Aesthetic environments

One of the things that I've discovered about myself is that I have a sensitivity to my work environment. I find that I am most creative, and productive when I am in an aesthetically pleasing environment. This applies not only to my physical environment but also to my computing environment which is largely why I prefer to use OSX over other equally capable computing environments such as Linux.

A by product of this sensitivity is that I have a deep interest in the work environments of others as a means for further refining my own environment. I'm especially interested in the work spaces and habits of people that I admire.

In a general sense, I admire writers as I have a growing interest in doing more writing myself. So it was with pleasure that I came across whereiwrite.org, an effort to collect photographs of the work spaces of various science fiction and fantasy authors.

I also enjoy programming (which is really writing for machines instead of people) and therefore I am also drawn to images of aesthetically pleasing offices such as:

• 25 of the Best Home and Office Mac Setups
• Where I program
• BusinessWeek: Readers Show Off Their Home Offices

One of my greatest idols is the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth. As a result I enjoyed this picture of his home office from a Standford Alumni Magazine interview.

Unfortunately my current work environment is a standard corporate cube-farm. I often consider sending our facilities people a copy of the book PeopleWare but I suspect its suggestions would be deemed "cost inefficient". My home environment is still a work-in-progress and unfortunately I don't get to spend much time working in it. It's a life goal of mine to find a way to earn a living in an environment of my choosing. So far, I'm not banking on my blogging skills!

Library, uploaded

After weeks of gradual effort I've finally completed entering my personal library into a LibraryThing account. If interested, you can view the contents of my library here. This is just the dead-tree stuff and doesn't include the many PDF books that I have collected over the years. Perhaps that will be the topic of a future post.

Until now I have used an OSX desktop application, Delicious Library, to catalog my books. It's a nice program that works fairly well but the eye-candy UI clearly takes priority over the needs of a serious book collector. LibraryThing, on the other hand, better suits my goals of:

• Cataloging all my books, including the older ones that don't have an ISBN number
• Providing online access to my library making it easier to recall references and send links to potentially interested colleagues
• Getting book recommendations based on the contents of my existing library

Some friends of mine use GoodReads for similar purposes. I spent a little time comparing LibraryThing to GoodReads and it seems that the material differences between the two are:

• GoodReads is free for an unlimited number of books, LibraryThing is free up to 200 books and requires a paid-for account for larger libraries.
• GoodReads prioritizes social networking over cataloging. LibraryThing prioritizes cataloging over social networking.

I think both services are good and provide much value to avid readers.

While I was entering my catalog, I also tagged each book to make it easier to browse and track my library. One nice feature of LibraryThing is that it provides RSS links for each tag so that interested parties can track additions to my library for a specific tag. Now I don't have to nag friends whenever I buy a new book, they can just subscribe to my feeds!

Colossus: The Forbin Project

While web surfing some time ago I came across a reference to a movie that I hadn't seen before, Colossus: The Forbin Project. I finally got a chance to watch it this weekend and it was fun.

Filmed in 1970, I understand this to be the first movie with the primary theme of a super-computer being given complete control of the nation's defenses, achieving sentience, and overtaking mankind for its own good. Given the period in which this was filmed, I was expecting much "cheeze" and nonsensical computer technology. Instead, it turned out to be a pretty good treatment of the concept based on sound principals. Of course there was some cheeze but this can only be expected from a forty year old movie.

The primary lesson to be drawn from the movie - don't build a super complicated mission-critical system, go straight into production, and then make it impossible to disable it. Advice that continues to hold value forty years later.

Worth watching if you're into this kind of movie.

First & Latest Computers

On the right is my first computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000. On the left is my latest computer, a Dell Mini9 hacked to run OS X. Putting these two machines side-by-side really puts into context how much computing technology has progressed over the past 27 years (1982 to 2009). Unfortunately, it also serves as evidence that I am getting old!

Joking aside, I bought the Dell more or less for the fun of hacking it to run OS X. My expectations for using it as an actual computer were low. Although I still greatly prefer using my MacBook, I have to say that the Mini has proved far more useful than I initially hoped. OS X runs really well, the screen size and resolution is good, and the keyboard isn't terrible. The Mini's small size, and no moving parts makes it a great machine for taking everywhere which has saved me from boredom on a number of occasions. For light work such as web surfing, email, blogging, and play-programming the Mini is quite productive.

