tobedetermined!

Another Beautiful Day in SF (today's pitstop #8)

Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008

Click image to enlarge ::: location on Google maps

Autumn in the Valley (today's pitstop #7)

Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008

How big a change from autumn in Amsterdam, where its probably raining cats and dogs right now. Weather here in the Valley has been perfect today, feels like summer with beautiful trees. Below are a few snapshots I took from the Hoover Tower on Stanford campus yesterday while attending the Open Source unconference, co-organised by a former NASA Ames collegue. The view is towards Southbay, with Palo Alto on the left of the image, and NASA Ames in the middle, noticable by the big hangers (click panorama image to enlarge). More images here. Google map with locations of all pitstop posts embedded below.






View Larger Map

Elections Through Gamers' Eyes

Posted on Saturday, November 15, 2008

(via)

President Obama's Acceptance Speech from a San Francisco Bar

Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008

History by Magazine Covers

Posted on Thursday, October 23, 2008

From this presentation of The Economist Magazine covers ;-) (embedded below).

10 Bucks Well Spend

Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Following on from yesterday's syndication of Tim O'Reilly's keynote at the NY Web2.0, I just finished watching the documentary he has been pointing out on several of his keynotes: A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. Buy it on itunes from their website and have a peak into the future of post cheap oil society. Quite informative...

Tim O'Reilly's Call to Action

Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008

And it ain't throwing sheeps. From last week's Web 2.0 Expo in New York entitled "Web Meets World".

(via)

tobedetermined.org Extended Credo

Posted on Monday, September 1, 2008

Update: A post over at O'Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminds me of another quote I've used in the earlier days of this blog. It's a (famous) quote from William Gibson: The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet. In his post, Nat refers to another quote from Gibson that brings the overarching point home:

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

Having a 3-day weekend does have its benefits (like in: having an extra evening behind your computer?). Think I just stumbled upon something like an extended credo for this blog (beyond tobedetermined.org: A blog about outer space, cyberspace, their common future and all that is leading up to it... ). I started gathering some quotes that resonated with me over the years and ended up with this list (read from top to bottom, in that order):




I am sure there are more out there that would fit this list, so if you have any suggestions pls let me know.

Above the photocopier

Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008

Its the Valley alright

Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008

Notice the little feet ;-). On the 101 on my way to work today.

Still tweaking with the layout (today's pitstop #2)

Posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008

War on Terror The Sequel

Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008

My brother works in the advertisement business back in Amsterdam. Yesterday he send me below "movie trailer" he recently made for the H20 film festival. Lip sync isn't brilliant, but the storyline soon takes over. Which reminds me that I've been watching a lot of 'Der Untergang' spoofs lately, like this TechCrunch one. As an aside, yesterday I saw this 'hot-of-the-Siggraph-press' video of Microsoft Research into new video editing techniques.

FriendFeed: the Network of Social Networks

Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008

I am late to the game, but having signed up just 5 minutes ago, I already like FriendFeed a lot. My feed brings together this blog, my delicious tags, my twitters, my facebook account, (not my Hyves account...ah, who cares about Hyves), my Flickr account, my Linkedin account and my Youtube account. See below for an interview with co-founder Bret Taylor.

Still tweaking with the layout (today's pitstop)

Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Summer 2008

Posted on Friday, August 1, 2008

Back from a week of Internetless holiday on the island of Korcula (above photo was at Koln airport just before we were told we could board the plane ;-). Catching up here are a few relevant tidbits:

• The Economist's commentary on NASA's 50th anniversary provides a sharp dissection of NASA's past, present and future. Its the most sensible story on space and NASA I've read in a long while. As always, the comments are worth reading too, if only to see how space proponents bring their arguments into gear to downplay the article's 'hammer on the nail' analysis
• Sanfran article of the week about twitter, relationships, and the bay area working spirit
• Missed OSCON, but here's a 37min intro and Tim Oreilly's comments
• A great discovery: this TED video by kevin kelly. I especially like his McLuhan Reversal analogy. Have to watch it again.

The Stone Age Didn't End Because of a Shortage of Stones

Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008

Bruce Sterling comments inline on this passionate call by Al Gore for the US to become carbon fuel independent in 10 years.

