Future

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Matters vs. Anti-matters

April 13, 2008 in Future, Past | 11 comments

A ways back, on one of Steve Gillmor’s podcasts, I said that the Democratic nomination was Obama’s unless he “stepped in it” before the convention.

“Gotcha” politics being what it is, Obama’s recent remarks — a few dumb words among amongst zillions of smart and/or safe utterances he’s made in the course of a campaign — qualify.

Naturally, they’re being spun (in some ways correctly) as “damaging”. But there is a difference between real damage (of the kind that would reveal that Obama — or anyone — is too flawed in a critical way to trust as president), and the kind of superficial embarrasment that gets buzzed far out of proportion to its actual importance. Andrew Sullivan, a conservative who favors Obama for reasons I find heartening, sees the difference, and puts it this way:

  Is this election about how to salvage the least worst option in the Iraq disaster? Is it about restoring some kind of fiscal sanity? Is it about doing all we can to unite Americans in a war against Islamic terrorism? Is it about restoring America’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions? Or is it again about red-blue culture wars? We know what the professional political class is comfortable with. We know what Rove and Bush and Penn and Clinton believe. What we will find out soon is if Americans want more of the same. It’s a free country – and people can vote. Goodbye to all that? Or hello again – for yet another cycle?

Later he adds,

  Americans have had the presidency they deserved these past four years; the war they voted to continue; the debt they voted to increase; the incompetence they decided to reward. They also get to pick who comes next. If they want more of the same, they know who to vote for.

Here’s how The Onion put it. And they’re right.

Rolling on

April 12, 2008 in Future | 12 comments

Sitting is hard for me. First, there’s the fear that I’m colonizing clots in my legs. That fear should recede when I know my IHR (a clotting measure) is between 2 and 3. Last tested it was 1, which is normal. Not good enough. Second, my chest still hurts, along with my lower back (which is an unrelated pre-existing issue, and still annoying). Standing up works. So do walking and bike riding.

Exercise is kind of orthoganal to blogging, but so what. Moving around keeps me alive, which is a prerequisite for everything else. So I’m following an active course for now, interrupted by brief visits to the laptop. Most of those are devoted to Real Work rather than to blogging. Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway) I’m backlogged on a lot of work.

In the next few days I’ll have a stand-up desk, along with a much more body-friendly chair than I’m using now. Meanwhile, I’m jiggering the above and other lifestyle changes. Many good new practices and attitudes have been recommended by friends and readers, and believe me, I’m following more than a few of them.

Hope I won’t get too boring as I report on those rather than the usual here.

Erring on the side of caution

April 11, 2008 in Future | 13 comments

A few hours ago, as I was getting ready to get the kid to bed, the pain in my chest returned. Concerned that another blood clot might be involved, I imposed on Nicco to give me another ride over to the hospital, where at length a fresh CAT scan showed the same clot in the same place. Nothing new.

Still, they told me I did the Right Thing. Guess so.

Left me even more wasted though. As Nicco put it in the car on the way back, I’m probably not as “good” as I feel. (Which is okay, aside from the chest pains.)

Anyway, now it’s 3am and maybe I can finally (well, for tonight anyway… that adverb creeps me) get some sleep.

Walking vs. Working

April 10, 2008 in Future, Ideas, Travel | 37 comments

I’m getting so many calls that I’ve started hitting “ignore” half the time, which makes me feel like a freaking call center. I can’t take your call right now, I’m inaudibly saying. But your call is important to me. So please listen closely to the following options, because my menu has changed.

That menu in my own life now includes walking as well as working, talking and eating, which used to fight over the top rungs on my priority ladder. Well, other exercise should be up there too, and it will be. But walking comes first.

They didn’t find a source of blood clots in my legs, but when one ends up in your lungs, a leg is where one usually begins. You get them there by sitting. Being a passenger in a commercial airplane is often blamed, and I’m certainly guilty of being plenty of that. But I’ve sat longer in stretches at my desk than I’ve sat on transcontinental airplane flights. The line “I’m a desk potato” is one of the first my wife heard me speak. And it’s no less true now than it was way back then.

So, post-clot, I’ve developed an aversion to sitting, if not an outright fear. And my natural hyperactivity urges me toward the road and the path rather than the office and the desk. That way lies survival. But not much work. Because to go walking is to snowplow already overdue work off into the future.

