SMART Letter #40
YOU CAN'T SEE *THAT* on TV
June 15, 2000
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SMART Letter #40 -- June 15, 2000
Copyright 2000 by David S. Isenberg
isen.com -- "the nail that saves the kingdom"
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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CONTENTS
> TED City: You Can't See *THAT* on TV
> Conferences on my Calendar, Copyright Notice, Administrivia
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TED CITY: YOU CAN'T SEE *THAT* ON TV
by David S. Isenberg
I like meetings that introduce me to stuff that I don't know I
don't know. If I knew which ideas I ought to know about, I'd
be able to look them up on the web. But the universe is a big
place. A concept that isn't aligned with my work's everyday
trajectory -- or a thought that doesn't orbit within the span
of my attention -- might never resolve in my consciousness.
But that concept could be the very nail that saves the
horseshoe that saves the horse that saves the warrior that
saves the battle that saves the kingdom.
So, while the rest of the telecommunications planet that I
call home was at SuperCom last week, I went to TED (which
stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design). The four days
of TED (June 7-10, 2000) are like freshman year at Harvard:
the short course for old farts like me. (Why waste such good
stuff on undergraduates?)
TED (www.ted.com) has a regular yearly stand each February in
Monterey, California. I've been there. It is special. But I
can't get in anymore. TED2001 is sold out except for the
overflow room. I won't pay US$3000 and travel 3000 miles to
watch TED on TV in the overflow room! TED is about being up-
close and personal. I've been a front-row kinda guy since
kindergarten, so either I sign up now for TED2002, or I go to
other TEDs that TED-producer Richard Saul Wurman pulls
together from time to time -- like the one in New York in 1997
or TED City in Toronto, Ontario, Canada last week.
A cell biologist, speaking on the last day of Toronto's TED,
called TED "A Mecca of lateral thinking." Indeed. It is
worth the pilgrimage, too. Inside TED's walls, heretics,
unbelievers and infidels worship at the temple of the question
that is unanswerable only if unasked.
Nominally, TED's Wurman is an architect. But he's not only a
designer of space, but also of the printed image, and of time
(as TED amply demonstrates).
Moses Znaimer was the co-sponsor of this Toronto TED. Znaimer
is a democratizer of television, a grinder of TV's leading
edge, and the owner of Toronto's CityTV and several cutting-
edge channels that I wish Comcast would carry in New Jersey.
If Marshall McLuhan were alive he'd probably say, "Moses
Znaimer's doing what I've been talking about." And Moses
would give a sweet closed-lipped smile, turn his palms up, and
try to hide his head between his shoulders.
A theme emerged, to wit: "You Can't See That on TV." I must
say that it emerged in my mind only -- and only after some
three days of post-hoc processing. Funny, given that the co-
sponsor is a TV impressario. Read on . . . maybe you'll see
what I mean.
I'd like to tell you about the high points, but, like a
mosquito in a nudist colony, I don't know where to begin.
(Credit where due: TED speaker Birute Galdikas used the
mosquito simile.) Looking back, there were maybe four stand-
out events -- two intellectual and two musical.
Intellectual Peak #1: Birute Galdikas had just flown in from
Borneo. She's been studying the orangutan in its habitat for
30 years. She related the orangutan and its habitat to the
habitat's place in the local economy, then to the interaction
of the local economy with the politics of Indonesia, and then
to Indonesia's place in the global economy. The orangutan is
the only great ape that still spends its entire life in the
jungle canopy, but it is as close to human in every way as the
gorilla. Females suckle their young for eight years. Orangs
are more solitary than social -- the mother-child bond is the
strongest relationship. Their historical range was from China
to Java, but today there are only 20,000 wild orangutans in
two small habitats Borneo and Sumatra. Galdikas has
established "Camp Leakey" in a national park in the lowlands
of central Borneo, to rehabilitate captive and orphaned
orangutans. It is named after Louis Leakey, the mentor of
Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Galdikas herself. Under the
dictatorial three-decade Suharto regime, the national park was
protected by a police force that ruled with iron fist. When
the regime collapsed in 1998, the local people found nothing
to stop them from making an illegal fortune logging the trees
in the national park. This logging is whittling the
orangutan's remaining habitat. Furthermore, the new
Indonesian government wants to be the world's leading exporter
of plywood. What a dilemma -- a brutal dictatorship that's
orang-friendly or a more democratic shot at the global
economy, which destroys the orangutan's last habitat! The
sustainable solution that Galdikas sees is to create local
awareness of the orangutan and its habitat as a world
treasure. This would bring in green tourism and build an
orangutan-centered local economy, including jobs for locals
guarding the national park against logging and caring for the
orangutans, plus the other tourism-oriented services.
