#tedxbrussels

When I heard that Brussels was hosting the largest TEDx event ever I signed up immediately. Now it's over, and I'm very happy I did. I'd certainly love to attend the real thing in Monterey, but until that becomes even faintly possible Brussels will do very nicely.

Organization was spot-on. Talks were scheduled to start at 15:43 and end at 15:53, and they did. Pacing felt just right: long breaks and longish sessions meant you didn't lose time shuffling in and out of the room, never felt overwhelmed and had time for meeting people and meaningful discussions. Every word could be heard clearly from everywhere. Whatever it is they're using for projectors, I want one for my home cinema, although I'd need a much bigger flat; the only thing comparable I've ever seen was at a Jean-Michel Jarre concert. WiFi didn't work, but, well, WiFi never works at conferences. (Good news is: I won't feel too bad if we screw this up for ER2011.) And obviously these are not normal people: there were 1000 attendees and 2000 WiFi devices in the room. At one point I wanted to download iMovie for iPhone so I could quickly edit and upload a clip I'd shot, and in that crowd there is nothing even remotely exceptional about this. Of the many iPhone 4 users I must have been one of the few who didn't have iMovie already. Anyway, I couldn't: as everyone with Belgium cell-phones or international roaming (i.e. everyone) switched to 3G the cell towers around the stately Palace of Fine Arts were hit with the kinds of bandwidth demands rarely seen outside the Bay area, and more or less gave up.

Talks were many and varied, about robotic cars, interstellar space flight, commoditized EEG as a human-interface device, how the digital doubles in Lord of the Rings were made, the internet of Things… My favorites were probably the ones about economics. Dambisa Moyo's talk on How the West was Lost, delivered with no slides while sitting on a couch, especially resonated with me. I don't think it's lost yet, and nor does she, but I've felt for a while that Europe and the US have some tough choices ahead and that they're not discussed nearly enough. Even though I'd be the first to say that you can be a nerd yet not socially awkward, seeing someone with a PhD in economics being that charismatic felt a little uncanny.

Although overall quality was staggeringly high, there were a couple duds. You'd think watching the founder of Doctors Without Borders talk about how innovative finance will save the world can't be anything less than good, but everyone I talked to agreed that Bernard Kouchner's talk was a huge waste of everybody's time. Not only was he late and slow and inarticulate and had lousy slides which he actually turned away from the public to read from the screen, (I wish I was making this up, but I'm not) no matter any of that, the real problem was his entire talk boiled down to: "getting a few countries to implement a Tobin tax is a good idea". You know, I actually agree with that. And I'm immensely grateful that someone as obviously gifted and influential as Mr. Kouchner is trying very hard to get it done. (Especially since, living in Belgium, I'm constitutionally unable to vote for anyone who even bothers having any opinion on anything other than language borders.) However, when I pay for the privilege of spending 18 minutes of my time listening to a world-class speaker, I expect to get a little more information out of it than can be found in the average tweet.

But that's not even the talk that really pissed me off. That would be Lynne McTaggart's, acclaimed author of "What Doctors Don't Tell You", who spoke about the Intention Experiment, i.e. the idea that "the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field" and can be influenced by thought, and her experiments to prove it. The talk was quite polished and competently executed, and even featured a complimentary hands-on faith-healing session at the end, but the problem is this is not actually an idea worth spreading. It's an idea that, in a perfect world, would have long ago been gagged, garroted, thrown out the window, shot, cremated, dispersed out at sea and never mentioned again.

By the way, I do understand that a conference that tries to be at the leading edge of both technology and art will have a few, for lack of a better word, "edge cases". People who are controversial but may possibly be right. Sometimes the difference between the brilliant out-of-the-box thinker and the nutjob is only visible in hindsight. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lynne McTaggart is not a pseudoscientific hack, but rather a visionary who's starting a revolution in how we perceive the fabric of the universe. It's possible. But I would bet a lot of money against it.

Anyway, if I'm spending a lot of time on the two talks I didn't like, it's only because I enjoy bashing people vastly more successful than I. They really didn't matter. After Lynne McTaggart came Paul Collier, who started by asking a trick question that tripped the entire audience (not 90%, not 99%, but literally everyone) and went on to give the most amazing talk about natural resources in developing countries, how they can help the poor improve their quality of life, and what he's doing to ensure they're used for this purpose. And after Bernard Kouchner came Stromae, who got the entire audience to stand up and sing and dance. Picture that: an audience of nerds, dancing in the fanciest classical concert hall in Brussels.

