Fractals of Change

Connecting the Dots

Sometimes connecting the dots is a very bad idea.

Part of learning to fly an airplane on instruments, perhaps the hardest part, is the discipline of NOT connecting the visual dots. You look out the windshield into fog or rain; your eyes will connect some dots and construct a horizon; they will convince the rest of your body including the seat of your pants that this horizon exists. You level the wings with respect to this horizon and you die. Lots of pilots have done that.

Obviously, translating visual clues into a complete image is an indispensable survival mechanism.  By the time you see the both jaws of the lion, they could be around your head. Without mirrors, we never see more than half of any particular object at a time but we can usually figure out what we’re looking at from just a few fragments. But connecting the wrong dots is still a good way to get killed.

Almost happened to me years ago on a night which was too clear. We were flying into the small strip at Provincetown on Cape Cod on a clear and moonless night. The stars were everywhere; shining in the sky and reflecting in the sea. I misjudged the runway and was too high and too fast to land on my first attempt so I powered up, raised the wheels and flaps, and prepared to go around and try again. But the wind sounded funny in the struts and the plane accelerated too fast even for a full power climb. We were dangerously close to banking into the sea when I realized that the horizon between the star-studded sky and the sparkling sea was a chimera; something my eyes had invented since there were stars and reflected stars everywhere.

Fortunately I was near the end of my instrument training and had just spent hours recovering from “unusual attitudes” by instrument alone. I stopped looking out he window at the treacherous sea and sky and got the plane back into a straight climb using the compass, the artificial horizon, and the attitude indicator with reference to airspeed and altitude.

Instrument-trained pilots know that looking out the window into a featureless void is dangerous. They learn instead to read the angle of the plane in all dimensions from the instruments. Even better as a life lesson, instrument pilots are taught the discipline of the scan: never, never focus on one instrument; always keep looking from one to another even if one or more are giving alarming or inconsistent readings – especially if one or more are giving alarming or inconsistent readings.

One of the instruments could be broken. You need to put together the whole picture. Is air speed decreasing? Could be that the nose is too high; check the artificial horizon and the altimeter. Could be that the engine is losing power; how are the rpm and manifold pressure? is there fuel in the tank? Could be that ice is building on the wings and prop; what’s the outside temperature? Could be that the airspeed indicator is clogged with ice; check temperature again, see what the other instruments say, and shine your flashlight on the pitot tube and struts to look for ice.

Even worse you could have more than one problem or more than one symptom of a single problem. If you fixate on the first problem you see, even if you’ve diagnosed it correctly, you still may fail to react to a more serious problem. Some years ago the highly-trained three-person crew of a commercial airliner flew into a swamp while they all fixated on a not-very-important dashboard light that appeared to be malfunctioning.

The point of all this is that we evolved for an environment very different from the one we’ve built for ourselves. For survival we have to fight our genetic instinct to tell ourselves stories (including the special case of connecting the dots) and be skeptical of our own conclusions. 

Pictures Trump Words

National Geographic has always been better at pictures than words. I particularly like the big foldout charts and maps that come with the magazine. Couldn’t find this one online so had to fold, scan, and reassemble. It’s about the relationship between global warming, CO2 content in the atmosphere, and sea level over the last 400,000 years. The interesting thing is that the picture DOESN’T show what the accompanying words say. This post is a practical exercise in the skepticism recommended in the last post – especially around critically important issues like global warming and rising sea levels where we must take some action or act by not acting.

To put this in context (not shown in the picture) the earth has been in a glacial epoch (a period during which there is extensive year-round ice somewhere on the planet) for the last 40 million years although, for most of its history, it has apparently been ice-free even at the polls. During a glacial epoch the amount of earth covered by ice varies periodically and, for at least the last 400,000 years (not a big sample) there has been a regular 100,000 year cycle to global warming and cooling. There are usually about 10,000 noticeably warmer years (the interglacial period) in each 100,000 year cycle; the rest of the time it’s cold. Each panel above represents about 100,000 years cropped so that the warm period is always on the right.

