Requiem for a Ray-Gun

This summer has seen a lot of time for nostalgia for me, and one of the big sources has been going through the old papers that my parents passed to me at the beginning of summer.  They're preparing for downsizing, and finally made good on the request / threat / reasonable-demand that I take all the remaining boxes of my old stuff off of their hands.  Since we're back in Boston for the summer, it was easy enough for them (relatively speaking) to pass on a carload of bankers' boxes as a side effect of one of their trips down to visit, and thus give me custody of things I probably should really have dealt with long ago.  And so it is that I've had a while going through twenty-year old boxes and unearthing some remarkable reminders of who I was as a youth.  And sometimes also, who I still am, to an uncomfortable degree of accuracy.

Interestingly to me, the earlier that I go in my education, the higher a percentage of the papers I find worth saving.  From grad school, I basically threw everything into the trash.  Undergrad, a few things survived.  High school yielded a great deal of fascinating essays and uncomfortable personal truths, but also a lot of translated Latin and math problems to simply be discarded.  Pretty much anything from earlier that had survived was still worth keeping.  Some of it, I think, is that my parents only held on to the memorable things from back when they were making decisions: there are no piles of practice sheets drawing letters of the alphabet, nor are there the arithmetic quizzes that my fourth grade classmates and I used to race each other to completion on.  Once we hit my own eras of curation, the pre-filtering has not yet happened.  Another and more important thing, however, is that as I grew older and my education became more specialized, my own set of life choices have tended to dictate that the classwork is more technical and less creative.  Reading essays and stories that I wrote in high school is like taking an archaeological core sample of my personality and history.  Reading algebra notes is just reading algebra notes that could have been taken by anyone.  Although, as I think about it, I'm sure that a lot of other people took more interesting notes than me, putting little cartoons or editorials about their feelings on the material in.  I just wrote it down and never once looked back to read it, except in unusual circumstances.  And having saved class material that is essentially just a poorly transcribed technical manual, why on earth should I hold onto it?  Either I use it every day and I know it still, or I have forgotten it and will re-learn the knowledge from some online source when I find a need.  My creative output shifted out of the classroom and into other areas, and by the time that I reach grad school, you can see my records in the early papers and screeds on my website.  There are times when I am tempted to purge the earlier and more embarrassing of these, but so far I have resisted.  I feel like it's something I need to just be honest and live with, even if some of the memories associated with those papers are ones I think that I would just prefer to forget.  And why, oh why, do people cite them?  I can only assume that they have found things more valuable in certain of them than I the author know in retrospect.

The motivating artifact for this post, however, was not a school paper, but one of the halo of other related objects that I found in those boxes.  You see, back in high school, my little nerd clique and I were all involved in writing computer games, and managed to compete each other into something approaching real competence.  We released a few games that were pretty awesome for our egos and tried to get serious and make bigger and better and more significant contributions.  One place that we over-reached was getting into 3D.  Oh, it worked and all, but despite our wishes we just weren't quite Bungie and couldn't aspire to match our engine to our idol Marathon.  But we put together a working engine that ran at a decent frame rate and started building worlds and enemies and such.  And here is where my ray-gun comes from:

Rather than try to draw the art that we were nowhere near capable of, we did a photo shoot with the fancy new "digital camera" thing my brother's friend Jeff had.  We set up a studio in one of the rooms of our house (now a guest room, but I think it was my mother's art studio at the time), used a white sheet as a "green screen", and got into costumes with the awesomest future bad-guy gear that we could come up with.  I wore a green SWAT-team outfit left over from playing a garbage man in a school musical (it was an odd show), carried a shotgun we'd borrowed from somebody, and scowled beneath the darkest aviator shades I could lay my hands on.  My brother wore hockey padding and a hockey mask and carried the ray-gun above (in the game, it shot energy rings at you).  Jeff wore the same hockey gear and a handheld small vacuum cleaner strapped upside down to his back, holding the straight steel tube out as the business end of his "flame thrower."  We shot from all angles, getting walking animations, attacks, injuries, and deaths.  Some PhotoShop time on the secondhand probably-legal copy I'd gotten my hands on, and we had glorious, glorious enemies that made everybody laugh at us because they knew who was trying to look badass under those shades.

