Week 1: DC, Wilmington, Albany, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto

May 2, 2011 By

Note: while the main stream of liveblogging will be over at the Tempobook blog, I will be cross-posting a weekly summary/itinerary on ribbonfarm. This is the first one. If you want to join in for this week’s action, post your comments on the original post. If you want the blow-by-blow liveblogging, subscribe to the Tempobook blog.

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.

Week 1: DC, Wilmington, Albany, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto

May 2, 2011 By

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.

 

The Tempo Road Trip

April 28, 2011 By

It’s been quite an insane few weeks, but finally I can cut loose and have some fun with my free agency. Tempo is now on Amazon.com. The early “Stealth Edition” on Lulu has been retired (sorry no more discounts until Amazon decides to offer some; I am doing my best to get the Kindle edition out as soon as possible though). The book site is up and running. I’ve also put most of my stuff into storage in preparation for a nomadic summer, based out of the Barbarian city of Las Vegas. The main act is a major road trip, spread across two legs, across most of the lower 48 states of the US. Here’s the rough map of the route. The first leg of the trip will be DC to Vegas, between next Monday (May 2) and approximately May 24.

The detailed logistics are in the inaugural post on the Tempo blog. If you’d like to meet me and participate in the road trip, click through and post a comment on that post. I am closing comments on this post to avoid confusion.

The immediate purpose of the road trip is to jump-start the Tempo blog and get the conversation around the book going in an interesting way. I will be live-blogging the entire trip in a Tempo-themed way, mostly in short-post, photo-blog and video-blog formats.  After ribbonfarm and the Be Slightly Evil list, the Tempo site is going to be my third major online property, and I am really hoping I can get good at the photo/video/short format/high frequency model I have planned for that site.

More broadly, the idea is to simply explore different places, meet different people and restock the hopper for all my writing with fresh experiences, conversations and other stimulating raw material. One of the dangers of blogging is that it is easy to get stale and start repeating yourself, drawing on fading memories of the same raw material over and over, especially if you don’t have a regular job feeding you live experiences to reflect upon. I hope the road trip recharges my writing.

It’s been insane getting ready for this trip (you’ll see glimpses of that once I start the liveblogging on Monday night), but I am hoping it will be worth it, and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the really curious characters I’ve met through ribbonfarm.

Before you click on over to the main post about the road trip, a couple more requests:

  1. If you’ve already read all or part of the book, I’d really appreciate a quick comment on the Reader Responses page.
  2. Now that the regular edition is out on Amazon, if you were planning on writing a review on your own blog, Amazon, or somewhere else, go right ahead. I’d appreciate a link to tempobook.com in addition to the link to the Amazon listing.
  3. If you were planning on playing the Tempo Tracer game at the back of the Stealth Edition, It would be a lot of fun if you finish the book, pass it on, and send in your picture sometime in the next few weeks

So head on over to the main post about the road trip.

p.s. Thanks to everybody who bought the Stealth Edition and helped fund this trip: I sold over 200 copies in less than a month.

p.p.s As expected there were some oopses with the Stealth Edition. Many US-based readers got copies with a misprinted page 12. Get the corrected page here. Readers in the UK and Europe appear to have received copies with all the apostrophes missing. Ouch. Sorry, but I can’t really fix that.

p.p.p.s Yes, regular programming on ribbonfarm and Be Slightly Evil will continue as usual.

The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence

April 21, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Brian Potter of  Coarse Grained. It explores a different aspect of some of the ideas in my post, The Return of the Barbarian, and Paula Hay’s guest post, Cognitive Archeology of the West. If you are interested in guest-posting, email me.

Consider the following experiment (the Wason selection task):

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

The correct answer is “8” and “brown”, but very few people get the correct answer – between 10-25% depending on the exact formulation of the problem. Even when its expressed in more familiar terms, such as “If a person goes to New York, then he takes the subway”, success rates remain extremely low.

However, consider the exact same problem, rephrased slightly:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a statement on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 16, 25, ‘drinking beer’ and ‘drinking coke’. Which card(s) should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if “If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 21”?

Phrased like this, success rates shoot up to around 75%. But what makes this form different than a question about riding the subway?

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The Tempo Road Trip

April 21, 2011 By

A big claim I have made in Tempo is that I hope to help readers develop a new perspective from which to view the world. When I finally released the book, the question that immediately occurred to me was this:  how could I demonstrate the value of the perspective? What if, I asked myself, I grabbed a camera and microphone an iPhone and went around interviewing readers and actually trying to look at different things with the lens I am selling others?

And the answer popped out at me: Road Trip!

Here is the rough route (click for larger image or here for the live Google Map) and dates. I will be liveblogging the whole trip (mainly video and photo blogging) right here on the Tempo blog.

