February 7, 2010

Shopping, One Man’s Perspective

For me, shopping is not an adventure, it’s a fucking mission.

Objective #1: Smartwool Socks

Store: Dick’s

Elapsed time: Under 10 minutes.

God would wear these socks. Dick’s is one of the few places I can get the hunting version. True, I don’t hunt (except for socks), but dam these suckers are comfortable, and they last for 5 years!

Objective # 2: Sweater

Store: Nordstrom

Elapsed Time: 16 Minutes

Nordstrom understands the American man and takes this into consideration when they design their stores. Meaning they typically locate the men’s department near an outside exit—no escalators, no hacking your way through a jungle of panties and no smelly trips through the cosmetics/perfume gauntlet. Easy recon, easy egress.

Objective # 3: Blu-ray DVD player

Store: Best Buy

Elapsed Time: 1 hr, 15 minutes

The Best Buy experience is kind of like entering a casino. No matter what you came to buy, you’re going to have to walk past a lot of distracting eye candy just to get to it. All this makes it difficult for a guy to reduce unplanned purchases. I have to admit, it took me probably 20 minutes to get from the front door to the DVD’s. Still a man has to take responsibility for his own impulses. I figure if there are women who can enter a shoe store for sneakers and walk out with only that (as yet, an unproven hypothesis), then I can do the same with Best Buy.

The place looked like a retail war zone, with tags out of place, stock missing from the shelves, and a lot of dazed kids in blue shirts. Most of them shrugging their shoulders—even when I asked them something simple such as, “do you have any more of this model?”, or “where is the rest room?”. I didn’t dare go any more technical than that.  It’s a cycle I’ve seen with this chain many times. After Christmas, it seems to take the average Best Buy store 6 to 10 months just to clean up rebuild their stocks. This is a sad thing for me to watch, cause I could live in this place.

Objective # 4: A Burger and a Beer (or 4)

Store: Redacted

Elapsed Time: 5 or so hours

Said burger was the real reason I chose to actually venture out and not just order all this shit on the web. Had I been married, this would have been a successful outing. The wife would have thought an entire afternoon dedicated to shopping reasonable. Little would she know that the average guy can handle such mission in less than 2 hours and spend the remainder of that time drinking beer. Mission accomplished.

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February 4, 2010

Uncommon Sense

I think about our business heroes a lot. Mainly because they have so much influence on our culture. Not only do they help mold the products and services we consume, they also influence the policies of our government in a very direct manner. Today, many celebrity CEO’s complete directly with authors, TV commentators, etc, in an attempt to influence our values, votes, and of course our pocketbook.

When I look at recent corporate leaders such as Welch, Fiorina, Murdoch, Buffet, Bezos, and Jobs. I see some people I admire and others I detest. On balance I know that some of these leaders are leaving the world better off than they came into it. They are net creators of jobs, wealth and opportunity for the rest of us. And even though there are some among this crowd that I feel are misguided, short-term thinkers, I also understand that at the deepest level each of them are just like me—people with friends, families and even nations they love and want so very much to protect. And to do this I know that each of them is exerting their understanding of this world through what they perceive as intellect and common sense.

Common sense is good, but it’s hard to put a specific definition to it. One of the best I’ve seen is: “Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge”. In essence it is the collected wisdom of our species. We’ve woven it into our parenting, our religions, schools, and government. To the human mind common sense seems mostly instinctual. It’s a known ‘good’ in a bad and hard world. A form of teaching which gives us comfort in its simplicity and familiarity.

Yes common sense is good, but uncommon sense is often better.

If you come to me with a ridged mindset and a notion that the whole of our existence can be summed up in black or white, then I would say that you are missing the essential element of uncommon sense. Uncommon sense means moving to the edge of your philosophical comfort zone. It is an acceptance that—no matter the subject—mingling opposing viewpoints will likely takes us forward, while wallowing in the comfort of like voices will likely hold us in place.

