Who Has Time For This?

Last week my son and I read a great book from Andrew Clement's Jake Drake series titled Know-It-All about a school science fair. A know-it-all scares his classmates away from the competition by touting his great work -- an expensive project really put together by his father. But the hero Jake Drake persists on his science project, working diligently and quietly. Of course I expected Jake to win the science fair (hey, this is a kids' book), but Clements throws us for a loop. Jake places second, the know-it-all places third, and first prize goes to a kid who had tested the impact of sunlight on grasshopper eggs over 3 months, which means he had started his experiment months before the science fair was even announced. Jake ended up feeling okay about losing, because the winner really deserved it.

Slide 18 is a prettied up version of my Internet Law that shows why internet investing is the most capital efficient opportunity in venture capital. 

Since I last blogged about the international 3rd place medalist a capella chorus Voices in Harmony, I’ve so enjoyed their performances that I went ahead and joined the chorus as a performing lead singer. To hear why, come out for our annual spring show, 7:30pm May 30 at the Center for Performing Arts in San Jose. Two awesome quartets -- Boyz Nite Out and Metropolis -- will perform with us. General admission tickets are available for only $12 at www.VIHchorus.org or by calling at 1.877.684.3844. I promise you a great time!

I lunched today with PR agent extraordinaire Abigail Johnson, who gave me great tips for my upcoming trip to Russia. I reciprocated with a lesson I learned from a recent exercise in amateur PR.

I had wanted to tell the world about an exciting development at MashLogic -- a startup we're incubating at Bessemer -- so I blogged about it. Having posted the article, I congratulated myself on a job well done. But weeks later I noticed a blog post titled Why I Uninstalled MashLogic from a user (Zoli Erdos) spooked by privacy concerns. Our mission at MashLogic centers on user empowerment and privacy, so this negative post might have easily erupted into a contagious meme on the web -- a potentially fatal backlash against our young product.

Fortunately, though, MashLogic's architect and co-founder Ranjit Padmanabhan (photo right) had been combing the blogosphere, so minutes after Zoli posted, Ranjit responded with a very open acknowledgment of the issue, a full explanation of our privacy policy, why we think our approach is right for users, and what we're doing to improve it. Ranjit showed genuine appreciation for the feedback. Zoli's response: "Kudos to you guys for recognizing the issue :-)" and then he updated his blog post with a commendation of MashLogic for the immediate response.

The conclusion here is probably obvious and intuitive to some readers, but it may bear elaboration for those among us saddled with more outdated expectations of the PR process...

As everyone knows, PR agencies cultivate relationships with journalists and editors who are in a position to generate product awareness among their readers and viewers. In a world where most people were reading a concentrated set of newspapers and magazines, these agency relationships -- combined with diligent follow-through to address the journalists' questions -- promised significant value to companies who wish to get their message out. Plant the story in a few key chokepoints, and everyone would read it more or less as pitched to the media outlets.

But in today's world, it's not enough to hit the major news sources. For every story printed in the New York Times, hundreds or thousands of reader comments, blogs, emails, and tweets react to the story. Indeed, user-generated content now dominates professional content in both volume and mindshare, and so the tenor of user-generated commentary is far more important to the agency's client than the tenor of the original article.

For almost all agencies, though, favorable press hits represent the end of the PR process, not the beginning. But favorable press hits themselves should not be the metric of success. Rather, PR firms today should document an intense followup in the two or three days following press hits to actively engage the market through comment pages, blogs and Twitter.

Specifically, a great PR firm should help its client companies address the inevitable questions and reactions that skeptical readers should and do express, and to do so quickly while the public reaction is still forming through social echoes of the story. Responding to a "backlash" a week later is much more difficult than pre-empting the backlash in the first place.

Really I'm just talking about listening to customers, giving them straight answers, and doing it quickly. In today's transparent world, spin doesn't work. Questions must be addressed with humility and honesty (just as Amazon did yesterday); today more than ever, a great PR firm must help its clients respond fast, without defensive thinking.

I hope Abigail appreciated the advice as much as I appreciated her pointers to the Czar's palaces near St. Petersburg. I do hope to see her agency and others adapting to the dynamic, transparent PR requirements of social media.

Congrats to the Smule team on launching Leaf Trombone World Stage!

Labels: leaftrombone, rhettandlink, smule, teaservideo

I didn't mean to become carless -- it just kind of happened.

