Mike Ball

We are all packed (except for necessities) and I’m at loose ends for the next few days, so I’ve been catching up on TedTalks. I’ve mentioned a few of them here before.

Here’s one I especially like: Norman Foster: Building on the green agenda.

I have a few special reasons for liking it. First, it explains how architecture is solving the problems of living, not just making beautiful things. Second, it talks about Buckminster Fuller, who is one of the great minds of the 20th century and a personal hero of mine. Finally it explains just how computers are letting architectures build much more efficient buildings.

The kind of computing he’s talking about is called High Performance Technical Computing (HPC), and although the hardware is getting steadily cheaper, is still very hard to write the programs. When I decided to join MicroSoft in 2006, it was because they told me that we could set up a group to make writing HPC programs much easier. Then MS decided that they weren’t going to do it, because there wasn’t a big enough market. I still think they blew it. Finally, I left.

Enjoy the video. If you really like it, subscribe to the podcast and watch more of them.

A couple of years ago I read a great book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics. It was a great book, applying economic principals in day-to-day situations. I heartily recommend it. This posting was inspired by a video of a talk by Steven Levitt on a topic from the book. One of them lived with a crack-dealing gang, and even got them to show him their books. The business turned out to be a lot more like MacDonalds than like the media depictions. Except, of course, for the very high mortality…

Oh, the talk contains quotes from the gang members. It’s definitely R-rated

Yreka (Why-ree-ka) is a small town about 25 miles South of the Oregon border. The name is said to come from the local native language and means “great white mountain”. The picture shows why.

We really don’t know much about the town, though we expect to learn more, but just driving by makes it look interesting. As you approach from the south, you encounter a barn advertising the State of Jefferson. Then you come to a statue of a cow (Moo-donna) in the middle of the field. It turns out that it was created by a local artist, Ralph Starritt. We drove by his shop and looked for a moment, but didn’t have time to explore properly.

As you leave town, you encounter a dragon to the right of the road. There’s no easy way to stop and look closely, but it’s an impressive bit of work. I wish we knew who made this one.

As I said in the last post, we’ve just acquired a house in Southern Oregon. At the moment we have a contractor doing some repairs before we move in. We’re planning on moving sometime during the first couple of weeks in June.

We set out to buy a house in Ashland, which is a small university town famous for its Shakespeare Festival. We’ve visited it often, and last summer we decided to retire there. We looked at quite a few houses in Ashland, which is built along the side of a mountain, but all of the nice houses had lots of stairs, which our bodies don’t like much anymore. Also, They all seemed to be really close together compared to what we’ve become used to. We expanded our search, and found a house on two acres in rolling hills that seem to fit well. It’s also only 5 miles from downtown Ashland, and the trip is a fast one.

I think we are going to like it there. The house has great views, but of a different kind than we found in Ashland. The area is a mix of farming, mostly pear orchards, and residents on bits carved out of farms.

I know I should have been keeping this up to date, and there really is lots to report on (we now own a house in Oregon), but I’ve just seen a talk and demonstration that really inspired me. Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab has been experimenting with new ways to play music, and closes with a demo of a man with cerebral palsy playing his own composition. His talk also features some amazing facts about how people interact with music and a clip of Yo Yo Ma playing the hyper-cello! Just watch it.

Oh, and would you believe a robot opera?

I just saw a wonderful talk by a fellow named Dave Eggers. He’s set up projects to get successful adults working one on one with school kids. Check out the talk or his website. It’s well worth the time.

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by languages, both natural and artificial. The book Biting The Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little, was written by a young lady with a similar interest. It’s a little full of oddities for the sake of oddities, but it does a good job of expressing the fascination and delights of languages. I recommend it to anyone. If it piques your interest, and you want to learn more, check out The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter. He also did a good lecture series for The Teaching Company, Story of Human Language

One thing bothers me about these books. The love of language leads the authors to a conservationist’s view of rare languages. Odd tribal languages must be preserved at all costs, and the only way to do that is to teach them to the children and insist that they use them. To me, this is converting the tribe into a museum exhibit, and deliberately making it more difficult for them to communicate with the world at large. Elders may support this as a way to keep the children down on the farm, but I doubt that the children would agree. Given the choice, I suspect that most of the children would choose a more common and widely used language. To be fair, this attitude is not as strong in Little’s book as in McWhorter’s, and I may be making false assumptions about her attitude.

Who would have thought that retirement would be so busy? I somehow thought that I’d have lots of time and would be looking for new projects. The trouble is; I’ve been saving up things to do and things to read, and there just always seems to be more to do. Reading in particular is taking a lot of time. With the “ripening” cataracts, reading had gotten downright painful. Now one eye is fixed, and the other isn’t really so bad, so I can read again. I’m picking up all of the books that I didn’t finish and working my way through them. And that doesn’t mention the stack of journals and papers sitting by my desk.

But back to Ashland. One thing we are doing is looking for a place to enjoy our retirement, and Silicon Valley is not it. The Valley is a great place for work, partly because it’s full of smart, active, people. Note that “full of people”. Though there’s a lot going on here, getting to where it’s happening is almost always a long and difficult journey. I don’t want to travel to Berkeley to see a play! So we’ve decided that Ashland is a good compromise, having enough smart, active people to be interesting, but not enough to cause problems. This last week we took a trip there to look for a house and check out the winter weather.
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Just a quick note.

We are in Ashland this week, checking out the weather and looking at real estate. The internet connection I have is painfully slow, so I’ll write about it when I get back.

In the last post there was a line “A lot of people I didn’t like”. This was the exact opposite of my intent. The “didn’t” was an edit error from the next sentence. It crept in when I was inserting the sentence in question.

My sincere apologies to anyone who read this before I fixed it.