It was great fun, and we got a long way, but the game never finished and never got released.  I'd wander around "debugging" by shooting myself and finding geometry problems that had to be addressed.  Our ambitions grew bigger and we kept trying to get a better engine and tell this giant story that was trying to brew, but none of us had read The Mythical Man-Month yet and we never just stopped at "good enough" and finished a game of some sort.  I moved on to another project, then college, and our software-making club dispersed as everybody else did the same. By now, the images are all long gone, dead long ago on obsolete media and obsolete computers.

The ray-gun, though, was waiting for me, coming up slightly dusty and otherwise good as new from one of the many boxes of archival stuff.  Showing it to my wife, I fired it, just to see.  The staple shot out and bounced pinging off a wall into nowhere, and then I needed to scramble and find it so it wouldn't pose a toddler hazard.  The ray-gun didn't get a decision that day.  Instead I put it off, and shoved it high on top a bookcase where Harriet would never see it, let alone get to test whether she could injure herself with either staple-gun or pneumatic door-closer.

I looked again up there today, and took it down to disassemble.  The choice was obvious, but bittersweet.  I just don't need this artifact: all that it can be is a trap for an unwary child some day to discover.  What I care about is the memory, to know this wonderful ray-gun once existed, made for a hot summer day in a makeshift studio in an appropriated third-floor room, where half a dozen kids dreamed of fame and fortune and dystopian future storm-troopers.  Remembering all of this, I laid the ray-gun on a black towel (shades of its earlier backdrop) and snapped photos until I had one I was satisfied could be enough for memory.  Then off came the packing tape securing the two halves together, and the gun was gone.  The old door closer went into the trash; the staple gun will join my tools, and will in time no doubt be put to its old and original use.  But if it's me that uses it, I guarantee that every time I fix a staple, a part of me instead will want to stop and wave it around in the air making ray-gun sounds: "P-tanngg! P-tanngg!"

Notes from The Princess Invasion

Having just been (very) rudely awakened by a toddler, I'm lying here all sleepy but not quite sleepy enough to go back to sleep apparently.  And so, it seems, I am finally breaking my long pause in blog posting.  I don't think I'll bother writing about not posting right now---that kind of post is something I feel is generally not too interesting to read, and besides I don't have any particularly interesting reason that posting has not been happening.

Instead, I think that I will tell you about our Princess Invasion.

It was, I think, a fairly inevitable thing.  Harriet has just turned two years old (her party is today), and despite our failure to expose her willfully to lots of Disney stuff, it's out there and it comes for little girls.  Nothing, I know, is new in what I'm saying.  My sister-in-law shared a book called "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" a while back, about the ubiquity of princesses and pink in the mass culture that we live in.  It's out there, it's going to come for them, especially through peers and daycare, where even the most controlling parent cannot isolate, and all we get to do is choose which ways we will and won't react, and try to navigate through as best we can.

Still, I think it was an ugly surprise when it appeared so suddenly.  My wife told me of the moment just two days ago: she'd been putting Harriet in the car in the morning to go to daycare, and our little two-year-old did not want to be buckled in.  Not being an area where compromise can happen, a struggle ensued, and after our little small one's inevitable loss, she registered her final protest: "No! I am a PRINCESS!"  Command, and dignity.  The penetrating hauteur of one who knows that she must be obeyed.  We're trying not to laugh too hard.

That night, we took her out to a toy store to get a bicycle/tricycle, so that she could pick her own out.  We like to give her choice and options when we can, and just try not to wince too much at what she picks.  We now have a lovely lavender tricycle in the house with pictures of a girl doctor who invites us to help her solve mysteries when Harriet pushes buttons.  But also, we found this:

In case you can't quite tell, this is a bright pink toddler chair with a heart-shaped back, covered with Disney princesses.  I didn't even recognize them all any more---having just looked them up, I can tell you that the black princess on the arm is apparently Tiana, from a retelling of the frog prince, and the left-hand blond on the heart is Aurora from Sleeping Beauty.  Front and center, of course, is Cinderella, and we also have Ariel, who radically alters her body in pursuit of her prince, Belle, the role model for abusive relationships, and Snow White, the Disney ur-Princess.