I look forward to posting 27 years from now with a similarly sized computer from that time.

Is an Entrepreneurial Bubble Next?

Will the next bubble be the collapse of small businesses started during an entrepreneurial gold rush?

This thought has been brewing in my mind for a while now but it was brought to the fore by this Jack and Suzy Welch article in the July 13,2009 issue of BusinessWeek Magazine. The particular quotes that caught my eye were:

Look, this recession has really shocked people…. The result? Many people have come to the conclusion that they don't want to work for "the man" anymore. They want to work for themselves or someone they know and trust.

To be someone else's employee, people are telling us, is to be at someone else's whim.

If anything, starting a business puts you at the whim of more people rather than less. Investors, customers, employees, suppliers, service providers, and others all place demands on business owners that must be addressed. Abandonment by any of these groups could be disastrous.

Also starting or working for a small business involves a substantial amount of risk and provides little insulation from economic downturns. In fact, I suspect that the current downturn has had the greatest impact on small businesses.

Jay Goltz's New York Times blog post, The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship, captures both of these issues well.

To be clear, I am a proponent of entrepreneurship and think that starting a business can be liberating. But to be successful I don't think liberation can be the only goal and I fear that many people are going into small business without the right expectations.

If that is true then what will happen if many of those businesses begin to fail in a couple of years? Do they represent a new form of systemic risk to the economy?

Von Neumann's Universe

In 2005, George Dyson gave a talk at the O'Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference on John Von Neumann's work at the Institute for Advanced Study on building early computers. This talk has been a favorite of mine since it was posted to the IT Conversations website. It is informative, entertaining, and well worth listening to.

Related to the Recursive Universe post, much of Dyson's talk focuses on Von Neumann's work on cellular automata in collaboration with Stanislaw Ulam. If you liked that post then you will likely enjoy listening to Dyson's talk. The associated slides are available here (warning, they are 111MB).

Book Review: The Recursive Universe

The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone

What a delightful book! I was made aware of it by Cosma Shalizi's commentary that I linked to in the A New Kind of Science post. It sounded interesting so I bought a used copy. I'm happy I did so!

The book takes the novel approach of using Conway's Game of Life to discuss complexity theory, specifically how simple rules can manifest into complex systems. Particular emphasis is placed on Von Neumann's interest in self-reproducing machines and cellular automata.

The book is structured in chapter pairs with the first discussing a particular aspect of complexity theory and the second showing how Conway's Life can provide deeper insight. A brief summary of the chapter pairs are:

Chapters	Theme
1 & 2	introduction to complexity, reductionism, information theory, and the Game of Life
3 & 4	entropy, Szilard's thesis on information and entropy, and the limits of empirical knowledge.
5 & 6	information, structure, meaning, and unlimited growth
7 & 8	recursion, the challenges of predicting complex systems using recursive calculations, and self-reproduction.
9 & 10	the evolution of the cosmos and random Life initial states
11 & 13	self-reproduction, the information theory of life, and Life computers.

Before reading this book I had a cursory knowledge of the Game of Life but I was unaware of the sophisticated constructs possible. The Life computers presented in Chapter 12 are fascinating and I can't imagine how much time was required to design them.

I was also unaware of how much attention Life received when it was first created; it seems that many of the bright minds of the time spent considerable time playing the game. I found the historical aspects of this interesting as well but then I have a fondness for computing of this era.

While discussing this book with others I was surprised to find out that an acquaintance of mine was on Gosper's team at MIT that discovered the first Glider Gun. I always enjoy it when I find a personal connection like this to a period of history before "my time".

While looking for additional materials to augment the book I found the following useful references:

• Two excerpts (part 1 and part 2) of a BBC documentary featuring interviews with Conway.
• A Game of Life news website
• Golly, a feature rich cross platform Life implementation
• Hashlife, an algorithm devised by Gosper that uses quadtrees to efficiently represent deterministic Life constructs.

All in all an entertaining book that is also very thought provoking. I only wish I had copious amounts of spare time to play the Game of Life myself!