The first leg starts next week. Between Tuesday, May 3 and approximately May 24, I will be driving zig-zag from Washington, DC to Las Vegas, NV, which is going to be my base for the next few months. I haven’t yet decided whether to start out going North and looping through Canada, or heading South.

Later in the summer (late June/early July), I’ll be doing the second leg: driving in a loop from Vegas, up the West Coast to Vancouver, and back.

If you want to meet me…

So if you live somewhere near the planned  route, I’d like to meet you.  The primary purpose is to really stress-test the Tempo perspective, but I’ll also be opportunistically looking for fodder for my other writing venues, and continuing my normal work for my consulting clients. I am open to anything interesting, including, but not limited to:

  • A quick 1:1 coffee
  • A group meetup if there are enough readers in an area
  • Doing an informal talk about the book at your workplace or a local group you belong to
  • Having you show me something interesting in your area
  • Having you ride along with me on a local side-trip or just to enjoy a good chat

If you are up for it, simply post a comment on this post mentioning what you’d like to do, and include your location (city, state). If someone from your area has already posted a comment, please post yours as a reply to theirs. Please use your real name, and if possible link to some sort of profile (LinkedIn, Facebook or a blog for instance) in the URL field. If you’d rather email me privately, you can do that too, but I’d prefer a comment here so I can see all the information in one place and make sense of it. If I decide to pass through a particular city/area, I’ll email all the readers in that area and arrange the logistics.

Quality of experiences, rather than quantity, is the criterion, so I am more likely to drive 100 miles out of my way to meet one person who I know well through ribbonfarm, or someone new who can show me a landfill or container-port than stop at a dull place to meet someone with whom I’ve never interacted before. I may spend several days on a 10-mile stretch and zip through 500 miles in a day depending on how interesting things are. The tempo of the trip is going to be highly variable.

I will also be slumming it a bit to save money. I plan on experimenting with Couch Surfing (my handle there is ribbonfarm) and Airbnb. If you’ve got a couch or spare bed you can offer me, please mention that in your comment (and I’d prefer to do that through the couchsurfing.org site).

I plan on posting several times a day, and this short format, high-frequency multimedia format will be very new for me (if you are a ribbonfarm reader, you know that my normal comfort zone is 2000+ word posts once a week).

And don’t forget. If you’ve finished the book, please post a blurb for me on the Reader Reactions page.

Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

April 7, 2011 By

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about extroversion (E) and introversion (I). As a fundamental spectrum of personality dispositions, E/I represents a timeless theme in psychology. But it manifests itself differently during different periods in history. Social psychology is the child of a historicist discipline (sociology) and an effectively ahistorical one (psychology).  The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment.  Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:

  • As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
  • Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
  • The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
  • Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
  • The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology

It was the last of these that triggered this train of thought, but I’ll get to that.

I am still working through the arguments for each of these conjectures, but whether or not they are true, I believe we are seeing something historically unprecedented: an intrinsic psychological variable is turning into a watershed sociological variable. Historically, extrinsic and non-psychological variables such as race, class, gender, socio-economic status and nationality have dominated the evolution of societies. Psychology has at best indirectly affected social evolution. For perhaps the first time in history, it is directly shaping society.

So since so many interesting questions hinge on the E/I distinction, I figured it was time to dig a little deeper into it.

Note: Apropos of nothing, I’ll be in Seattle tomorrow through Monday morning. If anyone is interested in meeting up, post on the ribbonfarm Facebook page, and we’ll see if we can work something out.

[Read more…]

Tempo Stealth Edition

March 31, 2011 By

Update – 4/28/11: the Stealth Edition has now been discontinued. Please check out the book site and buy the regular edition, available from Amazon.com. Thanks to the over 200 people who bought the Stealth Edition and get the buzz going.

Two and a half years after I began scribbling my first notes, my first book Tempo is finally sneaking out into the marketplace. Today, I am releasing an early stealth edition. It is exactly the same as the regular edition to come in about 6 weeks, except that this edition has a) a nice early release discount and b) an extra page at the end with details of a little experiment designed to get some word-of-mouth going. If you choose to participate in the experiment, you can get the ebook free later (the experiment involves giving your copy away).

You can get the Stealth edition via Lulu at 30% off. A reader informs me that the coupon APRILREAD gets you an additional discount, through the end of April.

The regular edition (without the word-of-mouth experiment) should be out on Amazon.com by May 15 or so.  This Stealth Edition will be discontinued at that time.