The burnt orange at the bottom is seal level. If you look at the far right, you see the level today and note that the sea is generally much lower during the colder periods when a lot of water is tied up in ice sheets on land. The lighter orange is average global temperature (subject to some debate); the temperature is shown in yellow where it exceeds current temperatures. The light blue line is atmospheric CO2 concentration as measured from Antarctic ice cores (except for last 50 years which are measured directly). This line leaps in recent years to concentrations more than 30% higher than previous observed peaks during the last 400 thousand years.

The words on the chart say:

“The warm spells… occur every 100,000 years or so and last about 10,000 years, driven by changes in earth’s orbit and orientation. Historically, temperatures rose first, then CO2 increased, accelerating temperature rise. Sea levels followed in turn…”

Well, that all makes sense according to the current dogma; but it’s not what the pictures show in three of the panels. Look at the left-most panel: note that the sea did all of its rising BEFORE either temperature or CO2 increased from their periodic lows and that the sea levels started down before the peak of the warming. Things that come after can’t cause things that come before.

In the fourth panel, the one we live in, and in the third panel, sea levels start to increase before warming begins although both then proceed together. Only in the second panel do rising sea levels and rising temperatures appear to co-occur.

It could be that the rising sea level cause warming. We can easily tell ourselves a story to explain that. When temperatures are low and there is little ice-free ocean, there is little evaporation from the sea. Snow fall decreases. Glaciers do sublimate (evaporate into the air) as well as tumble into the sea. If there isn’t enough snow to balance the ice loss, the extent of glaciation goes down, the earth is less reflective, it absorbs more sunlight, and it heats up. No reason to believe this story either – or think it is the “only” explanation; but we can tell from the pictures that neither warming nor rising CO2 levels are responsible for triggering the rise in sea levels (although they may accelerate it) since the sea levels “usually” (in our small sample) start to rise first.

Let’s take a closer look at our own time. Here it is bigger below:

 

   

Note that temperatures have been on a plateau for the last eight thousand years or so, unlike the other three periods where there was a sharp peak. This is unlikely to have been caused by our ancestors who were scarce and not yet indulging in agriculture let alone industry. Also note that during much of the last eight thousand years, temperatures have been HIGHER than today. The words on the chart say “11 of the 12 warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.” Yeah, but we haven’t been keeping records for very long. Temperatures are shown significantly higher (and sea levels and CO2 concentrations lower) about six thousand years ago.

This interglacial period, known as the Holocene, IS different than the three which preceded it: the temperature and sea level graphs are flat rather than peaked and it’s already lasted two thousand years longer than usual. This departure from recent history is NOT anthropogenic even though the very recent rise in CO2 concentration probably is.

It’s dangerous to conclude anything at all by looking at just 400,000 years of data from earth’s 4 plus billion year life. It’s possible that ALL the apparent patterns we see here are random. But even a small amount of data can be enough to disprove a hypothesis. This data, for example, shows that it is incorrect to say or imply that rising sea levels are always caused by or always follow (two different statement if you read them carefully) rising temperatures. So lowering the temperature (even if we were able) might not make the sea stop rising and higher temperatures could lead to lower seas – perhaps because of more snowfall.

The data also shows that temperatures today are NOT historically high, even by Holocene standards and that temperatures have been higher when CO2 concentrations are lower. That DOES NOT invalidate the prediction that the historically high CO2 concentrations will lead to higher temperatures and higher sea levels; it just makes the forecast less certain and should make us all more determined to question assertions that a specific increase in CO2 will certainly lead to a known increase in global temperature and a known increase in sea levels. Climate is too chaotic for such predictions; too little is known about the cause of past dramatic changes in all three variables.   

See the previous post for whether skepticism means inaction.

Global Warming, Skepticism, and Analysis Paralysis

Last decade I was skeptical that there was any significant current change occurring in global temperatures. Today I accept that average global temperature has increased about one degree Fahrenheit in the last hundred years but am skeptical both that this has statistical significance sufficient for predicting the next hundred years and that we know that the coincident dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide during this same hundred years is the cause of the temperature increase.

