People ask me regularly if I have books available on the Kindle.  It’s possible that happens more to me than to other authors, since I live and work in Amazon’s home town and my friends are tech geeks.   I’m pretty sure that my novels will find their way there eventually through my publisher, Tor Books, but I decided to put a few short stories on the Kindle myself after hearing that other writer’s are having success.

So I enlisted my trusty and helpful web expert, Jeremy Tolbert, in the project, and within a week or so there were three stories up there.  Here’s what I chose:

“Savant Songs” which is about a brilliant autistic scientist and is my most commercially successful short story (It came out in Analog and in Year’s Best SF10)

“A Lingering Scent of Bacon,” which got me my best-ever acceptance letter fron editor Kerrie Hughes, and which came out in the anthology “Maiden, Matron, Crone.”

“The Licit Zone,”  which is a “Kindle Original.”

This is completely an experiment.  I don’t expect to get rich from it.  But I like the idea that it keep the first two stories available since they are otherwise pretty hard to find right now, and I like them both.   Maybe releasing one only on the Kindle will have interesting side-effects.  Who knows.

Each story is a $1.99.  From your Kindle, you can find them by searching for my name in the Kindle Store.  Just for fun, I want to encourage you to buy one of the stories, read it, and comment back here (good, bad, neutral…I’m open).  I’ll draw one to three names (depending on how many people try a story) and send each of you a free copy of “The Silver Ship and the Sea,” which is the beginning of my current series of books.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

At this stage of my writing career, I’ve gone through a number of the fabulous firsts.  I’ve sold my first story, and my first novel, had my first awful review and my first stellar one.  I’ve won my first award, and I’ve taught writing for the first time.  These are things I’ll remember.  Well, today was another first - hearing a piece of my fiction professionally podcast at starship sofa.  It was quiet lovely to listen to my words being read out loud to me from my ipod.  Thanks to Tony and Grant at the Starship Sofa for producing this.  This is a piece of flash fiction called “A Hand and Honor” that first appeared in Nature Magazine.

I am also going to have a podcast come out at Escape Pod soon.  Both markets I didn’t even know about a few years ago and didn’t contemplate the technology for a decade ago.  Isn’t this a lovely time to be a writer?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Kyle Cassidy started it.  Actually, for me, the trail started with a picture of Neil Gaiman’s dog.  I can’t actually find the post that started it all, but it’s probably back there in the history on Neil’s blog.  He has a very pretty dog.  Anyway, the picture of Neil (also pretty) with the pretty dog sent me to the photographer, Kyle Cassidy.  Kyle started 2Xcreative - a pairing of creative people who had never met before from all over the world to commit joint creation.  He gave us all a month.

I got paired with photographer Clint Weathers who does some very cool stuff.   He is the only person I know with a daily phlogiston. Really.  Anyway - check out his site.   And even better, check out what we did together - a marriage of picture, poem and prose.  Look at the picture first, and then think about what it brings up — it’s a lovely shot that gave me about fifty ideas.

Please free to comment on my website or on Clint’s lj (since for some reason my wordpress to lj posts seem to show up uncomentable).  And if you have access to lj (livejournal), the whole 2Xcreative project si worth looking at.  I suspect a google or bing search will turn up a lot of it.

And I was at the Locus Awards where Neil got his award for the Graveyard Book (best YA book), and he wasn’t. That’s the sort of circular thing that happens to writers in the small sf and f community.

So thanks to Kyle, Neil, and Clint.  And no, I’ve never expressly met any of them, except Neil in a crowd once at a con.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Kudos to the Locus team for organizing an excellent event.  I had a great time, and enjoyed this year’s awards even more than last year’s.  A couple of highlights:

• Most of the winners were there.  So were a lot of the nominees.  That was very nice.  It’s a lot more fun to see someone win an award than to see an award accepted bysomeone else…it just is.  The emotional content is just a better quality.
• The University Bookstore and Locus did a nice job of supporting the signing - many books appeared. I, of course, bought too many.  Sigh.
• Connie Willis did a nice job as the emcee. 
• We have a huge science fiction community in Seattle, and a lot of them showed up.
• Watching Connie get her award was really touching.  She gives good speech, and by the end a few of us were crying.  All of the Hall of Fame ceremony was nice, of course. 
• I had a fun conversation with Frank R. Paul’s grandson, who accepted his award for him (but since Frank R. Paul is dead, he can be easily forgiven for missing the induction).  But we talked about the need for positive science fiction and the power of spiritual science fiction and the magic that certain places seem to have.  He is from Taos, which is on my list of magical places.

