My assistant Kelly spends a few weeks each summer volunteering at the Denver Zoo.  I think it’s probably an easier job than dealing with the animals she has to every day (me, Chris, and Seth.)  On September 8th from 6:30pm – 10pm, the Zoo is having a special annual event called “Brew at the Zoo and Wine, Too!”  Think “big party with local brews, food, music, and dancing with a backdrop of lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.”

Chip Griffin has an interview with Matt Rightmire of Borealis Ventures up on his blog.  Matt is ex-Yahoo and is now a partner at a VC firm in New Hampshire that’s affiliated with Village Ventures.  They had a nice exit in my backyard recently when Google acquired @Last earlier this year.  I got together with Matt for lunch when I was in Boston running the Boston Marathon and we had a fun conversation about entrepreneurship and venture capital outside of Silicon Valley.  Matt and Chip cover this topic extensively in the interview and – while it’s focused on New Hampshire – the ideas generally apply to many other geographic regions outside of Silicon Valley

A Boulder reader forwarded me an interesting article in eWeek titled The Doctor on the Digital Tundra that talks about how the issue of net neutrality could impact rural Alaska, using a doctor who lives and works in Homer, Alaska as the launching off point for the story.

After bitching earlier today about the current lack of critical thinking in the world today, Michael Hirshland of Polaris posted a long piece by his partner – Bob Metcalfe – titled Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks – which displays an abundance of critical thinking.

Metcalfe starts out by addressing a recent IEEE Spectrum article titled Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong – explaining why he thinks the authors’ analysis is boneheaded – and then proceeds to dissect Metcalfe’s Law and then put it back together in the context of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and the current excitement around social networking. 

It’s not an easy read (I’ve read it twice – I’ll take a third crack at it in the morning) but in between Metcalfe’s wicked sense of humor lie a couple of gems.  As someone who believes the really interesting stuff around social networking is just now starting to be worked on, V~N^2 – which has been around since I was 14 – lives on in powerful ways.

Ironically, on the heals of all of this, I saw an article somewhere today (I’ve lost it and can’t find it again) that says that the telecoms are going to have to make massive investments in the network again to support the expected demands of all the coming video and audio traffic that’s a result of all of the newly discovered Internet activity.  What was that about a bandwidth glut?  V~N^2 anyone?

My dad (Stan Feld) has a great post up about why he blogs.

I believe I’m seeing a steady increase in the lack of critical thinking from everywhere.  In an effort to be recursive, I thought about why I thought I was seeing more of this (and if in fact it was an increase, or I was just noticing it more.)  My “instinct” is that I’m seeing more of it, which amuses me when I ponder it.

My hypothesis is that it’s coming from a few places:

• The coming election cycle is causing sound bites and hyperbole to accelerate to “get the message out.”
• The proliferation of blogs – especially with fact masquerading as opinion and assertion – is changing the texture of the way people present (and consume) information.
• Mainstream media – in an effort to overcome the emergence of new media – is looking more like the new media – which creates a self-reinforcing loop of nonsense.
• People enjoy writing opinions that are not fact based because it’s easier and – as a result – leave real critical thinking by the side of the road.
• Agendas are commonplace and – if you want to accomplish your agenda – you sacrifice critical thinking for the outcome that you want.
• People are too distracted to actually do the work, so it’s easier to just pile on a current theme that one finds interesting without actually thinking about it.

I ran into two particularly strong examples of critical thinking in two categories that I’ve seen a huge lack of it in – (1) climate change / global warming and (2) Software as a Service.

1. Climate Change / Global Warming: The transcript with slides (very good ones, by the way) of Michael Crichton’s speech titled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century given to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy on 11/6/05 is an excellent example of critical thinking applied to the topic of global warming.  Actually – it’s brilliant.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS): Richard Davis at Needham is one of my favorite software analysts.  In addition to actually doing real analysis and using up shoe leather visiting companies, he’s hysterical.  His recent article titled Software as a Service: World’s Greatest Innovation or Just a Good Idea? is the best piece I’ve seen on SaaS yet and – as a special bonus – demonstrates real critical thinking.

Now – it might be that I’m just more tuned into this because of all the time I’ve been spending with Atlas Shrugged – but I don’t think so.  When Amy and I were talking about this the other day, she reminded me of the bumper stickers from the 1970’s that said “Stop Continental Drift.”  Er – um – yeah.  It turns out you can sign a petition to help stop continental drift.

I had a Rally Software board meeting – this has been a fun company to be involved in from raw startup through its current aggressive growth.  When we initially funded Rally – which is the market leader in Agile lifecycle management products, many people said “what’s Agile?”  That question isn’t being asked much anymore – in many cases it’s no longer “what’ and now “when?”  Rally’s expert coaching services has helped accelerate the general adoption of this, but it’s also very clear that Agile is shifting from a new / niche software development methodology to a mainstream one.

The Agile Journal has an excellent case study on Shopzilla’s implementation of Agile using Rally’s products.  If you are interested in exploring using an Agile methodology to develop software, this article can give you a high level feel for how to think about Agile tooling.

A friend who wishes to remain anonymous (and – ironically – is a journalist) pointed me at the Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas site.  If you ever wanted to pretend you were Jackson Pollock, this is a great (and inexpensive – no paints and canvas necessary) way to do it.  Awesome.  Don’t forget to click your mouse for different color ink.

I returned home to Boulder today to a stack of books I’d ordered in the spring about the TV show 24.  There are a pile of them out now – some are additional episodes in print such as 24 Declassified: Operation Hell Gate while others are critical analysis of various seasons.  As I laid on my couch trying to recover from the red eye from Anchorage while simultaneously adjusting to being at 6000 feet, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time reading A Day In The Life.  Keith Topping – a british writer – covered Season 1 in great detail along with his often very entertaining wit (e.g. many chapters have a section called “Points at Which [Teri / Kim] Needs a Slap” as well as a section titled “Logic, Let Me Introduce You to This Window.”)  I was beginning to feel a little 24 withdrawal – between A Day In The Life and the other seven books waiting for me, I think I’ll be fine until January.