The 2004 Mercedes E500 has a poor track record for quality, so a week before the warranty expired on mine, I sold it. I couldn't figure out what to buy, and there are so many cars to test drive. (Who Has Time For This?)  That was 14 months ago.

It hasn't been so bad, really. I hitch rides with my wife and my colleagues, and sometimes I bike to work. I borrow my friend's car when he's away on travel, and I joined ZipCar. And when I'm not traveling for a whole month, I pay Hertz $600 to rent an Audi, BMW, or Infiniti .For regular customers like me, Farshid at Hertz Palo Alto drops off and picks up the car and -- here's the best part -- It turns out that renting is actually cheaper than either buying or leasing.


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Here's why it works for me (and maybe for you): my wife drives an old Odyseey minivan (winner of the WhoHas award), for which the liability insurance has got to be cheaper than for any other car. But still the policy covers my liability for rentals up to one month, and AmEx covers any damage to the rental car (as I now know first hand). I don't have to pay for insurance, registration, sales tax, maintenance, depreciation, cost of capital or even car washing. (I still pay for gas, but less than before, thanks to BillShrink.) Even if I rent the car 7 or 8 months a year, it's still way cheaper than owning the same luxury car, and I get to feel just a tiny bit greener.

So when the hell are you going to buy your own car? they ask me at work as I bum rides home.  Well, I did put down a deposit on a Fisker Karma, so that pretty much guarantees I won't own a car any time soon!

On Friday Twitter was abuzz about GoodMail's new CertifiedVideo service.

For those who missed my post on Why I Invested in GoodMail, GoodMail shifts the onus and cost of email security from individuals like us to the commercial senders who have the budget and motivation to pay for authentication, cryptography, scanning, and monitoring. And the need for trusted email has never been higher, as scammers exploit the economic crisis to deploy phshing attacks of unprecedented sophistication. GoodMail already delivers billions of Certified Emails every month (look for the blue ribbon icon in your inbox to spot the authenticated, unphishy messages).

GoodMail's latest service enables senders to present full playback video inside email with cryptographic proof that the video is safe and the source is trusted. According to yesterday's Wall Street Journal, CertifiedVideo opens up for media companies and permission-based marketers a compelling new channel that promises much higher engagement and response rates. Studies show users 4X as likely to play video that is embedded rather than linked to. That's why the NY Times, Turner, Fox, NBC, Target and LiveNation are already on board.

Play ABC News segment:

<-- Previous TED Post

40-year-old Ray Zahab talked about his recent record-breaking 33-day expedition to the South Pole. Along the way he stayed online and in touch with kids around the world along the way. His previous adventure was running 110 miles through the Sahara Desert. The punchline is that 5 years ago he was sedentary, smoking a pack a day.

Score: 6 (out of 10) Balloons


Golan Levin generates art from images and voices. Foofy.

Score: 3 Balloons


Nina Jablonski delivered a good talk on the evolution of skin pigmentations. It's clear why pigmented skin protects equatorial populations, but I hadn't known why Eurasians evolved lighter skins during the three hominid migrations out of Africa (once Neanderthal, twice homo sapiens). Apparently less pigmented skin is better able to generate Vitamin D when needed, which preserves bone integrity and protects us from the kinds of radiation that penetrates at higher latitudes. So not only is it unhealthful for light skinned people to live in tropical climates, but there are also risks for dark skinned people who live far from the equator.

Score: 7 Balloons


Arthur Benjamin is a math professor who performs mathemagics on the side. (Below is a prior demonstration at TED.) Instead of performing mental tricks this year, Art delivered an intriguing message about math education in the US:

Instead of building up to calculus as the epitome of math education, we should instead sequence our lessons so that every high school graduate understands statistics and probability. Calculus is nice for scientists to know, but statistics inform most complex decisions that people have to make both at work and at home. Undoubtedly, Benjamin is right that most people don't understand simple concepts like expected value, which perhaps explains the success of lotteries and casinos.

Score: 8 Balloons


Hans Rosling came back to TED with his compelling data visualization techniques, using them to illustrate drivers of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. (Instead of a laser pointer he used a chair and pole.)

Score: 8 Balloons


Margeret Wertheim is a writer of science history who, together with her sister, crocheted a coral reef. The reef became a surprise hit on the museum circuit, as 30 to 40 volunteer crocheters attracted through the web added to the now extensive reef. Many TEDsters seemed to think this was all cool for the sole reason that coral reefs are so important and yet endangered. Frankly I thought the whole thing was a silly waste of time until Margeret explained the relationship between coral reefs and crochet...