Orangutan: Globalization -- Birute Galdikas illuminated the
direct link. Next time I'm in southern Asia, I'm going to try
to visit Camp Leakey.
Intellectual Peak #2: Vaclav Smil is the deepest, broadest
person I've met since Bucky Fuller. He speaks English with a
rapid-fire eastern European accent. As he spoke, I hung on to
the acoustics of his voice with the fingernails of my
attention. As long as my fingernails dug, I could hold onto
the idea web he wove. For example, Smil says that ammonia
synthesis was the most important invention of the last century
because it allowed the creation of artificial fertilizer.
Smil calculates that the world would only be able to carry a
maximum population of three billion people if we had to depend
on natural ammonia, which is found mainly in organic materials
such as bird guano. Smil has written 19 books. I bought the
one immodestly entitled Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the
Biosphere and Civilization. In some 200 comprehensive pages,
Smil makes the vast bulk of science and technology
comprehensible. Without dumbing down or talking down, he
covers energy, chemistry, plate tectonics, structure &
function, locomotion, circulation (dot, dot, dot). There is a
stunning (iso-blood-flow?) map of the human circulatory
system. There's a history of agriculture, a history of sail,
a six-panel illustration of the evolution of the blast
furnace, and an eight-panel picture history of the telephone.
I got Smil to autograph my copy of his book. "Science is a
big relay race," he says. "Sometimes somebody gets lucky
enough to cross some imaginary line and win a Nobel Prize or
something." I imagined Vaclav Smil with batons stacked in his
arms like cordwood, looking for as many willing runners as he
could find.
Musical Peak #1: When Nadia Cole walked up to the grand piano
on stage she was so beautiful and so poised that I whispered
to the person sitting next to me, "She doesn't have to play a
note." Then she dove into a Liszt piece of super-human
complexity with such skill and passion that I forgot to
breathe. Then she played another, even more transformative.
An instant later the entire not-easily-impressed TED crowd was
on its feet.
Musical Peak #2: Natalie MacMaster is descended from
generations of Cape Breton Scots musicians. Her mother is
from a dancing family and her father comes down a line of
fiddlers. MacMaster says that since Cape Breton musicians
hold no competitions, the music stays truer to tradition than
even in Scotland, where contests cause an inventiveness based
on oneupsmanship. MacMaster played a remarkably skillful solo
set to close the four days of TED in which she demonstrated
Cape Breton tunes in pure form. But later that night, at
TED's closing party at CityTV headquarters, she and her crack
5-piece band pulled out the stops. They threw tradition to
the Canadian wind, mixing Cape Breton Scots tunes with rock,
flamenco, a dash of rap and a pinch of gospel in a spicy,
chunky, bubbly musical stew. MacMaster expressed fiddling and
dancing genes simultaneously -- she'd jump high and click her
heels in the middle of an arpeggio. In the show-lights and
the fog machine of the CityTV studio, she embodied the
Grateful Dead lyric, "she comes skimming through rays of
violet, she can wade in a drop of dew". I sat in the front
row with an ear-to-ear grin plastered all over my face; it was
wonderful!