So I do the one to have a future, and the other in the future the first helps make possible. At sixty with a clot in one’s lung that still hurts, these are the kinds of thoughts the mind mulls.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll return to the old normal. Instead I need to make a new one that keeps me alive longer, and still allows me to do just as much work, only better.

I’ll be thinking about how on the walk I’m about to take.

Out but not quite about

April 9, 2008 in Future | 26 comments

I’m back home now. I feel fine, except for the fact that I’m quite the bleeder. Just before I was discharged, a nurse removed a … whatever they call it… one of those things they keep in a vein, so they can swap bottles of fluids that drip into you. And put a cushion of absorbent material over the wound, held down with a tight bandage. As I was wrapping up the power cord for my laptop, I noticed that blood was dripping on the floor. It was mine, coming from the puncture on the back of my hand. We stopped it with fresh dressing, but it was interesting to watch spilled blood that dried faster than it clotted. That was wierd.

Anyway, other than that, I’m cool. Or so I’m telling myself, anyway. Very eager to press on with work.

Meanwhile, I’m going to get some good rest tonight, take it easy for the next few days, and count my blessings. That the clot went to my lungs rather than my heart or my head means I won at a kind of scary roulette.

Thanks to everybody who has written, called, texted and posted their best wishes. All of it helped, tremendously.

Lesson: obey warning signs

April 9, 2008 in Future, problems | 47 comments

The short of it is that I’m in a hospital with a blood clot in my right lung.

The long of it is that I don’t have other blood clots, that I’m on blood thinners for awhile, and I’ll be fine. I might make it out by this afternoon, and I’ll even be able to get back to work by tomorrow and make VRM2008 and EIC2008 in Munich two weeks from now.

Meanwhile I’m having an educational tour of the health care system at Harvard and Cambridge. Very impressive, and reassuring.

This thing started with pain under my left shoulder blade on Saturday night that I assumed was a stretched muscle or something skeleto-muscular. It was uncomfortable but not debilitating. The next couple of days it spread to various places around my chest, so that breathing became a bit difficult at times, just because it was painful. Still, I felt otherwise okay. I didn’t suspect heart problems because just a few months ago I had a bunch of heart tests and came off looking quite good.

Then yesterday I had trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, because the pain, especially at the bottom back left of my rib cage, became too intense every time I breathed in.

So I called the health care center at Harvard Law School. The folks there were concerned just because “You’re sixty and have chest pains. That’s warning enough. Can you get in here, or should we send an ambulance?” I got in there, accompanied by the good Dr. Weinberger. The doctor there listened to my lungs, said things weren’t quite right — one of my lungs wasn’t moving air as well as the other — and ordered an ambulance.

Long story short, a CAT scan showed a “mid-size” blood clot in my right lung, plus the other stuff I said in the first two paragraphs. The only remaining mystery is the source of the blood clot, which additional tests they hope will eventually show. (Though they might not find out. If it came from a leg, there’s no remaining sign of one there now. Meanwhile, they need to eliminate other possibilities, including cancer somewhere, though they say the chance of that is low.)

Anyway, the warning sign I should have observed was the presence of chest pain that was clearly not the result of minor injury (such as stretching). When I pressed on pain locations, nothing happened, yet breathing normally was painful at those locations. Shoulda been a give-away that it was deeper than muscle or skeleton, meaning lungs.

Interesting discovery: pain from blood clots in lungs does not necessarily occur at the location of the clot. It can show up anywhere around the chest. That’s why it hurts in the lower left back side of my ribcage even thought he clot is in the upper part of my right lung.

I feel good enough to work here, though it’s not easy with tubes hooked up to one or both of my arms, at different times. So far this post has been interrupted more times than I can count, mostly with tests and other visits from medical folk. (Since this is a teaching hospital, I am a subject of sustained curiosity.) That’s why, even though I started writing this post around 6:30am, it’s now 9:43.

So I think I’ll just read some of the stuff that Nicco brought over (along with much more…the man is an ace), and hope that all this testing & stuff gets done enough for me to get out of here soon.

See-through Net Roots

April 1, 2008 in Future, Science | Permalink

The Glass Roots Revolution. A sample:

  Where it goes is the independent hacking together of everything: a convergence of cheap, mobile and hackable. Add to that the half-zillion open source code bases now populate the world of useful tools and building materials, and you have the ingredients — if not yet the recipe — for remaking infrastructure from the edges inward.