The honorees have always been talked up and shown off in the Sky Church at the SFM, and this year we ended up in the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel (a fine hotel, but NOT the Sky Church).  I do hope it moves back to the dressy SFM event next year - this felt kind of disrespectful to people like Connie and Michael who have given us all so much.  All we could give them back was a hotel meeting room?  Perhaps next year….

Most of my pictures came out marginal, but I posted some of the better shots.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I will be at the autographing, and probably staying through the induction of the honorees into the SF Hall of Fame.  There will be a lot of us there - I count at least 16 writers!

See you at the Lake Union Courtyard Marriott.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I bought green shirts and I am wearing them.  I have turned my twitter icon temporarily green.  I keep getting up from the middle of other tasks and checking on events in Iran, even though I am usually far more disciplined.  But I thought I should write down some reasons since my family asked, and since it’s useful rumination.

1. The futurist in me is totally fascinated by the role social media and worldwide transparency are playing.
2. The writer is fascinated by the stories and raw emotion.  Everyone is emotional.  I cried when I saw Neda’s death. How pointless.
3. The American in me does not believe religion and government should be all mixed up together.  Both are better and stronger if separated.
4. Watching the unrest in Iran is being part of something, perhaps something big, that is happening in the world.
5. There is a bit of adrenaline in this.  Just being honest.
6. I am hopeful for positive change.  Ahmadinejad with nukes is scary.  I would like Iran to be a country I am not afraid of.
7. (And I think this is the biggest one for most Americans) - I believe in freedom, and I believe that freedom needs honest elections.  If - at the core - that is what the Iranians are fighting for, it is worth it to me.
8. I have found Iran interesting since I read two books.  One was “Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi” and the other was “The Ends of the Earth:  From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan“

Some things I am not “For”

1. Formal government action by the US.  This is not ours to solve.  It would probably backfire.  Read some of the posts at the Tehran Bureau if you don’t agree - they are in first person and more eloquent than I could be on this subject.  We can help and we can cheer, we can retweet and write, but there is no other useful role for us.
2. I am not particularly “for” Mousavi.  Nor against him.  My vote is irrelevant on this issue, as it should be.

I hope my support is useful to even a few Iranians, or that it helps keep the attention here on the events there.  This is worth watching and helping where we can, as individuals.

What do you think?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I have been thinking about transparency, social media, and government accountability for a while.  At the FiRe conference in San Diego, I ran into fellow sf writer and contrarian, David Brin, who authored  the non-fiction book, The Transparent Society.  This book made a difference in the way I think about government and life, and has made me a firm believer in the idea that transparency begets accountability. 

As a futurist, I knew a long time ago that the Internet would be the doorway to the future.  I just didn’t know how that doorway would open.  Ten years ago I felt the insemination of Twitter and YouTube and FaceBook, but I could not have told you what they’d look like.  I might have guessed a few of the features of FaceBook, but Twitter has been a true wildcard.  Instead of simply providing hyperlinks between the static bits of information, the overlapping concentric circles of followers that tweet and re-tweet are linking human hearts and minds across the globe.  

That’s a powerful thing.

The current obvious example is the unrest in Iran.   Anyone in the world with an interest has been able to easily discover events that would have been fairly easily kept far more secret ten or twenty years ago, and in realtime.   Video is linked to as soon as it is posted, and retweets its way around the globe in what looks like minutes.  The tweets coming from and about Iran (primarily #iranelection, but many more) are helping to force accountability on the regime in Iran.  It’s too early to tell how this story will play out, but it is clear that social media has been a player.

Before we leave the subject of Iran, right after the protests started in Iran, many twitterers put pressure on CNN to provide coverage (see #CNNfail).  That’s the pressure of the popular stream on a third estate company. 

Some of our largest retailers have had the transparent breadcrumbs of Twitter work against them as well.    Or Take the #amazonfail slapping-about that happened within hours of people discovering that sales rankings on GLBT books were being dropped.  Amazon is being fussed at on social media networks as I write this because it appears that  a book from Amazon can only be re-downloaded a set (and smallish) number of times.  But we have to re-download every time we see it on a different device or even update our kindle technology.  My guess?  That will change.  Amazon will have to answer for the consequences whether intended or not, and it will choose a more consumer-friendly business practice.