The moment she saw this chair, Harriet hopped off her bike and beelined for it, picking it out of all the other options.  No, it didn't come home with us.  But as long as we were in the store, our little princess could have her pink chair time and celebrate her royal company, and so she did with great delight as you can see, and great velocity and vibration, which doesn't come through as well in still shots.

I am an American with a daughter.  We're just going to have to deal with this.  And so far, at least, it's not all one way on the gender coding, which I think is also a good sign.  Yes, she's wearing Batman shoes.  She likes those too, and they aren't pink.

Toddler Break

Some days, I just feel fried.  Today's a good example, on the tail end of four solid days of meeting and conference, which consumed the entirety of my weekend.  Oh, it was good stuff, and I have no regrets about going there, except that I didn't get my time off and will not get any more until Friday, when my folks fly in to visit us.

I like my time off and need my time off, and the best of it comes in toddler time.  I'm just a sucker for the enthusiasm and vigor with which Harriet engages and plays with me.  Some time in the past few weeks, I have naturally stopped calling her "baby"---with the onset of walking, we are clearly in toddler territory, emphasized even more so by her enthusiastic adoption of "Yeah!" and "No!"  My day ends sharply at 4pm every day (at least when I'm in town), when I go and I pick her up from day care.  When we get home, I keep meaning to go try to meet up with the neighbors who have little kids, but instead I just end up hanging out in the living room with Harriet, sitting on the floor while she jumps on me or puts things in my pocket or runs and snuggles and puts things in stacks or baskets.

Little humans are so damned endearing, once you get used to them: they are a microcosm of our grown up world, played fast and open in kaleidoscopic intensity.  Frowning in concentration, then laughing her evil laugh, angry and bitter cries when she can't get something she's put in my pocket back out of it, crafty smiles and sidelong glances to see if I'll let her get way with her ambitions.

That period of grace in the early evening, between when Harriet and I arrive home and when I start to make dinner or Ananya returns or whatever else can break our bubble, is my toddler break, and it's something I dearly look forward to.

O'Hare Again

I'm on another layover in O'Hare again, that great hub of air travel in the backlands of Chicago. Named for Butch O'Hare, the first Navy ace in World War II.  I've learned to curse it less these days, when once upon a time I always feared and loathed my stop-overs here.  But now that I am stopping here so often, I'm coming to find it comfortable, familiar, reliable in its jam-packed halls of madness, and the corridor of international flags that leads you through the main American Airlines terminal.

This is my 14th connection through O'Hare this year, and I expect to be making 9 more of them before the year is finished (maybe more, but I hope not).  That's... that's actually a lot more than I'd realized, before a grep for "ORD" through my travel records found such surprising numbers.  Apparently, even before leaving Boston for Iowa, a surprisingly large number of my trips went through O'Hare, and once you get Iowa in the mix, well, that's two stops in O'Hare for pretty much every trip.

The one truly damning thing about O'Hare for the traveling scientist, at least in the American terminals, is its lack of power and wireless.  I think there is a similar principle operating here as I have noticed in the case of hotels.  With hotels, the pricier per night, the more likely that the internet access will not be free, and the more likely that the connections will be terrible.  Cheap hotels often have excellent, excellent internet.  For airports, the bigger and more business-traveller-filled, the more likely they are to have no easily accessible power plugs and no free wireless.  Little regional airports pretty much always have nice seats with good and free connections.

And so I pay.  But not directly for the wireless.  I pay for a membership in the lounge, which means I get free decent wireless, and a quiet and calm place to sit and work or read or think.  It's worth it, but I feel ashamed.  Which is senseless, really.  If I'm traveling often, it makes sense, economically, to make those hours on a layover good and productive and not draining.  And yet, somehow I feel like I'm betraying my class.  Becoming one of Them, whoever that might be.

