It could happen before you expect it. I read a lot of science fiction and have been fantasizing about the opportunity to jack into cyberspace for a long time. We are getting one step closer with our latest investment in EmSense.

I wish it were as simple as “the weather.” After 27 days in a row of rain (ok – we had sun for part of two days), the sun finally came out today. I’ve been coming up to Alaska in the summer for about 15 years. Amy grew up here and after we started going out together it seemed like a trip to her home state was in order. I grew up in Texas, so after putting up with the “if you cut Alaska in half Texas would become the third largest state” jokes, I took a trip and immediately fell in love with the place. 

Mark Cuban has a brilliant post up titled How to Jumpstart the Economy – Tax Free Small Businesses. He totally nails it. Send a copy to every politician you know.

I had a week of “a book a day” where every single one I read was great. I’m now slogging through an “ok” book (The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism) so I thought I’d take a break and write quick reviews of the excellent ones that I have read lately. The Last Lecture: Wow. Randy Pausch is just incredible. A well known CMU professor with a great zest for life, Randy was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in September 2006. He broke into the mainstream with his awesome lecture titled “The Last Lecture” which was the final lecture he gave at CMU. It’s a riveting 76 minute lecture that the book was subsequently based on. Both are worth every second you spend on them. As of today, Randy is still alive, but according to his blog he recently “has also taken a step down and is much sicker than he had been. He’s now enrolled in hospice.” (Added the morning of 7/25: Randy Pausch passed away last night.) I don’t know Randy personally, but after hearing his lecture, reading as much of his as I could find on the web, and then reading The Last Lecture, I feel like a have a real sense for him. He teaches – and inspires – in a way and at a high level that few other do in this world. 

Amy insists I’m the Good Knight so we’ll call this a good night for the Dark Knight. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I love it when my dad writes about personal history on his blog. He’s a great storyteller and is extremely articulate about living and growing up in a generation that seems very very far away from today, as well as very far away from the generation I grew up with. His post titled Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund Summer Camp 1950 made me smile an enormous smile. I can totally see my scrawny 12 year old dad surrounded by these huge guys from the Red Hook District in Brooklyn, being scared shitless but keeping it all inside, and winning them all over on the ball field.

Fred Wilson – my friend and co-investor in Zynga – titled his post on Zynga’s $29 million financing Raising The Stakes so I couldn’t resist titling my post Doubling Down. And I’ll echo what Fred said – I’m amazed with the hand that Mark Pincus (Zynga’s CEO and founder) has and am delighted to be sitting at the table playing it with him. Zynga just announced that Kleiner Perkins has led a $29 million round that includes new investor Institutional Venture Partners and the old investors (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.) Bing Gordon from KPCB has joined the board – Bing recently joined KPCB and was previously the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts where he had been a key executive since 1982. The TechCrunch article has some good info in it including the news that Zynga has acquired Yoville.

Since last summer I’ve been talking about comments as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. I use Intense Debate* for the comment system on my blog and have learned a lot by experimenting with it. In the past six months comments have moved to the forefront of the discussion around user generated content. While the various new commenting systems that have emerged have played a part in this, I think the broad activity around systems that enable small bursts of user generated content (Twitter, BrightKite*) and systems that aggregate a wide variety of user generated content (FriendFeed, SocialThing*) are playing a huge role in this and more “comment-like” data is being generated all over the Web.

Having just finished reading George Soros’s latest book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means my brain is now full of his theories around reflexivity. I have always instinctively agreed with Soros’s philosophy even though I find it incredibly difficult and chewy to work my way through (but that’s true of all philosophy for me.) I’m a great fan of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which, according to my friend Wikipedia, “is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the velocity of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the velocity of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain.” Wikipedia suggests that this is often conflated with the Observer Effect (when you observe a phenomenon, you change it), but I think the intersection of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity reduce nicely in my brain to the Observer Effect.