Adam Keys is Thinking

Rabbit-hole-athon - it doesn’t look like an event is scheduled, but I dig the idea:

Tl;dr, we are organizing a weekend long IRL rabbit-hole-athon for technologists: an intimate retreat/hackathon dedicated to reading, thinking deeply about a topic, and sharing your learnings with others.

Like a hackathon or BarCamp, but with the intent to focus an individual’s attention on a topic of their choosing instead of diffusing it. (Which is fine, on balance!)

We believe that being a good builder and problem solver is rooted in being a clear thinker. Intentionally dedicating time to exploring, pursuing your curiosity, and understanding things deeply is an important part of exercising this muscle. We believe this is essential in shaping the next generation of technologists, builders, founders, and researchers.

That’s a snappy manifesto! The notion of taking an afternoon/day/weekend to throw tactics to the wind and go deep on a topic is exciting. I’m already thinking about topics I could go down the rabbit hole on. 🧠

I saw this local band Adam’s Farm (no relation, promise) a few times when I was 15 or so. In the era of mixing bass guitar out of rock music (no thanks, Metallica), these fellows stood out by being having an EP where I could clearly hear all the instruments. It was almost 25 years later that I’d learn that “Girlfriend” in particular is a Modern Lovers cover.

Sidenote: it seemed like this local band was lost to the internet until recently as well. I figured I’d ripped one of the only copies of this CD, but Adam’s Farm music appeared on YouTube recently. Fancy that!

William Shatner’s cover of “Common People” is less difficult to find, but possibly equally obscure. Back in the late ’90s, Shatner did some voice overs on a Ben Folds pre-solo album Fear of Pop. In the mid ‘00s, Folds produced William Shatner’s album of songs with tons of guests doing the singing and Shatner mostly talking about mortality and aging. Again, it was several years before I heard the original of “Common People”.

I rather like these two covers better than the originals. So it goes with a notable cover!

The modern marvel that moves commodities, sub-assemblies, finished product, and people across the planet is largely invisible. Except when I’m bumped from an overbooked flight. Or when I can’t buy your favorite kind of candy because the trucks to move the containers from the ships to the stores are in the wrong place. Or when one can’t build a car in Germany because semiconductor fabrication plants aren’t as elastic as some executive thought they were. Then it becomes all too apparent that the default state of transportation is, absent considerable effort and coordination, for the wheels to fly off constantly.

Hence, A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics is a great primer for understanding the weird state of our world:

The whole shipping process involves dozens of actors, from the exporter, through a long chain of companies who handle the container (incurring costs on behalf of the shipment), all the way to the importer. This creates a trust problem: who is responsible for the problems that arise when one part of this chain goes wrong? Some of these companies are hired by the shipping company, others by the exporter or importer, or even by a logistics company acting as a middle man. This is usually solved by some kind of chain of custody, where any problem with the container must be immediately noted and complained about by the relevant party.

Adjacent: Venkatesh Rao, Remystifying Supply Chains:

Supply chains are a new class of engineered-emergent artifact, one that includes a few other globe-spanning things like the internet, the air travel system, and low earth orbit, that exist at a level of Gaian phenomenology, terraforming, and planet-scale husbandry. We only ever catch local glimpses of these things. The wholes are too big to fit in a single human mind, and the physical embodiments are too vast to capture even on a single map, let alone in a single photograph.

We have to understand these beasts, in all their evolving, learning glory, while living within their bellies. Abstract slicing and dicing of the phenomenology, via aspects like computation, circularity, and situatedness, can only get us so far. To finish the picture, we have to develop a sensitivity to how we inhabit these beasts at a human scale.

This is extremely my jam. Beethoven Symphonies Abstracted:

To accompany the National Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & American Masters concert series, author and illustrator Mo Willems presents Beethoven Symphonies Abstracted, an exhibition of nine large-scale, painted abstractions inspired by the music and genius of Beethoven. Each large-scale work is a response to one of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, divided into panels that visually interpret each symphonic movement.

(Via Austin Kleon)

Previously: my affection for symphonies seven and eight, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” animated.

Fancy some near-term imagination on the opportunities the re-commercialization of space presents us? Yes, have some! Science upside for Starship:

It is, however, a fun exercise to enumerate all the ways in which Starship and related technologies can help execute bold, ambitious missions of scientific discovery.

Giant, poly-lithic space telescopes? Sure.