As I look back on where I came from, I know that Jake the child would barely recognize some parts of me in the man that I have become.  Would find it strange and alien, distasteful, impure.  I have a really devilish pride, you know, that makes me walk away from sensible things for a long time sometimes.  For years, as a grad student, I resisted any thought of getting an air conditioner.  I had never lived with air conditioning growing up (in the countryside, on the coast of Maine, where the air was so much cooler anyway), and I decided, in my stupid head somehow, that air conditioning was a sign of weakness, of over-consumption, of All That Was Wrong With America.  I even turned down a free air conditioner that my parents gave me as a gift, made them take it back to the store in my pride and self-righteous choice of bodily mortification.  We lived on the top floor of a 3-story apartment at the time, and there was a flat piece of black tar roof right outside the bedroom window, so on a really hot day the room just baked like a pizza oven.  I would lie there and sweat, my head aching, trying to focus on whatever I was trying to do.  But I was winning... winning against everyone else in the world, because I could judge them weaker and less than me, since I could live without an air conditioner.

You know, dear reader, I really hope you're laughing at me right now.  I hope you're finding that pride as stupid and shameful as I do now, looking back at it.  Trying to understand, where does it come from?  Where do I get this impulse, this need to go and do things as purely as possible?  I don't even realize I'm doing it sometimes, only in retrospect, as I'm analyzing the shame that comes when I finally come and let myself succumb to pragmatism.  Like having an airline lounge membership.  Like taking a taxi to the airport, when I used to take the T.  I can scoff at my resistance to air conditioning at the same time as I feel queasy about my airline lounge membership, and really, what's the difference?

Where is the boundary between pride and pride, dear reader?  If I bought myself a membership before I started stopping in O'Hare... an apparently startling number of times... then it would be a pride of aspiration, of conspicuous consumption, of indulgence in status and luxury.  If I avoided buying a membership now that I'm stopping here so often, then it would be a pride of avoidance, setting myself above the people who do have one through self-denial and asceticism.  I think that my wife, ever one for pragmatism, would find my dilemma odd and disheartening.  Honestly, I don't know where it comes from, myself, except that it is always with me, this improper degree of social consciousness that so frequently leaves me on the horns of a dilemma, where either path it problematic.

Perhaps, as I continue to learn and grow and mature, I'll finally just manage to let go a little.

Perhaps.

I just wish I had a better measuring stick, so I could always compute where the boundaries are...

WebProto

Dear readers, I am happy to announce an excellent thing. That excellent thing is WebProto, and it's a way that all of you, even those without a similar scientific background, can get a chance to play with the artifacts of my program of research.

Go on, click that link.  Or better yet, try this one that is all loaded up with a bunch of pretty demos.

Ain't it cool?

The WebProto effort was kicked off by my colleague Kyle Usbeck, who first realized that the new HTML5 and WebGL extensions in browsers had gotten powerful and sophisticated enough that it was reasonable to think about running a complex network simulator with 3D graphics and lots of virtual machines just as part of a web-page.  No weird plug-ins, no special-purpose software, just a modern web browser and a decently fast machine.  Then there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears as we worked together to figure out how to make JavaScript do our bidding, and another batch when the way we first built the system was too slow and we needed to port the whole virtual machine into JavaScript.

The point of the WebProto project is to make aggregate programming techniques, like we and a number of our colleagues have been developing, readily accessible to anyone who is interested. There have been a lot of really exciting advances over the past few years, in techniques that make it easier to program networks, by letting you write programs for the whole network at once.  Then the system figures out how that translates into the interactions that the individual devices need to have with one another.  This is all well and good, but in order to use any of these techniques, you always had to figure out how to install and configure a touchy piece of research software, usually with some gnarly dependencies.  Ours (MIT Proto) is unfortunately no exception.  And using it had some serious user interface issues for anybody who's not a fan of the Unix command line. So the barrier to entry has just been too high for most people to bother with it.

Enter WebProto.  WebProto's three big goals are:

1. Make cutting edge aggregate programming (via our Proto language) accessible to anybody with a browser.
2. Bring aggregate programming, test configuration, and network simulation together in one easy interface. 
3. Make it easy for anybody using WebProto to share their programs and simulations.

