Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: July 2011 (page 1 of 2)

The future began 10k-12k years ago

July 25, 2011 / / 1 Comment

From Monica Smith's A Prehistory of Ordinary People:

The transition to sedentism (and its frequent correlate, agriculture)…  requires significant changes at the individual cognitive level: attention to long-term planning, the acceptance of sunk costs as a daily event of work without immediate return, and the capacity to accumulate resources on a seasonal basis but distribute them on an incremental basis.

This makes me wonder if it's possible, pace Colin Renfrew and the cognitive archaeology school, to construct a prehistory of the future- in other words, to establish when humans began thinking about the future, and to trace what kind of thinking that was.

Working on other projects

July 24, 2011 / / Comments Off on Working on other projects

This is just a note to confirm the obvious: for the next several months I'm working exclusively on my next book, Taming the Digital Monkey: From Perpetual Distraction to Contemplative Computing (forthcoming with the fabulous Little, Brown & Company), and so will not be posting about futures-related things.

I will, though, be writing about the book on my contemplative computing blog, which like this blog I use as a kind of open commonplace notebook.

Its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk

July 24, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I notice that the last post here was about ten days ago, and I wanted to assure myself (and the two or three other readers) that I’ve been absorbed in working on my book, and so most of my posting is on the contemplative computing blog. Posts that have appeared there since Paris include:

  • The street finds its own use for things, Berkeley edition
  • Tony Perrettet on writing and distraction
  • Alok Khorana on electronic medical records
  • Another Zenware data-point: iA’s Writer
  • Do nudges work as public policy?
  • Internet use and transactive memory
  • Quote of the day: Hieronimo Squarciafico
  • Coverage in the Francophone blogosphere

I suspect this pattern will continue, and at times I’ll regret not having one blog for everything, but it’s too late to stop now.

(The title of this post, of course, is from the classic Monty Python dead parrot sketch.)

Please hold while I finish the book

July 24, 2011 / / Comments Off on Please hold while I finish the book

This is just a note to confirm the obvious: for the next several months I'm working exclusively on my next book, Taming the Digital Monkey: From Perpetual Distraction to Contemplative Computing (forthcoming with the fabulous Little, Brown & Company), and so will not be posting about futures-related things.

I will, though, be writing about the book on my contemplative computing blog,which like this blog I use as a kind of open commonplace notebook.

“the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well”

July 22, 2011 / / Comments Off on “the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well”

Watching the debt talks and efforts to kill off the new financial products agency, I wonder if some people are trying to create economic policy around Dr. Pangloss' declaration that "private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well."

Unintended consequence of tax pledges and car safety laws

July 22, 2011 / / Comments Off on Unintended consequence of tax pledges and car safety laws

Two examples of unintended consequences caught my eye today, one interesting, one rather macabre.

First, the Atlantic on Grover Norquist's no taxes pledge (when Conor is good, he's very good.)

What Norquist doesn't understand or won't admit is that deficit spending is worse than a tax increase, because you've got to pay for it eventually anyway, with interest. Meanwhile, you've created in the public mind the illusion that the level of government services they're consuming is cheaper and less burdensome than is in fact the case. If you hold the line on taxes but not the deficit, you're making big government more palatable.

The second example involves children being accidentally left in cars:

It's a tragedy that is on the rise — last year a record number of children nationwide died from being left in hot cars — and experts cite a surprising reason: a campaign to prevent young children from being killed by air bags.

That 1990s effort focused on moving infants from the front passenger seat of vehicles — where they could be killed in low-speed collisions when air bags deploy — to a safer position in one of the rear passenger seats. Since then, the number of baby deaths involving air bags has plummeted, dropping to just one in the U.S. last year.

But that means more children are out of sight in rear-facing seats, resulting in more chances they can be forgotten in vehicles. Even when it's only 80 degrees outside, temperatures inside a car can reach 109 in 20 minutes.

A little text about Paris

July 13, 2011 / / Comments Off on A little text about Paris

Having spent a day in Paris, it would be criminal blog negligence not to mention something about it, and put in a few pictures. I was there Saturday, and got to see a little of the Latin Quarter and the old Jewish quarter. Mainly, I took pictures. It goes without saying that a day is not nearly long enough to see the city, but it’s all I had. I’ll have to go back another time.