I just gave a talk in Memphis Tenessee.  The topic got away from me a little - shifting from the future to social networking.  Everyone (me included) appears to be fascinated by that topic.  After the talk, a photographer came up to me and said that social networks have built his business, and that he hoped the people would take what I had said to heart.   I have sold stories on Twitter, to be distributed by Twitter, and even for print magazines because I was toe–deep in the stream of Twitter at the right moment. 

I’ve been trying to figure out a better government model for our times (I’m an sf writer - my mind does weird things).  I think giving all of the people a way to talk immediately to anyone else who wants to listen may be a lynchpin setting tool for stories as I work this out in my head.

Twitter does not appear to have a traditional business model.  But maybe a primary value of social networks is in the peace, properity, and accountability they bring to the world.  Maybe its in the trail of transparent breadcrumbs we drop for each other across cyberspace in 140 character bursts.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

This is the bobcat my mom spotted yesterday.  It was lying in a little safe spot in the ravine right next to my parent’s house, and graciously allowed us to watch it and photograph it from the upper deck for about twenty minutes before it wandered off.  Photo credit to my dad, who had his camera ready.

It saw us; from time to time it looked up and kind of nodded and twitched its short tail.  We apparently did not present a threat.  Smart cat.

The neighborhood birds saw it and screeched at it from a safe distance.  They were very funny.  The rabbits generally remained in hiding although one little guy got pretty close and then froze dead still.  Eventually a bird distracted the cat and the bunny moved, and then the cat moved.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

This is the second in Tamora Pierce’s excellent YA series about a fantastical keeper of the peace in the realm of Tortall.  You’ll have to venture into the YA shelves to find it.  Frankly, some of the best sf and fantasy adventure is there these days, by the way. 

This book is told through the journal entries of young, precocious Cooper, who has just earned her stripes to be a real dog (translate here as cop).   The language and world-building are lovely, the characters people you’d like to know, and the interrelationships between them perfectly complex.  Not to mention the series is darned entertaining.  Start with the first one, though.  Highly recommended

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I talked to the good folks at the National Association of Consumer Shows this morning in Memphis Tennessee.  I walked away feeling as if I did a good job but not a great job.  I did talk to quite a few of them individually and I enjoyed a nice barbecue lunch with a convention goer, and they were easy to talk with in that context.  But as a room full of people, it felt tough.  In trying to figure that out I came up with two theories — one is undoubtedly true:  I could be more polished as a speaker.  But hey that’s practice, and the talk today was more practice.  So I get to own a piece of it for sure.  I think the other bit is that these are people who have been bit hard by the recession.  That came through in almost every individual conversation I had.  Their business is selling to consumers, and attending an auto show or a home show or a flower show or a car show are all optional.  Their success is closely tied to consumer confidence.  That’s returning.  But it’s returning slowly.  And frankly, it’s still bad.  I think it’s really, really tough to look forward when your business is tied to something that’s just not that healthy for the moment.  Oh, we’ll pull out, and so will they.  These are creative, smart people.  But it was a good reminder for me that there is still a long pull up to economic excitement.

Some people came up afterwards to tell me they appreciated my optimism, so the core message was there.  We do all have to change this together.

Two other observations:

• The most animated part of the the discussion was about social networking.  Of course, that’s what everyone is talking about.
• Memphis is the deep south.  I hadn’t really realized it until I got there.  Southern hospitality runs deep, and it seemed like everywhere I went in the hotel (the downtown Marriott), staff were bending over backwards to help.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

If you’re not on twitter watching the #iranelection or just searching for “iran” which will catch it all, you’ve missed a worldwide conversation.  A worldwide emotional reaction.   This morning, I feel connected to the people in Iran.  I’m glad they have this tool, which was missing from Tiananmen square.  It may or may not be enough, but it has changed the game.  And I feel like I’ve been part of it.

