I just had an amazing experience reading Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. This book is about how genetics can help us recover the history of man. I learned so much from reading this book and I strongly recommend it. It is easy to read and does not require a deep knowledge of genetics. Combining this book with Jared Diamond’s great book Guns, Germs and Steel, really gives one a great understanding of the human history especially the last 50,000 years.
Archive for April, 2007
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade
April 28, 2007Japan and me, then and now
April 22, 2007I am in Japan showing my wife Deborah this wonderful country for the first time. I have not been back to Japan since 2000 when I visited with Richard Li (I was on the board of his company PPCW at the time). It was just before the bubble burst and Richard and Massa (Son) were both boasting that they were the highest valued internet stocks. At lot has changed since then. The promise of PCCW which was to be both a new form of broadband distribution and content never really materialized. Fortunately, he had acquired the HK telephone company from Cable and Wireless. Son, continued in business but through some good time and not such good times and is now focused on building a cellular business in Japan. When ever I am in Japan, I have to think back on my first visit here. It was 1962 and I was eighteen years old. I was merchant seaman on the American President Line. I was not really a sailor but a steward for the officers. The ship, the President Cleveland, was kind of like the “love boat”. Japan was a developing country then and I was a developing person. It would have been hard to imagine what either of us would have become.
Those who couldn’t and did
April 21, 2007After the last tech bubble burst in 2000, I developed a classification system for the people I knew and or would meet that were shaped by this. It was a two by two matrix to deal with how people handled their stock (including options). There were four possibilities:
1) Those who had stock that they could sell and sold it
2) Those who had stock that they could sell and did not sell it
3) Those who had stock they could not sell and sold it
4) Those who did not have stock and did not sell it.
The first group (by the way, I am a member of that group fortunately) were pretty happy people. The second group were pretty unhappy people. The third group was truly miserable. They were the people who because of greed, hubris or ignorance sold stock that they did not really own like unvested stock, borrowed money using stock as collateral, exercised options and held the stock creating major taxes issues, or exercised stock options in companies which they managed knowing that their companies were not performing as well as the market thought. Recently there were to examples of this that I would like to point out. The first is that of Joe Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest which you can read about here and the other is that of David Hayden former CEO of Critical Path which you can read about here. They are very different stories of two executives in category 3. I do not sense that we are in the same kind of bubble as we were in last time. Certainly this is not a public market bubble but I thought I would share my little matrix and the dangers of being in category 3. By the way, many of the people in the last category we miserable when so many were getting rich (at leapt on paper) and felt a lot better when the whole thing came tumbling down.
Life 2.0
April 18, 2007I am trying to wean myself from being a “human doing “to become a “human being” and have only had moderate success. The trouble with retirement is you no longer enjoy doing what you are good at doing but you are not good at doing what you enjoy. This makes you go back to old patterns. I spend a lot of time thinking about how insignificant I am so that I can be free of responsibility. I dived my expect life span by the life span of the universe. I divide the mass of the universe by my mass. I dived the space of the universe by my space and still every morning I get up to make sure that the world is ok and decide how I can save it. So I have become the universal numerator!
Bush must be thankful for Imus
April 14, 2007George Bush must be so thankful for entertainers who do stupid things. They keep the focus of TV news shows away for him. When you look at the priorities of the news organizations (do the reflect the priorities of their audiences or create them) you have to think we are living in a mental institution. Here we are locked in a “war” in Iraq, see the potential development of nuculear wepons in the hand of a mad man in Iran, have thousands of people dying in Dafur as we slowly burn our planet and all the news shows can do is report on Imus and his stupid remarks. Lets put things in perspective.
Speaking of which: Check out a post by my son Asher on his blog Climate Changers in rebut the chairman of the London Stock Exchange (and by the way a former Executive at BP).
Is business like surfing
April 4, 2007To be successful as a surfboarder, you first need to go to the beach. Not just any beach but one with the right waves (it is too hard to make a wave although many people in business think they can). Then you have to fight your way out with all the little waves trying to push you back and knock you down. If you manage to get to the right place at the right time, you have to have strength and balance to get yourself up right on the board and again at just the right time. You have to notice everything including the other surfers. And don’t forget there may be sharks in the area. But if you do everything right you have a great thrill which can only by definition come to an end. And then you go and try it again.
Young Enough to be my grandson
April 3, 2007Yesterday I had a two hour lunch with a young entrepreneur. While I am use to working with men and women young enough to be my children (like Simon and David the founders of www.heavy.com), this was the first time I can remember meeting with a CEO who was young enough to be my grandson. He was born in 1984 the year that the MAC was born, (but not the year that George Orwell envisioned in his book 1984, we had to wait for George Bush and the Patriot Acts to start to see some of that stuff). I had to remind myself that when I was about the same age as this person I ran a dept. at a University. At that time, I was always the youngest person in the room. Now I am mostly the oldest person in the room. Well actually I am often both the oldest and youngest person in the room.
During the conversation, I was asked how I ended up at Intel which took me back to how I got started with computer in 1966 including how I actually learned to build gates and flip flops one at a time using single transistors, resistors and capacitors (those where the days). In the forty years that I have been working with computers a lot has change to put it mildly. And as we know, the changes in hardware follow Moore’s law which implies an order of magnitude improvement every five years (that is 100 times in ten years). Too bad software does not improve at that rate but then again we have not found the transistor equivalent of software yet. Driving home from the meeting, I had to laugh as I imagined my lunch companion having a similar lunch forty yeas in the future. I even have a shot at being there and hopefully still being both the oldest and youngest in the room and maybe even understanding what is being said (thanks Posit Science).
Kissing Behavior
April 2, 2007I know it is April Fools Day (it is also the first night of Passover and just 15 days to filling your taxes). But today, I learned something that really explains some kissing behavior. A male friend of mine evidently had the best kiss of his life from a lesbian friend. I heard that and a light went off in my head (I am not going to discuss the behavior of any other organs). I have a number of female friends who are lesbians and even more female friends that are not. Beginning a pretty affectionate person, I hug the guys and kiss the girls. And with many of my female friends, this means an innocent (not romantic or sexual) kiss on the lips. But many of my female friends press their lips together very tightly as if they are afraid that the kiss could become something more than just friendly. But my lesbian friends always give me big warm kisses. Now I know why. They are not afraid of the potential consequences (not one of them has become heterosexual do to my kiss as far as I know).
