Visions of potential blog posts percolate giddily up to the frothing top of my addled consciousness during the course of the day as I observe, muse over, and interact with the world. And still, every time I set myself down to write, the very thought of immortalizing, irredeemably and irrevocably, my follies of thought on this omniscient beast that is the web is enough to send me back into a life of happy, silent Internet anonymity. But oh, even then, the web is a repository--no, a bedful of fossilized dinosaur tracks--of gestures and signals (to crib off Steve Gillmor's lexicon)--what you click, what you don't, what you comment on, where you scroll, where you stop a piece of media--all this is insight into some fragment of your humanity or inhumanity (and your consumerist consumption patterns).
But as I sit to write my first actual post since the blog christening, I've decided that I might as well make this one as generous on addle-headedness but genuine as one can possibly be. A PayPal alum once said at a panel (and I paraphrase and embellish) the world is perhaps best served by "reformed perfectionists": poor sods who once ran themselves up the wall such that everything in the universe is immaculate, impeccable; checked into reality-check rehab, and then now swiftly appreciate the value of good effort and some acceptable degree of favorable result. It is not a life of mediocrity, it is a life of sanity ("be gentle with yourself, for you are a child of the universe no less than the trees or the stars", Lizzie reminds me of the old refrain from the Desiderata). The world is perhaps best run by those who know where perfection stands and the value of approaching it sanely and untyrannically.
This is a catch-up post. Skimming through very quickly everything I had hoped to blog about but didn't. And so with fond apologies, I begin.
1) Chinese New Year
It's a Pig Year, one to certainly make the best of. Its first weekend was spent in the company of good, good friends; quality human beings.
Here is the wonderful crew at Pacifica battling the Pacific winds beating down our ears as we descend the stony stair into a breathtaking view:
And the day after, a spontaneous rugged drive through the woods that eventually spat my friend Megan and I into Half Moon Bay:
More photos from the spontaneous beach trip here.2) Agents of change
One of the benefits of living at the periphery of the Stanford bubble is the opportunity to still be a part of some subset of the intellectual going-ons; one such opportunity arrived a few weeks ago at a provocative panel on entrepreneurship and its role in solving world problems. Unlike most panels (diplomatic and frustratingly civil), an interesting collision of opinions between Prof. Chip Blacker (Stanford University) and K.R. Sridhar (Bloom Energy) reminded me, very resonantly, of my own indecisions as to future allegiances to particular agents of change.
I am acquainted with the two worlds that Blacker and Sridhar represent--public policy, and entrepreneurship respectively. Blacker argues for the importance of public policy and structural change in governments in order to enact real, far-reaching, and lasting change. Even in the presence of entrepreneurs who innovate solutions around pain points, accountable and effective governments must exist to swiftly enforce the basic inviolable parameters of a functioning society (for instance, property rights) such that solutions aren't subverted by bad actors and bad behavior. Sridhar, on the other hand, sees entrepreneurial thinking from the grassroots as the ultimate empowering agent of change--decentralized, self-directed, not beholden to the whims and corruption of an intractable centralized bureaucracy. The fact of the matter is, in a system of multiple stakeholders, it takes the mobilization of all the different appendages of government and civil society to create enduring change (and arguably, the way of the Aristotelian mean is the perennial cop-out in any debate. Nonetheless, Jeff Koseff, in the same panel, brought up a real-world example as a testament to the mean--it is the limitations of both worlds that have compelled Muhammad Yunus--the founder of the developing world's entrepreneurial incubator Grameen Bank and Nobel laureate--to go into government). The question is, for a global citizen trying to make informed and discerning decisions about where one wants to be down the road in life, one simply has to pick one of these many, limited, appendages to call one's own. To pick the tool of choice with which to approach the problem of creating change. Pick your poison/ploughshare.
The panel is very much a worthwhile listen--check it out here. The exchange between Blacker and Sridhar happens somewhere in the middle: I recommend starting at minute 38:37 for context till the somewhat unresolved end of that exchange at 47:37.
3) "Drinking the Kool-Aid" (as they say around Silicon Valley) of New Media
Since I have the good fortune of working in the world of new media, I run into a remarkable selection of good media content (podcasts and notably, video) online. I've decided to start putting some of that good embeddable video content into a personal bucket--hence the VodPod video widget on the left panel of this blog. The first two in the bucket are two recent personal favorites:
i) Hans Rosling's hugely illuminating and riveting presentation at the TED conference on the importance of slicing, parsing, communicating, and presenting data in a compelling way; in this case, data on international development.
ii) Charlie Rose interviewing photographer Taryn Simon (watch from minute 11:40) on her latest project on hidden sights in the United States. "Hidden Sights" brings into focus very surprising and intriguing snapshots of our time (and I wish I were in NY to attend the exhibition at the Whitney).
More specifically, I was very much taken by the well-deliberated coherence that frames Ms. Simon's approach to photography. Among other memorable comments, she asserts, quite poignantly, that she "is not invested in risking my (her) life" when asked about whether she is interested in war journalism. "There needs to be an agreement," she affirms. Her work is defined by collaboration and deep calculation, not spontaneous "sneaking" of images (even if they are penetrating insights into raw human condition). One interesting point to note nonetheless is that although Ms. Simon's approach is, first and foremost, purely aesthetical, through the methodical and objective lens of art (as opposed to the subjective realm of a prescribed political agenda), her oeuvre inadvertently takes on implicit sociopolitical commentary. It appears that there are multiple pathways to actions and outcomes that fall under what I simply call "saving the world", even when unintended. Perhaps it is the nature of all good art to provoke (Ms. Simon insists on seducing as the motivation). And all the best acts of provocation are done when they compel us to reflect on the state of the world around us, beneath the aesthetics.
To complete the Kool-Aid, here are two worthy videoblogging journalistic efforts to look into:
Alive in Baghdad and The American Microphone.
Bon alors, this weekend, I hope to repay in kind, here in rather uncharacteristically saturnine northern California, the inimitable hospitality that a few good friends proffered me when I visited (cold and snowing) Chicago. That is, if I can get my body back in working order after a recalcitrant bug.
And if they deem me tour guide, I may just have to let the techie humor loose and show them a piece of architecture I nicknamed the "sinc function house", which I ran into while walking around the edges of campus:
