the Onda

As I sit here writing this sentence, my brain is consuming about 20 watts of energy. For some reason that seems like a lot to me, until I think of the fact that 3 of me could run on the energy that one of the many 60 watt lightbulb I constantly forget to turn off.

Thought exercises like this one were the natural outcome of attending Saul Griffith's energy literacy keynote— by far and away the best of the keynotes I attended. Underpinning the talk was a relatively simple premise: to put all of the things we do on a constant energy scale (watts consumed) and check out where we might be terribly wasteful (in my case: airplane travel by an order of magnitude, followed by commuting to the new HP offices, with buying too many gadgets as a distant third). His talk was fascinating because of this one act of normalizing data— and has given me a much better view of things than Al Gore's documentary or the various overly complex papers and books I've tried to digest. Watts, watts everywhere (edit: for clarification purposes I should say that a watt is a unit of flow, the real absolute unit for energy is the joule; 1 watt is just 1 joule per second [thanks Paul in the comments)— for everything from running your gas sucking automobile to that can of Coke you are about to drink.

And speaking of wattage, that brain of mine seems pretty efficient compared to the laptop I'm writing this on which sucks up about 40 watts to give me an infinitesimal amount of the processing my puny brain puts out (which according to Kathy Sierra's self-help /feel-good keynote could be vastly improved by less Brain Age and more intense periods of concentration). Why then does it suck up twice the power? According to Stan Williams, from our very own HP labs, because we may be using an inefficient model for computation. In a fascinating talk that made me proud of HP labs, he gave a survey of techniques used to increase computing power to get to computers whose power nomenclature sounds like the Sunday morning special at Waffle House (ExaFlop?). I've never been a big fan of the quantum computing stuff (which according to Williams only has application in crypto, if at all), but I was riveted by his assertion that our starting assumption that computers ought to be built with standard boolean logic (AND, OR, NAND, XOR) might be something that we want to check, especially because we trace its origins back to some 16 year old farm boy named Claude Shannon (famous for his work in information theory) who was getting his PhD at MIT in the 30s. The best part of Stan's talk: how even keeled and practical he sounded about all of the crazy sci-fi shit that is getting done in his lab! This is one guy I am definitely looking up when next at the mothership in Palo Alto.

Flawed boolean logic notwithstanding, it was awesome to see all of the hardware hacking taking place at the conference. Bug Labs and Chumby are neat attempts at building companies out of some of this creative energy, though limited precisely because of commercial constraints. Much more interesting were a number of conversations I had with folks about Arduinos and the whole related ecosystem of camera/GPS/network modules that are springing up around them. The king of cool in this category was definitely Chris Anderson (of Wired fame) with his DIY Drones talk on making full autonomous flying things out of cheap componentry. If I hadn't seen his videos, I would not believe that the stuff in his talk was even remotely achievable by an amateur. Particularly cool was the UAV that he flew over the Google campus to take pictures that he was then able to collage through GPS coordinates captured during flight.

And speaking of GPS, geo was the new black at this year's conference. The number of talks, hallway conversations, and keynote mentions that centered around location hacking were too numerous to list here. It is honestly beginning to feel like understanding how to work with geo-data is the new SQL with this crowd (where is the O'Reilly book on this topic?!?). And amidst this buzz, Yahoo launched FireEagle, a thin piece of geo middleware that lets users register producers and consumers of geodata. Despite the panning the poor guys took on TechCrunch, what they are trying to do strikes me as super cool and important (email me if you want an invite).

It's funny— during the first 12 hours of the conference (which I have to admit I was forced to duck in and out of due to work obligations), I felt ready to declare that it had jumped the shark (especially after Tim's rambling and slightly depressing opening talk). But in the end I'm glad I went, mostly because of the way that an event like this helps to remind me of the for some folks, it is a core belief that anything is hackable (including according to Lesig, government).

More than anything else the crowd that O'Reilly is still able to attract to this event exudes that ethos from every pore. Magazines like Make, blogs, and websites are helping to propagate this more broadly, but seeing it first hand— even if once a year— helps to recharge the batteries that run this 20 watt brain.

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