The Rest of TED: Picking four "winner" events is unjust to
the other genies and geniuses who presented at TED. But
you're seeing things through *my* eyes. If you want to see it
with your own eyes, you'll have to go to TED2002. So here is
the rest of my patchy pastiche of TED City. If you've never
been to TED, just let it wash over you. If you have, you'll
get it. Here goes:
TED began with "O Canada" sung a capella by the deep-voiced
Torontonian, Simone Denny, while the audience stood. Wurman
quipped that he had to promise Denny a standing ovation to get
her to come.
Then Don Tapscott reminded us that Ronald Coase won the Nobel
Prize for discovering that companies only exist when internal
transactions are cheaper than external ones. (So the next
time you're swimming in the honey of corporate so-called
culture, consider a less viscous environment.) Tapscott said
that today's Internet-based firms were so abstract that,
"There's nothing 'in' to outsource."
Christopher Dewdney, a self-described deep futurist, told us
about his studies of consciousness, "as an amateur observer."
Life, he said, has been on Earth for 4 billion years. Eyes
have been here for 500 million years. Humans (and, arguably,
language) have been here for five million.
Language, says Dewdney, is a prosthesis for transferring
consciousness. I agree, but only if cars are a prosthesis for
gathering food. Then he said that language was, "invented by
our species." Yeah, only if the meaning of 'invent' is
stretched, warped or broken. And if humans have "freed
themselves of the constraints of evolution," as he claims,
then I challenge him to go without air, light, water, food,
parents, companionship, tools.
Dewdney, though seemingly wrong on his face, nevertheless
impressed me as a smart guy. But why is he saying stuff like
that? Are we in terminology-mismatch space, or do he and I
have a deeper, more epistemological disagreement? (TED makes
you want to take words like 'epistemological' out of the
closet, dust 'em off and see if they still fit.)
Steve Mann has raised geek-freakiness to a high art. He was
the original "wearable computer" guy at the MIT Media Lab.
I've seen Steve at several meetings. You can't miss him.
He's the guy with the computer eyepiece duck-taped to his
thick glasses, the bad haircut and the battery pack around his
waist. He takes his computer off when he swims, he says.
Mann showed his documentary, "Shooting Back," an eyes-open
look at surveillance in stores and public places -- and
people's denial of it, captured live on embarass-cam. In
London, Steve says, the police net of surveillance cams and
face recognition software can find any face in a public place
in the city of London in 10 minutes. (To whom, I ask, do we
surrender the power to take our picture?)
Mann says, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions
that are hidden by the answers." Indeed. Mann's
transistorized canvas dares to bare.
Oceanographer Joe MacInnis told a story of a Russian colleague
who surreptitiously slipped him a videotape of a sunk Russian
nuclear submarine (with two reactors and two nuclear warheads)
that was leaking radiation. Joe snuck it out of Russia, and
it appeared on western TV news. He says that there are at
least 5 sunk nuclear subs, 50 warheads and countless barrels
of radioactive waste on the floor of the world's oceans. Do
you remember this story on TV? Neither do I. Maybe it was on
once, but the half-life of TV is a few minutes and the half-
life of plutonium is 24,000 years.
Alex Garden, now 25, grew up craving escape from an abusive
family. He found he could flee into video games. "I grew up
not understanding where the line was between me and the
machine," he said. "When I play, I am part of that world --
there is no other world." Today Garden is the founder of
video game company Relic Entertainment of Vancouver BC. He
tries to talk as fast as he thinks -- but he can't quite do
it. I got the feeling I was seeing his mind through a picket
fence as it sped by. He'll be a great test bed for a thought
transducer some day.
At TED, there are no podiums. You stand all vulnerable in the
middle of the stage and talk. Alex Garden did it. Every
thought he managed to complete was like a hockey goal. We
were all rooting for him. And, by golly, Alex Garden was way
out in front by the end of his period.
Robert Young Pelton wrote a book called The World's Most
Dangerous Places. He told stories of war on TV that you can't
see on TV. He told of the drug war in Colombia, and how
government generals and rebels alike pose even as they fight.