Time to put some solar panels on my roof here in Palo Alto. Or wait, wasn't I first gonna spend 2 weeks flying around Europe for my holiday, buy the iPhone and upgrade my car (from what I hear SUV's come cheap these days).

Could this be the "Moonrace" of the 21st century?

We need you. And we need you now. We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership. On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

Too Funny

Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008

God, did I miss Jon Stewart when he was on holiday. Watch this from the beginning and be ready for an apotheosis starting 07:20 (btw, I believe Hulu is only available for American viewers).

Yup

Posted on Thursday, July 17, 2008

Wading through +2k unread posts in my list of RSS feeds (Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond).

Its You They're After

Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008

The best analysis on Google's Lively I've read sofar comes from RealityPrime: Its not so much about giving people a nice virtual world to play with, its providing a new interface to harvest new and previously untapped user behaviour. Which reminds me of an excellent article I was send the other day on the near future of advertising, a must-read.

Its iPhone Time in Palo Alto

Posted on Friday, July 11, 2008

Just around the corner from where I live there is the Apple store on University Avenue. Not too big a crowd, mostly Stanford students playing guitar hero while the press anxiously awaits whats to come. I decided to opt for a roundtrip to Amsterdam instead, an alternative which also doesn't come cheap these days. But first its Mechanicrawl this saturday up in the City.

Windy Hill Overlooking the Bay Area

Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008

Click to Enlarge

Last weekend I finally found what I was looking for the first few weeks I arrived here: on top of a hill, a place to at the same time overlook the Pacific on one side and the Bay Area on the other (Thanks Deborah!). If you look closely, you can see the City (SF) in the far end of the Peninsula (follow the Bay to the left, the City is just visible before the hills start) and Stanford in front (the tower). At the end of the Bay (to the right), you can see the large windtunnels of NASA Ames. Further to the right is San Jose.

To make things easier, see below for the exact location on Google Maps from where I made the panorama.

And the folks in the image....uhm...they happened to be there as well ;-)


View Larger Map

Steve Jobs Down the Road From Here Back In 2005

Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Friday Afternoon Yawns

Posted on Saturday, June 7, 2008

OgleEarth is on the ball with his critique on Walt Disney Park's layer in Google Earth being 'the next best thing to being there'. Reading it, I recognise I am reading my own unexpressed yawn about it (without having had a look at it myself I do admit, but that tells it all I guess). A virtual Disneyland devoid of people, and no possibility to take a ride, WoW!? If only I had some time to go back to the enthusiasm while working on UGO, but for some reason, its not that attractive at the moment. Even with the ability to bring it into the browser, which is pretty cool yes, apart from the techno fetish, there's at the moment not much occasional inspiration to throw time at Google Earth (apart from learning the javascript GE API implementation perhaps). Has anybody heard anything about Second Life lately btw?

On a more enthusiastic note, I attended the Google I/O conference 2 weeks ago here at Moscone West. Now that was exiting! Not so much from a Google Tech or developers point of view (albeit that was pretty inspiring too, mostly diving into the Google App Engine, on which I had my first encounter with the GE browser plugin), but more from a cultural real people point of view. Apparently they brought Google culture over from the Googleplex to the conference center. I lost my camera in the meantime so can't show you my pictures of all the beanbags, free food, and other goodies, but man, that's a sweet company culture (and flickr tags are there to prove it). And a young crowd too.

I recognised the same kind of culture here at Yahoo HQ earlier this week where we were sitting in on a meeting on the upcoming Yahoo Hackday. Working at a place where the coffee corner closes 30 minutes after lunch has been served (that's around 2:00pm folks), and where the cappucino comes out of a prefab instant-make coffee-crap-machine, I am all for Google joining the ranks here on the NASA Ames premises. And I certainly hope some of their culture bleeds over the fence into Ames, which I'm sure it will (not sure if i'll be around to witness it though as they only start building in 2013).

As usual, these high profile Google announcements draw quite a bit of cynical critisism from the likes of Bull's rambles, Valleywag and ZDNet but that's as yawn inspiring as the Disney layer in Google Earth.

My two cents for the weekend: Ask not what Google or Yahoo! can do for you, but what Google/Yahoo! culture can do to your space program.