I think we've succeeded... at least enough to get a good start on things.  We're hoping this will be a good educational tool too, for people teaching classes on distributed algorithms or self-organization or complex systems.  Heck, we've already got a tutorial of our own that has embedded examples and problem sets!  And it's all free and open software, so anybody who improves things can contribute back to the community.

And you know why else I'm feeling that glow of pride right now?  Because today was Demo Day at SASO, and WebProto received an award for being the best demo of the conference.

So come on down, dear reader, and help yourself to our wonderful toys...

SASO!

Hey folks, it's time for my favorite conference of the year!  That's SASO, or as its more properly known: the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems.  SASO is probably the conference which is most home to me as a scientific research community, and I've attended it every year since it began, in 2007.  Now in its seventh year, the conference is going strong: it's not a big conference, but that's by design: it's very cross-disciplinary, and has only a single track in order to ensure that people aren't closing off into their own little sub-communities.  That does have the side effect of keeping it relatively small, but I find a lot of value here.

The main conference started today, but the affiliated workshops and tutorials began already yesterday.  I started off my day yesterday in the workshop on socio-technical systems, where I was invited to give a talk about my recent results on very fast approximate consensus, which I had published at this year's Spatial Computing Workshop.  The link between approximate consensus and social interactions is pretty clear: whenever a group needs to make a decision, it needs to come to an approximate consensus.  My own work has been motivated more by the technological side, but there is a lot of overlap and my talk, The Importance of Asymmetry for Rapidly Reaching Consensus, appeared to be quite interesting to the attendees.

I found quite a bit of interest to listen to as well, and something that Jeremy Pitt said in his talk has been bouncing around in my mind ever since.  Jeremy, talking about social capital, decried the commodification of social relationships, FaceBook's business model being an excellent bad example: "friends are people you can count on, not people that you can count."  Turning towards a more positive definition of social capital, the foundation of the definition is "trustworthiness."

And here's the observation that has been racketing around in my head ever since: if social capital is based on trustworthiness, then any attempt to engineer social capital is guaranteed to undermine itself.  Look at it this way: if you do something that I find beneficial, generous, or reliable, I will trust you more.  If I know that you only did it in order to win my trust, then I have no reason to trust you, because I know you're trying to manipulate me.

This poses a real paradox.  Building trust is vital, and so understanding how to build trust is useful, but the more precisely you understand how to build trust, the less trustworthy you may be!  It makes me think of the problem of ethical placebo.  The placebo effect is a remarkable mind-body interaction in medicine: when you give a person a non-functional treatment, like a sugar pill or a salt-water injection, it can provide real medical benefit, like reduction of pain.  The theater of the treatment is the treatment.  If you know that a treatment isn't real, however, then the placebo effect doesn't work.  Now, it used to be acceptable to give patients a placebo without telling them, but that's not considered ethical any more, and for good reason.  Lying to patients for their own good is not too far away from clear horrors like involuntary sterilization of the disabled, stealing babies because the mother is unmarried, and faking treatment to study how bad a disease is.  So you can't lie to a patient, but telling them the truth destroys the efficacy of the treatment.

The problem of engineering with social capital seems similar: somehow the engineering needs to understand and manage social capital without turning it into the type of cold and calculating process that sucks all the human value out of the relationships.  I don't have any good answer, except that somehow, we need to keep the technical systems out of the relationships as much as possible: let them facilitate, let them help track information and help rendezvous, but don't attempt to monetize those relations... but can we avoid it?  The conversation went on, and we talked of it over dinner as well, broadening to the questions of privacy and the balance of trust between people and governments and corporations, and the way that software intermediates it all.

A Business Trip Back Home

I'm back in Boston again, for the first time since moving to Iowa.  I'm at home right now, for a certain definition of home, in our old apartment in Somerville.  It's like I never left, in some ways, back in the bedroom where I first arrived just over five years ago, where I lived by myself all alone for the very first time in my life.  I moved into this apartment in Somerville just as I was starting at BBN, at the same time as my relationship at the time was breaking up and as our old commune-style apartment where I'd lived through most of grad school was dissolving and people were going their separate ways.  My first night alone in this apartment was remarkably frightening to me.  When I was a kid, my brother and I tried to sleep in the lean-to a few hundred yards away from the lake camp where we always went on family vacation, and we had to come back in the middle of the night since we kept imagining bears into every snapping twig and sighing tree.  My first night alone in this apartment, I kept hearing burglars and home invaders in every creak of the old house and every autonomic twitch of an appliance.  But truly, I had never before lived alone.

