Light irony

Oh, the irony.

One of the companies developing LEDs for lighting applications decided to set up an LED demo room-- like one of those "rooms of the future"-- packed with multicolor LED accent lights, wall panels, etc. People who have seen it say it's gorgeous.

But is it really 100% LEDs? No! They had to install one (ugly, harsh) fluorescent light because there is an energy conservation law in California that says the first light switch in any room in a commercial building must connect to a fluorescent bulb.

Consumer goods price check

I went to Fry's today and bought two items related to consumer gadgetry. Check out the prices:

Cell phone case with belt clip: $12.99
131-function scientific calculator with battery included: $5.99

Yes, we live in a world where the padded containers to protect our electronics cost more than the electronics themselves.

Providing food for a day

I did a neat thing yesterday: I went with about 6 other people to provide lunch for two Buddhist nuns in a nearby city.

Buddhist monks and nuns have a lot of restrictions around eating; it's a method for examining and eventually becoming free of the obsessions we naturally have around food. One restriction is not eating after noon each day, and most only take one meal around 11 am (although they may have a small snack upon waking).

If you think that's hard, consider that monks and nuns also are not allowed to cook or use money. How do they get food? Every day, someone has to give it to them. They are at the mercy of the people around them. (Actually, not much more so than the rest of us. Reflect sometime on how many people you needed to get you your food today, from the farmers to the truck drivers to the check-out clerks).

Contrary to popular belief, by the way, they are not required to be vegetarian. And these ones aren't.

They don't quite have a temple (more on that later). In fact, it's just a rented apartment for now! But they will soon be buying their own place to fix up as they need. One nun has been a nun for 15 years, and the other just started a few months ago (both are Westerners, by the way!). They have the living room set up as temple-like as possible, with a Buddha statue, various sitting cushions, candles, incense, fresh flowers, etc. Upstairs they have their bedrooms and another sitting room.

We arrived at 10:30 and set up the food along the counter. There is a procedure for offering it formally, where we held each serving bowl/plate and passed it directly into their hands (they requested that we offer the salt and pepper too :-)). If a layperson touches something again, it must be formally reoffered before they can use it because it is considered to have been taken back.

They filled their (enormous!) bowls and sat down to say various chants and get started eating. Then we took our food. They only get one pass through the line anyway, so it was no problem for us to take the food (or go back for seconds). Lunch lasted until noon, and all the food was exquisite. Salad, fruit, hummus, rice, curried squash, chicken, fried eggplant and egg, Indian beans, roasted garlic, bread, etc etc. Then we had tea and chatted.

Later, we went out for a walk through a nearby bird sanctuary and visited the local Thai temple/monastery, where the teacher of the older nun resides. Why only a monastery and no nunnery? There is some politics involved here. The line of monks is known to extend all the way back to the Buddha with no breaks. But at some point after the Buddha established the line of nuns, it died out for a while before being rekindled. There are those who believe the new line is illegitimate. (I find this ironic from a group of people who believe in rebirth, but no one asked me....).

Anyway, Ayya Tathaloka is considered legitimate only by some fraction of the Thai Buddhist community. But it's not like being shunned. Those who don't think she is a real nun just treat her like a regular human; Buddhists respect all humans.

So she has lots of friends on both "sides" of this issue. Which is exactly what is placing her in a dilemma right now.

You see, she was invited to speak before the United Nations on March 7, in honor of International Women's Day. Having a Buddhist nun stand before that body and speak *as a nun* would be a political act within the Thai religious tradition. She doesn't especially care about the politics, and doesn't want to muck with her friendships, which are more important to her than some abstract religious idea. But she does want to speak in honor of Women's Day because she knows her voice is important and could be inspirational. So, what to do?

She tried to refuse the invitation, sending her apologies and declining. But they didn't accept this! They sent a letter back asking her to please forward her picture and bio as soon as possible. So she is writing the speech herself, but having a friend (who is not a nun) deliver it. It seems like a good compromise. In her words, "I can speak there in 20 or 30 years." (It's good to have a lot of patience!).

So keep your ears open on March 7. Those are the words of a quiet, friendly woman who lives in California, wears a brown robe, and doesn't cook.

Urban screens

As a display analyst, this special issue on Urban Screens (at First Monday) caught my eye.

Some of these pieces wax poetic about the new culture of giant outdoor screens. Others are more staid, but all acknowledge that there could be fundamental shifts in our public life due to these screens.

I am not so sure the screens themselves are a key cause. After all, we somehow had to get to the point where we think megascreens in public are a good idea. People's ideas about how to create and use such screens evolved from earlier forces relating to advertising, entertainment, public life, and trends in design.