Probably the coolest telescope concept enabled by Starship, though, is the giant segmented telescope to end all giant segmented telescopes. An unmodified Starship can deliver perhaps a dozen 8 m monolithic hexagonal free-flying segments per launch to a target location such as L2, where they self assemble, calibrate, and then focus incoming light. Over a few dozen Starship flights, a truly enormous spherical mirror section perhaps 1000 m in diameter and with a focal length of 1000 km or so can be assembled behind a free-flying sun shade, pointed in a direction of general interest.

Heating (low-key terraforming) Mars with constellations of mirrors? Okay.

The second is mass producing light sails on Earth, launching them into LEO, then flying them to Mars where they can lurk near Mars-Sun L2 and reflect light back at the planet, reducing heat loss during the Martian night.

“Flood the zone” of our planetary neighbors with exploratory robots? As you wish.

Why shouldn’t we have a dedicated orbiter, lander, rover, helicopter, and submarine on every discrete body in the solar system over, say, 100 km in diameter? Let’s build a fleet of clockwork automatons for Venus and an armada of submarines for Europa, Enceladus, and Titan. Let’s darken the Martian skies with helicopters. Let’s drive rovers across the frozen nitrogen plains of Pluto.

I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds from these pull-quotes. I’ll bet that SpaceX’s starship won’t meet some of these expectations. We will have to hold our nose or plug our ears as Musk bloviates. Despite all that, it’s exciting that folks are thinking, writing, and blogging about this and some of it could come to fruition in my lifetime!

Favorite tracks: “Suck My Kiss”, “Sir Psychosexy”, “Power of Equality”, “The Righteous & the Wicked”.

The essential (in my opinion) Red Hot Chili Peppers album is, for me, a few things:

• One of the first albums I heard with good bass playing (I ‘grew up’ in the age after Metallica had mixed bass guitar entirely out of their albums and many others followed suit)
• One of the first albums I heard that was great from end to end and where many of the songs flowed into each other as if played live, meant to fit together, or like they weren’t even separate songs
• Extremely teenage and horny, of which I was both when I first heard it

It’s an album that has aged well for me. It was an excellent album when I first heard it, and is still an excellent album when I listen to it today.

There are other nice qualities too: Rick Rubin’s production work. When it’s not extremely horny, it has some good lyrics. It’s rooted in the RHCP musical predecessors with intelligent awareness, not than blind copying. They are seeing further by standing on the shoulders of George Clinton, not just sitting on his shoulders for a free ride. It’s just good funk.

And yes, the RHCP joke in The Good Place is superb.

Gotta sneak this one in under the wire, otherwise it’s just a sparkling list of things.

Movies

Summer of Soul - Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone. Heck yes.

Dune - loved the world building here and I’m willing to look past the decision to split this into two movies.

Somewhere You Feel Free - I didn’t realize Wildflowers was so pivotal for Tom Petty. Made me want to get in my car and listen to the whole thing, which I did and greatly enjoyed.

Shows

Only Murders in the Building - is there a greater showbiz duo than Martin Short and Steve Martin?

Hacks - inside baseball on standup comedy plus Jean Smart is 👨‍🍳

What We Do in the Shadows - a mockumentary sitcom expanding its world, taking chances with changing things up, and absolutely nailing the landing.

Albums

Funkadelic, Maggot Brain - hits more emotional points than I’d ever expect from a George Clinton thing.

Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain - nudging into Very Intellectual, nearly classical, jazz, Davis is at least as good as Mingus was at this.

Prince, Welcome 2 America - recorded ten years ago, but it absolutely works today.

Books

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon - I finished re-reading the whole Baroque Trilogy plus this one and they surpassed my recollection of how good they are.

Adrian Newey, How To Build a Car - a memoir on designing three decades of winning Formula 1 cars.

Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist - enjoyed the whole trilogy on writing motivation.

My best writing

Don’t be spooky

“Rationalize and solve” doesn’t help someone who is venting

One priority is like wind in the sails

The long game of notes

My best tweeting

On emerging from a winter storm 

On accordions

Finishing is the hardest part

The Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. no shoes/shirt policies

Proof of work is a better idea for sustaining recurring meetings than for software currency

Kevin Kelly, The Third Way:

Huge monopolistic companies running platforms like Facebook and Amazon are not mere corporations, nor are they governments, even though they have many of the attributes of both government and corporations. They are a new third thing: platforms. We should not expect to regulate platforms like companies, nor expect them to behave like governments. We need a third category of rights and responsibilities for them.