I call it uncommon sense because it does not seem instinctual for our tribal species. Long ago we found comfort in our family caves and jungle nooks. We ventured out because of necessity and we only did so in the safety of numbers. Outsiders were never trusted. Somehow, we learned that cultural homogeneity is good.

Today, we have access to so many options: in products, opinions, media, and culture. Yet it seems to me that most of us use these levers to narrow our exposure to new ideas, rather maximize it. We choose our news source based on ideology; listen to music stations geared for a specific generation or genre; visit the same chain stores and eat the same food no matter our geography. I once traveled with a guy who insisted on eating at McDonalds in Paris. Not Paris Texas, mind you, the real Paris!

The essence of uncommon sense is understanding that diversity, experimentation, and compromise are far better than homogeneity. In my view, the 227 year old struggle to realize the true vision of our U.S. Constitution has been a steady process of cultural diversification—from the abolition of slavery, to suffrage, to genuine civil rights. The main mechanism for this progress has been our willingness to respect each other’s humanity and learn from our differences.

Curiously, at the most basic of levels we learn there are no differences. In his excellent book, “Three Cups of Tea” humanitarian Greg Mortenson shows us how the simple act of building a $12,000 school in rural Pakistan can transform the local standard of living. He demonstrates how educating girls can make a fundamental difference to the health and safety of a community and do far more to discourage terrorism than a hundred half million dollar bombs.

Many Americans may read that and think “Duh! Education is just common sense”. I would encourage them to look back a few generations into their own family history. One of my grandmothers was illiterate, born in a time and place when most men didn’t see a need to educate their farmer sons, much less their daughters. But something happened. Somewhere along the way my grandma decided that her children would be educated. For a sharecropper’s wife, that was a pretty strong measure of uncommon sense.

© 2010 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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January 21, 2010

Father’s Day

On a cold summer’s day in Cambridge, England some 19 years ago, I stood beside my father and watched him cry at the grave of a compatriot. I was 32 and this was the first time I’d ever seen him grieve. In his face I recognized the null of buried trauma. In his face I recognized my own pain. It may not have been the third Sunday in June, but for me that moment of connection made it Father’s day.

As a young father, my guiding principle was rational thought. Over the years I sought to endear within my children a healthy skepticism of anything artificial or staged. I often minimized the very notion of Father’s day. I derided the occasion as little more than a manufactured event—a hallmark holiday, dedicated to no more than the stimulation of our economy. When the kids where young I would insist to my spouse that she not buy a present for me in their stead. “After all, I am not your father” I would tell her. How very strange and cold that must have seemed to her at the time—how cold it seems to me now.

These days many men do not begin fatherhood until they are well into their thirties. They do this for many reasons—damn good reasons—and I applaud those who seek to better know themselves and their partners before taking this step. I became a father at 24. I started relatively young and relatively ignorant. But I’m convinced that when it comes to fatherhood, all men—regardless of age—start relatively ignorant.

I’ve come to realize that fatherhood is a process. It may begin with an event—a birth or adoption—but it is certainly never fully realized at that moment. You may carry the title in an instant, but you need to learn its significance at your own pace. For me, fatherhood was a process of building a new type of emotional connection—something unlike any relationship my bumbling male ego had ever encountered. This connection was forged via a series of innumerable moments: instances of pure growth, pain, openness and joy. Those moments were my Father’s days.

Father’s day was the moment I let go of my daughter’s bicycle and watched her ride off into independence. It was seeing her in her prom dress and listening to the grinding of gears in the Volkswagen when she learned to drive. It was the moment, shortly after she came to live with me, when she began to share her life with me, the moment I began to earn her trust. It was high school boyfriends, and mistakes—a fatherly foot put down too hard, when love and understanding would have done the trick.

Father’s day was the day I first held my infant son. It was the moment I noticed the wondrous perfection of a baby’s feet. It was that shot of joy that comes with a simple toothless grin. It was countless bedtime stories and transformer battles on the family room floor. It was timeouts, and roving hands in department stores, and bug bites, and the horror of bicycle wrecks and playground tumbles. It was my overly tight grip in the parking lot. It was the awful moment I realized that no matter how tight my grip, my protective instincts would not always be up to the task.

