Cycling

I'm going to start carpooling with someone from work, who has moved to this side of the Bay. The fastest route between our homes is actually by bicycle, taking the bridge behind Oracle, and the bridge behind Asera, to cross from Redwood Shores to Foster City. Yes, isn't it kind of silly for people to live within a 5 minute walk from company headquarters but work at a different location far away. I would have to go by the sadly completely empty Asera parking lot and building on a daily basis. Empty except for the several cars parked in the corner by the bike bridge, which I'm guessing belong to other Redwood Shores-Foster City carpoolers.

Stanford has a new program joining earth sciences with computer science. This comes after all the other fairly recent new programs relating to the environment. And the new Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering.

When I started looking several years ago, the most interesting math PhD program was at NYU Courant, and this was one type of program I thought Stanford and the Bay Area was missing. Well, now they have one. I also thought that computer science has been lacking in collaborating in the environment and earth sciences fields. Now they are starting such a program. Gee, it would be kind of an exciting time to go back for a PhD if I wanted to.

And there are a fast growing number of very interesting job postings. The 10 year cycle is rolling around again. I haven't really spotted the next Yahoo! or Google though. Aside from Wikipedia, the most exciting things lately seem to be organic food and natural bug spray.

Networks

I've been noticing a trend of alternatives to mass-produced global-branded consumerism. Organic foods from family farms are almost omnipresent in grocery stores around here, just over the last few years. The newspapers are publishing more articles about such things too... most recently, heirloom meats (as opposed to tomatos...).

The book, The Hydrogen Economy, presented the interesting vision that our energy infrastructure would follow in the direction of our information highways and become more like the Internet, networked and with lots of smaller autonomous units contributing to the grid community. This is still a long way away, but every solar roof added eliminates a little of our dependence on the large utility companies. Though this independence is highly dependent on a functioning network infrastructure. Independent yet codependent... hmm....

And as for the World Wide Web, the trend is toward more content being served up by individuals in the masses. The Thinking in Java author is quite visionary as well. He mentions the idea that the increased enabling of people to communicate with each other will allow some sort of "group think." Well, I already use Google as an extension of my brain. Instead of having to search and store things in my brain, I can use Google just as fast. The network is the computer becomes the network is the brain. Google has had it's awe days. What is impressing me now are things like Wikipedia. Beyond technology to human behavior - a bunch of random people coming together on the Net can regulate themselves and produce something higher quality than otherwise.