How can I persist in being so pigheaded? You may ask (some people have). Having been wrong before, wouldn’t it be better to keep quiet now?

Reader Adrian Cockburn comments:

“The global warming denialists are a small vocal minority who have been repeatedly shown to be cranks or have vested interests. There are also an increasing number of groups who are overstating the problem and confusing short term weather with long term climate change. For a skeptical and scientifically sound viewpoint I recommend tracking the Stoat blog http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/ Governments need to be upgrading levees and sea defenses in areas at risk, we should expect more disasters due to larger fluctuations in weather patterns, and we should be reducing CO2 levels.”

I have no vested interest in denying global warming although am, perhaps, a crank. But I thoroughly agree with Adrian that “skeptical” and “scientifically sound” go together and that short term weather should not be confused with long term climate. Skepticism isn’t denial; it’s the right way to approach both observations and hypotheses. It was right – not wrong – to be skeptical of last decade’s observations even though the more moderate of them proved to be correct and it is right to be skeptical of current accepted wisdom even if it’s subscribed to by exPresidential candidates and legions of scientists endorsed by the UN. But skepticism is not denial! It would be just as unskeptical and unscientific to say categorically that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have NOT affected the pace of global warming as it is to assert that they are, beyond reasonable doubt, the main cause of the recent acceleration.

Reader Mike Kowalchik writes:

“I agree that there is a tremendous amount of hubris in believing that we are in control of our climate / environment. I also have a personal theory (I'm sure shared by many others) that human beings are *awful* at understanding complex systems with lots of interacting variables. We're terrible at understanding real cause and effect as you point out…

“This does however bring up a problem with the argument you're making. Like you say, there is a possibility that we *are* causing global warming. There is no way to use the scientific method to prove or disprove this hypothesis however. It's not a system we can reduce, or isolate variables effectively. There is also only one climate, so experimentation is impractical as well. This is one of the reasons "the science isn't conclusive" argument put forth by many people really bothers me, it will never be conclusive.

“If we have no control over climate, then so be it, but if we *do* isn't it worth it to try to control the variables we can? I have my doubts whether we truly understand what's going on, but if we control only a few of the inputs to the system, I think it behooves us to try and reduce and/or manage those inputs.”

Couldn’t agree more with Mike. Life isn’t business school. You can’t wait until all the facts are in to act. Not acting is an act in itself. He’s also right that we don’t have any laboratory – except history – in which to do climate experiments and we can’t control the historic variables.

Since it is often necessary to act before we certain, it is especially necessary to remain skeptical even AFTER we act. It is a huge mistake to convince ourselves that we’re certain of something just because we have a need to act. When we act in advance of certainty – which we usually do in real life – then we MUST remain open to the possibility that the actions we’re taking will be proven wrong. We must discover our mistakes as soon after we make them as possible and correct them without hesitation.

If we convince ourselves that all global warming is CERTAINLY a result of manmade CO2 and that we know how to affect the climate by reducing it, then we open ourselves to huge dangers including the following:

1. we spend huge resources reducing CO2; the effort has no significant effect; global warming accelerates;  we wasted critical money and time which we should have been spending relocating people from coastal areas.
2. we reduce CO2 just as some other cycle reverses and we find ourselves having to deal with intense global cooling which would have been mitigated by the current CO2 levels (after all, the onset of another ice age is about due).
3. we take radical steps like adding reflective ash to the atmosphere or recycling deep ocean water (some – not me – would include building new nukes in this category) and end up with drastic and unforeseen consequences.

Instead, we need to proceed skeptically. This does mean working rapidly towards reducing the use of fossil fuels per capita of “developed world” life style – especially since many more people are becoming rich enough to enjoy that lifestyle. We’d have to do that for economic reasons anyway.

We do need to study – but not begin to implement – some of the more drastic countermeasures against warming in case it continues and leads to rising water levels (itself not a certainty).

We need to spend relief money on moving people out of constantly flooded areas rather than rebuilding in situ.