Righting wrong

March 21, 2008 in Future, Past, problems | 11 comments

Andrew Sullivan: What I Got Wrong About Iraq. A sample:

  I recall very clearly one night before the war began. I made myself write down the reasons for and against the war and realized that if there were question marks on both sides, the deciding factor for me in the end was that I could never be ashamed of removing someone as evil as Saddam from power. I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn’t really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness. I saw war’s unknowable consequences far too glibly.

At its best, war is a lesser evil. I said that in 2002, and got quoted by Glenn Reynolds as well. It was all part of a larger discussion that involved Nick Denton, Dave Winer and others.

Still, I hesitate to say that ‘we’ were right and ‘they’ were wrong. There is too much we don’t know and can’t ever know. We can’t go back and conduct a controlled study of futures, one with and one without the Iraq war.

The side I still feel most comfortable taking is the one against war itself. That it’s a lesser evil doesn’t make it good.

Some times we have no choice. That clearly was the case for WWII. Most times we do have a choice. Iraq was one of those. And we made the wrong one.

But knowing that now doesn’t help show a path of right choices toward ending the war, ending terror, ending hatred and distrust of The Other.

Still, failure teaches. It gives lessons.

Andrew Sullivan again:

  When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it with the far left, or boomer nostalgia, and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle, and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be. I allowed myself to be distracted by an ideological battle when what was required was clear-eyed prudence.

There is a generational battle of sorts going on here too. Andrew is post-boomer. So is Marc Andreessen, who gave this as one of his reasons for supporting Barack Obama:

  Most of the Boomers I know are still fixated on the 1960’s in one way or another — generally in how they think about social change, politics, and the government.
  It’s very clear when interacting with Senator Obama that he’s totally focused on the world as it has existed since after the 1960’s — as am I, and as is practically everyone I know who’s younger than 50.

Today we have a boomer president who is one of those who did not learn any lessons from America’s failure in Vietnam: how we entered the war on delusional and trumped-up premises, how our conventional means lost to the unconventional ones, how we failed to understand the culture and language of the war’s theater, how millions died for no good reason, how the nature of a vast and bureaucratized national security apparatus is too devoid of imagination to do anything on this scale without failing.

That void still exists. If General Petreus and his strategy succeed in Iraq (and we’re a long way from finding out), it will be due to imagination and resourcefulness that are devalued by practice in any large bureaucracy.

Recognizing this does not require having lived through the Sixties, or being obsessed with that time. It does require some perspective. In regards to Iraq, we finally have some of that.

The making of an icon

March 21, 2008 in Art, Business, Events, Fun, Future, Life, News, Sports | 4 comments

I’ve always liked cars. Never owned a great one, unless you count an ’85 Camry that ran forever with the fewest possible repairs. I did have a hand in my wife’s purchase of a ’92 Infiniti Q45a — a fabulous piece of work, sadly dulled by the maker in subsequent models. It was sadly repair-prone and finally croaked somewhere north of 200k miles, when the active suspension gave out. Still, for quite a few years it was an exceedingly pleasing car to drive.

These days my aging eyes and slower reflexes caution me against car fantasies that would be too pricey in any case. But I still harbor wishes for a car market not dominated by inefficient manufacturers of cookie-cutter vehicles, but rather populated by an infinite variety of designs that combine the best of invention, engineering, light manufacture and customer input on design — a value constellation rather than a value chain.

One such maker is Iconic Motors. The brightest star in its constellation is Claudio Ballard, an inventor whose obsession with automotive perfection is matched by his commitment to small, high-quality U.S. manufacturers. Together they’re producing the GTR:

Its a beautiful thing, and so hot it’s scary. It packs more than 800 horses in body that barely outweighs a Miata. It will rocket you past 200 miles per hour, and carve around curves on a suspension that’s as close to Formula One as you’ll find off a speedway.

They’re only producing a hundred of them in their first run. They are also interested in input as well as interest from fellow enthusiasts. This is the open source part of the story, and one of the big reasons I’m interested in it. (Besides having gotten to know Claudio over the past few months.) To get that ball rolling they’re hosting a reception at 7pm tomorrow night at the New York Auto Show. Wish I could be there, but I can’t.

They don’t have a link up yet, but will soon. I’ll add it here, soon as they do.

Profitsy

March 14, 2008 in Blogging, Future, Ideas, News, Past | 1 comment

Not content to just make the future, sometimes also predicts it. Congrats to the big guy for winning $2k with his forecast.

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