• I have engaged a tiny bit in moving it along (by passing along information)
• I’ve got a green face on twitter now
• I’m wearing green

This isn’t all about me.  It’s about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people watching and listening and sending on information.  It’s about enough pressure on Twitter to postpone maintenance because it is the most effective tool in the hands of Iranian protesters. It’s about people using green icons on twitter to show support.  And that the people who aren’t interested, are talking about other things that are important.  Some of us are talking about multiple topics.  It’s an active multi-threaded critical conversation that just might change the world.

Reading about the protests on Iran as they occur (and watching almost real-time video on YouTube) on the streaming web, I’m fascinated and connected and curious.  I hear and see anger and support, love and fear, hatred and hope.  Mostly in 140 character bursts.  Who woulda thought?

Yes, there is undoubtedly information and mis-information, chaos, and even danger in this conversation.  There is disagreement.

But that’s what it is to be human.  A few years ago, I read David Brin’s nonfiction book “The Transparent Society.”  It changed how I look at a lot of things.   Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to actually get to know David.  He’s irascible and brilliant and often right.  He characterizes us (humans) as brilliant, optimistic, capable, and brave.   The last few days show that. They also show a central theme of Brin’s book, which is that transparency and a lack of privacy, while scary to many of us, create freedom and accountability.  The more we know about others, the more we know they are us.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

From time to time, people ask me what it takes to be a futurist.  Really, it’s an interest in thinking about the future and a habit of keeping my eye’s open.  I think there is one other bit:  the desire to make the world a better place in the future.

I stay aware of what’s happening in the world, paying special attention to politics, culture, economics, and science.

I read the daily newspaper.  In paper.  I almost canceled it Saturday when they called to get a fresh and unexpired credit card number from me, but I couldn’t do it.  And then the paper today was full of good stuff.

The main story on page 1 is by a Seattle Times Environment reporter (so I might not get it by reading just AP).  The headline reads “Is the Pacific Ocean’s Chemistry killing sea life?” and there is a compelling quote “…shifts in ocean chemistry associated with carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may be impairing sea life faster and more dramatically than expected.”    If I put this together with other things I’ve read - like sea ice melting faster than expected and even Antarctica melting faster than expected — then it’s really scary.

The other two scary parts are on page A14 and A15 - articles about North Korea wanting nuclear weapons and about the unrest in Iran (and to give the Seattle Time more credit than CNN - it did start on page 1).   North Korea worried me more in the long run than the short run, but the general idea that we haven’t really gotten nuclear non-proliferation right yet is a concern we seem to have mostly forgotten about.  We’re paying it so little attention that I won’t be surprised if we get terrorists with access soon.  Can you say Pakistan?  And the Iranian election is tough because this is the guy who doesn’t believe in history, and for whom the the holocaust never happened.  We need leaders who lead based on science.  Faith is fine, but not faith that science is wrong, since I just don’t believe it is.  Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes its good, but it’s a good way to be thinking.

Still in section 1, a good idea.  Paint our roofs white.  Reflect that sunlight instead of absorbing it.  Mind you, we just bought a new roof, and I don’t know how well white paint would sit on our composite roof.  I would have bought a light one, at least, if the thought had occurred to me three years ago.  The idea is sound, and I’ve been hearing about it for a while from the environmental folks at CH2MHILL.

On the “probably good” side of the news, the UN is after us to review US raids.   Do we want this particular review?  Not likely, nor are we likely to be subject to it.  But the more light shines on all governments the more accountable we are, and the better the world will be.  I know that sounds simplistic, but power bears watching.

Later on, there is much good news and hope about graduations.  We have a crop of graduates out here (and everywhere, I’m sure) from all levels of school.  The paper is full of hope and well wishes for them. In general, the new graduates are lauded as caring about the world.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I read this for a book group - I would never have picked it up on my own.  I do like crime/detective novels, but I don’t read them much since I like some other genres more.  I was really glad to have read this one.  Mr. Connelly is a very polished writer, and he did a nice job getting me to keep turning pages.  I often find this genre to be pretty cerebral, and pretty easy to put down when you’re tired or swamped with workish stuff and non-fiction, like I often get.  While solidly in the genre, I found Lost Light to be touching and entertaining.  It’s an older book that came out in 2004, but it’s still in print and easy to find on store shelves.  I feel like I found a new, excellent writer.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I’m really pleased to announce the very first edition of my new column at Futurismic is posted now.   Today’s Tomorrows takes a single topic and looks at through a science and a science fictional lens.