"The future of war is entertainment," he said. Young Pelton
says that if we leave it up to career journalists, we'll
always get the easy-to-do story instead of the real one. And
then he told a story of being in the middle of a battle on
Kosovo, calling one TV network that said, "It's OK we already
have somebody covering that region," and another one that
said, "Nobody's here to take your story. Why don't you fax it
in and we'll look at it in the morning."
Later he told another story (in the lobby, to me and three or
four others) about how ABC begged him to rescue Ted Koppel
from a hostage situation in Cambodia. He finally did it after
CBS couldn't find anybody else who could. When he got there,
Ted Koppel complained about the small twin-engine plane that
Young Pelton used to airlift him to safety. And ABC didn't
pay him for over a year. Maybe Young Pelton is a liar -- I
never heard of him before, and I don't know his work. If he's
lying, he's an amazing storyteller with a convincing way of
weaving known facts and personal events into plausible
narrative. If he's telling the truth, it is unbelievable that
he's not dead. Either way, he is remuckingfarkable.
Keith Bellows sees the future of travel, and to him it is so
crowded that nobody goes there anymore. He showed a Machu
Pichu nightmare with crowds, trams, fast food places and
souvenir stands. " . . . and when the Chinese start to travel
. . ." he said. Indeed, more of the world's people are
joining the middle class, and they all like to travel.
Anybody who's been following the development of the Mexican
Caribbean (south of Cancun) knows he's right. The solutions,
to Bellows, include theme-park-like travelariums, where people
can have the experience without over-running the world's
sacred and beautiful places. And they include time drugs --
drugs like time-plus that cause time to stretch out (so people
can experience a week's vacation in a day, allowing great
places to accommodate seven times more people). Then there's
time-minus for the crowded plane ride home.
So that, approximately, was Day One of TED. The TEDsters
adjourned to the lobby of the theatre to meet each other and
feast on goose sausage, crab cakes, bisonburgers and ice wine.
Don McKellar is a Canadian actor. I only partly "got" him.
He gave a mildly amusing shtick about his fan's websites,
which they populate with Don McKellar content, including,
"things they should rightfully say behind my back." He spoke
of toying with his fans, writing them things pseudononymously
to start new rumors. This "fame because I'm famous" thing
seems flat to me -- where's the beef?
Astrophysicist Barth Nettlefield delivered a meaty talk. He's
reached fifteen billion light-years back through space and
time to measure the temperature of the Big Bang to within a
third of a degree. He had pictures! (This is a direct
extension of the work of Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias.)
Nettlefield's explanation of the Doppler effect was amusing
(fire engines look redder coming towards you and greener going
away) but his conclusion from his measurements, that the
universe was flat, left me with a vast empty timeless feeling.
I was impressed with famous film director Norman Jewison. He
paced back and forth, and spoke passionately. Two other
TEDsters commented to me that they were disappointed with
Jewison's presentation. I disagreed at the time, but now I
can't remember why.
I remembered Atom Egoyan's presentation but I had trouble
remembering his name. (I have an excuse. I'm from the United
States.) He observed that digitization has erased the
material nature (and the potential scarcity) of video. Now
since images are not 'on film', "It's not really a graven
image anymore," he says. So you can shoot and shoot and not
waste anything, he says. He showed some video his son shot --
it was energetic, disorganized, with the attention span of a
young child, and completely memorable. It had a sense of
humor, too; another kid with a video camera and Egoyan's kid
went lens to lens in a humorous moment reminiscent of the
Three Stooges.
Paul Hoffert proved Faith Popcorn wrong -- new tech is not
about 'cocooning'. Hoffert was part of a community networking
study that put people who were physically in the same
neighborhood on the same network. Suddenly people recognized
their neighbors three times more often, and neighbors invited
each other into their homes 50% more. The neighbornet buzzed
about baby sitters, good mechanics and rip-off repairs, and
how to get the town to fix that darn pothole. He said that
every hour on-line for this kind of network was cross-elastic
with TV. Then Hoffert invited singer Aura out. He played
vibes while Aura sang some skillful scat.