(see it in google maps, or, if you really really want to, in Google Earth)


View Larger Map

Intergalactic TV

Posted on Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Doing some research on NASATV (wikipedia) I come across a couple of other space agency TV stations, like ESA's (boring not much happening there) and this one from the Russian Space Agency. On the latter, I am welcomed by Mr Ostrovsky, Head of Roscosmos-TV (below). Reminds me of a Dutch show. Too bad they don't have regular TV webstreams ;-).

US culture in the US

Posted on Saturday, May 24, 2008

Haven't had a chance to watch movies since I moved to the US, let alone good movies, like these, or this one, and this one. That changed 5 minutes ago when I finished watching The assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Wow, what a great film! And what a great pleasure watching it. Damn, I love good cinema!

Some views to enjoy (until I get back to posting regularly)

Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Its busy times here at Ames...

web2.0 Expo day 2

Posted on Thursday, April 24, 2008

Today is the second day of the Web2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. It keeps getting better. And busier. Below is a (very) brief impression: morning sessions (including this one on Yahoo answers and their open source platform), the Expo Hall (times 4), and a demonstration marketing for a new mindmapping2.0 tool. The afternoon keynotes are coming in a separate post.

A.C. Clarke died today

Posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008

...(bbc news)

update: Google's Chief Evangelist Vint Cerf also says goodbye to Clarke in this post. It includes a nice video of Clarke recorded end of last year.

Craig Venter @ The Long Now

Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008

After watching online seminars for over a year now, yesterday I finally got a chance to visit a Long Now seminar in person down in San Francisco. And guess what..!? I was on their guest list ;-) Ever since I learned about The Long Now Foundation over a year ago, I've been a fan. So when I was offered a chance to become a charter member last year, I didn't hesitate. Even got me one of those metal plates the size of a credit card. Plus my name on their guestlist. #518 I am.

So here I was, first choice in seating, amongst all those people I've been learning about by reading a wide variety of blogs over the years: Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, John Brockman, Stewart Brand, Chris Anderson etc. Having arrived in the US only a few days ago, I was clever enough to take my camera battery charger with me while jumping in my car here in Mountain View to head over to SF, only forgetting to realise it only has a European plug. With the battery depleted before arrival in San Francisco (driving the 101 makes for perfect filming scenery ;-), I was left with only my Sony Ericsson P990i phone camera to make some snapshots of the lecture and the audience. Overall, Craig Venter was pretty straightforward in his view on the coming age of biotech. Or, as Stewart Brand put it in his short summary emailed around after the event:

To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it live, Venter explained.

His sequencing the first diploid human genome (with the genes from both parents) last year showed there is much more genetic variation between humans than first thought. His current goal is to fully sequence 10,000 humans and bring the price for each sequence down to $1,000. With that data, his says, "We'll begin to really learn what's nature and what's nurture."

"Microbes make up one half of the Earth's biomass." Venter's shotgun sequencing of open-ocean microbial samples revealed that every milliliter of ocean has one million bacteria and archaea and ten million viruses even in supposedly barren waters. Taking samples on a round-the-world sailing trip showed that every 200 miles the genes in the microbes are 85% different.

"Microbes dominate evolutionary diversity," Venter said. Some 50,000 major gene familes have been discovered. Humans and other complex animals have a small fraction of that in our own genes, but the "microbiome" of our onboard microbes carry the full richness. Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species.

Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. "We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us."

In an effort to determine what is the minimum gene set for life, Venter's team took a 500-gene bacteria and began knocking out genes. They got the viable set down to 400 and realized that the only way they are going to understand the complexity is by mimicking it. They would need to synthesize a working genome artificially, first on a computer and then with assembled base pairs and "boot it up" in a living cell, making a new, unique species. They devised techniques that repaired errors during synthesis, and they demonstrated that a genome from one kind of bacteria could be implanted in another and come to life there, changing one species into another. "It was true identity theft."

"This software builds its own hardware," Venter marveled.

He emphasized that synthetic biology does not re-do Genesis, but it does offer a kind of Cambrian explosion, building on 3.5 billion years of evolution to go in an infinity of possible directions. The range of possibilities is indicated by an existing organism that can take 1.75 million rads of radioactivity in 24 hours, which explodes its genome. It can reassemble the shattered genome and live on. It can go dormant for millions of years, and live on. That means life may already have migrated between planets.

Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he's working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a "4th generation biofuel," where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors.

"Ten million genes are the design