/sub communication pattern, and the structure of information,

I wrote up specific examples recently in Can elmcity and Delicious continue their partnership? Today I realized that I still lack an answer to that question. If the new terms of service are going to require me to swap out Delicious for another service I should get cracking. But first I’ll try again. Is it OK for elmcity to keep using Delicious the way it has been? If anyone reading this can help me get that question answered I will be grateful.