In 1997 Dr. Daina Tamina at Cornell discovered that thanks to its undulating curved surfaces, crochet is the only straight-forward way to model hyperbolic structures. Hyperbolic surfaces exhibit non-Euclidean and even non-Lobochevskian geometries. Unlike Euclidean flat surfaces and Lobachevskian globes, on a hyperbolic surface there are infinity lines to be drawn through any given point that are parallel to an external line. You can see this on a crocheted fabric, where multiple contour lines can run through a single point.

Score: 9 Balloons


Jennifer Mather gave a talk on octopus intelligence. She set forth parameters of intelligence and documented anecdotal evidence of octopus intelligence, such as "playing" with a floating object. Unfortunately she did so with no scientific rigor, explaining that somehow the experimental method doesn't work in this context. Once she convinced herself that octopi have personalities, she posed the profound question:

"Will they crawl out of the ocean and compete with us? No, that's physiologically impossible."

Oy, who has time for this?


Score: 1 Balloon


Nalini Nadkarni loves and studies the forest canopy. She talked about epiphytes and other organisms that have adapted to this ecosystem. To staff one of her research projects involving the categorization of different mosses, she recruited prisoners, who have the time, the room, and the interest to study mosses (fortunately they didn't need any sharp tools to do the work). Now she's using them to raise the endangered Oregon Spotted Frog, "in captivity" of course. To promote the field, Nalini's team collected hundreds of old Barbie dolls and converted them into Treetop Barbie, to get girls excited about the field. Lots of TED points here for inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Score: 7 Balloons


Friday's highlight was certainly Bonnie Brassler from Princeton. She and her grad students have discovered that bacteria communicate extensively, and she explained how and why they do it. She began her talk by pointing out that 90% of the cells in a human being -- and 99% of the genes -- are bacterial, so we ought to pay attention to the critters.

Four years ago Hawaiian researchers discovered a squid in shallow waters that uses luminescent bacteria to counteract its shadow in order to hide itself from predators. It has two lobes full of luminescent bacteria that glow only at night when it's awake and hunting, and just enough of the lobes are exposed downward to offset the right amount of moonlight and starlight of the particular evening. What an amazing adaptation.

But a curious property of the squid caught Bassler's attention. The squid can essentially turn the light on and off (no dimming), so the lobes glow only at night. What makes the bacteria all start and stop glowing at once?

Bassler's team discovered a mechanism in the bacteria -- and subsequently in all bacteria -- that allows them to communicate. Specifically, each bacteria emits a stream of enzymes for which it also has a receptor. The receptor acts like a switch in the bacteria, so that when the enzyme reaches a certain density in the solution around the bacteria, something inside the bacteria responds, perhaps by starting to glow. Therefore the bacteria doesn't start to glow until there is a sufficient concentration of bacteria around it. And when it starts to glow, it also accelerates its enzyme emission so that all the bacteria in the colony get the signal at roughly the same time. The squid flushes 95% of the bacteria each morning, which turns off the light, and during the day the colony grows until it reaches critical mass at night.

This mechanism explains how bacterial infections are able to overcome our immune defenses. They enter our bodies in a slow-growing relatively harmless state, and only after amassing a sizable cluster of agents do they suddenly, simultaneously attack.

Bassler also discovered an inter-species communication systems, so that bacteria know when there are other bacteria around outside their species. Essentially there is a universal enzyme that they all emit and receive, so that they can behave differently depending upon the presence of other strains.

With this awareness of bacterial communication networks, Bassler's team is pursuing a novel approach to fighting infection. Instead of trying to kill the cells one at a time, which often leads to resistance, we can develop molecules that bind to the communication enzyme, immediately shutting down the attack. It's like turning off the light in the squid.

Beautiful!