Gare du Lyon station, via flickr


Along the Seine, via flickr


Florence Kahn, the noted Kosher bakery/deli/etc., via flickr


The obligatory picture of Notre Dame, via flickr


Small Fountain, via flickr


Shakespeare and Company, via flickr

Remembering Theodore Roszak

July 13, 2011 / / Comments Off on Remembering Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak, author of Making of a Counter Culture and The Longevity Revolution— and another two dozen books, more or less- has died. I interviewed Roszak a few years ago for a project on the future of aging, and loved the passion and energy of his first book, on the counterculture. In effect, in those two books Roszak chronicled the Baby Boomer generation’s great impact on American society and culture. As I explained a while ago,

Roszak spent his career at Cal State Hayward, and retired a few years ago. A decade ago, he went through a medical crisis “that would have killed our parents or grandparents. I came through this realizing that… I might live another twenty or thirty years,” he recalled to me last fall.

His experience revealed two things. First, surviving an event like this is “a profoundly transformative, spiritual experience” that makes you “wonder what you’re going to do with what you now see as a gift.” Second, he wasn’t alone: for more and more people, events like this are becoming a passage into a new, as-yet undefined phase of life.

I really became a fan of his when I came upon a review he wrote of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that was one of the most critical, smart attacks on Fuller’s worldview.

My other substantive encounter with Roszak happened a decade ago, around his book From Satori to Silicon Valley, which he was kind enough to let me republish on my Making the Macintosh project. He was quite supportive of my interest in the book (which makes an argument about the link between counterculture and computing later explored by Fred Turner and John Markoff, and more recently applied to theoretical physics by David Kaiser), and gracious in letting me reprint the book.

Finally, I recently rediscovered a book he published in 1986, The Cult of Information, which I’d picked up at a book sale and never actually looked at in detail. However, it prefigures some of what I talk about in contemplative computing, particularly in acting on an understanding of the difference between human and computer intelligence and memory:

Two distinct elements come together in the computer: the ability to store information in vast amounts, the ability to process that information in obedience to strict logical procedures. Each of these will be taken up in turn in Chapters 5 and 6 and explored for its relationship to thought. There we will see how the cult of information fixes upon one or the other of these elements (sometimes both) and construes its intellectual value. Because the ability to store data somewhat corresponds to what we call memory in human beings, and because the ability to follow logical procedures somewhat corresponds to what we call reasoning in human beings, many members of the cult have concluded that what computers do somewhat corresponds to what we call thinking…. The burden of my argument is to insist that there is a vital distinction between what machines do when they process information and what minds do when they think.

Greetings from Charles de Gaulle Terminal 1, aka a badly-designed circle of Hell

July 10, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I think everyone will agree that 18 hours is far too little time to really see Paris; likewise, any seasoned traveler will agree that 8 hours is more than enough time to experience Charles De Gaulle airport. Or at least that's what I expect to conclude, after my day here.

I was supposed to be on a flight home early this morning, but thanks to a problem with my ticket that's too pedestrian to share yet sufficiently problematic to keep me from getting on the plane, I've got a full day here at CDG. I was going to fly out of the relatively new Terminal 2E, which is a shiny giant shed-type hall familiar to anyone who's spent time in Singapore, Malaysia, Terminals 4 and 5 of Heathrow, the phenomenal Denver airport, or any number of other airports built in the last decade. (For those of you who don't know, the Very Big Terminal That's Also a Destination and a Statement is all the rage, and the new ones tend to be mind-bogglingly large open spaces.) Since I could get a flight on Continental and United for 1/4 what Air France wanted, and since Star Alliance flies out of Terminal 1, I'm here.


via flickr

For those of you who've never been to Terminal 1 and are of a certain age, you've seen it on the cover of the Alan Parsons Project's classic album I Robot. For those who are younger, imagine the proposed donut-shaped Apple headquarters… gone terribly, terribly wrong.


via flickr

I really enjoyed myself on this trip, I have a growing number of French friends, and I find the place completely lacking the snobbishness that Americans expect (partly this is a function of moving in tech and academic circles, whose membership seems to regularly worry about having to play catch-up to the US). But Terminal 1 is one of the great, if not the greatest, acts of architectural contempt ever. It's like foreign policy in the 2000s, or the creation of subprime mortgages designed for people who couldn't even make the first payment. It seemed like a good idea in a certain heady, breathe-your-own-exhaust bobble, but in retrospect is so obviously a bad idea you have to wonder: didn't anybody say something?