This time, I took on a favorite sfnal trope of mine:  Artificial Intelligence.  As usual, the universe gave me a little daily news to report on the topic — in the column, I talk about Robert Sawyer’s device for waking the Internet up:  a firewall over China.  Today, in the news, there are articles about a firewall over Tienanmen square (on a  side note, it was apparently not very effective - merely annoying).  So maybe the Internet got a soul today, who knows?  I’ve still seen spam today, so I’m doubtful.

But I’d love to have people skim the article and let me know what they think, or leave a comment about their favorite story or book that deals with A.I. (fiction or non-fiction).

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

We live in an attention economy.  Which really means our attention has scattered.  There is danger here.

Advertisers and news sources spend enormous resources to get our attention.  They’re getting better at it, too.  A lot of the ads I see these days are actually things I’m interested in.  Further, constant connection splits our attention.  I’ve typically got Twitter, four or five web pages, a word document, and two email accounts open.  I’m tracking a wide range of topics I’m interested in:   global economics and politics, writing, technology, speculation about the future, family members, and friends all at once.  I’m sifting the info sphere for information related to my work (technology for a local city), my current fiction story or novel, and my next column or blog.   Good, right?  In some ways. 

I worry that this keeps my attention off the right topics.  As a futurist and a bit of a historian, I feel pretty confident in saying that we are at a crossroads.  The weight of population, waste, and greed has placed us in danger, and yet we also have better tools for talking about solutions and better solutions than ever before.  There are more bright spots than dark ones.  But we need to pay attention.  There are precipices around us, and the quick slide from prosperity to peril that happened in world economics late last year should remain a wake-up call, a reminder of how fast things can change.  So should 9-11.    But it’s so easy to spend time on the latest sale at Nordstrom’s or the latest singing idol. There is no one I know of making short-term money from drawing our attention to world solutions. 

A goal for the rest of this year is pay more attention to where my attention goes, and to spend more time thinking (undistracted) about what how to get more of the people in the world paying attention to the topics we can’t afford to miss.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I was helping a friend out with some Twitter questions via email and thought my response to her might actually be useful to others.  So here it is:

First, for 140 characters a shot, Twitter is a big topic.  So I’ll stick to the basics: followers, following, dangers, protocol, and a tool.  

Followers:

You will accrue followers.  The more you use twitter, the more you will accrue.  Twitter is very searchable, and so people may be searching for a word like “acquisition.”  If you tweet about acquisition, and someone is searching in that term, they may choose to follow you.  That’s the primary way I know of that strangers find you, but there are third party programs that will recommend matches for people I think.  I don’t use them.  But there are now hundreds of twitter applications.

Friends, business acquaintances, and neighbors will find you.  It really doesn’t matter.  You will have a little more “cred” on Twitter if you have a decent number of followers.  You don’t need thousands – but a few hundred is a good thing. Generally, more followers doesn’t hurt you, and who follows you doesn’t matter – that is, you want certain followers, but if you get extras, that’s probably fine.  If you get ones you don’t trust or like (say someone starts to @reply you with offers to sell you Viagra or someone you think of as not quite a friend follows you) then you can block them.  Every once in a while I’ll go browse some of the followers I don’t know, and I’ve been pleased and surprised at the people who chose to follow me.

There are people who seem to want to have thousands of followers and follow thousands.  I personally think that diminishes the Twitter’s usefulness, but it seems to be an important meme out there right now.

Following:

Often people will give you their twitter user names on business cards and the like now.  You can also search twitter by term and follow people you are interested in.  At this point, at least half of the known universe appears to be twittering. I try to only follow people whose tweets interest me or who I think may interest me – meaning if I get a bunch of tweets on topics I’m not interested in, I stop following that person.  You will be able to see the tweets of everyone you follow, and you don’t need to clutter you twitter screen with thousands of people’s tweets. 

Dangers:

Spam has hit twitter.  Often tweets are a few phrases with a shortened url.  Be careful – if you don’t know and trust the course of the tweet, I recommend not clicking on that url.  Pretend it’s like email.  There’s viruses and nastiness out there in twitterland.  If you are smart and careful they will not bother you.

Protocol:

Use twitter as a conversation tool.  Do as many @replies and direct replies as you can – I try to do two responses to every tweet I send – otherwise the app becomes a bunch of people splatting up data that no one responds to.  Don’t do very much direct marketing.  For example, I made a list of top 100 authors who twitter on mashable (which is very cool!), and partly that was because the selector culled all of the marketing-only writers.  A little is fine - everyone expects that –but be yourself and be a person.