Sci-fi author William Gibson must be about seven and a half
feet tall. He gave me a disorienting perspective, like the
vertigo I get when I look up at a tall building. He stood in
the middle of the stage and looked up at the lights as he
talked, as if he were reading his speech from the sky. He said
that he didn't use the Internet much because it was orthogonal
to his writing. He pronounced it, "ortho-GOAN-al" as if he
had read the word but never heard it pronounced. He was far,
far, far out.
Sandra Witelson was a blast from my past. I used to be a
brain scientist like her. I read her work in graduate school.
She presented her discovery that Albert Einstein's parietal
lobes were 15% wider than they should have been. (The
pathologist who autopsied Einstein 40 years ago had kept his
brain in a jar until he found the right scientist (Witelson)
to pass the baton to.) Then she showed a clip from the TV
program Chicago Hope, which had ripped the story off. Yeah,
Chicago Hope stole the Einstein's brain story right down to
the short dark-haired female neuroscientist -- without so much
as a Witelson interview. Royalty? Fuggedaboudit! Witelson
had no trace of bitterness as she recounted this. More power
to her. But I was pissed. Besides, ER's a much better show.
Newsman Arthur Kent had to keep his video camera hidden when
he visited Afghanistan. He showed footage -- that you can't
see on TV -- of a bombed out culture, a dictatorial Taliban
that does not care about the country's infrastructure or the
people's well-being, and a people's will to learn and
communicate despite dictatorial repression and obscene
conditions. "A culture that can't afford to know what's going
on in the rest of the world is doomed to fail," he said. That
chicken roosts pretty close to home, I'd say. Eh, CNN? ABC?
CBS? NBC?
And that, approximately, was Day Two of TED. We adjourned to
The Rosewater Supper Club, a delightfully swanky restaurant,
clearly designed by somebody from the "How Buildings Learn"
school. The food was delicious, but the place was so noisy
with enthusiastic TED conversation that I couldn't talk to
anybody. I tried to tell Richard Saul Wurman about the fiber
revolution in Canada -- his response, "Not in my lifetime,"
floored me. Does he expect to be dead in five years? Gosh, I
hope not.
Day Three featured Smil, Galdikas and Cole -- see above.
Firoz "Fuel Cell" Razul, the founder of Ballard Power Systems,
spoke. The concept of the fuel cell has been around for 160
years -- longer than the battery (140 years) or the internal
combustion engine (110 years), he says. Fuel cells -- if you
haven't heard of them yet -- generate absolutely clean power
by a process involving hydrogen, oxygen and water. Talk about
disruptive technology! Today fuel cells costs are beginning
to come within striking range of other power technologies (in
terms of cost and compactness), and the first fuel cell
powered vehicles are in beta-test. Razul points out that
other values besides bang-for-buck could put fuel cells into
the marketplace sooner than market analysts expect -- he
points out that people are perfectly willing to pay 400% more
for a Ford Navigator (versus a Ford F-100 pick-up) for the
same technology. I'd gladly pay a premium to do my part at
getting U.S. foreign policy unstuck from the oil patch.
When Anne Golden was introduced as president of the Toronto
Chapter of the United Way, I said, "Oh no, institutionalized
charity!" and I put my head in my hands. But I was pleasantly
surprised -- she gave a perceptive talk about the cost of
sprawl, building transit-friendly communities, and keeping a
city's regional economy vital. The Toronto region has many
municipal entities, each with its own government, but it
functions as a single economy, she said. Well, duh. But as
she talked about the new Toronto regional federation, I
thought of the New York City region that I live in and of the
stupid feud between the governor of New Jersey and the
governor of New York over the Port Authority. I fantasized
about what the NY/NJ waterfront could look like in the hands
of green architects and entrepreneurial environmentalists. I
thought of the silly little fiefdom towns of New Jersey like
Garwood and Fanwood -- each with their police chief and tax
collector and garbage contract. I thought, "Where is the New
York City region's Anne Golden?"
