I had a great vacation with Amy this week. My reading was varied and included two books (American Sphinx and The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe that were useful in my current “thinking about how humans think” theme and how that might be different than how machines think. I then came home to a short story by my long time friend (32+ years) Dave Jilk called Fork. If you don’t know what a “fork” is (hint – there is no spoon) take a quick Wikipedia read on Fork (system call) or Fork (software development). Since I first encountered fork on a Project Athena RS-6000, I prefer the system call definition and it makes me very happy that Dennis Ritchie (brother of my friend Bill, uncle of my friend Sam) created the Fork-exec system call.

My dad – Stan Feld – turned 78 years old today. He’s one of my closest friends and a life-long buddy. He always rocks a wild green outfit on his birthday. In honor of him turning 78, following are 7 things I’ve learned from him: Be kind to everyone. Treasure you wife. Never lose your anger in public. If you aren’t standing on the edge you are taking up too much space. Naps are awesome. Chocolate ice cream is the best food in the universe. Learn something new every day. and 8 things I love about him.

Before you have an allergic reaction to the title of the post and respond with “you are stupid”, bear with me for a second as I set up the problem. I’ve been a heavy Slack user for at least six months (probably closer to nine). We started using it internally at Foundry Group and then I joined a number of Slack instances of companies that we are investors in. For at least three months, I joined a number of relevant channels for each organization and tried to participate. I use Slack on the Mac primary so I used the left side bar to have multiple teams active, tuned my notifications so they weren’t overwhelming, and engaged as best as I could. I tried to post on Slack when I had an issue with the company – usually around a product – that needed to be communicated to a group instead of one person. And, for a few of the CEOs, we used Slack as our primary DM channel.

Applications are open for the second group of Colorado Global Entrepreneurs in Residence. If you are interested in applying send a resume and a cover letter, including a statement of interest, to GEIR-apply@colorado.edu. The Global Entrepreneurs in Residence (GEIR) Program brings international entrepreneurial talent to the CU-Boulder campus and community. GEIRs work across the CU-Boulder campus mentoring students in a wide array of projects requiring an entrepreneurial mindset. GEIRs guest lecture in classrooms, advise on entrepreneurial research, and provide mentorship to CU community members developing their own startups.

I read The Three-Body Problem last week and loved it. It was a little hard to get into it at the beginning and that ended up being pat of the beauty of it. I’m not going to summarize it here – I encourage you to read it – but want to talk about the thoughts it simulated. About two-thirds of the way through the book, I had a thought while laying in bed next to Amy that we don’t have any idea how the universe works. I blurted out something like “We don’t know how the universe, whatever that means, works.” Appropriately, Amy asked “Tell me more” which is how many of our funnest conversations unfold.

Dan Caruso (Zayo CEO) is one of Boulder’s remarkable entrepreneurs. Phil Weiser and I will be interviewing him as part of the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series on 3/15. Sign up to join us for what I expect will be a very interesting evening.

When I sat down this morning with Amy she started reading off people who had funded entire cities worth of projects on DonorsChoose this morning. Amy has DonorsChoose in her twitter feed and we quickly figured out what was going on. I saw Fred Wilson’s post on #BestSchoolDay and we agreed to fully fund projects in a number of cities that we have connections to. We ended up fully funding all the DonorChoose projects in Alaska, Boulder, Longmont, Brighton, Breckenridge, Richardson, and Detroit.

I was at dinner a few weeks ago with my long time friend and first business partner Dave Jilk. We ended up talking about how difficult it is to determine signal from noise, fact from fiction, truth from bullshit, and bullshit from complete-and-total-bullshit. I recently hit the wall with all the political stuff that was popping up everywhere. I think the thing that flipped my switch from on to off was a satirical article about Hillary Clinton and all the horrible things she had done that was being passed around by people who I think considered it to be factual. As I read through it, I imagined all the derivative articles building on the sarcasm embedded in the article and then making arguments which would be cited by others as truth because they showed up credibly somewhere.

On Saturday I went to two films at the Boulder International Film Festival – Code: Debugging the Gender Gap and A Good American. Both were excellent and worth watching, but Code was special for me as its an issue I’ve been helping work on for over a decade. When I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board as the chair in 2005, it was a nascent organization and the issue of the small number of women in computer science, while often talked about, wasn’t well understood. Today, not only is the issue well understood, but many of the solutions are clear and being talked openly about, such as in the article At Harvey Mudd College, the Ratio of Women in Computer Science Increased from 10% to 40% in 5 Years