We also need to continue to try to DISPROVE both the hypothesis that anthropogenic CO2 is causing global warming and the hypothesis the global warming inevitably leads to higher ocean levels. Why? Not because we know they’re wrong or even because we want them to wrong but because we ARE acting on these hypotheses and need to find out as quickly as we can if we’re doing the wrong things. We need to be skeptical.

Personal notes: I’m greatly influenced at the moment by philosopher/trader/skeptical empiricist Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose Fooled by Randomness I’ve just read and whose Black Swan I’m now enjoying greatly.

We’ve “acted” personally by installing solar hot water, getting the permit for and preparing to install photovoltaic generating capacity, and beginning the installation of a geothermal heat pump. So skeptics CAN act, although our actions are motivated as much by the desire to reduce dependence on imported fuel as to reduce emissions. 

Causes of Global Warming – Are We Fooled By Hubris?

According to Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness we like to tell ourselves stories, perhaps to aid in remembering otherwise unrelated events. Often these stories can mislead us because we tend to assume that events which come first are the cause of events which come after even though the events may actually be either unrelated or both the independent results of some unknown third event. Philosophers are sufficiently aware of this fallacy to give it a Latin name – post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Among other examples, Taleb, who is a trader, points to the absurd sound bites in the daily financial press which ascribe a cause to every statistically insignificant market move. If the market moves fast enough, the same cause is often used for the move in both directions.

Taleb points out that scientists are no more immune to bad logic and group think than the rest of us. Those who mistook scientific consensus for proven fact “knew” that the earth was flat and that the sun circled it.

We have another tendency in our storytelling according to me: we humans like to be the cause of everything. We hate being helpless. Think of all the stories about the wrath of various gods in all the mythologies of the world. The people were sinful so God destroyed the city; the woman was vain so the Goddess punished her; the sacrifice was not properly prepared and therefore…

What these stories really say is that we control the gods and not vice versa. My friend W, who prefers to remain anonymous, pointed out to me that the sale of indulgences to those who felt a need for some kind of forgiveness is another example of man controlling God. He also pointed out that there are resemblances between individual purchases of carbon credits and indulgences. Hmm….

The arguments in favor of the hypothesis that human-caused increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are unfortunately laced with post hoc ergo proctor hoc thinking:  many past warming cycles have been accompanied by a significant increase in CO2 (fact); therefore, the current increase in atmospheric CO2 (which is probably attributable mostly to human activity) MUST be causing the causing the recent short-term (so far) acceleration in global warming (conjecture) and that warming will continue unless humans reduce their production of CO2 (prediction).

It is quite possible that all of the above hypothesis, conjectures, and predictions are right. It is also possible that some or all of them are wrong. Unfortunately, it is critically important that we figure this all out. For example, if the oceans are going to continue to rise no matter what we do (as they have many times in the past clearly without our help because we weren’t there) and if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are NOT causing global warming, we should be spending money directly on plans to deal with billions of coastal refugees rather than on reducing coal burning or in carbon sequestration (or on rebuilding coastal properties destroyed by storms in the same about-to-be-inundated places).

It hurts to believe that we have almost no control over our environment. Somehow it’s psychologically more comfortable to believe that it’s all our fault (or at least the fault of our neighbors with SUVs) and we have it within our control to placate the gods or nature with some well-designed sacrifice.

The assumption that climate is within our control is hubris even though it may eventually be true. There is stuff – lots of stuff – that we neither understand nor control. Many civilizations spent much of their declining fortunes in rituals and monuments designed to ward off the effects of climate change and other catastrophes they didn’t cause – but wanted to believe they were in control of. Everyone knew that witches were responsible for crop failures – most people even “knew” who the witches were.

We have to answer critically important questions like is the current warming trend short or long-term? Is it reversible? Did we contribute to it or cause it? In either case, can we reverse it? if warming continues, will seas continue to rise (not  a given because snowfall patterns as well as temperature govern glacier extent)? We’ll have to takes many actions before all the results are known since no action is an action in itself.

This will all take our best thinking but Nassim Taleb’s point is that we are not actually designed to think very well. We have the same brains as the people who believed the earth was flat and who conducted witch trials. In order to do good thinking, we have to be aware of and fight against our tendency to tell ourselves stories when no story line actually exists. I’d add that we also have to watch our tendency to cast ourselves as major characters – even villains – rather than believe that we are just bystanders.