As enjoyable as the event was, from the start I felt somewhat weird about it. Only standing in the bus back home did I figure out what it was: it's not, actually, a conference. Both academic conferences and trade conventions are gatherings of people who come together to discuss their work. Yes, this involves a lot of people talking in front of slides, but this is only a means to an end. The end is to get people in a given field to discuss what they do. That's not at all what TED(x) is.

At TEDx, you don't meet the speakers. To be honest, I didn't really try to, but even if I had, the odds were severely stacked against me: there are 20 speakers for 1000 attendees. Add all the breaks together, and even under the ridiculous assumptions that speakers don't talk with each other, you only talk to speakers, never go to the bathroom and are comfortable talking to Nicholas Negroponte while sampling the cheese platter, statistically you can only hope for four minutes of face time with speakers in the entire day.

So you don't even try to. What you do is talk to random attendees, about nothing in particular. During the coffee breaks of a normal conference, you meet people who closely share your interests and discuss these. TEDx feels more like a speed-dating/networking session targeted at the kind of crowd that attends TEDx. It's a great crowd. Mostly young technophiles with a creative bend, yet diversified. I chatted with a retired English professor about underwater photography. I learned how the Yugoslav wars were perceived by Croats who were six-year-olds at the time. (Apparently it was kinda fun if you were lucky enough to be a child and not get killed.) The place is chock full of amazing people: scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, engineers… and not the kind of engineer who's a lifelong employee at a major utility company, but the kind who taught himself graphic design and understands the music business and wants to use that combination of skills in a unique way. Everybody reads Malcolm Gladwell. Many want to be Tim Ferriss.

The "conference" part, with the speakers and the slides and the introductions, is actually a sort of day-long entertainment that simply happens to be co-located with the networking session. Nerdy entertainment certainly, and great entertainment. If I were to list the five best talks I've ever attended, four of these would be from today. (The fifth would be the EuroPython keynote by Hans Rosling, who also spoke at TED in Monterey.) At TEDxBrussels, you get to see Nicholas Negroponte throw his laptop on the ground and tell how he dares intel or other competitors to do the same with their prototypes when he faces them. You get to see a fashion show by Bibi Russell, a former top model who gave up her modeling career to create a fashion house that employs 35,000 workers in rural Bangladesh who make fashionable clothes you really want to wear. You get to see truly amazing people make passionate statements about the world and wild predictions about the future. As Rik Torfs said in closing, they're unlikely to all be right. "Maybe we're just telling jokes. But they're good jokes, by brilliant people." I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good day to me. It's a surprising event, unlike anything I've ever been to and not quite what I expected. But one thing's for sure: I'll definitely go again.

The Stupidest Political Statement Ever

If you've been following the US midterm campaign at all, you know that 2010 is an extremely good year for stupid, ignorant, or even certifiably insane candidates. Which begs the question: who's the craziest? That's probably too hard to answer, so let's try something simpler: what's the craziest thing that was said?

Until today I would have found it preposterous that amid the frenzy of inane statements made by hopeful politicians in the last few months there could be a "winner", an argument or position so outrageously wrong that it clearly stands on "top" of the pile. Now however, I think I might have found exactly that.

Asked about immigration at a town hall meeting two weeks ago, congressional candidate Joe Miller replied:

The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. . . East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.

Have you read that? Read it again. Ponder the implications. A guy who's running to oppose Obama's oppressive socialist government thinks the US should look towards a Soviet puppet state for inspiration. He also seems unaware that the Berlin wall and the iron curtain were built to keep East Germans in, not to prevent people in Paris and Copenhagen from taking advantage of the freedoms and opportunities offered by a life under the Warsaw Pact. Unless, that is, Mr. Miller's immigration strategy is to screw America so bad that it becomes desirable to prevent Californians from fleeing to Mexico. (Actually most of his economic program makes a lot more sense in that light.)

Bill Maher once said that Bush's stupidity made him an easier target for comedy than Obama. He should be afraid: if Joe Miller is at all representative of the next crop of politicians, comedians will soon become redundant.