Applications:

There are a lot of twitter applications.  My favorite is Tweetdeck.  I can have my twitter stream, my @replies, and a few searches running at once and visible.  It does have an annoying audible beep it comes with which you want to immediately turn off.  On the iphone, I like Twitterific.  But there are a lot of people who swear by a lot of applications, and so you might ask other people what they like.

Anyone else have favorite apps for favorite advice I missed the chance to pass on to my friend? 

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Join me, Robin Hobb, and Louise Marley at Park Place Books on Wednesday evening at 7:00 PM.  We’ll be discussing our books and how science fiction and fantasy can be positive images for young adults.  I hope to see some of you there.  I know it may be a sunny evening, but come on out, have sushi at Rikki Rikki or wine and a salad at Purple beforehand, wander through Peter Kirk Park, and then drop in and join us.  While you’re at it, Park Place Books has wonderful books and gifts, and as an indie who’s still running, they can surely use the support.  They’ve earned it, too.  Park Place did Kirklanders a big favor buy allowing a few functions of the Kirkland Library to operate out of their store while the library building is being updated and expanded.

For more info on my fellow writers:

Louise’s website

Robin’s website

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

The morning started with the most explicit of the conversations on philanthropy: a look at the work Pearson Learning has done in Africa, and a brief discussion of project Inkwell. The first project we saw, the Sara Communication Initiative, helps girls in Africa tell their stories, and actually brought me to tears for a moment. Project Inkwell is working to get more technology into schools. After seeing our resident household twelve-year-old who attends an essentially paperless school, I can see the value of technology-based training and the need to get it into more places around the world. In particular, the project is hooking children in the US up with children in Africa. A follow-up conversation that happened offline to the conference was the question, “Will we ever stop seeing videos of children in Africa thanking us?” and I think these projects will help make that go away.

The second presentation I want to comment on was by Roger Payne, Founder and President, Ocean Alliance, who gave a thoroughly gloomy commentary on the state of ocean wildlife. This was a sub-plot that ran throughout the conference and I found it perhaps the most worrisome discussion overall. FiRE was largely about applying technology to real problems and finding real ways to develop excellent business models in the process. But I’m not sure we know enough about the oceans to apply technology solutions to them as easily as we can address, say, world hunger. The problems and possible solutions seem to be on a bigger scale. It drove home that we have rather a lot to get done if we want to survive well into the next century.

We heard from Jay Miller, who has spent his life’s work on recording and helping to save the Lushootseed language. I was lucky enough to sit beside him on the bus returning from the Calit2 trip, and hear a number of details about the difficulty inherent in saving a language where all but two of the native speakers are dead (and now it is all but one). This seems like a small thing in context to the topics we generally discussed at the conference, but I think it was very symbolic of the history that technology and change are taking from us. As we have lost some of the native understanding and wisdom that lived in the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, we may have lost some of the wisdom we could use now as we try to save the Earth from our own excesses.

And then, just in case the hero of modern commercial rocketry and alternative energy (Elon Musk), and the CEO of HP (Mark Hurd), and the man behind Calit2 (Larry Smarr) wasn’t enough heroes, we got to hear from a man on the front line of activism, Paul Watson, President and Founder, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. With his fleet of three boats, he spends much of his time on the high seas coming between Japanese whalers and their prey. Literally. His stories made me grateful he was alive for the sake of the whales. To top it off, he has a great sense of humor and kept us in stitches.

For closing comments, FiRE was a truly phenomenal collection of thinkers across a broad spectrum. I remember when I was finishing college, the schools were just then promoting the concept of “interdisciplinary studies.” This conference, while centering squarely on technology, was the grown up version of interdisciplinary study in the real world. I was truly honored to be invited.

Surprisingly, although I am a tech professional, I found the economics and the environmental discussions the most fascinating, and have pages of notes on those while I only have sentences on most of the tech topics.  Perhaps they are not as new to me though - I’ve had high-level discussions about Cloud Computing for a year or so now.

