Early next year I will be giving a talk on the challenges and opportunities arising from the current transformation of economy and society by technology and technology enabled globalization. I am rapidly realizing though that I don’t have nearly enough time to chase down all the primary research to validate (or invalidate) some of my thinking. Here are some of the questions I am most interested in: 1. What is the foundational math of a Basic Income Guarantee? That is comparing some of the cur...

Early next year I will be giving a talk on the challenges and opportunities arising from the current transformation of economy and society by technology and technology enabled globalization. I am rapidly realizing though that I don’t have nearly enough time to chase down all the primary research to validate (or invalidate) some of my thinking. Here are some of the questions I am most interested in: 1. What is the foundational math of a Basic Income Guarantee? That is comparing some of the cur...

So earlier this week while in SF, I was trying to get some work done on my way from the city to Sand Hill road. As per usual I turned on tethering on my Android phone and started up my laptop. Within seconds my wifi had connected to the hotspot, I fired up a browser and …. nothing. No connection. Open up terminal, ping google.com and times out. Huh? Turn off the phone, wifi, etc and restart just to clear out any wonkiness. Still nothing. Then I remembered that between my last tether and now I...

So earlier this week while in SF, I was trying to get some work done on my way from the city to Sand Hill road. As per usual I turned on tethering on my Android phone and started up my laptop. Within seconds my wifi had connected to the hotspot, I fired up a browser and …. nothing. No connection. Open up terminal, ping google.com and times out. Huh? Turn off the phone, wifi, etc and restart just to clear out any wonkiness. Still nothing. Then I remembered that between my last tether and now I...

The biggest challenge of homeschooling is letting go of push and waiting for pull. It is really hard to remain patient when kids are goofing off. The instinct is to push more things at them in the hope that they will pick one of these up and run with them. And it is easy to be afraid that without push they will never discover the thing that unlocks their intrinsic motivation. Yet the reverse may very well be true – anything pushed at them they will wind up not liking even if it would have bee...

The biggest challenge of homeschooling is letting go of push and waiting for pull. It is really hard to remain patient when kids are goofing off. The instinct is to push more things at them in the hope that they will pick one of these up and run with them. And it is easy to be afraid that without push they will never discover the thing that unlocks their intrinsic motivation. Yet the reverse may very well be true – anything pushed at them they will wind up not liking even if it would have bee...

A couple of years ago I wrote about our need for an “opposing view reader” that would intentionally show us commentary from people with opinions different from our own. As far as I can tell relatively little progress has been made on this front. Twitter, for instance, will generally recommend to me that I follow people who are like the people I am already following. So I was happy to see that there is at least some academic research on this topic. The Technology Review mentions a paper titled...

A couple of years ago I wrote about our need for an “opposing view reader” that would intentionally show us commentary from people with opinions different from our own. As far as I can tell relatively little progress has been made on this front. Twitter, for instance, will generally recommend to me that I follow people who are like the people I am already following. So I was happy to see that there is at least some academic research on this topic. The Technology Review mentions a paper titled...

There have been a spate of deadly train derailments including two in the summer (one in Spain and one in Canada) most recently the Metro North one. Human error played a significant role in all of these. For instance, in the New York crash it appears that the driver alert mechanism was not installed in the front car. In Spain, the train driver was texting on his phone. In Canada the brakes had not been properly applied. This is particularly unfortunate at a time when the technology for reducin...

There have been a spate of deadly train derailments including two in the summer (one in Spain and one in Canada) most recently the Metro North one. Human error played a significant role in all of these. For instance, in the New York crash it appears that the driver alert mechanism was not installed in the front car. In Spain, the train driver was texting on his phone. In Canada the brakes had not been properly applied. This is particularly unfortunate at a time when the technology for reducin...

Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced the halting problem. As you may recall the upshot was that there is no general algorithm that will determine whether a Turing Machine will stop for a particular input. Now you might at first think that this is not a big deal. After all do we really care if a Turing machine stops or not? As it turns out the implications of this are significant including philosophical limits on what is knowable (to humans) and the practical impossibility of building secure comput...

Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced the halting problem. As you may recall the upshot was that there is no general algorithm that will determine whether a Turing Machine will stop for a particular input. Now you might at first think that this is not a big deal. After all do we really care if a Turing machine stops or not? As it turns out the implications of this are significant including philosophical limits on what is knowable (to humans) and the practical impossibility of building secure comput...

Two previous Homeschool Wednesdays covered the relationship between math and beauty as a different way of motivating the study of math. My first presentation was on spirals and the second one on waves. In each case the main point I am trying to make for our kids is how relatively simple mathematical formulas can generate magnificent patterns found in nature. Another area where this is true are fractals. These self similar patterns often have surprisingly simple underlying algorithms: http://w...

Two previous Homeschool Wednesdays covered the relationship between math and beauty as a different way of motivating the study of math. My first presentation was on spirals and the second one on waves. In each case the main point I am trying to make for our kids is how relatively simple mathematical formulas can generate magnificent patterns found in nature. Another area where this is true are fractals. These self similar patterns often have surprisingly simple underlying algorithms: http://w...

In my personal public markets portfolio I am long a number of robotics companies because I see robotics as one of the big secular trends that’s investible. As we are getting more and more robots in different form factors (including drones and even 3D printers), I am curious whether there is a need for a realtime OS. I would love to hear from folks active in these communities to learn what they are using and what they see as promising. For instance, is anything on this Wikipedia list exciting?...

In my personal public markets portfolio I am long a number of robotics companies because I see robotics as one of the big secular trends that’s investible. As we are getting more and more robots in different form factors (including drones and even 3D printers), I am curious whether there is a need for a realtime OS. I would love to hear from folks active in these communities to learn what they are using and what they see as promising. For instance, is anything on this Wikipedia list exciting?...

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not only is there no gift giving madness but it is great to be reminded that I have much to thankful for. Last year I wrote a post thanking my parents. This year I want to give a big shoutout to Susan. We met completely randomly in a cafe in Paris in 1991 and if she hadn’t been the one to suggest that we meet again the next day our lives would likely be very different! There are so many things that I am thankful to Susan for but two in particular stand out...

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not only is there no gift giving madness but it is great to be reminded that I have much to thankful for. Last year I wrote a post thanking my parents. This year I want to give a big shoutout to Susan. We met completely randomly in a cafe in Paris in 1991 and if she hadn’t been the one to suggest that we meet again the next day our lives would likely be very different! There are so many things that I am thankful to Susan for but two in particular stand out...

The current sequence of Tech Tuesday posts is about the theory of computation. We have already seen that a simple of model of computation such as the Finite State Machine is very useful but has severe limitations in that it cannot even decide a language as simple as all palindromes. We then learned about the Turing Machine as the most powerful known model of computation and saw how a Universal Turing Machine establishes the separation of software from hardware. This leads to a natural questio...

The current sequence of Tech Tuesday posts is about the theory of computation. We have already seen that a simple of model of computation such as the Finite State Machine is very useful but has severe limitations in that it cannot even decide a language as simple as all palindromes. We then learned about the Turing Machine as the most powerful known model of computation and saw how a Universal Turing Machine establishes the separation of software from hardware. This leads to a natural questio...