Dreamworks' Katzenberg: “The number one aspirational purchase of Wal*Mart customers is a big screen TV. This is a challenge for the movie industry. Movie theaters are not honoring their customers. They must innovate or die.”
Scott McNealy: “Technology has the shelf life of a banana.”
“We have no privacy. Get over it. And we are doing dumb stuff. Facebook and MySpace are like permanent online digital tattoos. Post some drunken photos from the party. Employers are having a much easier time doing due diligence.”
Paul Saffo (moderator on right): We are preserving all that we will want to forget.
Yang Yuanqing, Chairman of Lenovo, acquired IBM’s PC business, and so he thought he should learn English for the first time. A year later, he is on a panel in America speaking just fine.
Tying them all together is Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD. (conference agenda)
Tags: AMD Global Vision conference Talking Heads Katzenberg McNealy Hector Ruiz Lenovo Saffo
Last night at AMD GlobalVision, a room of tech execs confronted 100,000 LEGOs. The challenge: build “what the world needs now.” Most of the projects had some solar or green or goodness theme.
This was the most whimsical entry for what the world needs now: a “DARPA orgasmatron”.
This unfortunate ex-IDEO volunteer was transformed into a LEGO-borg that made manifest a number of topics brought up earlier in the conference (see Notes). VS Ramachandran spoke of a magnetic pulse helmet that can enhance creativity temporarily, mimicking the enhanced creativity of people with frontal temporal dementia (I am currently reading his book on phantom limb pain).
A DARPA doctor and med tech speaker described some freaky body modifications, posing the rhetorical question “What would a monkey do if it had a third hand?” Here is the answer.
We also learned from Søren Lund that the world’s largest manufacturer of tires is LEGO at 300 million per year.
Tags: Woody Allen LEGO Design Contest AMD Global Vision creativity play DARPA VS Ramachandran Søren Lund
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
Tags: Puzzle NASCAR AMD interior roll cage Stock Car race
I had the great honor to have lunch with James Watson. I will try to collect some of the especially spunky gems to share on a later post.
Here you see as the proud new owner of a LEGO Double Helix kit.
It was a symbolic gift, since Watson’s breakthrough technique in 1953 involved fiddling with 3D metal models.
“We needed a shortcut, so we build a model instead of solving a formula. Our three strand model was crap, so I was told to build no models… So, it all happened in about two hours. We went from nothing to thing.” (from an earlier talk)
(blog on his child-like mind)
Tags: Watson DNA Helix James Watson AMD GlobalVision lunch LEGO Nobel
Secret to his success: “Go to where there are smart people. It’s very boring to be with dumb people.”
“Schizophrenia is the essence of stupidity. If you tweak it the other way, you may have the essence of intelligence. We may find out why some people play the piano better than others.”
“Two companies are sequencing my DNA. I told them they can publish everything except for genes indicating a propensity for Alzheimer’s. There is no cure yet.”
“There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy about our government. It is being run by rich white trash. They have no regard for truth or reality.”
When asked about Francis Collins’ book about discovering God as a scientist: “He’s the only scientist I know who believes what he does. Our morality is in our human nature. Religion does not correlate with morality.”
When pushed, “I’ve just tried to avoid God as much as possible. As Darwin said, it does no good to try to convince others not to believe in God.”
(At lunch, I asked him why he held his punches on that one topic, and he had a pragmatic reply: “much of my funding comes from sources that would be insulted by an attack on religion.”)
“Instead of causes, we should ask why people don’t get cancer. There are natural inhibitors. Much of the current research on cancer is misguided.”
When asked if we will discover a cure for aging: “Well, we’ve been pretty successful with plastic surgery. (laughter) Alzheimer’s is the issue. Without a cure, our country would not benefit from living much longer.”
When asked about parents that genetically screen embryos: “I can’t think of a better use of money.”
“People talk of the danger of discovering that someone has stupid genes. But we already know they are stupid!”
“Unsuccessful psychopaths are in prison. Successful ones are in temp employment agencies. Instead of 3% of the population, maybe it’s 30%.”
And an emotional disclosure that seems to lie at the root of his passion: “We have a compromised child. We made so many mistakes parenting him because we didn’t know. We could have been a better parent from age two to five… Oh, the misery. I just want knowledge.”
Tags: AMD Global Vision conference James Watson Nobel Jaron Lanier Saffo Watson James D. Watson DNA