Vacation planning

Why leave green for red?

In a recentish post I wondered aloud what drought conditions this spring portended for fire conditions this summer. A rhetorical question, really: it could only mean something bad. And bad it has been. The Dixie Fire, which has been burning since mid-June, is now the second largest fire we've ever had in California, and continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as shown in this terrifying visualization:

 

 

And with fire (Dixie being only one of them) comes smoke...

That smoke blanketed our planned vacation spot, so we went to the Mendocino coast and sat in the gray for a few days, watching AQI values tell their sad story, before converting the remainder of our vacation week into a staycation. And here's the kicker: this is the second summer in a row we've redirected to the coast as our mountain camping plans have been overtaken by events. It may be that the drought will retreat and the fire patterns lessen. More likely, though, this is the new reality, and redirected vacations only one of the smaller sacrifices it will demand.

The Smart Bridge

 

Queen Maxima, watching her ribbon-cutting duties being automated away

On a trip--such a wonderful trip--to Amsterdam in 2016, Felix and I visited MX3D, a Dutch startup developing processes for large-scale 3D printing in metal, to talk to them about their plans to print a bridge. I was looking for my next Internet of Things project, something that would generate well structured data in a reliable and consistent fashion, and Felix was there because robots. The IoT was in a hype cycle at the time, and "smart cities" especially so, but practical examples of the benefits to be gained from placing sensors in the urban environment were scarce. Would a smart bridge in the middle of Amsterdam prove the case, one way or the other? The question is still open, but now--literally today, exactly 5 years to the day after that first meeting with MX3D--we can finally begin to answer it.

The MX3D bridge took a long time to print--money was scarce, other projects came and went--and creating a sensor network to fit onto the bridge was a major effort on top of that, but what really ate up the years between then and now was the work required to rebuild the canal walls upon which the bridge rests. Amsterdam is, famously, a city of canals, and canals, like everything else, require maintenance every so and so many decades. Indeed, it was the plan to renew the canal walls that created the opportunity to place a new bridge in the Red Light District in the first place, so I can't complain about the delay caused by that maintenance effort, nor is there any point in complaining about the additional delay caused by COVID. But really.

A lot has changed in the half-decade between inspiration and installation. I've had three different jobs at Autodesk, each within a different division of the company. (Ironically, and really very much by chance, I now sit in Autodesk Research, which is the part of the company that has sponsored this work all along.) I've moved to Amsterdam and then back again. I've read and thought and even written a thing or two about the smart city thesis--i.e., that the massive effort required to sensor an urban environment produces novel and useful insights justifying that investment--mostly focused on the fact that there are significant downsides to the current approach to the collection of data in public spaces. And I have learned more than I ever expected to about sensors and structural engineering and the inner workings of city bureaucracies.

My goal with this bridge is to demonstrate a model of effective and ethical collection of data in the urban environment, and to draw lessons from that example for other projects and other cities. But that's for another day. Today I'm simply enjoying an enormous sense of relief: the bridge is in place and the data has finally started to flow.

Evacuation Information

Though you wouldn't necessarily think so

It's April, and we are already under mandatory water restrictions, with more to come. We've had 20 inches of rain this season and anticipating another dry winter in 2021-2022 the local utility, it seems, is even dusting off plans to run a giant pipe across the Richmond Bridge, a multi-million dollar last resort but no fantasy: it was done back in 1976, and our winter this year was even drier than the winter of '76. And what do you suppose this means for fire season this year?

In the mail today....

Earth Hero

Join us at earthhero.org

I've written now and again about our communal climate challenge--you may recall such classic posts as "We don't have four more years" and "We are all going to die"--and about the need for each of us to do all we can to try to bend humanity away from its current disastrous course. Recently, I've discovered Earth Hero, a mobile app (Apple, Google) that is intended to help you do just that. So impressed am I with the app, and even more with the group of volunteers behind it, that I've started working on it myself. And, as part of that work, I'll be staffing the Earth Hero booth at the Virtual Earth Day event on 19 April 2021, answering questions about this effort. Come find me!