I already released this last Friday on the Be Slightly Evil mailing list, and sold just over a hundred copies on the opening weekend. Let me address the two most common questions immediately:

  1. eBook edition: The eBook edition won’t be out for several months. I’ll try to get the Kindle edition at least out by July/August or so. Other formats will follow.
  2. International availability: If you are NOT in the US or Canada, Lulu DOES deliver internationally, but the shipping costs seem to be highly variable, ranging from reasonable in the UK and Australia, to somewhat expensive in Norway to ridiculously expensive in some parts of Eastern Europe. Check before you hit “submit.” If it is too expensive, you may want to wait for the regular or ebook editions. I am trying to get the cheapest possible distribution lined up.

A quick request: if you plan on reviewing the book, please hold off till May 15. The regular edition should be available by then, and I’ll probably do some sort of official launch event around then. I don’t plan on overtly promoting the book beyond this blog until you guys have had a chance to read the book, and I can get a good email conversation going with at least some of you about it. I am taking this one slow and easy.

Note: if you were one of the early buyers, and your version has a misprinted page 12, download the corrected page here. My sincere apologies if you received the flawed copy.

So much for the basics. Let me share a few tidbits about the story so far:

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Say Hello to “Barbarian,” the Crowd-Funded Ribbonfarm Laptop

March 24, 2011 By

When I went free agent a few weeks ago, I solicited micro-sponsorships to help keep ribbonfarm free.  Thanks to my first spike of generous sponsorships,  I raised approximately $1100, which I used to buy a new laptop to replace the one I had to return to my former employer. Say hello to the new crowd-funded ribbonfarm laptop,  a Lenovo Thinkpad T510 that I named Barbarian, to commemorate the circumstances of its purchase.

A big thank-you to everybody who signed up as a sponsor. I can think of nothing more appropriate than my primary creative tool being a gift from readers. If I were religious, I’d call this  an auspicious start.

On a more practical note, you have no idea how much of a relief it is to get back to a machine that I am comfortable with. I’ve been getting things done using my aging Windows desktop and my wife’s Macbook for the last 3 weeks and I learned two things about myself: I can no longer work at a regular desk for more than a couple of hours without a coffee-shop break, and I will never be able to make the mental gear-shift necessary to become a Mac guy. I nearly went crazy for three weeks. Things are back to normal now, whew. Evil empire or not, I guess I am a Windows guy until Microsoft goes under.

Sponsorships are continuing to trickle in slowly after the initial spike. Check out the sponsors page if you’d like to support the next crowd-funded ribbonfarm capital investment.

In other news, Information Week just soft-launched a new site The Brain Yard. I will be posting there biweekly on Enterprise 2.0 topics. Check out my debut column, Hard and Soft Power in Enterprise 2.0.

Lots more brewing in the background, so stay tuned.

Cognitive Archeology of the West

March 17, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Paula Hay 

Venkat’s recent post The Disruption of Bronze touched on a subject I’ve been pursuing fervently for the better part of a decade now: the time frame in which psychologically modern humans evolved. More than that, however, my interest is in why and how human psychology shifted to cause the sudden, radical changes that ultimately resulted in civilization.

My view is that without an understanding of this shift, there can be no evolution beyond the devouring, predatory virus that is civilized culture. In a mere 10,000 years, civilization has all but wrecked the planet — a truly impressive horror.

Collapse (of either the slow or sudden variety, take your pick) is a certainty, in my opinion; what I needed, for my own sanity, was a context in which to fit this state of affairs. Does the story really begin and end with American avarice? Are humans condemned to repeat the rise-and-fall of civilizations until we wipe ourselves out for the last time? Is there no greater narrative arc here?

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The Return of the Barbarian

March 10, 2011 By

Our cartoon view of history goes straight from the Flintstones to Jetsons without developmental stages of any consequence in between. Hunter-gatherers and settled modern civilizations loom large, as bookends, in our study of history. The more I study history though, the more I realize that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are mostly of importance in evolutionary prehistory, not in history proper. If you think about history proper, a different lifestyle, pastoral nomadism, starts to loom large, and its influence on the course of human history is grossly underestimated. This is partly because civilizations and pastoral nomad cultures have a figure-ground relationship. You need to understand both to understand the gestalt of world history.

Modern hunter-gatherer lifestyles are cul-de-sacs in cultural evolution terms. They stopped mattering by around 4000 BC, and haven’t significantly affected world events since. Pastoral nomads though, played a crucial role until at least World War I. Until about 1405 (the year Timur died), they actually played the starring role. And in reconstructed form, the lifestyle may again start to dominate world affairs within the next few decades. Their eclipse over the last 5oo or so years, I am going to argue, was an accident of history that is finally being corrected.

The barbarians are about to return to their proper place at the helm of the world’s affairs, and the story revolves around this picture:

I am about to zoom from about 15,000 BC to 2011 AD in less than 4000 words, so you may want to fasten your seat belts and grab a few pinches of salt.

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