Score: 10 Balloons

<== Previous TED Post Next Ted Post ==> Talking Bacteria


I awoke early on Thursday to ensure I wouldn't miss the first speaker, Dr. Oliver Sacks. Sacks wrote the great study of neural disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, as well as Awakenings (adapted to film with Robin Williams). Recently he wrote Musicophilia, documenting music-related brain disorders that yield a glimpse of how the brain understands and creates music. At TED he talked about the visual hallucinations that plagued many of his older patients. Sacks described the hallucinations in detail, and explained his diagnosis of Charles Bonnie Syndrome, named for the scientist who first observed the incidence of hallucinations in his own grandfather as well as about 10% of people with any kind of sensory impairment (even partial). Part of Sacks' charm is that he respects his patients enough to understand the details of their hallucinations (they tend to be repetitive and often feature staircases and deformed faces), assuring them that despite a tangible neural condition, theyr'e not demented. Sacks lamented that only 10% of people who suffer this syndrome tell anyone for fear of derision.

Sacks ended by disclosing that he himself is partially blind in one eye, and that he himself experiences a mild form of these hallucinations (geometric shapes). Like Jill Bolte Taylor's "stroke of luck", Sacks now has a subject he can study at all times.


Score: 9 (out of 10) Balloons


The other highlight from Thursday was Ed Ulbrich from Digital Domain who has won more than one Oscar for his digital effects. Ulbrich walked us through the story behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button movie, and how his team achieved what everyone had thought was impossible: for the first hour of that film, Benjamin Button is represented by a digitized head imposed upon a different (much shorter) human actor. The head must appear genuinely old, and still capture all the facial gestures, nuances, and actins (cry, sweat, vomit...) performed by the actor Brad Pitt.

When Ulbrich took on the job he had no idea how they would tackle this challenge, but he and his team applied a "stew of solutions" that utterly pulled off the illusion on time and on budget:

1) Animators have conventionally applied radio receptors to the face to track the movement of facial muscles. This generates about a hundred polygons that can be rendered to simulate human expressions. But to render the resolution of a human face without any hint that it is digitized, 100 polygons is not detailed enough. So Ulbrich pioneered the use of a radio-reflective particulate (?), mixing it into Brad Pitt's makeup so that they could track the movement of the entire facial surface, generating 100,000 polygons.

2) With the particulate in place, they recorded the execution of every possible facial gesture one can perform. every twitch of the eyebrow, flare of the nostril, quiver of the lip. On demand, their digital face could now re-produce those gestures.

3) They sculpted and scanned three replicas of Brad Pitt with all the aging that he will show at 60, 70 and 80 years of age. They mapped the surfaces of these scans to the gestures in their database, so now they could render every facial gesture that Brad PItt will present in his senior years.



4) The short actor who played the elderly (er, I mean infantile) Benjamin wore a blue head mask -- sort of a human green screen upon which Digital Brad's face could be inserted.

5) Brad then acted his part, while a computer recorded and identified each and every gesture to render it digitally upon the other actor's head. We watched Brad on one screen acting his part while on the other half of the screen older Digital Brad was duplicating his facial gestures. Obviously Brad Pitt is a very talented actor, whose every expression had to genuinely carry through to his character. They did, and the result was compelling.

I must admit I did see one tiny flaw in the process. Benjamin was saying that due to his condition he might die or might not die while he was still young. In a wonderfully childlike manner, Brad Pitt quickly glanced to the upper left corner of his eye and then forward again -- but it happened so fast that Digital Brad missed it.

This was a great talk that incorporated all three original meanings of TED: Technology, Education and Design.


Score: 10 Balloons


Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the bestseller Eat. Pray. Love. Her talk was well received, so you may wish to watch it, especially if you liked the book. Indeed, she did make me laugh out loud a few times. But the message
-- how to tap into your muse and unleash your creativity -- was sufficiently foofy that it wasn't one of my favorites.



Score: 6 Balloons

Louise Fresco, an international expert on hunger, walked us through the history and economics of bread-making across centuries and cultures.

Score: 4 Balloons


I normally don't expect to like the design-oriented talks, but Jacek Utko was worth watching. Here's a young guy who got the job as "art director" at a tiny struggling newspaper in Poland, and attacked the job with such passion that he transformed the newspaper into an award-winning, fast-growing regional magazine. He started with a re-design of the layout to provoke the interest of readers, much the way web designers do, and compelled the editors to fit their stories into his format. It's a nice story of an underdog's success.

Score: 8 Balloons


Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the Thursday afternoon sessions.

<= Previous TED post Next TED Post =>

TED is just too intense to blog – I can’t keep up. I’ll try to at least keep reporting on the highlights…

But first, some more brushes with celebrity: Paul Simon, Daniel Dennett, Nathan Myhrvold, Meg Ryan.