The perspective of a father is fundamentally changed from that of a childless male. That’s not to say that every male who fathers children will gain this perspective. A single man may long for fatherhood, but I do not believe he can fully grasp the emotional significance of it. No amount of love, savvy, or wisdom will prepare you for what you are about to encounter. Nor will you understand the ways it has changed you until you are looking back.

I was a young man that day in Cambridge. A young father with so little understanding as to how my own father had molded me. That moment with him was but a first insight. A sharp realization that his mistakes, his brutal ignorance, and his always present emptiness were coloring and shading my own existence.

Father’s day is the day I forgave my dad for his legacy of suffering. It was the moment I let go of his mistakes, and through that simple act, learned to release some of my own. It was seeing his grandchildren offer him healing through their unconditional love. Father’s day was the comfort of having my children at my side when we laid him to rest. It is the joy at having known this man and the growing acceptance of his voice imbedded in my own, of his face emerging in my mirror.

© 2010 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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January 9, 2010

4 Reasons You Should See Avatar, Even Though the Story is Stupid

There was a moment, very early into James Cameron’s new film that I considered chucking my eleven dollars and walking out. It came in the form of a single word: “unobatainium”.

This was supposedly the name of the rare mineral we humans had traveled five light years to find. The word itself was so startlingly stupid that I laughed out loud. It destroyed any chance what-so-ever of enjoying the story.

But I didn’t walk out and I’m glad for it. The story didn’t get any better or less predictable, but the entertainment experience itself was mind boggling. This movie represents a baby step toward changes that will affect us all. And I’m not just referring to the obvious profound changes in how we experience entertainment. The movie also points to coming technological innovations that will alter the way we will perceive our world at every level. So here, in pretty raw form are 4 reasons you should go see this movie:

1. You Get To See A Scantily Clad Sigourney Weaver At 30

Sure she’s blue, eight foot tall, and has a six foot tail. And yes, the character is completely computer generated. Yet when you look at her face you know it’s Sigourney: her gestures, her facial expressions, her delivery—it’s all there. So if they can give us a giant blue Sigourney Weaver, what’s to say they can’t render her at 16? Or 5? Or 85?

The core of this capability is a technical process called performance capture. Boiled down to its’ basics there are really two things happening in the process. First, in the classical sense of movie-making, the director is composing a scene and his actors are performing it. But just as importantly he is also collecting data. Reams of it. And as we technologist know, data is expensive to collect but very, very cheap to keep.

With data in hand in the next 10 to 20 years the technology will likely advance to the level of performance re-purposing. Meaning that once a range of images, motions, expressions, and voices are captured for a given actor they can be stored indefinitely and used to generate different characters over and over again.

Think of it. Shoot the actor once, and then generate an infinite number of stories, characters and scenes using their original talent, all without ever engaging that person again. For an actor this technology represents a whole new range of thrilling creative challenges. For her agent it represents a whole new range legal nightmares. The future rights to use a person’s digital data will soon be far more important to an actor than the immediate gig.

Performance capture has already been used extensively in computer gaming, I can see it moving into movies and television as the quality goes up and cost of doing it come down. The last stage will be on a personal level. Perhaps you will be able to plug the actor of your choice into any story you like. Want to see a 20 something Denzel Washington cast with a young Katharine Hepburn? Go for it. In fact, watch it in 3D:

2. Avatar’s Take On 3D Is But A Stepping Stone

Digital experiences are becoming increasingly immersive. If you’ve ever gotten into a computer game you know this. But even the uninitiated have probably encountered a web experience so engaging they spent several minutes on it. Those of us in the business strive for this. Time on the site, or page, or application is one of our key metrics.

To make an experience immersive we want to engage as many of your senses as possible. Movies have always had an advantage in this because the size of the screen allows it to dominate our visual input. In the beginning it movies were only visual, then sound came in the mid 1920’s and both audio and visual technologies have improved ever sense. But an immersive visual 3D has experience has remained difficult until now.

