I had not realized, but my celebrity continues to grow.
Monday
I went to Bio-IT World (Expo and/or Conference!) today expecting to see Ray Kurzweil talk, and then be pissed off at the small turnout. I say him talk, was pissed about the small turnout, but then got a nice complement by walking around the show floor. It took me an hour to make my way around a smallish conference room, because people kept stopping me. “Chris,” this, “Chris,” that. “I read your article,” this, “i heard about,” that. It was a *trip*!. The ego has been fed. Please do not feed the ego any more this year. I don’t want it getting (any more) out of control (again).
Kurzweil was really good. I recently watched a video that my cousin put together on the similarities between being a saloon piano player and being a pool hall ace. One of his repeated points was “make it look easy.” If you’re really stunningly good at something, you make it look easy. Kurzweil made it look easy. He showed a series of plots of various stuff leading up to facts like (a) computing power has doubled every 18 months for the past 150 years, crossing 5 different sorts of hardware. (b) The boom and bust of the “internet bubble” don’t even show up on a log plot of profit over year. That was purely a market error correcting itself. (c) Similarly, WWII, the Great Depression, and other major events don’t show up on log plots of any technology (the power thereof) over year. One of my favorite bits was when he had a plot of the number of computers networked together in the world, vs. year. On the log vs. year plot, it’s just a straight line from 1975 to the present. Then he flipped to a non-log plot and the exponential explosion pops out at 1995. He just said “this is why everyone was surprised by the web explosion in 1995. You had the wrong axis on your graph, so you thought you were dealing with a linear phenomenon.”
The really cool part was when he started to extrapolate into the future. It’s totally obvious from the plots, man. The plots tell all.
Sunday
Yesterday, excellent time at the Mystic Aquarium, followed by dinner with friends Peter and Rosa. Their daughter Aleyna is at that incredibly cute age (two) where you get to teach her isolated words. I taught her “rock,” as differentiated from “dirt” and “grass.” We wandered around the lawn (she, knee high to me) identifying and categorizing. Kids are kinda cute.
Saturday
On Saturday, I saved a concert. My friend Mark called to ask if I could honcho one of his a cappella shows, since it was about to do without an organizer due to family difficulties. I agreed and drove down Saturday afternoon. I showed up at 3, which was also when the facilities guy got there to open the building, the audio guy showed up, and the performers started arriving.
I took a chance and walked up to the person that most of the people already there were looking at. I stuck out my hand and said “I’m Chris. I’m in charge.” He bought it, and the rest worked out well. I started delegating, and in pretty short order had audio set up, sound checks running, groups in their rooms, and so on. Then I realized that I had one dedicated volunteer (the guy they were looking at earlier) and nobody else. He got his wife and son, which covered (a) selling tickets (b) taking tickets at the door (c) working house lights (d) keeping time for the performers (e) everything else (me).
I think that my least favorite part was that my “special guest group” totally failed to show. The Yale “Red Hot and Blue,” are deadbeats and losers, in case you’re thinking of hiring them. I used their concert fee to buy a nice dinner for the judges and my family of volunteers. At the end, my only slip into negativity was announcing from the stage “I would like to thank our special guest group. **pause** I really would **pause** …”
Still, the competitors were amazing. A four woman 50’s style “lollipop, lollipop” group kicked the ass of everyone else there. Surprising that it takes a bunch of high school kids to renew my faith in music. Oh well.
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