Does skepticism imply inaction? Nope – next post.

Rent vs. Buy – ooma

A company called ooma offers a clear alternative for buying domestic phone service rather than renting it. For an introductory price of just $399 you can buy a box which you attach to your Internet connection and, optionally, any phone line you may have. You plug your regular house phones into the box.  Forever after, says the company, you can make “free” calls to anyone with a US phone number.

How can ooma offer free unlimited calls to ordinary US phones? A previous post in Fractals of Change points out that companies like Skype and Vonage have to pay local phone monopolies per minute of connection to their subscribers. That’s why Skype only allows free calls when both parties are connected through the Internet and charges SkypeOut rates to call ordinary phones; that’s why Vonage must charge a fixed amount per month.

Nope, ooma’s not ad-supported.

Ooma gets around the toll booths of the local phone companies (are Verizon and at&t really local?) by making all calls local and taking advantage of the fact that most local calls in the US are free of tolls. If you have an ooma device which is also attached to the local phone system, you are helping out by being a GATEWAY (remember that word) which fellow ooma owners use to call local numbers in your neighborhood; you are relaying their calls into the local phone network. Here’s how ooma explains it all in their FAQs:

“ooma's patent-pending call-routing algorithm—Distributed Termination—uses the internet to connect local calling areas throughout the United States for free instead of relying primarily on traditional phone switches, known as the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). As a result, each ooma customer who maintains their landline helps grow the ooma network. ooma’s call-routing technology ensures a completely transparent experience so that the ability to make and receive phone calls is not impacted when their line is in use by another ooma caller.

“As an example: Let's say you want to call “Claire” in Boston. You simply pick up the phone and dial. The ooma call is routed via the internet to an ooma customer with a landline in the 617 area code (let's call her “Cassy”). Cassy's ooma device (in Boston) completes the call by acting as a gateway and routes the call from her broadband to her landline, which is used to place a free call to your friend Claire. All this is done without any interruption to Cassy's phone service. In fact, Cassy doesn’t even know her landline is in use and shall still be able to make and take phone calls.”

Gateways have been around as long as VoIP. My old company ITXC installed gateways at telephone companies and alternative telcos around the world. Often these enabled us to deliver international calls at domestic termination rates instead of having to pay artificially high international tolls. Companies like Skype and Vonage use gateways directly or indirectly for exactly the same reason  - the gateways let them sell cheaper international calls than they would be able to do if they had to pay international PSTN tolls.

But the gateways which carriers like ITXC, Skype, and Vonage use are massive and switch hundreds of calls at a time. They are usually interconnected to telco switches. Ooma is using one call at a time gateways distributed among box owners and connected to single phone lines. They are bypassing the billing side of the telco switches.

This is an interesting idea but not as unique as ooma claims (I’m not commenting on their patent since I haven’t read it). Ham radio operators provided local bridges for each other into phone systems even in pre-Internet days. VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, probably building on his ham radio background, supported gateways in the 1990s version of FreeWorldDialup (note: FreeWorldDialup is now FWD International and I’m an investor in and board member of that along with Jeff but I was not associated with the original company).

Predictions:

• One way or another, phone calls will become as free of incremental charges as email is today.

• The carriers will take legal action to block ooma service. They will claim that customers are not allowed to provide this kind of bridging and that ooma is disguising “long distance” calls as local calls. Make no mistake, success by ooma and/or others lke them would leave a big hole in the domestic termination revenues which at&t and Verizon and other last mile telco providers receive and domestic termination is very lucrative.

• You’ll hear more about gateways – at least on Fractals of Change.

This series on rent vs. buy starts here.

Rent vs. Buy – Photovoltaic Electricity and Common Infrastructure

In Vermont as in most other places in the US, net metering is available to those who install “alternative” power sources including solar photovoltaic. The sound bite for net metering is that your energy source “runs your electric meter backwards”.