It was here that I lived when I met my now-wife, here that we returned for shelter during the memorable snow-storm that accompanied our first date.  Many times, this house has been transformed, as I settled in, as we learned to live with one another, as we tried to superpose two well-equipped bachelor households into one tiny space, as we rearranged the rooms and the furniture again and again seeking the balance, utility, and mental space that we are only now finding in Iowa.  It's rearranging again now, as our landlord renovates the downstairs: right now, there is simply no kitchen, nothing at all but walls and floorboards, and the living room is filled with all the appliances and furniture that used to go there.  I pass through a seal of plastic sheeting when I go upstairs, to where the bedrooms at least remain untouched, and sleep backwards on the bed from how we usually do, in this temporary half-nest that is home and not-home and new and old all at once.

Soon, I will go to the office, and I will move all my possessions there from the window office that I am giving up to an interior office more suitable for an occasional visitor.  Another mark of my status changing, my presence here in Boston diluting as it concentrates in Iowa.  Can't live in two places at once, you know.  And truly, it's a simple fact of presence and location.  Working in Iowa is good, and I like the University and the faculty I'm getting to know there, but I am definitely becoming less in touch with my old co-workers in Boston.  The closest collaborators, no problem, but in just two hours in the office yesterday, I had good and unexpected hallway discussions with three different colleagues who I hadn't even spoken to since I left for Iowa.

Relocation is challenging and good and hard and necessary.  I like my new life, I miss my old life, I can never go back and can never stay still in stasis.  Last night, I had dinner with an old, old friend, and we talked about growth and struggle and the demons we fight and are at least aware that we are trying to overcome.  It's interesting and strange and lovely that as a well-privileged adult, I have choices to make, and my life is never at all near where I'd expected to be five years in the past, and that has been true for at least the past 20 years: a major turn in aims and expectations at least once every five years.  My apartment is in (renovative) ruins, and it is home, and so as well is my house in Iowa, and I'm happy where I am, doing what I'm doing, and also can't wait to return home to the home in my other state.

Yours in a satisfied and joyful confusion, dear reader, and the bittersweet tang of a life not lived in stasis.

Return to the Land of the Blogging

Good evening, dear readers, and welcome back to me.

Tonight, I return to the land of the blogging, not for an epic post, but just the simple beginning of my return to self-reflection and communication with the wider world unregarded.  My silence, dear readers, began with a simple thing: just taking a week or two off while I moved from Boston to Iowa City.  Not that there was any particular reason that even moving would need to result in a pause in blogging.  After all, this wonderful sophisticated software allows me to schedule updates however I would like them---any time you see a post set precisely at 5pm on a Monday, that would be the reason.  Nevertheless, I went away, and now I am back.

I'm back, slowly feeling my way into a new set of routines in Iowa.  I'm back, with the momentous change of living in my own house for the first time in my life, something which feels (now that we're over the initial unpacking) just simply delicious.  For the first time in my life, I have all the space I would like, and our house is beautiful.  Also, not overly large.  Lots of little stresses that came from packing two households of stuff into one tiny place as we lived in Boston have simply evaporated, and we are taking every pain to avoid filling up the new place.  It is good.

Our neighbors are lovely, and I can bike to work from my home.  Well, the Iowa version of work.  I've picked up an affiliation with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department here at the University of Iowa, secondary to my primary affiliation with BBN.  So I work remotely for BBN and am building collaborations with people here in Iowa.  For the next little while, at least, I'm in a magnificent office, squatting while the professor who normally occupies it is on sabbatical, practically next door to my wife and a bunch of other folks in her department who are enjoyable on both a personal and professional level.

