Rowing to Alcatraz

Books, Gallery, Health, Review, Travel

My friend Neal Mueller, who holds a Guinness World Record for longest non-stop row in Arctic open water—1,000 miles over 41 days in 2012—gave me the incredible gift this morning of introducing me to the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, which has a rich lineage of these hand-built rowboats and love of the craft of rowing. It was awe-inspiring. He then rowed me to Alcatraz! We saw a rainbow (third from last photo in gallery)!

We captured some Spatial Video that will be fun to look at on the Vision Pro later (mine just arrived, but I haven’t opened it yet).

I think what I learned this morning is there is something deeply profound about the act of rowing, of being in harmony and synchronicity with others on your boat, how good it feels when you’re in sync, and how obvious it is when you aren’t. I’ve done rowing machines before many times but never been on the open water, and I saw also the impact of the variability of the ocean, currents, and waves had on the rowing. I think there is also something related here to when autistic people (and myself!) rock back and forth when something feels like it’s in alignment.

Luckily I was with literally one of the world’s best rowers, so I always felt safe and was able to enjoy the feeling of being on the water, and really felt the heritage and respect of these beautiful craft we were on, Cronin-1938. I introduced Neal to the concept of the Ship of Theseus, one Matias and I love to talk about in the context of Gutenberg. One of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in San Francisco. Here are a few photos from this morning.

My sabbatical is off to a great start. ☺️

Gmail Invites

Email

Gmail invites. The only thing I get on my Gmail account (mmmmmm@gmail.com) are people begging for invites, which has gotten very old very fast. It’s almost as bad as the people who stumble across my old Orkut entry and feel it’s my duty to invite them. I’ve given out one account so far, and it was to Simon.

Corante Not Trustworthy?

Humor, RSS

Okay, it was very funny that a blogger by the name of Dana Blankenhorn (who we’ve seen before) attributed Why Google Is Faltering on RSS and that “Google needs to bring in someone with a Clue.” He had no “Clue” himself that the person he was trying to roast left the company half a year ago and he’s now doing cool things with Odeo. Now it’s not worth mentioning or even surprising that someone made a false assumption and came to a silly conclusion because of it. What is interesting is how Corante’s response to the entry, or lack thereof.

As it stands the entry is inarguably factually inaccurate, yet only the comments point to that. Dana has not responded to the comments or updated the entry, even though he had time to write 8 more entries that day. It may seem obvious to you and I that the entry is wrong, but not everyone and the entry is still gathering links. What’s more interesting is that entry has disappeared from the front page. (Screenshot of where it should be here.)

Corante claims to be “a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business that’s authored by highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists; read by many of the sector’s top entrepreneurs, executives, funders and followers; and is helping to lead the emergence of blogging as an influential and important form of reportage, analysis and commentary.” They’re not helping blogging or their trust by leaving that entry up un-corrected and covering it up by taking it off the front page.

Update: Jason notes that the entry was deleted in MT, just not removed from the filesystem.

Nathan Myhrvold and Modernist Cuisine

Books, Food, Personal, Review

Nathan Myhrvold, an interesting character I’ve following for a few years now, has been in the news lately for his co-authorship with Maxime Bilet and Chris Young of the new food bible Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (Amazon link). (Peep that beautiful, 100% WordPress-powered site.) I pre-ordered it forever ago, a fact that may surprise friends who know how little I cook, but I do love food and I was as interested in the pictures and the result of a detail-oriented and science-driven obsession with quality that goes all the way down to the stochastic printing process as the articles/recipes .

The books are, in a word, stunning. I’m probably a lifetime away from attempting a 30-hour burger, but last night I did try a sous-vide approach to a New York sirloin and it turned out amazing. (Though that photo probably won’t be in a future edition of Modernist Cuisine.) The fact I can barely scramble eggs but made a super-good steak might portend the apocalypse. I think sous-vide cooking is something that will appeal a lot to engineers or analytically minded folks because it’s a controlled process with predictable outcomes.

Here are some interesting links and videos I’d recommend around Modernist Cuisine, sous-vide cooking, and Nathan Myhrvold himself:

If you made it this far, two bonuses:

At the EG Conference in 2007 I interviewed Nathan Myhrvold about the Dvorak keyboard layout, which I’ve used about 11 years now, and here’s that video:

Second, Mark Pearson of Pear Press (also associated with one of my other favorite authors John Medina) recommends the Pizza Nepoletana technique in volume 2 page 26 as an accessible dish, and the tip on decanting wine in a blender.

Thanks to many friends for the links, and also for listening to me blather on about this for the past week or two. You may also be subject to more experiments in the future.

I’m just going to keep updating this post with more links:

Hours and Work

Automattic, Health

There’s no correlation between hours worked and work done. I think this is why traditional corporate structures are starting to crack at the seams, and the distributed model companies like Automattic, MySQL, SocialText, and many others use will start to gain real legs and acceptance. The best example of this was at a place I used to work: after lunch everything seemed to shut down. Several people obviously got very sleepy after lunch and would spend 2-4 hours of the afternoon on auto-pilot. (This was me sometimes too.) It would have been infinitely better for them to take a one hour nap and get back to productive work than spend 3 hours in an obviously hampered state. Happy, healthy, well-rested people work orders of magnitude better.

The app that changed my life is Simplenote, linked to Notational Velocity. I have Simplenote on my phone and Notational Velocity on my computer, and I’m obsessed with to-do lists and lists about my to-do lists. It allows me to have my lists on my phone and my lists on my computer, and they sync… if you are a list freak, with lists of lists, it will change your life.

— Lena Dunham

From a talk with Kara Swisher on Re/code. Listen to the whole podcast, Simplenote comes up at the 48-minute mark. Hat tip: Toni Schneider.