At some point in the future I’ll imagine I’ll be able to link to some of the video taken there or to other blogs. In the meantime, I’m home after seven days of traveling, and quite happy to be in my own place surrounded by my dogs and people and books.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Wow.  I heard there are 87 speakers.  With half a day left to go, I think we are through at least 60 of them.  I couldn’t give back what they gave to me without writing for hours. So once more, here are a few highlights:

Basically, on the topic of global economics, the most time went to China.  Every speaker who addressed China directly or indirectly seemed to believe China is healthy and capable.  They are not expected to take over our economy soon, or to pass us immediately, but there seemed to be a two-power sentiment with the powers as us and China.  I’m paraphrasing badly, but I think I heard it right.  A number of people in other venues have expressed fear that China would withdraw its investment from the United States, but the very logical comment here was that China is in fact our friend, partially because they wish to protect their investment in the United States.  One observation of interest that I wish I could pinpoint to the speakers who made the comment is”China is becoming more capitalist and the US is becoming more socialist. This will matter.”

Larry Brilliant spent some time with us talking about the flu. As of today, there have been ten deaths attributed to swine flu in the US.  Three points particularly interested me.

1. The last swine flu scare had only one death, and a number of other deaths followed from complications of a massive vaccination program which has been widely panned as a mistake.  But there is a CDC theory that the reason this round of swine flu is not killing very many elderly is because they were vaccinated then.
2. We should neither worry, nor stop worrying.  I had been quite ready to write this off as overblown, but I the message I heard was that we should continue to be wary.  There is a lot about this virus that is still not understood.
3. We should thank Mexico for being so forthcoming and quick to release information.

The highlight of the day for me was sitting in the front row and watching Mark interview Elon Musk.  Elon Musk,of course, is the guy who founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, Space-X, and is the Chairman of Solar City.  He is a breath of freshness and pure competence across industries.

We watched a video of the successful Falcon 1 launch and Elon discussed the Falcon 9 which will be used to carry cargo to the Space Station as part of the strategy for shuttle function replacement (Soyuz will carry people for now).

The day ended with a delightful trip to the Calit2 lab at UCSD, where we saw a number of telecommunications and technology experiments and research results including phenomenal telepresence, excellent HD and sound, and other tools for visualization ranging from a way to watch a server room that lives in a box to a newtork of cameras recording nature.  Many of the staff were graciosuly willing to stay around after hours and answer our questions.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

So the day here in San Diego felt like sitting in the chair being hit by bullets of information.  The format is that there are multiple back to back 1/2 hour segments with industry and thought leaders from around the world.  I’m not even going to try to capture the day in total.  But here’s four bits of it:

Leadership matters.  Obama is leading.  Leadership also matters in industries.  This isn’t exactly new news, but I think the takeaway was that with world problems as severe and varied as they are, principled and transparent leadership may be required, hands down, to succeed.  Even that may not be enough, but without it, we are in trouble.  It was also noted that a downturn is a good time to create a new shaping vision, whether for country, company, or market.

There were a few sessions  essentially about economics.  The overall theme felt like fragile progress.  The best news was that we seem to be doing the right stuff, and a lot of people who are smarter about economics than me support the general Keynesian approach (government spending) as a short term move.  A mistake to avoid:  expecting it all to be spent on the right stuff.  What we need is for most of it to be spent on the right stuff.  Stimulus is like inventory; expect some shrinkage.  That doesn’t mean accept shrinkage like we got in the Iraq war.  It means don’t beat the feds about the head and shoulders if 2% gets spent on the equivalent of a bridge to nowhere.  And the worst worry?  What if California goes bankrupt - which it may, in reality, already be.

Nuclear power has been off the table as a viable major part of our energy strategy for a while. There has been research about using thorium instead or uranium.  This is good for three reasons.  It’s more plentiful, the half-life is not so long (our children’s children need to care for our nuclear waste, but that’s about it.  Better than uranium by far).  We also heard that thorium won’t make weapons.  Sounds good to me,  if it works. Solving the storage and the nuclear winter problem at once is handy.  The analogy we heard today was that retrofitting plants would be about as tough as changing over from leaded to unleaded gasoline.  We’ll see, but worth watching.  I’m willing to be open.

The last thing I want to leave you with is the title of a film.  The Cove.  We saw it, and talked to the man who made it.  It’s a powerful film, worth seeing when it comes to your area.

More tomorrow if I’m still standing at the end of the day.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.