I’ve been in a technology training class this week in downtown Denver. I’m fortunate that an express bus to downtown stops at the end of my street, so I’ve been bus commuting this week.  I used to do that when we first moved here 20 years ago. Times have changed. technology has changed, and the more things change, the more some things stay the same.

Social vs. Solitary

20 years ago when I was a regular bus commuter, some folks read the paper, or a book, and some would talk to each other much as neighbors did when I was a kid.  This week, most folks who would have read a paper back then were using their smart phone Kindle or iPad to read. I was the only one reading a real paper. Comfortingly enough, the percent preferring solitary pursuits vs. social was about the same. There was one debate between an older gent and an older lady with a Kindle about his preference for a book and the feel of paper and her preference for many books in a light weight form so she could read whatever she wanted whenever convenient. It was a draw in my opinion. Each to their own.

Women Prefer eBooks

I read an article that Kindle readers et al have sold very well to women. This also has led to a boom in romance novels, aka, “bodice rippers”, in eBook format. It seems that a Kindle provides the “plain brown wrapper” of anonymity lacking in print copies of the same book.  Being anonymous shapes human behavior when passion and romance are involved.

End of Encyclopedia Britannica Sales

I get to read the paper on the commute and noticed a WSJ article about the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door salesman. Why?  Because the Internet, Google and Wikipedia have replaced it.  In the 1960’s and 70’s when I had to do research papers in class, access to an encyclodedia was the fastest way to get the project done. Today, the information available to a person on a given day via a laptop, smart phone or desk top computer surpasses the total content in the Encyclopedia Britannica, (and in fact, the entire contents of my public library) and it’s available on demand pretty much anywhere you are if you can afford a smart phone.

Social Networking and the Power of a Single Voice, Part #1

The news this week included the letter from the disgruntled employee of Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith. His letter in the New York Times triggered a twitter/blog echo.  Result, the CEO and the President of Goldman publicly had to respond promising “investigations” into the claimed abuses of customers by Goldman.  A Senate investigation with Lloyd Blankfien’s grilling didn’t achieve that much impact after the recession. One man, one letter and then the echo chamber of social networks created more pressure than the US congress.  Hmm, participatory democracy in the extreme?

Social Networking and the Power of a Single Voice, Part #2

The trial of the university student who video taped his roommate’s homosexual encounter with a fellow student and then promoted it using Twitter resulted in his conviction on charges of invasion of privacy, among other charges. If he had made the same comments in the student union and in conversations with friends, would he have been prosecuted?  Would there have been any hard evidence prosecutors could have relied on? Does social networking impose harsher restrictions on what you say then a private conversation in a public square?

Something to consider when next you tweet or post a comment to any blog.

IT Administrator Perspective on Social Media

My class mates are IT administrators in private companies, local government, and not for profits. A comment overheard about Google and Facebook, “I don’t worry about privacy when I use these. Sure they collect information, but I don’t think the government would really be interested in mining this to learn all about me.” 

Most of the people in this class were born long after the Joe McCarthy era. the late 1960-early 1970’s with the infiltration by the FBI of various “left-wing” organizations, or Nixon’s Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.  I made the comment that a rereading of “1984” was in order to appreciate the ability of government to abuse surveillance powers. Sadly, I don’t think many understood my 1984 reference.

Today, substitute “advertising funded free applications” for Big Brother in the story of 1984. It seems in the 21st century the power of “free” is far more effective, and less costly, then overt surveillence to collect an in-depth dossier of Winston’s comings and goings. How much more powerful is surveillance when human nature is leveraged to collect the information instead of covert means?  It’s well worth considering I think since we do have a choice in our use of social media applications.

The title of my blog does include the word “musings”, but I’ve been mostly focused on the “Motorcycle” part for awhile.  So, I figured I’d work on the musing part.  The word can be a noun, (meditation) or a adjective (thoughtfully abstracted).  So, here goes.

Skiing and Genomics

On the way up on the gondola at Keystone on Friday, I struck up a conversation with two fellows. They were at Keystone for a conference on immunology and Friday was the play day. We chatted about the acceleration of discovery in biology driven by sequencing the genome. They said there was a growing excitement at the conference over discoveries about the ecology of bacteria and viruses in the body. By count, there are more bacteria in our bodies by a factor of 10 than human cells. So who and what we are is likely more about the bacteria and interactions with our cells than it is about the DNA of our cells.  This seems similar to the revolution in cosmology where we learned  how small matter and energy are in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter make up 90% of the total. Our ideas about the universe are based on about 10% of what’s actually there.

Epigenetics is the emerging study of the interactions of DNA with the environment, bacteria and viruses. Science finds that gene expression is influenced by virus and bacterial interactions that can activate or inhibit gene expression. In some cases, this is the casue of disease. One of them pointed out a recent experiment with the Toxoplasma virus. It reproduces in cats and uses rats to infect other cats. The eggs move from cat feces to rats. Inside the rat, it causes changes in gene expression in rat brains making them less afraid of cats and easier to catch. When the cat eats a rat with Toxoplasma, it infects the cat thereby ensuring it’s survival. At that point, we got to the top of the mountain and bid adieu.