We have no intention of disconnecting from the power grid. If we did, we’d have to buy a huge bank of batteries and still probably wouldn’t have enough electricity for our very electric life style during gloomy winter days. With net metering the grid takes the economic place of the batteries. When the sun shines, we pump power into the grid and build up a (financial) credit. When we consume power, we run up a bill like anyone else but we can use our credit to pay it. In Vermont, the credits last twelve months: if you generate more power than you use over a rolling twelve month period, that power is a “contribution” to the grid. You don’t get paid for it.

Technical note: You don’t really use your own electrons with net metering (just in case you can tell one electron from another). You sell all the power you produce to the grid; you buy all the power you use from the grid. In fact, if the grid goes down, you have no way to use the power you’re generating because you have nothing to buffer between fluctuating supply and fluctuating demand. The grid’s your battery. We have a propane generator installed for grid outages.

As in the other examples in this series of posts, we’re buying capital equipment – photovoltaic cells and all that goes with them – to reduce or eliminate the rent we pay for other people’s generating facilities. But this buy rather than rent decision would be even more impractical than it already is if the common infrastructure of the electric grid and the other power sources tied to it were not in place just as personal cars would be impractical if there weren’t a common infrastructure of roads.

The economics of this project aren’t good even with relatively high electric prices where we live (over $.20/kwh and rising), a rebate from the State of Vermont, a small federal tax credit, and the right to sell power back to the utility at the same retail rate we buy it (not a good deal for the utility). We justify it the same way we do our garden or our sailboat – it’s something we want to do. And we’d rather buy than rent. We do look forward to helping (in a tiny, tiny way) to reduce the amount of oil that the US imports from unfriendly and unstable places and, if global warming does turn out to accelerated by CO2 production, then we’ll have helped environmentally in a token way.

To be accurate, in our case the fossil-fuel savings is pretty indirect and reduction in imported oil even more of a stretch. The majority of Vermont’s power comes from a combination of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and HydroQuebec. During peak period, some of our power comes from natural gas generators and some from wherever the big grid gets it. But, in theory at least, the power we’re generating makes more of Vermont’s clean power available somewhere else which is not so clean and green.

Another social benefit is that small power sources help reduce the need for building more big ones – the kind no one likes to live next to. Moreover more decentralized generating capability means less dependence on long distance transmission lines and a somewhat more catastrophe and terror proof infrastructure.

Back to the main point: our ability to buy our power generation rather than rent it is dependant on existing common infrastructure. We couldn’t do it on our own without either hugely greater expense or a big change in life style. Coming up is how this all ties to telecommunications.

This series of posts on rent vs. buy starts here.

Livestrong

The post below was written by my nephew Cody Clinton, a second year medical student. The "grandmother" he writes about is my mother who, for the last twenty plus years has bravely battled the horrors of Parkinsons and the side effects of the medicines which slow but don't stop its progression.

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LIVESTRONG

What does this word mean to you? Is it about living healthy, exercising, and studying hard? Most medical students would probably agree. Could it be a state of mind; a belief system affirming you will not accept what others tell you will inevitably occur? For a lot of cancer survivors, this may have been a mantra that kept them alive. But could it be the exact opposite? Could it be accepting what others tell you about your road ahead, even when you know it scares the hell out of you? Ask a terminally ill patient. My guess is that they relate better to this last admission, are prepared to end their life, and may even feel more at peace about their situation than you do. For a family member, this is a tough pill to swallow.

So, what is the true meaning of livestrong? This was a question I asked myself over the last few weeks. I experienced all of these different scenarios above, albeit some vicariously, and still struggled with the answer. The problem being, that each group of people was absolutely committed to their own ideals. They were convinced that they were right and were not about to change their minds, in spite of the best advice of those around them. Never had I seen more determined individuals in all of my life. Unfortunately, it took 24 years to see it. Fortunately, it took getting my head out of the books and grasping the opportunity to experience real medicine for the first time since I entered medical school.