Wednesday afternoon’s session was titled Reframe. Ben Zander came back to TED to kick off the session, conducting the best rendition ever of Happy Birthday To You. I don’t know if it will make the DVD but if so he’s great to watch -- he always leaves shining eyes.

Tim Berners-Lee thanked the world for uploading documents to his HTML project and asked that we please follow up now by uploading our data. His new vision for the web centers around Linked Data – tables of structured information that can be linked to other tables enabling massive joins. His database in the sky is object-oriented, with a URL identifying each object (person place, etc). Tim led the audience in a chant of “Raw Data Now!” to compel the world (especially the US government) to publish raw data that anyone can access, rather than waiting for completed applications.

Score: 9 (out of 10) Balloons

We heard a funny interlude by Cindy Gallop who complained that hard core pornography is now so easily accessible online that young people have twisted ideas of what most people consider to be normal in bed. So she unveiled her educational site MakeLoveNotPorn.com, debunking myths perpetuated by pornography. Definitely rated R, so I'll leave it at that.

Al Gore delivered a very short talk on climate change -- careful not to rehash old slides. He presented an update on the rate of arctic melting along with other ominous metrics of global warming. The focus of his talk, though, was "clean coal" which Al says is a myth promoted by the coal industry. He played a cartoon commercial developed as part of a shocking campaign to promote clean coal, that Al understandably compared to Joe Camel:

Gore also played the clip of a commercial meant to fight back the coal industry's campaign on clean coal.

Score: 10 Balloons

Tribes author Seth Godin gave a rousing and entertaining talk about leadership, and taking the initiative to activate groups of people around whatever cause that moves you. His basic point is that it’s easy to connect with people on the internet, so lots of micro-communities form.

Having said that let me caution you away from his book Tribes. If you read the paragraph I wrote above, then you get the gist. And if you get the gist, well then you’ve pretty much read the book. At least Seth doesn’t pretend that his conclusions are based on scientific data, so his books are better than Malcolm Gladwell’s.

Score: 6 Balloons

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of InfoSys spoke well about the changes thrusting India's economy into a major world player. Unfortunately, I misplaced my notes today on this and several other lectures!

I may have also lost my notes on MIT Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes' talk but the highlight was unforgettable: a personal, wearable mobile system (cam, phone, battery-powered projector...) that scans the world around you, and in real time projects helpful video on any surface. For example, when you're looking at products in the store (books, paper towels, whatever), it will project information right onto the product such as a green rating, price comparisons, and consumer reviews. Presumably it could also scan the buildings around to tell me who and what is in them. Presumably, it could also "speak" to me through headphones so I can hear private tips such as the name of a person I run into and his/her spouse and kids!

It was an impressive demonstration. Pattie introduced the student behind it, and he evoked a standing ovation.

Score: 9 Balloons

Next we all danced, led by Matt Harding the guy who dances around the world in his famous YouTube videos. He tried to teach us a Bollywood dance, but he’s not really an expert. Chris compared the exercise to “learning science from George Bush.”


The day closed with a strange performance (and really, I mean that in a bad way) by Regina Spektor.

<-- Previous TED Post Next TED Post -->

To help prioritize your viewing of TED talks, I offer a TED score of each 18-minute presenter, ranging from one to ten TED Balloons. If I fail to score a presenter, either I missed the session, I quickly gave up on it and checked my email, or didn’t score it because it wasn’t a full-fledged 18-minute TED Talk. The factors I consider: interest, importance, clarity, entertainment, and the speaker’s personal connection to the content. For example, based on these factors I would have given 10 balloons last year to Jill Bolte Taylor (whom I met yesterday in Google Café) and Ben Zander.

The opening session of TED, called “Reboot,” had a strong lineup…

Next TED post -->

Here I am once again at TED, the fabulous conference (now 25 years old) that attracts some incredible minds to tackle the big issues facing our species. (The celebrities I've seen so far include Al Gore, Larry Page, Forest Whitaker, Tim Berners-Lee, Oliver Sacks, John Doerr, Ben Affleck and Bill Gates.)

Today MashLogic released Mash Feeds, a free service that pushes your links and content to every relevant page on the web.

Repeat traffic is critical to the success of any web site, so most publishers today like to offer an RSS feed -- a stream of content intended to keep the user engaged and coming back. This worked for a while among the early adopter crowd, but most people never use an RSS reader, and those who do often complain of RSS overload as they find themselves overwhelmed by content that seldom gets read.