Still, I'm finding my feet.  With Ananya working full time again, and more than full time given the realities of tenure track, Harriet's in daycare full time, and I'm the one who picks her up in the afternoon.  So every day, I have a hard stop at 4pm (5pm Eastern, since I'm keeping my work in sync with my colleagues in Boston).  I bike home, grab the car, go over to Harriet's daycare, and then it's me and her for an hour or two until Ananya (who's got the morning baby shift), gets home.  Family time for a couple hours, then the rituals of baby bedtime, with a daughter who despises the idea of sleeping while parents are up and around.  It all leaves rather less "overtime" than I am used to being able to put in.

Soon, I will return to Boston for my first trip back since I arrived in Iowa.  It's going to be a fast, intense trip, followed immediately by a conference in Philadelphia.  I'm looking forward to it, and also going to miss my new life here, even as I delight in returning to my roots and my bigger city fast-flying life.  And you, dear readers, will once again be in on the discussions.  Welcome back to me, and also to you.

And now, let us end with a picture of Harriet adapting well to her new state: eating corn on the cob all by herself, just like an adult.  I am very impressed with our 13-month old, who refuses adult assistance and can eat half an ear all by herself in a single sitting.

Networking

I've just gotten back from a rather intense set of conferences, having spent the majority of my time for the last week just plain networking.  This is something that most definitely does not come naturally to me.  I am not a politician, in the sense that I am not good at estimating what people's wants and desires are, or how my actions will be interpreted by them.  Sometimes, this happens even for those friends and family who I most know and love.  It's not that I don't understand emotions---I don't fall anywhere on the autism spectrum---but that I simply get too swept up in my own momentum and my own desires and feelings and stop paying close enough attention.  And I do have to work to put myself in others shoes---again, not because I can't, but because the pull of my own perspective is so compelling to me, and I'm often quite bad about making assumptions that I should not and don't even realize that I am making.

It's a flaw.  It's especially a flaw in science, though perhaps there is a bit more margin for error there than in other entrepreneurial professions. After all, if what you can deliver is valuable enough, then there are many sins that can be forgiven.  But it makes a difference, and a big difference at that.  For those of you not scientists, this fact may be surprising.  Is not science the land of the fact, the truth, the existence of rightness against all odds?  Eppur si muove?

What you have to remember, dear reader, is that the classic image of the scientist as lone scholar or brilliant genius is rooted in a time when the practitioners of science were by and large the lordly class, set apart and at idleness to think by their wealth or their position.  From the classical Greek philosophers to Confucian scholars, medieval monks to Indian astronomers.

Over the past two to three centuries, however, the democratization of science and its fusion with technology have expanded the breadth of participation in science by many orders of magnitude.  At the same time, the advance of technology enabled by this democratization has been tying us ever more tightly together into a single large, global community.

Scientifically, there are so many things going on now and with so much complexity, that one person alone is quite limited in what they can accomplish, even if they were in the privileged position of one of those ancient lords and could take things like food, shelter, and internet access for granted.  To be really effective in the world we live in now, a scientist must collaborate: colleagues bring problems to solve and techniques to help in solving them.  Working together strengthens your ability to publish, to seek funding together, to think of new ideas, and in all other ways to go out and get your science done.  So any scientist who wishes to pursue their ideas in research, as opposed to being a technician in the lab of another person, will of necessity need to learn to be effective to at least some minimal level in the land of networking.

For me, I hate the necessity of having goals in mind for networking.  I basically like people.  I like a lot of my colleagues, and I really enjoy debating things.  If networking just meant socializing, shooting the breeze and debating the nature of facts, I would have no problem with it.  But it's also important to get things done, to avoid offending people accidentally, and to step beyond "interesting discussion" and forward to "mutually beneficial action."  These are the things that I struggle with, and above all else I fear offending colleagues, for I know that is something I can do all too easily, especially if I think I'm debating a bit of science, but they feel like actually I am attacking them.

This last few days went well, I think, with lots of exciting discussions and the opening up of new opportunities, though if there are any ways that I have screwed up, the most important mistakes are the ones that I am least likely of all to know about.

But on I go, to live, to learn, and hopefully to keep making good progress: in my science, in my relations with colleagues, and at simply being a decent human being.