Garth Drabinsky's talk made me furious. He was the only TED
presenter who read his talk. Worse, the speech was a whiny
plea for government support for the arts. He seemed to want
guaranteed incomes for artists, and he never addressed the
issue of who decides who's good. Maybe Richard or Moses knows
a different person -- but the guy I saw on stage at TED is a
flaming asshole. (No, I won't apologize. I mean it.)
The first time I heard Frank Gehry speak, at TED in 1996, I
didn't know him from Adam. He showed pictures of an Italian
hill town and pictures of a shopping center he designed to
resemble it. I was impressed at the way he had transplanted
the sense of walkability and discovery. Last week at TED,
Gehry showed his design for Paul Allen's Experience Music
Project in Seattle. Allen asked for 'swoopy' but I think
Gehry delivered 'lumpy'. I'll reserve judgement until I see
the actual building. Gehry then spoke of a cancer-care
building he designed in memory of a long-time friend who died
of cancer. One night in the middle of designing it he dreamed
that his dead friend told him, "Too much architecture." In
the morning he re-drew it -- the building now is simple and
elegant with bold roof lines. It's a telling story.
There were three more speakers before the end of the third day
of TED. But my mind had filled up. I knew I should stay, I
knew I'd find value in at least one of the three speakers if I
stayed, but I couldn't listen anymore. I missed hearing
architect Moshe Safdie -- he seemed like a sweet person in the
lobby. And I missed Douglas Cardinal.
I talked to Cardinal later that evening, and he was kind
enough to recount the story he told. Cardinal, a Native
American from the plains of Alberta, was tapped to design the
National Museum of the American Indian on the Washington DC
mall. He went to the elders of his tribe for council, and
designed from the advice his elders provided. Then the
politicians of Washington toyed with, backed away from,
renegotiated, reversed, stole and rethought Cardinal's work,
as they've done with Native American property for two
centuries. I do not know the whole story. I have not seen
Douglas Cardinal's work, nor have I seen his presentation, but
I know him to be a centered and a wise man, and I count myself
as his friend. I heard later that the TEDster crowd gave
Cardinal a rare standing O.
The last day of TED featured physicist Art McDonald and his
neutrino observatory 2 kilometers down in the earth, French
Canadian astronaut Julie Payette (who just returned to Earth a
few weeks ago), privacy advocate Austin Hill, and singer-
songwriter Bruce Cockburn. Designer Bill Buxton reminded us
that there's more than one future, and that design is the
process of choosing the future we want, and that an
engineering education is not enough. I'm giving all of these
people, indeed all four days of TED, short shrift. Hey, I've
been writing this 'summary' for three days, and I *do* have a
couple of other things to do.
I wanted to end my recounting of TED City with the story of
Professor Judy Anderson of the University of Manitoba. She's
an anatomist who enjoys studying how parts work together to
make a whole. She muses over biology's puzzles, for example,
how muscle repairs itself when it is cut. One day, in her
spare time, she went to a lecture on liver disease, and she
learned that when the liver shears against itself, it releases
nitric oxide, and that this triggers manufacture of hepatic
growth factor which causes new liver tissue to grow. She
realized that muscle is also subject to shear -- she went back
to her laboratory and in short order showed that muscle shear
releases nitric oxide, and that this causes release of the
very same growth hormone, which causes new muscle cells to
grow.
Anderson's was a story of facts, some old and some new, that
clicked together in a new, surprising, productive, original
way. It's the story of TED. And you can't see that on TV.
-------
June 26-27, 2000. New York City. Entertainment Internet
2000. I'll be on a panel with some of my favorite fiber and
bandwidth companies. The website is thin, but there's info
there -- http://www.imn.org/2000/a245 or call 212-336-6000.
September 13-15, 2000. Lake Tahoe CA. TELECOSM. Featuring
George Gilder, Clayton Christensen, yours truly, and a cast of
geniuses, troublemakers, and people who got rich by listening
to George. This thing sells out, folks -- a word to the SMART.
http://www.forbes.com/conf/SSL/Telecosm2000/register.htm
-------
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Copyright 2000 by David S. Isenberg
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