Mash feeds are an alternate way to syndicate content, pushing it into the browser rather than an RSS reader. Subscribers to your mash feed will get your links with rich callouts embedded into every relevant page they visit. There's no longer any need for them to install, learn and regularly check their RSS readers. It's the simple, ultimate way to engage your audience.

When you install a mash feed on your site (we recommend you put it near the RSS icon, as shown on the right), MashLogic starts indexing the keywords in your RSS feed (it may currently take MashLogic 6 hours to build the complete index). Visitors to your site can now subscribe to your mash feed by clicking on the mash feed icon, which installs a mash in their Firefox or Flock browser. (IE is coming soon, and in the meantime IE users will not see the mash feed icon.) Even if your users never run an RSS reader, links to your site -- with your content in the callouts -- will follow them to semantically relevant pages on other sites. It's as if you had free rein to hyperlink the web as you want.

Of course, the user retains ultimate control of and visibility into the mash. MashLogic's mission is to empower people to Take Back the Web, so we always respect the user's choices -- whether that means embedding links to your site in the web or, at any point, de-activating the mash. And we never insert ads into the user's web experience.

By subscribing to mash feeds that you like, you no longer have to read every news feed "cover to cover" (Who Has Time For This?). MashLogic does it for you, and lets you know when that content is relevant to something else you're doing on the web (or, soon, in other applications as well). For example, I've subscribed to so many science and health news feeds that I can no longer keep up; but now I let MashLogic link me to the news (or auctions, or media, or job listings...) from sources I trust right when I'm most interested in those topics. For another example, see on the right how my blog's mash feed pushed topical, relevant content to the Forbes web site.

So if you like WhoHasTimeForThis? please subscribe to my mash feed, and try adding a mash feed to your own site (unless, of course, you hate free traffic...).

Hey, Pope Benedict: When you've been criticized as unfair to the Jews by the Chancellor of Germany, it's time to consider that maybe you're an Anti-Semite.

Just to be helpful, here some other signs for my readers that you just may be an Anti-Semite:

-- When stopped for drunk driving by the LAPD, if you guess that the arresting officer must be a Jew, you might be an Anti-Semite.

-- If the address on your checkbook is "Unknown Cave, Pakistan" then just maybe you're an Anti-Semite.

-- If President Ahmindejad invites you to be keynote speaker at his next conference, then you should consider the possibility that you're an Anti-Semite.

Hurray for Bessemer Venture Partners! Forbes recognized six of our partners on this year's Midas List, more than any other firm. This is the third year running that Bessemer boasts the highest number of investors on the list.

Today I was on top of the world. A cadre of my CEO’s joined me atop the tallest mountain on Earth -- Mauna Kea -- with great views of both our planet and others. This summit is the site of about a dozen observatories operated by universities and agencies from Japan, Canada, France, and other nations whose astronomers seek a thin, and accessible atmosphere unpolluted by light (not to mention a nice island to visit).

A geodesic dome housing one of Caltech’s observatories.

The jewel of the summit is the Keck Observatory, a joint venture of UCLA and Caltech that operates the world's two largest telescopic lenses with diameters of 8 and 10 meters each. In fact the effective resolution is much greater because the two lenses can be individually adjusted by interferometers for atmospheric distortion (primarily from light-bending air turbulence) and then combined to present a highly precise parallax and panoply of data points. Researchers apply up to a year advance for the chance to use Keck’s equipment on just the right night, but only 20% of the many applications can be accommodated, and even the winners of the peer-reviewed selection process can be stymied by cloudy weather, only to get in line again. It was here at Keck that astronomers discovered most of the several hundred known exo-planets, as well as observable properties of the black hole anchoring our galaxy.

Now we had started the day 14,000 feet below the top of the world -- racing our stand-up paddleboards in the warm Pacific, and snorkeling the reef. Coming off Sunday’s storm, the waves were higher than any the locals had seen. We were a tad reckless, and sure enough it ended in injury as Mike Fitzsimmons kayak-surfed a wave right into shallow coral and a dozen sea urchins. (Ouch! Not my most value-added day as a VC.)