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal had an article on this topic including a discussion about the Toxoplasma study. Serendipity.

As we improve our ability to measure and see at smaller and smaller scales in biology, we find once again that human’s aren’t center stage. We keep confusing our ability to ask questions and make connections with our overall importance.

Pay for Maming in Sports

When did we forget that sports should showcase sportsmanship and serve as a platform for the higher qualities of human character. There was a letter in the Saturday Wall Street Journal that asked why “assault” was not a prosecutable offence in the NFL? Or, said differently, why is premeditated intent to maim, or kill, not a criminal matter?  At a minimum, why doesn’t the NFL at least expel for life any player or coach for this kind of behavior? We do that in other “professions” when members violate the code of conduct.  I don’t get it.

We took a ride up to Golden Gate State Park and continued on CO-119 on Saturday. It was a day with really clear skies the color of blue you only see at 8000 feet or more. The wind was blowing the snow off the peaks creating the only clouds in the sky. Tis a priviledge to live in Colorado.

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David Brooks asked people over 70 to write “life reports” and send them to him.  He has posted several on his blog.  I find them fascinating.

The stories document our culture over much of the 20th century (at 70, the youngest were born in 1941) as much as they do the experience of living. Their values, challenges, triumphs and observations are rooted in what it is to be human which is a process of continually becoming, not a static goal achieved once and put on the shelf like a trophy.

Those in their 20’s and 30’s may think folks over 70 are near the end of their lives. But none of the writers seem focused on the end as much as they are on the living process of becoming who they are.  Despite the bad behavior some confess to, none of them are static, unchanging, nor accepting of the ultimate end, their deaths.  Instead, they are actively engaged in writing the next pages and chapters of their lives.

Their stories underscore what I hear in Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night“.

I started a project in 2010 to rebuild my BMW R75/6 motorcycle with 103,000 original owner miles.  I wanted to get back to tacit knowledge derived from doing it myself as most of my working day is spent in what has euphemistically come to be called “Knowledge” work.

Prior to that, I was reading articles on the hand/mind connection, the plastic brain, learning and the value of tinkering .  Tinkering for kids comes in two varieties. you can tinker with stuff (inanimate objects) and you can engage in unsupervised play (animate objects), and both seem to be missing for today’s children.  I’ve come to separate learning into two kinds: abstract, or “Knowledge” learning where the animate and inanimate objects (people, things, materials, etc.) are purposely left out, and “Experience” learning where the objects are kept in and you are confronted with the cussedness of inanimate objects and the irrationality of motives.

I ended up subscribing to a magazine, Make which has a number of do it yourself (DIY) projects.  I stumbled across articles in The Denver Post about a tool lending library that operates like a public library, and an inventor’s workshop where you can pay a flat fee for access to a large variety of tools and shop space to work on projects.  And just today, I came across a video from TED about Marcin Jakabowski, an ex PhD in physics who decided his formal education as a Knowledge worker was “useless” and became a farmer.  From the hands on experience, he identified the 50 basic machines that support our civilization.   Then he decided to build them in a DIY fashion publishing the blue prints, material list and cost estimates so others can do the same.  An additional goal is to store all the information on a single DVD. Very interesting.

I see the beginning of a movement back toward experience-based tacit knowledge that comes from DIY thinking.  In many cases, the people who are DIY evangelists were fully invested in the mythos of the knowledge worker as the highest and best use of humanity but in practice found it to be hollow.

This raises a question about living a good life and if abstract knowledge alone really provides it.  I’ve had a growing sense that the lack of wisdom evident in many sectors of society may be correlated to the growing number of people who never tinkered with real things as part of their education.  I use “education” in the broad sense so it is not unnaturally constrained by what happens to you in school.  I see resumes in the tech sector from people who spend 1-2 years doing something and then move on.  How can you really have experience, let alone wisdom, from that short a time doing anything that is meaningful?  You hardly had time to fail spectacularly and figure out how to assimilate that experience, and its those kinds of experiences from which wisdom comes.

I have another perspective on knowledge workers vs. experience workers. I think there are two important contributors to the global problem of sustainability and throw-away culture (aka, things).  I’m  interested in how to change the throw-away “things” pattern underpinning the first world economy.

As a kid growing up in the 50’s, products were built to last a long time and ease of repair was an important part of industrial design.  For those of a “certain age”, remember Sears and the spare parts available for just about everything they sold?  They did that because DIY was alive and well in the 50’s due to the shared experience of the Great Depression by the majority of their customers.

I suspect that if we looked in detail at the difference in “carbon footprint” between a “Design For Throwaway” (DFT) and “Design For Repair”  (DFR) economy, the DFR model would demonstrate a dramatic reduction.  (I’d be interested in references to any research along these lines.)  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a DFT culture reinforces an education model that teaches a rubric where an abstract knowledge worker is superior to a pragmatic experience worker.   In fact, I think nothing could be farther from the truth.