Erik Wiener

Today I came across a TEDx talk from 2010 by Thad Roberts. In it, he describes his Quantum Space Theory, an eleven dimensional model of the universe that he claims can explain all the current mysteries in physics (dark matter, etc) and unify relativity and quantum mechanics.

The talk starts out interesting enough, but it quickly becomes clear that there’s no “there” there, and a quick perusal of his site confirms that this is amateur pseudo-science.

Some actual scientists have responded with vigorous attacks on his character and methods, or at the very least casual dismissal of his ideas as unscientific. There are, after all, no equations or proofs in his theory and he hasn’t published in a peer reviewed forum.

It doesn’t help that he went to federal prison for 10 years for stealing moon rocks from NASA. And it doesn’t help that he gave a TEDx talk on his theory. TEDx has been widely criticized for using the TED brand to help legitimize low quality or crackpot theories. (TEDx is only loosely affiliated with TED. Local TEDx licensees have no oversight from TED in vetting speakers.)

So this guy is clearly not advancing science and his audience and readers are being misled. Fine, we can and should ignore him.

But there’s still something that interests me about him and what he represents.

Is he a huckster? I think it’s possible he’s quite earnest in his beliefs and in the scientific potential of his “theory”.

Is he a fool? Possibly, though more likely he’s a mediocre physicist whose knowledge and skill put him above your average armchair physicist but are no match for his ambition and confidence.

Is there a role for someone like him in or around physics? The most charitable description I can think of for him is “amateur”, in the sense of an enthusiastic non-professional. Is there a role for amateurs in physics? Is there a role for those outside the academy and professional physics community?

One contribution amateur physicists can make is publishing thought provoking science fiction. By couching pseudo-scientific theories in a story, the amateur can make an end run around Big Science and earn credibility as an imaginative author and inventor of worlds. Interesting enough “fake”, incomplete or half-baked physics can still inspire future scientists, sometimes better than real physics can.

To look at his web site, Thad Roberts already appears to be fashioning a sort of fictional universe with himself at the center. Journalists or future conference organizers wouldn’t be off base to introduce him as science fiction writer Thad Roberts. If he were wise, he would embrace that title and pursue his ideas in the realm of fiction, at least until he thought he had enough of a real theory to put to the test of scientific peer review. And should he never get to that point, at least he might find more legitimate influence and perhaps more personal satisfaction through clearly marked fiction than falsely marked “scientific” books and talks.

I’m not sure why this guy stuck in my head. It was TEDx. They lent credibility to someone who I otherwise would have immediately passed over as just another guy with a half baked idea. Which just jolted me a little out of the comfort zone of my ordinary working assumptions about what I can believe.

And it was also his bio. Is he a desperate, delusional wanderer with a penchant for self-mythologizing or a visionary, overachieving polymath? Is there a line between those? Or is he just a mediocre Everyman with many interests and a narcissistic streak? Is he a self-assured go getter or is he often crippled by self doubt? The more certainty I see in those attacking and defending him, the more nuance I know there must be.

Thad Roberts, who are you?

Plenty of ink spilled on this one already, but I was having fun armchair quarterbacking a particular angle here: I’ve seen many comments to the effect that Apple missed the boat on Nest and it would have been a natural fit.

Here’s why I think Apple passed:

• Focus: Apple is good at saying no. A side business in thermostats and smoke detectors and whatever others gadgets Nest has in the pipeline would be a distraction to whatever Apple has in the pipeline. Google, on the other hand, is focused on everything.

• Mobile: Apple is now about mobile, personal tech. Smoke alarms: decidedly not mobile.

• Market: Apple makes products that kids and teens and young adults want. This is an important market for Apple and an important part of their strategy for perpetual relevance. Today’s buyers were yesterday’s borrowers of their parents’ products. Kids don’t care about thermostats, and smoke alarms are not status symbols for college students.

• Revenue model: Apple loves having their users upgrade every few years to the latest model. It’s built into their revenue model and marketing strategy. Will people upgrade their smoke alarms every 3 years?

• Brand dilution: as every Apple commercial hammers home, Apple is about creativity and connection. Mediating human expression. Creating, consuming and sharing. Thermostats, smoke alarms, smart locks or whatever - not vehicles for human expression.

• Interaction frequency: Apple makes products that people interact with all day every day. The value is indeed in the interaction. Apple’s strength is making the interaction delightful. Nest products so far are meant to be non-interactive or only implicitly interactive. They are ambient technologies.

Now the counter argument to the above is: maybe Nest’s current products aren’t a fit for Apple now, but wouldn’t it give them a beach head into the Smart Home and Internet of Things? Isn’t there a longer game to be played? Maybe smoke alarms aren’t very cool, but surely there are opportunities for making cooler home products that do fit with Apple’s brand?

We see Google’s vision coming together — to be the OS for the world, to mediate all interaction with an increasingly automated, connected and intelligent world. (Thus enabling an ever more pervasive and efficient market for consumer attention.) In this vision, Nest makes perfect sense for Google as an avenue for getting their OS into the home.

But what is Apple’s vision?

I don’t know, but I’m willing to take their brand marketing at face value. As Tim Cook just tweeted, referencing their new iPad commercial, “What’s your verse?”

They want to help empower the world to fulfill its creative ambition and to create meaning through human expression.

Perhaps I’m being charitable, perhaps I’m just a sucker for their slick marketing, but I want to live in a world where one of the largest companies has that pursuit and so I’ll grant them it.

In that vision, home automation may or may not play a role, and Apple may well find a way to create value in that space consistent with their brand identity. But if so, I think they will do it on their own terms as a natural extension of their product line at the time.

