Fresh Land

This summer's travel included visits to two of the freshest pieces of land in the world, Iceland (made by volcanic activity) and the Netherlands (for the most part made even more recently by the Dutch; for more on our trip there read the next two postings). The comparison is closer than that: having been stripped of 99.5% of its trees by its agrarian inhabitants and then covered by sheep to ensure those trees never return, Iceland is also very much a man-made environment. For all that, it is extremely beautiful, and we've got the photos to prove it:

Well to the North, we didn't see the sun set the entire time we were there.

Much raw volcanic landscape to be seen.

Also, bizarre installations, only some of which are geothermal electricity generating plants.

Evidence of geothermal activity is all over the place.

We'd been in the country for less than two hours when Felix befriended a local fishing net maker and toured his manufactory.

That was a good day's fishing, though a long, long time ago....

Icelandic moss isn't moss, it's lichen, but it does cover a lot of Iceland.

Welcome to the Blue Lagoon. Will you be bathing today? No? Oh.

Well we will.

This is the Geiser after which all geysers are named. Not active at the moment, but plenty of leaping water elsewhere.

Leaping water, and falling water, lots and lots and lots of falling water.

As soon as you take off your polarized sunglasses you see rainbows.

Technically, Iceland's oldest swimming pool, surrounded by various bubbling pots and a mini-geysir of its own.

Healthful pool chemicals.

Climbing through a field of flowers to the top of a waterfall.

Side view of said waterfall.

For scale. 

And this one, much larger.

Not atypical landscape, especially on the southern, and wetter, coast.

Negotiating sharing rights pre-lunch.

Shall we climb higher? No?

Scaring ourselves.

Worth it for the view.

Scaring me.

How do you like Iceland, boys? It's epic, they reply. Indeed.

Acclimatized.

Even for people used to Route 1 there's some remarkable rock formations here.

Our ride. Thank goodness for the way back seat.

We're so excited to be at the edge of two continents (that's North America there behind us)!

Yay, they eat horse! (Unfortunately, also whale.)

Our driver.

Keeping up with the Jonesonses.

Lava posts, why not?

And lava tubes, too.

No trees but plenty of flowers.

Major geothermal activity, which is bound to mean...

More hot water for everyone!

Relaxing. 

Roads on map are often marked "mostly paved."

One of thousands.

On the edge of the Greenland Sea.

Things weather around here.

Roadside public hot tubs, you know, in case of emergency.

More roadside public bathing.

An inquisitive raven.

Ready for more swimming? Certainly.

Biggest water slide yet. 

Sudden dramatic lighting, house in Reykjavik.

The perfect sunglasses, lost within 48 hours.

Oh, that church.

Color!

Making new friends.

What see you there, Leif?

Time to climb Bifrost back to the heavens.

  It is also very fun, certainly so if you like water slides:

We had only a little more than a week there. It was surely not enough, but how wonderful to have gone at all.

Sabbatical Reading

Last summer's reading was driven by fear, this summer's by opportunity, which says a lot about my frame of mind. There's much overlap in subject matter--the rise of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, sustainability, the future generally--and two authors, Bruce Sterling and Jaron Lanier, make a return appearance. One big difference, though, is that this summer I'll have a lot more time for books.

Autodesk is routinely lauded as a great place to work, and rightly so, not least because every four years each employee is given an opportunity not to work there for an extended period. The sabbatical is an opportunity to travel, to relax, and to retrain. I'm taking my first sabbatical this summer. I'll spend most of July in Iceland and the Netherlands, then return to build a treehouse before heading up to the Sierras in August. I'll be reading throughout.

Happily, I know what two projects I'll be working on when I return, so can focus my research accordingly. They are applying IBM's Watson (pictured below, in its big debut as Jeopardy! champion) to Autodesk's customer and partner support needs, which I have been asked to do, and turning the company into a global meter of sustainability, which I have not.

The key to the former is mastering the art of Natural Language Processing, so you'll see a good deal about that topic in the list below. My reading about sustainability is less focused: it's a huge field, a huge issue, and I'm only just beginning to take a structured approach to it. There's also some IoT literature there, just to keep my hand in, but the selection is limited. Capabilities, techniques, social impact...but enough preamble, here's the list:

NLP, Deep Learning, AI and the nature of work and the economy:

John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm, Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing
Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Daniel M. Bikel and Imed Zitouni, eds., Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape our Future

IoT:

Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think
Scott Burnham, Trust and the Internet of Things: An Introduction to Designing and Navigating Trust in a Hyper-Connected World
Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
Joe Barkai, The Outcome Economy: How the Industrial Internet of Things is Transforming Every Business

Sustainability:

Tim Flannery, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
David MacKay, Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air
Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen, Sustainable Materials without the Hot Air: Making Buildings, Vehicles and Products Efficiently and with Less New Material
E.O. Wilson, Half-earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life
E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
Rebecca D. Costa, The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Life on a Hotter Planet

The hotlinks, above, go to a mix of synopses, full length pdf versions, and related explanatory material. Perhaps by next summer I'll be able to feed all this to Watson and let it write my blog for me thereafter.

Thanks to Catherine Wolf, David Thomasson, Doug Look, Creighton Hoke, and Dan Knightly for providing suggestions.