It all began on August 26^th, when students at our college provided medical support for bike riders taking part in a 100 mile Livestrong Challenge. First, let me preface by saying that a 100-mile bike race in extremely hot conditions, on a hilly course is not easy. It is a grueling test of your endurance, muscle strength, and mental composure. In short, it is downright masochistic. I do not recommend it. Yet these riders were out in full force. The riders were largely composed of cancer survivors, as well as family members, friends, and loved ones of cancer victims. There was even one female rider who flew in from Chicago and completed the entire course while in the middle of a chemotherapy regimen! It was absolutely jaw dropping. A member of our medical team, who had recently battled Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, described this rider as “ needing to finish the race, in order to keep her mind off the reality and gravity of her own situation.” By the way, this medical student waited at the finish line, even while the race was over, and made sure that her newly found friend made it to the end.

Over the course of the day, we witnessed riders speeding down flats and attacking hills, completely by themselves. Yet, you could feel that deep down they were back on the pavement with their old friends or loved ones, rehashing past experiences. It is a very difficult scenario to have to imagine and an extremely sobering sight to see. It meant much more that simply finishing a long bike ride, instead signifying a step closer to maybe finding some closure to a situation that they were not ready to face. You could see in all of the riders’ faces that living strong was much more than just a physical challenge, but an emotional challenge one as well.

The next unexpected development occurred shortly thereafter, on a morning when the only decision I was planning on making was whether I wanted hazelnut or regular coffee to get me through the morning. I received a call from my family notifying me that my grandmother was in septic shock and might not make it through the day. I immediately rushed up to the hospital where she was being treated, not knowing whether I would be staring at a blank corpse or my last remaining grandparent. Thankfully, she was still alive, was being stabilized, and had a good prognosis. Yet, even stable, she was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure, a collapsed lung, immobility, and blindness. I wanted to do everything in my power to get her better as quick as possible and back into her home where we could take care of her. But this was not what she wanted. What she desired, and had told my mother repeatedly, was not to be resurrected every time she fell ill, but rather left to let “nature take its course” and die in her own home. I wasn’t ready to hear this kind of news. After some tough reflective time, it soon became clear that the choice my grandmother had made was completely justified because it was what she wanted, not what the people around her felt was best.

Witnessing these difficult decisions gets me thinking about what the term livestrong means for patients that are nearing the end of their lives. For them, living strong is about being confident in their choice to die. Terminally ill patients, unlike the riders and cancer patients, do not find strength from rage or unresolved opportunities. They take solace knowing that they have fought hard, and hopefully will find a place that rids them of their suffering and rewards them for their sacrifices. For them, livestrong is about resolution.

The truth is, as I am sure you know, is that the meaning of this word conjures a different ideology for each person and likely will vary throughout his or her life.  Gratefully, we are all distinct. Yet, we all share a similar passion. Health professionals, cancer survivors, and hospice patients alike, we all want to be content with our actions and decisions throughout our lives. It doesn’t matter if these decisions might not be the most sensible, or if we are going “against the norm”. As long as in the end, we have weighed all our options and trusted our own instincts, can we can go to sleep soundly. Only then, will the word livestrong hold meaning.

Recovery Log – Can Geek Squad Save the Data?

As previously posted, since I forgot to back up the Quicken files on Mary’s computer, they weren’t available at our online backup service to be restored after her hard drive crashed. Maybe, I thought, Geek Squad can save me from my stupidity so I hustled off to Best Buy with the drive-dead Dell.

Explained the problem to the young man behind the geek counter; he was pretty kempt for a geek.

“All we can do,” he said, “is send it out to a data recovery service. That’ll cost you between fifteen hundred and three thousand dollars.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Can you try booting with some other startup disk and then see if they data’s recoverable?”

“No,” he said. “That might infect our machines.”

“Huh?” I asked. “Don’t you have a boot disk you could put in the CD drive and then see if the hard drive is visible or do something to it?”

“All we can do is send it out.” Wrong geek, I thought.

“How do you know the problem is the boot drive?” he asked. Should’ve asked that first, I thought, but showed him the messages while I tried to boot up and hoped that actually looking at the computer would spark his interest.

“Yup, the drive is bad,” he said. “All we can do is send it out.”