The 3D you see today in Avatar is only the beginning, but it’s a really good start and certainly worth a taste. The next step will be to take it to 360 degrees—sights and sounds will be directional. We’ll see our movies in near complete sensory immersion. Initially we’ll do this with headsets and lots of graphical processing horsepower. The theater of the future may not even need a screen.

This may happen faster than you think. I’m in my early fifties and fully expect to see it. I’m less confident of seeing the next step in the process: complete immersion. But I’m completely sure my 25 year old son will experience it—should he elect to do so. It will be a tough decision for him, as elective brain surgery should be. Which brings me to reason 3:

3. The Brain To Computer Interface Represented In Avatar Already Exist

In the movie, which takes place 150 years from now, humans lay in a coffin like pod and control the biological bodies of genetically engineered beings with their thoughts. To some degree, this vision of the future is already outdated.

Some eight or nine years ago a cute little owl monkey named Belle sat in a laboratory at Duke University and moved a joystick left and right. This is not a particularly startling advancement for owl monkeys but it is for us. That’s because the joystick she moved was sitting in a room 600 miles away at MIT and the movement itself was controlled not by her body, but by her thoughts. Tiny electrodes implanted in her brain transmitted her commands directly to a robotic arm. Today this same technology is being used to operate computers for disabled humans. In the near future it will help amputees to control extremely advanced prosthetic arms (DARPA is working on this effort as we speak).

In forty years it could be very common to implant technology into the bodies of otherwise healthy people—even children—in order to enhance them. Human augmentation is a very real field with very practical outcomes. There are many credible scientist and engineers, like Ray Kurzweil, (seen here at TED, 2005) who view this as the next stage in human evolution.

This technology will enable us to live much longer, think much faster and remember virtually anything we experience. We’ll be able to access the internet with a thought. Learning will be via a direct port to the brain. All done wirelessly—like The Matrix but without that unsightly 60 pin cannon plug in the back of your head.

Kurzweil believes this technology will start yielding such results as early as the 2020’s. Even if it takes a few years longer it’s likely that 150 years from now the level of brain to brain connectivity will far exceed that pictured in Avatar. Thus my final point:

4. Humans Will Become Networked, Sentient Organisms

One of the so-called ‘discoveries’ in the Avatar storyline was the idea that all life on Pandora was connected through a biological network. Many people find this to be a silly and certainly it doesn’t seem likely with our biology. But it’s very likely with our technology. If you can connect your brain directly with a machine, then you can use said machine to connect your brain with another person, or many other persons.

We’re not talking mind control here (though it is a real danger), think of it more as Facebook on steroids. As you live through your day you will interact with people you know, both near and far, via thought. This doesn’t mean you will give up your physical life, though eventually that will be an option.

It sounds like a lot for one person to manage, but we are defiantly drawn to it and with the technology at hand I think we’ll adapt. People like Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, have a pretty coherent vision of how this will play out over the next few years. We are rapidly evolving new social standards for connected behavior. And as the level of technological connectivity becomes more intimate, we will establish social norms for that as well.

We are entering a period in human technological evolution called ‘Convergence’ . We’ll will all hear this buzzword with increasing frequency over the next few years and it’s very likely we’ll grow tired of it very quickly. Convergence refers to the growing intertwining of four emerging branches of technology: Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nano (GRIN).

Once we pass through this phase, human reality will be very different from what it is today. In fact, physical reality will become increasing irrelevant. Avatar, both as a technological product and as entertainment, illustrates a few scenarios for how this convergence could play out.

I think it is important we begin to raise awareness of these advancements and to discuss the implications they hold. As I watched the ball drop over Time Square last week I was struck by how Dick Clark has finally begun to age. And I realized that if they can only keep his face alive for 10 more years, then we can digitally reanimate him. Then it’s Dick Clark, on demand, for the next 150 Rocking New Year’s Eve’s.

© 2010 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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