On duty, at the Earth Hero booth, virtual Earth Day festival 2021

Mickey

"Primordial Ethics": Music to my eyes

Let me tell you about Mickey. Mickey is a rock star, by which I mean not that overused expression for a high performer, but literally so, as I define it: Mickey is a portal into the world for thrilling music that will otherwise never be heard. He doesn't constrain himself to the stave (see image, above), may not even know that Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit, but then again, a lot of rock stars don't. He's an insatiable consumer of the work of others and a master synthesist, yet his output is utterly original. And, not least, he's incredibly fun to watch. Rock. Star.

I encountered Mickey's work before I met the man himself. It was the summer of '15, and I was doing my summer reading. I was on the hunt for something that would help me understand the Internet of Things, and after wading through a bunch of crap I discovered Trillions. To this day, it's the only book on the topic that expresses the scale of the IoT without being hand-wavy: "computing as an ecology" means something, and Mickey and his co-authors convinced me that the IoT portends a paradigm shift in your and my favorite technology and everything attached to it. Trillions is nothing if not big.

So imagine my delight upon discovering that Mickey had joined Autodesk as a Research Fellow. He, knowing no better, accepted my immediate request for a meeting, and I, determined to impress him in that meeting, brought with me some of the "elephant diagrams" I used to understand the company....

It's...complicated.

Mickey was, if not impressed, at least amused, and a bit later invited me to join Project Primordial, his effort to help Autodesk think about generative design at scale. Join a cutting edge IoT project with my favorite IoT thinker? Yes, please.

Primordial (which later became and still is Hack Rod) was an education in lots of ways, but most especially a master class in unbounded thinking. I am a repressed person generally, and while that's probably for the best in most respects, it translates into a certain lack of audacity in my intellectual scope (if you're surprised to read that then you haven't met Mickey). And it was with those lessons in mind that I later catalyzed the MX3D Smart Bridge project, about which I've spoken before. What I haven't acknowledged previously was that Mickey was one of the first people I asked to help figure out how to make a bridge smart, and his ideas and especially his questions on that topic have been an inspiration more or less continuously over the (gulp) half decade we've been trying to do so.

So that's Mickey, or at least my Mickey. Now comes a request, from his partner (an extraordinary person in her own right): Mickey, it seems, is going to be bed-ridden for a time, a depressing and boring prospect. She asks for a story "about the goodness that Mickey has brought into your life," and that's what this is, if only a partial account. It was a pleasure to write it, but in addition she asks for reading suggestions for Mickey, which is the exact equivalent of trying to figure out what to get the man who has everything. Indeed, when I want to build a reading list, Mickey himself is my first stop: he's long since left Autodesk, but we are still collaborating, and I've actually just got off a Zoom call with him in which he first recommended The Nature of Technology and then proceeded to chat me (while operating what appeared to be a very up to date if fussy Jacquard loom) enough additional material to keep me busy the entire time he's recovering:

But I have a niche experience that will help here. I've been sick before, and in desperate need of bookish distraction. I read fast, too, so what I really want isn't a book, it's a series, and long enough that I won't be worried about it running out. It also has to be well written, entertaining, and not so tightly plotted that close attention is required. There are some obvious ones--Pratchett's Discworld series and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin stories come to mind--but I'm sure Mickey's already been there. Here are a few that got me through tough times, and which he might have overlooked:

• Tim Dorsey's Serge Storms series about an amateur historian/serial killer, probably available at SF Public in e-book.
  
• The greatest manga ever, Lone Wolf and Cub (will deliver all 28 volumes upon request).
  
• Samuelson's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (don't own it, but do own Churchill's own history of the Second World War, which is almost as good, half as long, and likewise available for delivery).
• The Flashman Papers, not nearly enough of them, and dangerously funny, so best not started until the stitches are set.

Get well soon.