via flickr

The thing that sums it all up is the central courtyard, which is enclosed by the torus-shaped building, and whose airspace is crisscrossed with people movers, like the travelators at Ikea that always seem to be out of order. It was probably meant to be a commentary on alienation and modernity, or maybe it was a way for the travelers to begin to take to the skies as soon as they headed to their gates, but- bitch, PLEASE. They're a bunch of damn hamster tubes. I doubt anyone working today would create something that would be such a challenge to maintain, and creates such a traffic bottleneck. We still make plenty of design mistakes, but I think airport designers today would make different ones.


via flickr

The rest of the airport feels to me like your basic 1960s modernist dream, the sort of thing that Archigram and Team X would have cried tears of joy over: it's all roughened, sculptural concrete, primary colors, glass and metal. Some of the ceiling detailing has a wing-like filigree that suggests that Someone Was Trying, but still… it's a whole that's much less than the sum of its parts.

Plus a circular building feels like a mistake. It takes a big space and makes it feel eternally smaller, without hinting that there are interesting things elsewhere. And of course, expansion is impossible. You can't build onto a building like this, you can only build new terminals in the same general time zone (the inter-terminal train system deserves high marks).


via flickr

Still, it's better than the Dulles gates, if only because the contrast between Saarinen's magnificent main terminal and the shocking pedestrianism of every later expansion is so painful. The other terminals don't feel like they were even designed: they were assembled in the same Platonic architectural workshop that mindlessly turns out self-serve gas stations and downscale strip malls. At least this place was trying to make a statement, and no matter how badly they misfired or how poorly the project has aged, there was effort here.

But I found a working power outlet for my iPad, I have Diet Coke, I have 900 pictures downloading into my photo editor, and most important, I have a ticket home. So it's cool.

Working with the iPad

July 10, 2011 / / 2 Comments

On this trip I've experimented with leaving my laptop behind and just taking my iPad, and so far it's performed pretty brilliantly. So long as I have an Internet connection I can do pretty much everything I would want to do with a laptop, and even without one I can do about 80% of the things I would normally do with my MacBook Pro.

The thing that makes the difference is the keyboard. Apple makes an excellent Bluetooth keyboard, which is both extremely thin and light, and has a good solid feel: they're full-sized keys, and they have nice throw, so I don't feel like I (or my hands) are compromising. And the difference between writing with a real keyboard, and tapping on the screen, is like night and day: I can tap with more than one finger on each hand, but it's not as fast or accurate as when I'm using real keys. Not only do I make more mistakes, but I can't feel when I make mistakes, the way I do when I'm using a regular keyboard.

Of course, the other thing that makes a big difference in the functionality of the iPad + keyboard is not the device itself, but rather the fact that I've got a bunch of useful material up online that I can access when I'm writing my talks. In particular, my habit of putting pictures up on Flickr is really starting to pay off: as my photography has improved (or at least gotten more quirkily distinctive, and migrated to ever more impressive devices), that's turned into an online repository that I can access when I'm revising my talks and need to illustrate new points.

I would like to see better synchronization between my machine and iDisk, or a feature that automatically backed up files to my iDisk. Or rather, I would like this for my hosts, so they could always have access to the latest version of my talk.

I may go for an adapter to connect the iPad to a monitor, but I really liked being able to carry around the iPad and read my talk off it. I worried that it looked a little dorky, and it probable does; but apparently the aluminum back reflects the stage lights in cool ways, so I'm going to keep reading off it (and maybe look for some holographic cards or such to tape on the back for such occasions). I know it makes me look a little like Jonathan Pryce's evil Rupert Murdoch-like character in that James Bond movie, but c'est la vie.

The other thing I'll have to practice is using it as another display surface, so I can occasionally different images than what's showing in the presentation, or maybe toss our specific words than I want the audience to focus on. Not even technically or logistically difficult: I could just add pictures to the presentation text, and flip over the screen when I want to show something to people.

Though I wonder if the VGA adapter works with the iPhone? Could I do presentations in Keynote and then run them off my phone, while reading the text on the iPad? Must experiment. I should also see what the Keynote remote control is like.

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