Platform-principalities. Bank-states (which, oddly enough, includes airlines). Energy-sovereigns (British Petroleum, Exxon). Media-empires (Disney, Universal).

We require a better term for companies that have grown so extraordinarily. Those like Apple that run international diplomacy programs with China. Those like Amazon or Google, that regard their employees as de-facto citizens. Those like airlines that can print a currency (in the form of loyalty programs).

And, as Kelly notes, we should look at them in an entirely different way. We shouldn’t treat Amazon the same we treat a local retailer, just like we don’t treat your local HOA the same way we treat the European Union. “Platforms” is a good start, but a word that connects the tremendous influence modern mega-corps have with the power that Standard Oil or The British East India Corporation had at their apex would be even better!

Endtroducing is my canonical example of a revealing album. I heard “Building Steam With a Grain of Sand” completely accidentally in a college business writing class, of all places. A fellow student used it in their presentation, ironically. Afterwards, I asked “what was that?!”, my mind still blown.

I downloaded it and was immediately like “wow”. A whole new angle on music became apparent. I was vaguely aware that hip-hop quotes other music, but didn’t really understand sampling. I’m just old enough that hip-hop has always been a thing. But this was so different, like an other-worldly quote-fest. But, in a good way. A great way, even.

I later learned Endtroducing is notable in that it was made manually. Ableton didn’t exist, so if you wanted to change tempos on samples, you had to pitch correct them yourself. You didn’t have to tape splice anymore, thankfully. But it was still far tricker than making this album would have been today.

This album would spark many musical explorations. Mash-ups like A Night at the Hip-Hopera. The Roots, J Dilla, Soulquarians, and a myriad of other artists. “Building Steam With a Grain of Sand” sparked amazement, curiosity, and appetite for more music I was previously unaware of.

These are my favorite of Beethoven’s “more approachable” symphonies. Symphony No. 9 is my favorite, but it requires a bit more context to take in. Further, it’s a solid seventy minutes of music, ramping up the difficulty of attention span.

Symphony No. 7 (hereafter Seven, etc.) is my favorite outside of Nine, which is sort of its own pivotal thing. It’s a definitive no-skip symphony. Every movement is sublime in its own way. The first movement for its vigor and speed. The second for its solemn opening that builds and builds into a big, emotional moment. The third for its frolic. The final movement for feeling several minutes of emphatic, resolving punctuation and resolution.

Symphony No. 8 has a wonderful opening. The structure and melodic quality is closer to what came before Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. It sounds like a nod back to Haydn or Mozart, Beethoven’s predecessors. But the harmony and orchestration is distinctly of Beethoven. It’s a great bridge from Beethoven’s Very Good symphonies to his Amazing Symphony Number 9, The One with Ode to Joy (not the official title as recognized by music historians).

These two symphonies fit together really well on CDs. So, you can find basically any conductor/ensemble you prefer performing it. I listened to the Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic version when I was playing music in high school. I’ve found this piece easy to hear little variations between conductors, so if that’s your thing, queue up a few interpretations and go hunting for little distinctions!

There are four-ish kinds of great albums, in my mind:

1. Pivotal albums: the artist or genre was distinctly different before and after the album came out. e.g., classical music was distinctly different after Beethoven, particularly Symphony No. 9
2. Revealing albums: pivotal to my perspective or knowledge of music. e.g., my understanding of hip-hop was distinctly different after I heard DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing
3. Consistent albums: no track justifies skipping, you can listen to the thing end to end, every time. e.g., Tom Petty’s The Last DJ
4. Under-rated albums: albums that are outshined by their extraordinary peers or contemporaries. Most folks know that Born to Run is great, and all other Springsteen albums (generally) rank below it. But that shouldn’t let otherwise excellent and out-of-sequence later albums like The Rising or Human Touch go unnoticed.

Imagine all the busses, boats, monorails, trains, and gondolas in Disney World as (quasi-public) transit system. Then make a transit-style map of said system. It’s fun, but a little dismal once I think about it.

Walt Disney World has significantly better transit than most cities in the US.

America’s fantasy world, it turns out, is a place you can get around without getting into a car.

Definitely a top 10 reason (but probably not top 5) I enjoy and find Walt Disney World so intriguing.

Adjacent: if the best transit system many middle/upper-class Americans will experience is a rigorously-top-down, corporate quasi-state, well, that’s a pretty sick burn on capitalism.

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” — Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá