Posted on February 14, 2009 - by amy senger

25 things…

You may or may not know about Steve aka the @robotchampion:

1. He wears black socks to gym. Somehow he manages to make this look good.
2. He wears a pink sweatshirt with a lion on it and doesn’t understand why guys hit on him.
3. He’s completely monogamous.
4. He is an office lady-charmer.
5. He does get jealous but tries to never let it show.
6. When he’s really excited, he says “omigod!” with a Brooklyn accent.
7. When it comes to our relationship, he has repose. I’ve been with him after his car’s been towed, while I’m freaking out about how closely he is driving behind another car on the beltway on route to the WIRE/ICES conference, and after I’ve yelled at him for failing to communicate with me – and he did not respond with the typical human knee jerk response of anger or aggravation.
8. When he’s stressed or completely engrossed in figuring out something, he gnaws on his fingers.
9. He likes to touch – almost like a blind person communicating through his fingers (I think this is why he loves Apple products so much).
10. He denied my advances not once but twice and is the only man (that I recall) who has done this.
11. He’s able to organize virtually anything in a wiki (and is known as “Wiki Steve” by colleagues).
12. He is insecure about his body.
13. He’s intimidated by pretty girls.
14. He cried upon receiving churros at the Mexico/California border and during Obama’s acceptance speech.
15. In California, he was a boogie board surfer, not a long board surfer.
16. He will be an amazing father.
17. He loves that he gets the pretty girls and guys have no idea why.
18. He intentionally asked me to hold his passport at the airport b/c he knew my ex always handled everything, including the holding of the passports and was psychologically challenging my historical construct of relationships.
19. He’s an incredible teacher – one of the best I’ve seen.
20. He has an amazing family (and his brother Spence is quite possibly one of the coolest, most “truest” people I’ve ever met).
21. Sometimes he’s afraid of me.
22. He feels so deeply that he’s trained himself not to.
23. He’s the only man besides my dad who I never get bored talking to and is able to throw humor at me from left field.
24. He thinks I will somehow help him become President of the United States.
25. I met Steve the day after I had given back my engagement ring to my then fiancée. It was a point in my life when everything was in flux and I knew what needed to change and where I wanted to go but I wasn’t sure how. I had spent too much time trying to please other people, to be something I wasn’t or didn’t want to be, and without trying, by just being himself, Steve showed me how to be me. I am who I am today because of him.

Posted on February 1, 2009 - by amy senger

The 8 questions

Below is a list of 8 questions that was given to me by Bill Jordan, an 80-year old man I met while waiting at the Ritz Camera in DC. He was wearing an Obama cap and holding an iPhone.  We started talking about iPhones, Apple, and travel. His blind 12-year old granddaughter convinced him to buy stock in Apple  when it was selling at $42/share. He has visited over 100 countries and handed me a slip of paper that read: The doom of a profligate nation is certain – having been foretold by all of recorded history.”~Bill Jordan

1. If you had unlimited time and unlimited money, what three cities in the world would you like to visit?
2. If you could be present on any one day in the history of the world and participate in the events of the day or simply observe what happened what day would you choose?
3. If I would reserve a table for four tomorrow night at 7pm at the very best restaurant in town (I would agree to pay the bill) and you could invite three people (now living or you could bring them back from the dead), what three people would you choose to visit and converse with for several hours?
4. Please give me your three most negative impression about America or Americans.
5. Out of 1000 people selected at random, how many do you believe are capable of original thought?
6. Do you believe in life after death?
7. If you believe in life after death, is there anything that you can do to improve your status in the afterlife? If so what?

Feel free to leave your answers as a comment:)

Posted on January 29, 2009 - by robotchampion

Twitter is way better than anything else

I love you Twitter. You are the new hotness. I don’t care what other people say about you. I don’t even care if my business partner thinks that time apart from you is beneficial. This is your time, your moment.

Heck, even US News loves you. You recently made the list of “50 ways to improve your life”. And, in so doing you were called: “increasingly popular and addictive”. (yep, found via twitter thru @tigerninety and written by @papertrailblog).

Now even the celebrities love you. Your newest friends are @jimmyfallon, @tinafey, @mchammer, @greggrunberg, @al_gore, @the_real_shaq, @lancearmstrong, @breagrant, @johncleese, and my personal favorite @hodgman.

If that wasn’t enough, all of your competitors are just not cutting it. Each one goes for your jugular only to settle for some small piece of the pie. You are even rumored to be on your second round of funding in a deep recession. That is because you are way better than anything else.

This is partly due to being the first on the block (which I am not even sure you were). It’s also partly due to your simplicity. But, and I mean but, I attribute your success to a little discussed fact.

You are the first great success of the mobile web. Your predecessor is the Blackberry. The mobile device that brought mobile email to painstaking heights of popularity and necessity (/wave prez obama). Your successor may come around, but until it does, you are king of the mobile web hill.

Now that you are in that moment, all of your detractors are singing death and destruction mightily. Clinging to anything that will allow them to avoid your wiles. You are not the fad, silly tool they think you are. You are not just a mobile facebook or a place for “extraverts to lord over the intraverts”. Nor are you just a place for “social media experts” to bask in their own glory.

What you really are is harder to say. As the first true child of the mobile web you are changing the game as you play it. Your question of “what are you doing right now?” is not even important anymore. None of your strongest users even answer that question anymore. They have moved onto taking the richness of their lives and posting that instead. They post photos, links, jokes, pithy thoughts, dinner plans, current events, conversations, and they create accounts for their animals (<3 @fuzzles).

That would be impressive all by its lonesome. It would be extremely impressive for a “website”. But one cannot talk about your glory without talking about your inextricable connection with mobility. As @stoweboyd once told me, mobility is the future of the web. We are no longer sitting at our “command center” with our clunky desktop. We are on the go and joining that “world consciousness” that my roommate surmises is the next evolution in our spirituality.

This mobility is really the hardest to explain. It is, well, umm, just amazing. It is incredible. Ok, I’m obvsiously struggling to define this, so instead let me tell you a story. A weird story, really, but it resonates with me and stirs up fondness for you:

Strange, I know. But, in that moment I realized what the mobile web meant to me. It was an instant connection. A tie with the world at large that never existed before. An ability to stay connected anytime with everyone important in my life.

Let’s utilize some academia for this point. Have you heard of the “aggregate phenomenon”?

Let’s just break the space/time continuum and let me connect with my family back in California and my friends in cities all over the world.

Finally, the capstone for this love story. Time. It’s so valuable. I just don’t have enough of it for everyone in my life. Twitter, without you there would be no way for me to maintain my Dunbar number (a theory that humans can only maintain a max of 150 social relationships) let alone the 500+ people I connect with regularly.

But, with you I can and do. I develop bonds with over 500+ people on a consistent basis. I do it with little or no effort. I even save time. Which allows me to turn around and spend that time on more quality things in my life. Like pretty girls or writing inane posts on this site.

Written by the @robotchampion

Posted on January 29, 2009 - by robotchampion

Apple Keynotes Are Inspirational and You Should Watch

Seriously, you should watch the Apple Keynotes. Each video demonstrates the amazing engineering capabilities of one of America’s most innovative companies.

I get a lot of crap for getting excited about these keynotes. I really think its kind of silly too. It’s easy to get caught up in the vogue of marketing. Where the PC vs. Mac commercials tell you to choose sides. Then there are the fanatics (yes I am one) who absolutely gush about Apple products. It is similarly silly to fall back on our typical American skepticism.

If you can avoid the pop culture magnetism you can easily see why I like Apple. Every 6 months they sit down and have a conversation with their customers. Yes you can say they are locked down and controlling, but you could also say they are constantly upgrading their products to meet customer needs. Every keynote they address our needs and they do it innovative futuristic fashion. They bring together the best technology, best minds, and best engineering to make it so.

Beyond that they make it a big deal. Every day folks are doing innovative things but rarely do they stop and share with the world. In the keynotes, Apple brings in musicians, top company engineers, state-of-the-art presentation tools, and more.

So, do me a favor take off your gloomy shades and watch one. Then come back and tell me if you were’nt inspired and you couldn’t see American ingenuity at its best.

While you’re at it the TED videos & Google Talks are also absolutely inspirational to watch too.

Posted on January 27, 2009 - by amy senger

One Human’s Minutiae is Another’s Munificence

For thirty years, Albert Einstein struggled to produce a unified theory that would provide an explanation for everything in the physical universe. This quest for a single blueprint for life would accompany him to his grave and in his last years he admitted, “It is so difficult to employ mathematically that I have not been able to verify it somehow, in spite of all my efforts.” He finally conceded, “Someone else is going to have to it.”

For several decades in the 1500s Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe diligently recorded the positions of the planet Mars. Every day at the same time  he observed its position and noted it, and while this might have seemed like a trivial acquisition, qualifying it as minutia even, he eventually observed that Mars drifted from west to east, “but every two years roughly the planet would take a brief diversion, slowing down, going backward and doing a loop, before regaining its senses and continuing its normal motion.” (The Social Atom)

After Brahe’s death, Johannes Kepler studied Brahe’s notebooks, and eight years later he concluded that Mars and Earth were rotating on elliptical tracks around the sun, with Earth on the inside track. This served as the foundation for Issac Newton’s laws of gravity and motion.

The scientific method for gathering data, identifying patterns and finding a mechanism to explain them is the same one that social scientists today are using to find solutions to problems such as global warming and the spread of infectious diseases.  People, like the physical world, fall into very explainable patterns and these patterns reveal regularities that the seemingly complicated just isn’t so.

There are some patterns that are not so common, not so regular, not so obvious in their occurrence and therefore are more difficult to understand. Acts like the “random” campus shooting that took place at Virginia Tech could be considered one of these anomalies, not easy to predict given the paucity of data about the shooter and lack of similar events to which to compare it. I’m curious what a stream of this shooter’s life would have looked like in Twitter, what it would have revealed and what we could have learned from it. Given a large dynamic system like Twitter, where small variations of a initial condition can be captured, would a butterfly effect emerged? Clive Thompson compared Twitter to “proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are.” I consider Twitter a tool for social omniscience, in which the identification of natural laws of patterns can lead to the possibility of prediction.

What’s so intriguing and exciting about social patterns is the ability to change them – social behaviors are often dictated by mutable and constructed norms. However, because social patterns are influenced by norms, social etiquette “black holes” can present great barriers to revealing true patterns and ultimately presenting solutions. When I hear how I should conduct myself, what I should and should not say, by entities as imposing as the United States government and as intrusive as the “family order” – I immediately object. These formal and informal gag rules are exactly what will prevent us from solving the most complicated of issues – the ones that keep me from saying I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes this weekend, or I think the industry I work in is inherently doomed for failure and virtually no one understands this, or I do look at porn on occasion, or I like illegal aliens because they work jobs that “Americans” don’t want but I get annoyed when they don’t learn/speak English.

I laugh at the notion that technology alone will ever solve a problem; even if we lived in a world in which every person could contribute to one global database, these invisible barriers would still exist. The fact is I am regularly surprised by what I say has meaning to whom and while I myself don’t want to read every single thing a person does or thinks, I’d be willing to bet the farm that the compilation of this minutiae, coupled with other sources of data, would reveal patterns never obvious to us before and present answers to questions that have eluded humankind for ages. To do this however would require a lot of data, a lot of minutiae, all the minutiae you don’t want to hear. And yet the more information we make available, the greater our ability to understand our world and change it.

I believe with enough data, we can discover the truth in everything – and we will unveil an artisan’s masterfully ordered structure and achieve what Einstein simply did not have enough minutiae to achieve.

I Just dont Understand an Open Mind

by robotchampion on January 19, 2009

Two Conferences Worth Attending – SXSW & ETech

by robotchampion on January 13, 2009

The Value (and Price) of Twitter: Part II

by amy senger on January 10, 2009

Twitter Silence: A Diary

by amy senger on December 15, 2008

The Value of Twitter: Part I

by amy senger on December 14, 2008