Sometimes I think our visual brain is overstimulated. It's like our love of fat and salt-- which was a valuable evolutionary adaptation, but has gone awry now that these items are in abundance. We are highly visual creatures, and that has served as an unstable force in technical development, resulting in greater and greater focus on the eyes at the expense of other senses.

I recommend developing all 6 senses in full measure. Which one seems neglected for you? Go work on that one.

High tech in the high desert

I just spent a few days in Phoenix at a conference about flexible displays. People are busy making display panels that can wrap around corners, drape across surfaces, or unroll like a magic scroll. (Don't expect to buy one soon, but some very nice demos have been made).

After a couple of intense days talking about organic semiconductors and web processing, I was ready for something tangible, even a little gritty. A desert hike-- perfect! Just up the road from my hotel was the Dreamy Draw Nature Park (there must be a story behind that name, but I don't know it). I spent an hour at sunset climbing among rocks and cacti, filling my shoes with reddish dust that later proved problematic when packing my bag to go home.

Looking across the desert as the sun dipped below a distant outcropping of rock, I felt a bit sorry that people may someday have flat-panel displays on the sleeves of their chamois shirts, tempting their eyes to watch sports clips and cartoons instead of the surrounding terrain. But then again, an interactive map could be really handy.

May I kiss you, CAIT?

The World Resources Institute's Climate Analysis Indicators Tool is really neat. It's a collection of data on carbon emissions, energy usage, social and health factors, and weather disasters, all organized by country or state. It's great for policy analysis, market research, and general eye-opening. And it's free!

Still in the beta phase, you can comment on CAIT on the discussion forum to suggest new views, more data, or better usability. And you'll actually get a response from the team working to put the info together.

There are more and more of these kinds of tools (several have come out based on Google Earth, for instance). Although data are only as intelligent as the mind interpreting them, this seems to be a case where having lots of information is really helpful.

Farewell, Dave

My work colleague Dave, who was battling colon cancer, died this past weekend. He had been sick for about 2.5 years, and had been in decline lately. He was the second employee after the founder, and did a lot to shape the business. He had one of those boyish faces so his age was hard to judge, but I think he was in his late 50s.

One thing I remember about Dave is that he had a phenomenal memory, and it was organized in a uniquely Dave way. He would pull up obscure little things he had heard 5 years ago and point out how they were related to something happening now. When I encountered new topics in my early years at the company, I always wanted to talk to Dave because I had a strong sense that he knew interesting and useful things about any topic, and I would benefit from talking with him. Because of his unusual mental filing system, it was sometimes a challenge to get out the desired information! He often gave nonlinear responses to questions.

And now that he has made this transition ahead of the rest of us, I feel that he still has information I don't have :-)!

Farewell, Dave. And thanks.

Knowing when the time has come

In this editorial, All is Silent Down at the Pond, Professor Tim Halliday argues that it is simply impossible to save all species from extinction. As evidence, he points to cases where the habitats were carefully preserved by conservationists, but the species died out anyway. Clearly, the system is more complicated than humans can control.

He states bluntly:

It is clear that the mainstay of conservation, the protection of habitat, is no longer sufficient to ensure the survival of many species. There is a widespread culture of denial about this situation, not least among conservationists, who must take a lead in alerting humanity to the current extinction crisis.

The reality is that many thousands of species will become extinct in the near future; so perhaps it is time to face this reality and to replace the "conservation paradigm" with the "extinction paradigm".

[...]

It is the responsibility of biologists, I suggest, to admit that the conventional view of conservation - that we can and should preserve at-risk organisms - is simply untenable. What we can and must do is document the decline and disappearance of species that cannot be saved, so that at least some kind of record of them will be preserved.

It's provocative, and worth considering. All things die, including each of us and the species we represent. Of course, opponents will always (legitimately) point out that the assurance of my death does not mean I give up trying to live a healthy and happy life, or that I don't take steps to get medical care for illnesses or injuries (unless I am a Christian Scientist).

But let's look beyond these uninteresting top-level arguments. Halliday is suggesting something like hospice care for endangered species. Stop trying to save them and just let them die peacefully, caring for them and making memories of them-- just as we might with an elderly family member for whom medical treatment is no longer helpful.

This can actually be a very compassionate and wonderful action. When we get out of the mode that says illness is the enemy, we can appreciate the person in new ways, as well as deepen our connection to our own life. We can use death as a way to wake up. This does not happen when we are lost in scurrying around trying to prevent death.

Done in the right way, Halliday's idea could be extremely fruitful. We might find, paradoxically, that by observing and really understanding the loss of a few species, we become much more inspired to respect those that remain. More inspired than we were when we saw loss as tragedy.