I left. Almost certainly will key in the data I can’t extract from the banks and credit card companies. But, if I ever can find a boot CD around, will see for my own satisfaction if I’m a better geek than the young man. Will also try dismembering the Dell and putting it back together just on general principles since I can’t hear the hard drive running any more (it was loud just before and during failure). Reader suggestions welcome.

FWD on Facebook Because No Network Should Be An Island

FWD, (formerly FreeWorldDialup) which I am an investor in and board member of, has released the first version of VoiceMail for Facebook. Think of this as the first footings for a bridge that will connect users regardless of what social network they use rather than as an application only for Facebook users (although that’s what it is today).

If you’re a Facebook user, give it a try.

In the very near future, all of the many FWD members will be able to exchange VM with each other as well as with Facebook members who install this app. Soon after that the FWD team, headed by CEO Dan Berninger, will begin interconnecting users of other social networks with each other and with the many SIP-based VoIP networks which already peer with (connect to) FWD. APIs will be open, of course, so that any social or other kind of network that wants can connect itself.

VoiceMail itself is just an interesting opening wedge for FWD on social networks. Ever since Chairman Jeff Pulver founded the service in 1995, it has been providing Internet-based connectivity. FWD is about real-time communication between people and supports both voice and instant messaging and was an early showcase for features like presence management which don’t exist on the PSTN (the legacy phone network).

When physical phone service started over one hundred years ago, each community was an island. Gradually – more gradually than you would think – these islands were interconnected by “long distance” service. When email began, it was on closed networks like MCI Mail and CompuServe or within enterprises. Then there were special purpose gateways from one network to another. Finally, the Internet, SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol), and DNS (Domain Name Service), made it possible to connect all users of email regardless of their mailhost – without any intermediary service provider in the middle or charging tolls.

At FWD we believe that real-time Internet-based communication including voice is ready to move from islands of service – think of Skype and Facebook as big islands – to universal connectivity. We think that off-island service will be as free of incremental costs as on-island service is today. This Internet-based communication – unlike today’s islands of VoIP service – is a much more capable replacement for, not an evolution of, the current tolled phone service.

FWD’s role is to be the service ENABLER for this communication, not the service PROVIDER. We don’t think of FWD as a network (although it technically is) but as a bridge between networks, social and otherwise. Stay tuned.

Jeff posted about FWD VoiceMail here.

Dan York posted an excellent detailed description of the service here.

Andy Abramson mistook our first landfall for island-forming. We’ll have to communicate better.

At Least Verizon Isn’t GFing the FCC

When  I was at the old AT&T, the unlovely word “grin-fucking” – GFing for short - was used to describe the common practice of pretending to agree with someone while preparing to stab him or her in the back. Verizon Wireless, however, is being right out front in its opposition to the part of the FCC order for the 700MHz spectrum auction which requires that the winning bidder for the C band keep that spectrum open for user-chosen devices and applications. Here’s the meat of what they filed:

Not surprisingly, Verizon doesn’t want you to use “their” spectrum to download ringtones or games from anyone else. More seriously, they wouldn’t want you to use VoIP over WiFi or something nasty like that and bypass their tollbooths. Since they don’t really need this spectrum anyway but have a lot to gain by making sure it doesn’t fall into dangerous competing hands like say Google, it makes all the sense in the world for them to file suit and gain either delay or change.

But it is surprising that at&t, after initially opposing the FCC’s openness provision, now says that they can live with it and that it is a reasonable compromise between what Google wanted and what they wanted. Why is at&t being so reasonable?

Could it be that the new at&t understands GFing as well as its predecessor? Could it be that they are confident of their ability to avoid actually complying with these conditions even if they nominally agree with them? Could that confidence be based on the fact that the FCC does not seem to be enforcing the conditions which at&t agreed to just last year for buying BellSouth? Or on the fact that neither Congress or the executive branch or the judiciary has ever forced them to live up to all the promises for investment and new services they made in return for deregulation? Or are they confident because anti-trust seems to be out of style and the Justice Department has advised that “competition” will determine whether net neutrality is a good idea?

Hmmm…

At least we know where Verizon stands.