Author: JP

The first album I can remember holding in my hands was a Beatles album: A Hard Day’s Night. Until then, my musical upbringing was largely Western classical, jazz through the ages, fifties musicals and crooners. Not surprising, given that I was born in 1957 and lived in India.

It was a good upbringing to have, as far as Western music was concerned: Perry Como and Pat Boone, My Fair Lady and South Pacific, all interspersed amongst the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and accentuated by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Ravel. It wasn’t a question of choosing either: we listened to what our parents listened to, and that was that. It didn’t occur to us that some people thought musical taste was an individual thing; music, like food, like reading, like life itself, was a social thing, enjoyed best in the company of others.

I must have been around 10 when we bought ourselves a new gramophone player for the house, and shortly after that a few albums emerged that were different from the others. Peter, Paul and Mary’s seminal In The Wind. The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out. And of all things, Edmundo Ros’s Bongos From The South.

And the Beatles, with A Hard Day’s Night. The start of a wonderful trip through the music of the age.

Over the next ten years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums flowed through the house. No sense of ownership. We bought some; traded some; some were parked there by friends, loaned indefinitely; some just turned up, forgotten leavings.

We were eclectic in our listening; if there was a bias, it was towards singer-songwriter folk rock, but it went a lot further than that, starting with the Beatles (together and solo) and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan. Simon and Garfunkel. The Grateful Dead. Traffic. Cream. John Mayall. Jethro Tull. Joan Baez. Dave Mason. Crosby Stills Nash and Young, together and separate. Buffalo Springfield. The Who. Emerson Lake and Palmer. Yes. Neil Diamond. America. Janis Joplin. Kris Kristofferson. Joe Cocker. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Santana. Donovan. Don McLean. Clapton. Hendrix. Jim Croce. Cat Stevens. Leonard Cohen. Allman Brothers. Elton John. Lindisfarne. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Doobie Brothers. Joni Mitchell. James Taylor. Carole King. The Band. Jose Feliciano. Melanie. Seals and Croft. Loggins and Messina. The Doors. The Eagles. Steely Dan. Poco. New Riders of the Purple Sage. Ten Years After. Deep Purple. The Kings. Herman’s Hermits. Iron Butterfly. King Crimson. Pentangle. Queen. Police. Elvis. Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. The Jackson Five. The Moody Blues. Pink Floyd. John Martyn. Gordon Lightfoot. Chicago. Blood Sweat and Tears. Van Morrison. Harry Nilsson.

You get my drift. One paragraph. My pantheon from 1967-1980. Not that much into heavy metal. Not that much into pure pop. Deeply into rock, but mostly based around a folk-rock foundation. Usually singer-songwriter, usually able to play an instrument or two, usually in harmony.

I just loved the music. Really really loved it. At the time I felt like there were a couple of hundred albums that were all I ever needed to listen to, with songs that were full of life and stories and joy and sadness and melody and poetry. And memories.

That’s how I used to think, in my teens and early twenties. I felt rich in the music I knew and loved, and felt no real reason to step out beyond that area.

Guess what? It’s largely stayed that way. Thirty, forty years on, that’s pretty much all I listen to. And I’ve been very privileged, able to watch many of my childhood idols live since then. In fact, tonight, I’m off to see Bob Dylan at the Hammersmith Apollo, and already holding tickets for Jethro Tull next April. I was always sure I’d spend most of my life listening to Sixties and Seventies music. I hadn’t quite considered that it would mean going to concerts where the musicians were in their sixties and seventies!

To all of them, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, for filling so much of my life with pleasure, with joy, with delight.

Thank you Sixties and Seventies musicians. Particularly those who believe that music is a performance art, not something to can once and exploit forever.

I must have been around 13 when I had my first pizza, courtesy of my neighbours, a warm and friendly Sephardic Jewish family; Flower Silliman, the mother of the family, was, and continues to be, an incredible cook; I took the family to India for a reunion last year, and we had Christmas lunch (!) at her home. (One of her daughters would later become my first ever girlfriend).

And what a pizza it was. The bread was flat, round and unleavened, gently golden. There was a light yet generous tomato sauce, lots of cheese, soft in the middle, a little crisping at the edge; some onion, some garlic, amazing fresh herbs. I keep imagining there was the hint of chilli, but that may just be me…. I like imagining things with chilli. And everything was cooked to perfection. Even today I salivate thinking about it.