Facebook's Meta-Likes

Since facebook came up with the idea that you can like not only things but also "actions", (e.g. while you've been able to like one person's status for a while, it only recently became possible to Like another person's commenting on that status.) the site has moved one step closer to the realm of simple-yet-impossible-to-understand webapps so recently left empty by the demise of Google Wave.

See if you can make sense of the following screencap:


What the hell is going on here ? The first line is clear enough: Cécile, Julie and Sophie like Laureline's status. (Of course they do. She's in Thailand.) The "unlike" link implies that I too apparently like her status. This begs the question of why this shows up in my news feed when I've reacted to it before and thus am obviously aware of it. But never mind: the thing that really bugs me is the last line. Apparently eight people like "this". What the hell is "this"? Are they liking Laureline's status, or Cécile's liking of Laureline's status ? (If the latter is true, Cécile has apparently gone to the trouble of liking her own liking of Laureline's status.)

At some point I thought both lists referred to the same thing, (Laureline's status) and the "4 others" were just people I wasn't friends with. But that isn't the case : clicking on "4 others" reveal a friend and 3 people I don't know. It follows that either the first and last lines are lists of people liking different things, or there is a weird reason (or bug) in facebook that explains why one of those friends is counted in the last line but not in the first.

This kind of thing has been happening all the time for the last few days. Am I the only one who is confused by this? Is there a simple and obvious explanation that I'm simply too stupid to figure out? If facebook really wants to complicate its user interface, why on Earth doesn't it provide a "dislike" button? I've been hating Florent Pagny for years, yet it's 2010 and I still have no easy way to share that feeling with the people in my life…

By publishing this, I'm taking a risk that someone might come along with a perfectly sane and simple explanation, and prove me an idiot in the comments. It's a risk I'm willing to take for three reasons: first, even in the worst case I'll actually learn something. Second, I strongly doubt that any explanation can undermine my fundamental point, which is that facebook's "like" mechanism is fucked up. Just to make the point, I'm pretty sure this is a bug :


Last but not least, as a researcher working in knowledge representation, I can't help but see a silver lining in all this: in an incredibly roundabout and unexpected way, facebook is teaching the masses one thing: reification is bloody hard.

Has America become Too European?

Yesterday I read Richard Feynman's Caltech 1974 commencement address, where he said that scientists had a responsibility to be more than just honest, i.e. to go beyond simply telling the truth, and make a point of mentioning everything that might make their results or argumentation wrong. While better scientific papers often have a "threats to validity" section doing exactly that, Feynman insisted that scientists should exert this strenuous form of integrity not only in academic circles, but also while addressing laypeople.

Thomas Straubhaar's latest op-ed is a perfect example of a piece with not even a hint of Feynman's "scientific integrity." Mr. Straubhaar, professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, presents an argument that goes something like this: "During the 20th century, the US favored small government, individual freedom and market forces. It rose swiftly to superpower status. Today, it has a bigger government that uses more interventionist policies, but its growth is anemic and some fear its greatness is fading. To remain powerful, it needs to shrink government and return to laissez-faire economic policies."

Sounds like a good argument, right? What kind of hesitant, unconfident chump bothers with "threats to validity?" Well, I do:

• Were the laissez-faire policies of the early 20th century really the main reason for America's success? Weren't, say, low population density and immense reserves of oil and other natural resources at least as important?


• How laissez-faire were those policies really? Isn't FDR's 1933 New Deal, widely credited with helping the economy recover from the great depression, just as interventionist as what Obama's doing now?


• Even assuming America's greatness is really due to the free market policies of the industrial revolution, is it so obvious that they still represent the best option now, a hundred years later, with the world increasingly multipolar and domestic oil pretty much gone?

I'll stop at three things, but the attentive reader will easily find more.

Cargo Cult Science

Richard Feynman talks about pseudo-science, honesty, scientific integrity, and how Millikan set a bad precedent for measuring the charge of an electron.

I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

You should read it.

Swedish Lapland – What's in the bag?

Today is packing day for my next trip: a weeklong walk along Kungsleden in Swedish Lapland with my friend Rolando. We're both out there to take serious pictures, and of course we need to carry clothes, shelter and food, for ten days away from electricity and cell towers. Getting enough gear for serious pictures to fit inside a backpack along with all the things one needs in the wild just to stay dry, warm and fed is always a challenge. Here's what we'll end up carrying.