Scientific Posters

I have a confession to make.  Posters are the method of scientific communication that I like the least.  I've just been preparing three right now, for presentation next week---two on synthetic biology and one on representation for electromechanical design.  The problem is really the logistics: design, production, transportation, and presentation.

Let us consider the poster's two main forms of competitor, the paper and the talk.

When I produce a paper, these four stages are:

• Design: Assemble the document in LaTeX, a system extremely well adapted for this task, using figures built however I feel like it.
• Production: Run LaTeX on the document, admire the beautiful PDF.
• Transportation: Upload electronically to the publisher's site.
• Presentation: The publisher does everything automatically, and the paper is disseminated to some fragment of the scientific community.

Talks are not quite so smooth, because I usually have to deal with PowerPoint.  I resisted this for a long time, and still use OpenOffice when I can.  The problem is that a lot of material from collaborators comes to me in PowerPoint form, or is explicitly required to be in PowerPoint by the US Government.  So I just have to put up with substandard editing software, giving me a workflow of:

• Design: Curse the Beast That Dwelleth in Redmond as I wrestle with its Hideous Offspring.
• Production: Flip into presentation mode and walk through to make sure nothing weird is happening with animations or videos.
• Transportation: Get myself to the conference, bringing my computer and its precious, precious bits.  Leave a copy of the presentation accessible to myself via SSH, in case my computer self-destructs and I have to download it and try it on somebody else's machine.
• Presentation: Stand up in front of a room full of scientists and talk to them, take a few questions, continue the interesting bit of discussion in the hallway after.

Posters are also very graphic heavy, and so they tend to end up in PowerPoint also, if only to ensure smooth transfer of images from existing slides to the poster design.  But that's only the beginning of the trouble.  My poster workflow is:

• Design: PowerPoint was never intended to edit poster-sized images, and so it goes very slowly.  This interacts with its already iffy UI to result in lots of waiting for updates, discovering that event processing lags have resulted in PowerPoint changing the wrong object, undoing, trying again, etc.  It also really wants to resize text pasted in from smaller documents to fit the poster, turning some things into 80+ point font and leave others the same, in a pattern that I haven't entirely figured out yet.  Eventually, though, the beast is tamed, and I've got a PDF that PowerPoint isn't resizing down to 8.5x11 because it has decided I can't really have wanted A0 format.
• Production: Print on a specialized piece of hardware for that is generally temperamental and poorly maintained, because it's not part of the daily workflow.  Then get a pair of scissors and trim the poster down to size because the size requirements of the poster session are always different from the width of the poster printer.  Or, like today, discover that the poster printer is down, everybody's taking the day off, and desperately search for an outside shop that can print my posters before my flight leaves.
• Transportation: Roll the posters up, putting them in a tube if you can lay your hands on one, then carry giant delicate pieces of paper through taxis, airports, planes, and public transit while attempting to preserve them from crushing, rain, etc.  If something bad happens, you're out of luck.
• Presentation: Give an interactive talk like you're singing a round: as people arrive and leave, you'll generally have a mixed audience who have all come in at different phases of the discussion and have missed different parts of the material.  It's essentially the following (please hum along, to the tune of "Row, row, row your boat"):

Primi:                    Secundus:             Tertio:
This is my abstract
Methods over here         This is my abstract
Here you see experiments  ...                   This is my abstract
Conclusions are so clear                        ...

Moreover, you're probably doing this in a crowded hall with dozens to hundreds of other posters all being presented simultaneously.  At the end of a good poster session, I'm always hoarse.

So posters are just much more of a hassle than the other forms, from A to Z. It does have its advantages, though, in that it's much more interactive than any of the other forms.

Now, dear readers, I'm sure that somebody is going to want to suggest that I could solve all my software problems by ditching Microsoft.  Let me head that off at the pass by saying that, much as I think Beamer and Prezi are awesome, Beamer just can't illustrate or animate worth a damn, and Prezi has some serious usability issues.  Don't talk to me about Keynote.  Network effects mean my world is going to be dominated by PowerPoint, with OpenOffice/LibreOffice the only hope of salvation.

But for now, I'll carry my precious cardboard tube and be thankful the production nightmare is over...