It looked a bit like this photo from foodporndaily:

Now my memory’s not what it used to be. Perhaps there were other ingredients in the pizza. Perhaps I was 14 not 13 when it happened. Perhaps I’d already started going out with Flower’s daughter Michal. As I said, my memory’s not what it used to be.

But I still remember what a pizza was. And I still know what a pizza is.

A pizza is not a vegetable.

Apparently this is not a universal truth. According to the Huffington Post, in a story carried last Wednesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. Confused? Don’t worry. The Gothamist story illustration, reproduced below, may help you:

I read the story, and I was more saddened than surprised. Because I’d seen pizza masquerading as vegetable before.

The recipe seems to run a bit like this:

1. Take a data centre.
2. Add two spoons of tomato sauce.
3. Decorate with the words “private” and “cloud”
4. Serve

Had a number of you ping me about my last post, when I shared the tabs I had open. So I thought I’d do it again:

1. Radiation levels in Fukushima lower than predicted. Couldn’t understand why this story didn’t receive more coverage. The levels being encountered seem remarkably low, so I wanted to look into it. I was in Japan last month, due there again next month. Love it.

2. Soccket To Me: I just love the idea of Soccket, decided I would spring for giving someone the energy-producing football. Amazing invention. Great video as well. Found via TED.

3. Sustainability, 21st century style: I’d heard that Patagonia were encouraging people to create a secondary market for their products rather than keep buying new. Now that’s a story I like. Someone at Salesforce.com gave me a Patagonia garment, so I looked into it.

4. Trent Reznor on TuneCore: I’m not a big fan of Nine Inch Nails, some of their music is too noir for me. But I love Trent Reznor’s attitude to the industry. So I try and keep up with what he’s saying and doing. Their latest album is, as usual, downloadable for free.

5. Brit on the PlugBug: Friend Brit Morin launches a fascinating site, I love the PlugBug and the rickshaw. And Weduary will probably make a bang not just in the US, but also in places like India. I like seeing what friends are up to.

6. Evolutionary ecology of pungency in wild chillies: I have a real passion for capsaicin, so I tend to spend some time every week trying to understand more about it.

That’s it for now. Tell me if you like my doing this occasionally. Tell me to stop. All feedback useful.

I happened to look at the tabs I’d got open over the past few days, stuff I was gently drifting through, stuff I intend to complete reading/experiencing later. And I realised they were sufficiently eclectic to be worth sharing, in case some of you hadn’t come across them or were interested anyway. So here goes:

1. Malaria’s Achilles Heel: Details of a recent breakthrough in understanding how the parasite gets into red blood cells, and the discovery of a single receptor without which the parasite appears to be powerless. Early days, but there is now a real possibility that an effective vaccines emerge.

2. Crowd-curating: Continuing to track what hypothes.is is doing, something I’m very excited about. “A distributed, open source platform for the collaborative evaluation of documents”.

3. Matsutake dobin mushi: Ever since I experienced this dish a month or so ago, I’ve been mesmerised. Been trying to find out everything I can about it.

4. Unintended consequences of age-based privacy laws: danah boyd, John Palfrey, Eszter Hargittai and Jason Schultz looking into Facebook ToS and age constraints and COPPA

5. Preserving the lifesaving power of antimicrobial agents: James Hughes’ seminal paper on running out of antibiotics.

6. Keeping fit in 1919: An uproariously funny booklet issued in 1919, not intended to be funny at all, brought to life by the wonderful How To Be A Retronaut. Thank you Chris Wild.

7. Serge Storms: An excerpt from Tim Dorsey’s next book. Can’t wait.

8. Wolfgang’s Vault: The best live music downloads site in the world for retired hippies like me.

At school and at university, I was reminded by teachers not to allow the knowledge I’d accumulated to constrain unduly my thinking about the future. There was something liberating about the mere process of trying to understand that knowledge could be considered a constraint, a liberation that continued throughout my life, evinced at different times and in different ways.

Early on, it was a personal fascination with the concept of time, triggered by an experience every child in India goes through: finding out that the hindi word for yesterday: “kal” was the same as that for tomorrow: “kal“. While still at school, as with most of my fellow students in the Sciences stream, the thoughts and writings of Richard Feynman entered my life. His teachings on The Character of Physical Law, more particularly the chapter on The Distinction of Past and Future, influenced my conceptions of time even further, giving me a sense of its irreversible nature. Most 13-14-year olds have a blank-slate approach when it comes to absorbing ideas, and so it was when we were first able to think about what Einstein had been saying about relativity, allowing us to view time as a dimension.