Rolando's photo gear:

• Canon EOS7D
• 2 Batteries
• 40GB of CF cards
• Tamron 11-18
• Sigma 30/1.4
• Canon SD860IS pocket camera

My photo gear:

• 5DMk2 w/ RRS L-Plate
• 4 Batteries
• 44GB of CF cards
• 24/1.4 (stand-in for my 16-35 which is getting repaired)
• 50/1.4
• 70-300 DO
• Gitzo 1530 (center column removed)
• Canon SD3500IS pocket camera

While we're both self-sufficient as far as photo gear is concerned, it's nice that we're both using Canon gear and can thus exchange batteries, memory cards and lenses if the need arises.

Camping:

• Tent
• Stove, pot, two gas canisters
• First aid kit
• Sleeping bag, liner, sleeping pad
• Water bottles (cheap plastic disposable ones — they're lighter than Nalgene)
• Three-season hiking clothes (sun, rain and cold all expected)
• Towel, knife, spork, headlamp, compass, cell-phone, iPod

This comes to a 13kg pack before food and water. Certainly not lightweight hiking territory, but we've carried much worse. We'll see how it goes.

Göteborg by night

No matter how many times you've heard that Scandinavia is an expensive place, there is no dampening the shock that comes while ordering lunch at Copenhagen airport, when a smiling Bjorn Borg-lookalike asks you for 27 euros and 45 cents in return for white wine in a plastic glass and a very small cardboard box of Thai red curry.

Then you fly on to Göteborg, gather your luggage, take a bus to the city, then a tram to your hostel. The cool evening air would be a warm and soft caress on your skin if it wasn't eclipsed by punishingly cold rain. By the time you reach your hostel you're drenched to the bone and seriously questioning your lifestyle. The door is locked, so you need to call the owner, but the only thing on your mind is shelter from the rain. Beyond the window you see a warm corridor, a dark and empty front desk, and a lobby with two guests sitting in front of shiny computers. You rap quietly on the window. Nothing happens. You rap a little louder. Nothing continues to happen. The rain continues pouring. You knock as hard as you can. One of the guests, a fat guy in a sports jersey, shuffles in his chair, seems to consider turning away from facebook for a second, then obviously decides against it. You knock again, hard enough to bruise your knuckles. He shuffles once more. The girl next to him is obviously deaf. You're now shaking the entire door, mildly hoping that the hinges will snap free even if it gets you in jail. It doesn't rain in jail. The guy finally turns around and looks at you with a vague "What?" on his face. You gesture for him to get off his fat ass and walk three meters and open the fucking door. He holds your gaze for two seconds, his face a picture of immense stupidity. Then he swivels his chair back to his facebook profile. You question his morals, values and membership in the human species, curse him to the seventh generation and call on god to strike him with a severe coronary leading to slow and painful death, then whip out your cell phone to call the owner under the pouring rain. He'll be there in twenty minutes. You select a nice puddle to sit in while you wait.

At no point during any of this does it escape you that the amount of money you're spending on this memorable experience would, almost anywhere else in the world, buy you a night in a full-service hotel with a 24h reception that promises to move you from rain-drenched street to sweet linen and fluffy pillows in as little as four minutes, five tops on a busy day. But as much as you'd wish to be, you're not anywhere else: you're in Göteborg, watching continuous strings of water falling from the heavens and onto your head, meters from a warm room that is technically yours if only you can get to it.

When he eventually arrives, the owner isn't sure you really are the same two Belgian guys who booked a room at his hostel tonight. You manage to convince him. When you reach your room, the door is closed. This makes him surprisingly angry. He needs to fetch the key at his girlfriend's place or something, which should take him about thirty minutes, so he shows you to "the pool room", a combination kitchen and basement construction site with a slanted scratched broken-down excuse for a pool table. Scattered around the room lie twelve balls and two halves of a broken cue. An hour later the owner comes back and finally opens the door. He's not a bad guy really, but slow enough to be startled by continental drift. When he leaves with your travel companion to settle the bill, you take the luggage inside, unpack, remove your contacts, do a bit of reading, then, vaguely worried, go out to join them. Payment has just been delivered and he's just beginning to suggest places where you could enjoy a beer if only he'd stop talking. You've been thirsty since landing at Landvetter airport in the early evening, so you go there and get a drink. It's one in the morning.