My best wild guess is that rather than build specific gadgets like thermostats and smoke alarms, they will create little connectors / sensors that act as satellites for your iOS devices with an API for apps to interact with them (temperature, camera, motion, presence, etc). See e.g. SmartThings. Apple can treat the sensor units as a hobby like AppleTV. And play up the ways in which giving your iPhone remote sensing capabilities enhances your ability to fulfill your creative ambitions. These things don’t necessarily need to be thought of as house-bound. Think more GoPro than Nest. iBeacon is is not quite this, but it points in a direction.

Following up on the screen shot of my home screen, some notes (again for posterity)…

To make the cut, the app has to be used almost daily if not several times a day.

In a couple cases, this is just aspirational. I want to use FaceTime more, but rarely do. I want to use Instagram more but rarely do.

As much as I try to avoid using Google products, Apple Maps just aren’t as good. So Google gets the nod.

And as much as I’ve tried using fancy cloud note taking apps like Evernote, I still find myself using the standard Notes app for most personal note taking and list making. In part because it’s faster to start a new note and just… simpler.

Among the set of social apps, my go-to order is currently Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn/Facebook, FourSquare. I can’t stand LinkedIn, especially because the main feed is not chronological, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low, and half of their trending news stories are about themselves, but I want to keep up with the occasional interesting job change by someone I know.

Skype I have mainly for my current job - text chat, not video.

I don’t use folders very much, but wanted to contain the games, most of which are for occasional use by the kids. Only game I play regularly is Words.

Reeder - my RSS feeds. I don’t read many, but I love them. Subject of another post. Most frequently opened (after Safari) along with Twitter.

Podcasts - another frequently used one, in the car and on the bike.

Rdio - my main music app, possibly my favorite internet service.

On the trending list: Trello, for task management. We’ll see if that kicks out someone for a home screen spot sometime soon.

I just now, in a semi-dream state, experienced getting older in a way I haven’t before. It happened in a flash, but it felt like this: that instead of me getting older and advancing on my own in age, I was rather getting pushed along by the explosion of younger people. But the anxiety was in the sense that this is taking place in a finite world, that we are not forever at the center of our own world but are getting forced out to the edges by each new generation of youth and getting smothered by the crowd.

In this flash, I felt the cliche that the youth are getting younger manifest as claustrophobia. There is a conveyor belt carrying us all from birth to death. Pop culture’s gaze holds steady in one spot where the twenty-somethings roll by. We get our turn for a minute to be parents, to hold power. But we roll on, with less space ahead of us as a never-ending stream of youngsters gets extruded out, ready for their turn. And we start piling up against the edge of irrelevance.

Music (most released before 2013):

1. Social Studies - Developer (2012). Out of San Francisco, gives Metric a run for its money.
2. Shout Out Louds - Optica (2013). Swedish indiepop splendor.
3. Matthew E. White - Big Inner (2012). Pop gospel with groove.
4. Hosannas - Together (2010). Haunting and driving.
5. of Montreal - Paralytic Stalks (2012). “We Will Commit Wolf Murder”. Enough said.
6. STRFKR - Miracle Mile (2013). Perfectly of its time.
7. Owen Pallett - Heartland (2010). I think he invented some new notes.
8. iamamiwhoami - Kin (2012). Mesmerizing.
9. mewithoutYou - Ten Stories (2012). Rock stories. Love it, feels like something I would have loved when I was 19 as well.
10. The Strokes - Comedown Machine (2013). Just rocks.
11. Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo (2010). Sweet little lo-fi pop songs.
12. Deerhunter - Monomania (2013).
13. Wye Oak - Civilian (2011). 
14. Mac Demarco - 2 (2012). Ear worms.

Movies:

1. Gravity (2013).
2. Upstream Color (2013).
3. In a World (2013).

TV:

1. Orange is the New Black (2013).

Exhibitions:

1. Garry Winogrand - SF MoMA.
2. David Hockney - A Bigger Exhibition - de Young.

Books:

1. Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000).

The recent passing of Colin Wilson, an author who I’ve never read and know nothing about, nonetheless caught my eye because of his adjacency by name to Robert Anton Wilson, an author I was into for a while in the early ’90s. Name adjacency may not matter so much in the Internet age, but in the days of scanning bookshelves and record bins, there would be those artists you would keep running across on the way to your favorite destinations.

At a minimum, you would develop name recognition for these strangers, even a false sense of familiarity based on undoubtedly mistaken inference from the titles or book covers. But worse, you’d grow to resent in some fashion the strangers adjacent to your absolute favorites, simply for being in the way, or for faking you out time and again. “Hey, there’s a new Alan Parsons record! Oh wait, no, that’s just a Graham Parker record.” (Saying that, I realize the Alan Parsons Project may have been filed under “A”, but for some reason I have a memory of a particularly reviled stranger in the “P” section.)

I guess if this name adjacency applies on the Internet, it might be in the form of the auto-complete suggestion that comes up before the name you’re really looking for. Not sure if that has the same potency as the adjacency of old. Doubt it. But there must be other forms of adjacency that now do have the same effect. What are they? 

I get anxious when I see a jumble of cables and wires in my house, especially if they’re all plugged in doing what they’re supposed to be doing, like connecting the AV equipment. Something about the disorganization and opaqueness of it.

I feel better when I understand what each cable is doing, at a minimum, and better yet when they’re all nicely organized with no extraneous cords.

It struck me today, though, after managing to subdue my anxiety over a particularly dense thicket of cables, that it’s a good thing wireless networks are invisible. Briefly, I pictured the unfathomable mesh of signals all around me, then shook my head, took a deep breath and sighed with relief that they’re out of sight and safely out of mind.