Then came university, where I read Economics, and then work, where none of this appeared to matter. The nearest I came to thinking further about all this was in my late twenties, when I went through a long period of regular dreaming, often lucid, often with repeating themes. [The commonest theme had me in flight: I’d slowly lengthen my stride and then gently take off, more gliding than flying, able to keep myself airborne for a minute or so, soaring and banking using my arms as wings, never flapping, unable to hover.].  They were dreams rather than nightmares, relaxing me, letting me feel rested and refreshed; this, coupled with their lucidity, meant that I tended to remember my dreams. And occasionally, very occasionally, I would experience something in “real life” that seemed, if I stretched it enough, to be something I’d experienced before in a dream. But I “knew” it wasn’t possible and so I dismissed it. Sort of. It didn’t stop me from reading Michio Kaku from the mid-1990s onwards, starting with Hyperspace/Parallel Universes. But the Feynman in me ruled, time continued to be seen as something irreversible.

One other principle stayed with me, influenced by some of the sayings and quotations I’d been attracted to over the years: Einstein saying that we couldn’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create the problems in the first place, Einstein suggesting that common sense was the collection of prejudices one has by age eighteen, someone (occasionally credited to Schopenhauer) saying that talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. In each case, I was reminded of what my teachers had said to me, about not allowing my “knowledge” to constrain my “thinking”. Easier said than done.

Over time, I understood more about cognitive biases and anchors and frames, a learning that was accelerated by conversations with colleagues like Sean Park, Malcolm Dick and James Montier while at Dresdner Kleinwort. So it should come as no surprise that in my roles as deputy CIO and CIO, and as chief scientist, in multiple organisations, I kept taking the “don’t let the past predict the future” tablets, religiously, systematically, every day. That didn’t always endear me to everyone, but it helped me keep my thinking fresh. It was the reason I kept wanting to connect with people outside the organisation at least as much as I spoke with people within the organisation. It was the reason that I’ve always tried to support a graduate intake program in firms I’ve worked in, one way of ensuring that fresh thinking is allowed to enter an organisation.

Which is why I loved the Wayne Gretzky quote about playing where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is or was. Which is why I loved the Steve Jobs quote, in his Stanford Commencement Address in June 2005:

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

In the words of Stephen Stills: Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now. [That’s taken from my all-time number one favourite song, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. You can hear a sample, containing the quote, here…. and even buy the MP3 download if you so wish.

It is with all this in mind that I spend time thinking about streams of information. For most of my adult life, these streams have been about the past. Transactions that had already happened. We spent a long time studying the fossil remains of human activity in order to try and predict what the future would look like, a mongrel form halfway between scatology and eschatology.

More recently, we’ve been able to “life-stream”, sharing our current activities and our “status” with others, aided and abetted by near-ubiquitous connectivity, ever-smarter devices and digital frameworks that support the social networks. In the past, we were only able to capture things that had happened. We were used to calling things that had happened “transactions” and so we called the analysis of those records “transaction processing”. We’re able to look now at what people are doing, within “activity streams”, and, because we share our activity streams within social networks, we call the study of this “social media monitoring”.

But we’re on the cusp of something way way more exciting, in a classic William Gibson future-is-here-but-unevenly-distributed kind of way: we’re beginning to what we intend to do.

Doc Searls, a good friend, was the first person I heard using the term “Intention Economy” to describe this. And I’ve signalled my intention to him, by pre-ordering his book on the subject, due May next year.

Esther Dyson, another good friend, when talking about the future of internet search, complimented Bill Gates on saying “the future of search is verbs”….. now that gets interesting, really interesting, when you consider verbs as having tenses. Tenses that help segment the continuum of time. Past. Present. And future.

The future.

When I was at university, one of the things I studied in classical economics was the works of Jean-Baptiste Say. And one of the ways in which his “Law” was paraphrased, originally by John Maynard Keynes, was as follows: Supply creates its own demand.

We’re soon going to be able to signal our intentions in ways that we could never have done before.

Over time, those signals will become more sophisticated, more evolved, more nuanced.  Social norms will be formed, telling us what we can or can’t do with our signalling of intent. The semaphoring of intent will slowly come to include disinformation, the false-carding,  feints and dummies, elaborate ways of disguising intent in order to further some other intent. With that will come the need to watch for, and to recognise, the digital “tells” in the world of supply-and-demand poker. On both sides.

And over time, the systems and processes required to interpret and assimilate those signals into actionable information, this too will evolve.

I cannot wait.