Heresy makes you think. Amy sent me an essay about heresy written by the great physicist and thinker Freeman Dyson titled Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society. Following is the setup to what is a phenomenal essay.
“The main subject of this piece is the problem of climate change. This is a contentious subject, involving politics and economics as well as science. The science is inextricably mixed up with politics. Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.
My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans. “
About halfway through Dyson’s essay, I came upon what I consider to be a simple yet brilliant paragraph.
“When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models.”
I’m a huge environmentalist, but really struggle with all the popular / political stuff going on around climate change. I’ve studied it some but am not expert. I’m careful about expressing my opinion because much of it is simply opinion and reaction, rather than data driven conclusions. As a result, my personal focus on improving the environment has been around land conservation and intelligent land use and management. Interestingly, Dyson touches on some of this in his discussion of the dynamics surrounding the evolution of the biomass of the earth.
I mentioned this casually in a conservation with a colleague the other day and he pointed me to an article titled Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car.’ While a knee jerk reaction from a climate change believer would be “that’s total bullshit”, it was another intriguing set of thoughts from Chris Goodall (Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abington) about a different approach to thinking about the problem.
While it’s currently popular to “think green”, it’s always been less popular to put forward heretical thoughts. But the heretical thinkers are often the most innovative ones. Hopefully they get us to think.
I was delighted to wake up this morning. I’m delighted to wake up every morning, but this is a particular beautiful sunny Saturday in Boulder, Colorado which means I can cuddle up to my computer and catch up a little (ok – and go for a long run.)
My inner feeling of delight was improved even more when I was scanning headlines online and saw the NY Times article Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell. This has been a long time in coming and finally puts a stake in the ground around (or in the heart of) SCO’s ridiculous copyright suit against IBM around Unix.
Unlike patents, I’m a big supporter of copyright (and trade secrets, GPL, and copyleft) as a mechanism for addressing and protecting software innovation. However, SCO’s behavior around Unix has cast a pallor over the legitimacy of copyright and open source since 2003. Once again, a Federal judge stepped up (this time it was Judge Dale Kimball – Federal District Court – Utah) with another important decision around intellectual property rights and software.
I had breakfast with Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – yesterday. I’ve worked with Matt for at least six years and love the way his brain works. During my frustrating quest for the best chocolate croissant in Boulder (so far all of the ones I’ve found appear to be exactly the same – I’m guessing there is one chocolate croissant distributor in town) we talked some about “collaboration.”
Matt has been writing a book (actually – a series of blog posts) on collaboration titled Collaboration is Hard. So far there are three parts: 1, 2, and 3. Matt goes deep on how he thinks about this as a CEO and how they approach this at Return Path.
We must be getting to the end of the summer – I’m starting to see more deep, thoughtful, reflective blog posts in my feed reader each morning vs. the typical “news” or “repost” type of stuff (although I recognize the irony that my two posts this morning have been “hey – read that other guy” type of things.) Time for a run – maybe I’ll come up with something creative on my own.
Fred Wilson has an awesome post up today titled Venture Fund Distributions – Cash versus Stock. It explains, in great detail, how a VC thinks about distributing stock (either from IPOs or from sales of companies to publicly traded ones) back to their investors (or LPs.) It’s extremely detailed, gets into the mechanics of it, and also – as usual for Fred’s posts – has Fred’s own personal viewpoints woven through it. This is by far the best discussion I’ve ever seen of VC stock distributions either in the blogosphere or in interviews. A must read.
It’s August and there must be extra “release mix” in the water in Boulder (in addition to the city supplied Accelerate and Endurox.) I come from a land (MIT) where “demo or die” is the motto. Since I started doing Internet-related stuff in 1994 I’ve often chanted “release early and often.” There is nothing like exposing your software to the world to get quick feedback.
Intense Debate – another one of the TechStars teams – has started to release their comment replacement system out into big bad world of blogs. David Cohen – the ringleader of TechStars – has integrated Intense Debate into his ColoradoStartups blog and describes how it works in his post Intense Debate – Exposing comment “Dark Matter.”
In my The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere post I discussed the lameness of the blog comment infrastructure. Intense Debate is addressing “the future” of this with a complete blog replacement system that plays nice with existing blog comments (one of my other investments – BigSwerve – is addressing “the past.”) Right now Intense Debate supports WordPress.org, Blogger, and Typepad; Movable Type is coming soon (and – once it’s ready – you’ll get to play around with it on this blog.) They are in a controlled beta to insure that they are 100% stable with each blog platform – if you are interested in getting on the list to experiment with their stuff, sign up for the closed beta.
Last week I had an afternoon meeting with the founders of several companies, including Intense Debate, BigSwerve, Lijit, and NewsGator – each who are working on different parts of the Dark Matter problem. I’ve also been talking to a handful of other folks that are going after various parts of this problem. I’m starting to get my mind around interesting ways to address the extremely large number of comments out there in the wild.
I predict that 2008 will be the year that the software patent situation finally goes critical and the nuclear meltdown in the reactor begins. Two things happened today that are notable: the gigantically stupid $1.52 billion judgment for Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft was overturned and a hard to find company named Aloft Media sued Microsoft and Adobe for “user interfaces in a network browsing window that display the content at a specific URL as well as the URL itself somewhere on or around the window.”
The backstory behind the original Alcatel-Lucent judgment boarders on the insane. It’s extremely complicated and kafkaesque – the only conclusion a rational person can draw is that it’s further evidence of a completely broken software patent system. Just mention the name Fraunhofer and watch people’s heads start spinning around (with the audio track presumably encoded in some non-MP3 format.)
Today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster of San Diego that the damage award was not valid because it appears Microsoft never infringed one of the two patents is another brave and thoughtful move by a federal judge following Judge William Schwarzer’s (San Francisco – Federal) dismissal of a lawsuit from Friskit Inc. against RealNetworks citing the Supreme Court’s April ruling in KSR v. Teleflex.
Of course, a good deed never goes unpunished. Aloft Media’s lawyers apparently found their way to the Texas East District Court and managed to file a lawsuit against Microsoft and Adobe for – well – it looks like “URLs near a browser window.” Maybe someone should suggest that browsers exist because of URLs in the first place and it would be perfectly natural to assume that someone would put URLs near the browser window. Or – more specifically – that it would an obvious thing to do to put URL’s near a browser window.
Are there windmills in East Texas?
I’ve been excited about Me.dium since fifteen minutes into the first time I had it explained to me by David Mandell, Robert Reich, and Kimbal Musk. Up until today, Me.dium was in a controlled beta as the company spent a lot of time and energy making sure that the magic technology both worked and scaled.
Today they’ve launched two new things – an IE 7 browser extension and a Me.dium map widget for bloggers (note the pretty new widget titled “my world” on my sidebar.)
Peter Butler at CNet has an outstanding description and overview of Me.dium up on The Daily Download.
Me.dium’s vision is to reveal the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. For the first time, you can see your friends and others as they surf around you on the web.
Today’s release is a giant step forward to accomplishing this vision. Joining Me.dium and friending me is easy – just click here.
And Lindsey makes it (and the stock) look really good.
The Garmin Forerunner 305 Wrist-Mounted GPS Navigator and Personal Training Device with Heart Rate Monitor – my heart beats for it. Every good marathoner needs one – don’t leave home without it.
On the heals of their recent financing, Lijit is looking for an experienced software engineer (4+ years) and a database wizard (5+ years). In addition to a clothing optional work environment, Lijit offers a fully paid health plan and all the M&Ms you can eat. Interested people should send a resume to info<at>lijit<dot>com.
This job opportunity brought to you by the Feld job board (free listings for companies I have an investment in.)