Debbie Goodwin at Keck drove us up the mountain grade as we passed through several micro-climates (the Big Island of Hawaii has 11 of the planet’s 13 climates). At 9,000 feet we stopped for lunch at base camp to acclimate ourselves to the thin air. At 12,000 feet we started seeing the snowboarders and skiers on the slopes around us, and a man filling his pickup truck with snow to bring back down the mountain for fun. As we finally reached the top, we all felt the effects of a 60% atmosphere – nausea, dizziness, forgetfulness, and freezing temperatures. It was great! (Though we did have to stop now and then to tap the oxygen tanks.) Unfortunately the effects of high altitude are more dangerous children, who are restricted from the summit until age 16.

To achieve such high resolution imaging, Keck pioneered a scalable design of segmented mirrors driven by actuators. The mirrors form a parabolic surface that directs all the waves to a secondary mirror opposite them, which bounces the waves back into the center of the parabola where a tertiary mirror bounces them into the interferometers along the side. The entire mechanism -- which we watched in awe as its 300 tons glided into proper viewing position for its next target -- floats on a ring of hydrostatic oil that enables a single person to move it!

With such a segmented design one can theoretically build a mirror of any size to catch photons and indeed there are even larger telescopes in the works. Keck is hoping to house a project planning a 30m lens, but the island's residents have interceded on behalf of Poli'Ahu the snow goddess, so the project may be headed for Chile. (Who has time for this?) Here’s one of the 2 spare glass segments, which rotate off the telescope periodically for maintenance. In this picture, the mirrored aluminum coating has been chemically removed, so you can see the sensors and actuators.

Here’s the second spare segment that has been re-coated with a layer of aluminum 1% as thick as a human hair.

In this photo below from the Keck web site you can see the laser beam they emit into the atmosphere to measure atmospheric disturbances to their observations.

At the end of the day our friends at Keck surprised me with a birthday cake and song. I got to discuss multiverses with the astronomers while downing layers of chocolate and coconut. Yeah!

When we were back at sea level we shed the layers to enjoy barbeque, spa, poker and pool. Among other lessons today, I learned how to shear off the top of a bottle Dom Perignon by swiping a butcher’s knife along the bottleneck, just as Napolean’s cavalary did with their sabres. (Don’t try this at home.)

Blessed be Namakaokahai who revealed majestic whales to us today as they crested the waves of Her sea.

May She protect the feeble minded snorkelers who obliviously explore Her watery canyons below the ball path of the picturesque 15th hole on Mauna Lani South. Oh, Namakaokahai, did I not try to call out to them over the clamor of Your crashing surf? I did furiously wave my hat in a move-your-ass gesture, to which the surely oxygen-deprived bathers simply smiled and waved back before resuming their ill fated swim only a cubit from where one of our foursome's wayward tee shots soon splashed in.



And Blessed be Her Sister, the Mighty Pele, who smiled upon me today at the base of Her volcano, bestowing upon me the totally chillin' score of 81!

And may She bring wisdom to the waiter who, when asked at lunch today if the pea soup is vegetarian, responded, "Yes... mostly."

The first night of my birthday trip to Hawaii was a glorious tribute to the heavens. It started with a divine meal on the beach serenaded by Nino Kaai's Izzy rendition of Over the Rainbow. Then my friends and I strolled to a torch-lit lecture arranged by the Keck Observatory, where astronomer and author Timothy Ferris -- undeterred by the evening's thick volcanic haze -- guided us through the stars with HD clips from his film Seeing In The Dark.



Professor Ferris' mantle displays more fabulous trophies of achievement than I care to list at this late hour. I will point out only that his contributions will likely outlast those of anyone else in history, as he produced the phonograph containing music, sounds and photos that now hurtles through inter-stellar space aboard the Voyager spacecraft. (Too bad Ferris couldn't include Pogue's MacWorld performance this week, accompanied by Ge Wang on the spacey Ocarina.)

Tonight's lecture kicked off Keck's celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's invention of the refracting telescope. (Gordon Moore and lots of other Big Island immigrants were there to support Keck.) Here are three gems I picked up from Ferris' talk:

"Bringing our model of the universe into better accord with the facts is a pursuit worthy of adults."

"All of human evolution occurred in less time than it takes light to traverse the Andromeda galaxy."

"You couldn't get a murder verdict from a Texas jury on the scanty evidence we have of alien visitation."

Heavens, it's late! Better get to sleep if I'm to catch the voggy sunrise and early tee times...

Labels: ferris, hawaii, keck, Moore