Tempus Fugit

Time flies when you're having fun... Or when you just simply get busy, as I am prone to do from time to time.
I guess the start of the academic year at WPI has put a real damper on my blogging... Sorry about that.  Three months have passed since my last entry and -- of course -- lots has happened in the meantime.
Where to start?  There is no way I can summarize everything in this entry, so I will just hit the highlights and will fill in the details later.  First of all, let me say that I am writing this from Venice, where I have returned since the last blog entry which I wrote from here.  I am sitting in the NEW Venice Project Center office, which is far better than the legendary VPC of yesteryear.  We are now on the "other" side of the Grand Canal (de ultra as our ancestors would say), near the Rialto market, on the Fondamenta de le Tette, whose translation is unsuited for underaged readers of this blog. Suffices to say that it has to do with the "oldest profession in the world".
Since August, Nick and I have returned to the US where he started his studies at Quinsigamond College in Worcester.  I am very proud of him for getting himself on the college track, which, among other things, also involved getting his driver's license.  These are major milestones for Nicolo', veritable rights of passage that mark the relentless trajectory of our lives.
While Nick stayed back on Castle Lane to get ready for his new life as a full-time student, I managed to go sailing quite a bit: first with Jonathan a couple of times, then with my MIT advisor Joe Ferreira and finally with my WPI friends Dave and Natalie.  I also traveled to Santa Fe twice to set up the 6 projects for the first full contingent of 24 WPI students who will spend term D at the newly minted Santa Fe Project Center (SFPC) with me and former provost John Orr.  I enjoyed living in Steve Guerin's former home overlooking "the city different", with our Croatian guests from GIScloud (Marko and Dino), whose "google docs of GIS" was well received at MIT and deserves a separate blog entry of its own.  I had fun with my friends there while I got a lot work done and was invited back during term A to give a presentation to the statewide Metropolitan Planning Commissions meeting in September.  Steve and I have proposed a major project to the NM State Transportation Commissioner, which promises to transform mobility into a full-fledged utility -- like water or electricity -- with end-of-the-month billing for one's transportation usage...
Revolutionary.

I had to leave Nick in Massachusetts on his own, while I spend term B in Venice with 27 WPI students, who have been working on seven very challenging and important projects for my hometown since October 24:

1. The redesign and release of Venipedia - the hyperlocal wikipedia for Venice we created in 2008
2. The continuation of our DNA project on the origins of the Veneti (or Venets as some call us)
3. The creation of PreserVenice - a non-profit for the preservation of Venice's material culture
4. The assessment of the impacts of Cruise Ships on Venice and its inhabitants
5. The re-measurement of canals, to see what changed in the 15 years since our initial UNESCO studies
6. The creation of a pedestrian model for the city with a mobile app to catch the elusive vaporetti
7. The study of the evolution of Venice's retail sector since WWII

Each of these projects warrants an entry of its own, which I will put together once some final results begin to emerge.  For now, click on the links above to take a look at each team's web page.
Since I've been here in Venice, a lot has happened as well.  I've driven to Ljubljana (Slovenia), which is a mere couple of hours from Venice, and I managed three important meetings there: (1) a lecture at the University of Ljubljana's Dept. of Electrical Engineering thanks to our old contact from the failed Divertimi EU project, Marko Tkalcic, (2) a dinner with Robi Petric who runs the veneti.info web site and is eager to collaborate in our quest for the genetic origins of the Veneti, and (3) a pick up of 2 portable aethalometers from Grisa Mocnic of Aerosol thanks to the kindness of VPC alumn Jeff Blair and of Tony Hansen of Magee Scientific.  These instruments have been monitoring emissions from cruise ships since I returned from my overnight trip to Slovenia.
Shortly after that, we had a weekend visit from Evie Ansel, who is helping with our project to restore traditional Venetian watercrafts, and who also had the fortune to participate in a one-of-a-kind orienteering race by row boat on the canals of Venice, courtesy of the glorious Settemari aeno-ludo-gastronomic association.  Even though we placed 8th out of 10, we did well and had lots of fun finding the culinary check points in the meanders of Venice's waterways that I know so well.
Right now, I am hosting my freshman year roommate from WPI, Ruudje Arends and his son Jake who is studying in Amsterdam, the Venice of the North.  Even though we all support Pitura Freska's desire to turn Venice into the Amsterdam of the South, the connection with Holland is that Jacob Rudolph Arends III and the IV are from Aruba, which is part of the Netherland Antilles, so they are actually Dutch nationals.  Sadly, Jacob Rudolph Arends Jr., Rudy's dad, died just days before this long-planned trip, so we're doing our best to make it a merry occasion.  I hadn't seen Rudy for a quarter century and it's been great to catch up with him.  He just left today.  We are going to reconvene in Amsterdam with Joe Moreau on 11/11/11 for the 30-year reunion of the famed IAO - Italo Aruban/American Organization.  It's already in my calendar.
Thursday, the students will cook the traditional Venice Thanksgiving dinner, one week early, at the Settemari clubhouse.  It's a great way to mark the midpoint of the term, before the long holiday break next week.
At the end of this week (Friday), I fly back to the US for Thanksgiving week, so I can interview 48 WPI students who would like to come to Venice next year, plus 12 who want to go to Santa Fe in 2012.  Despite my best efforts to dissuade perspective students from applying en masse, Venice is still one of the most attractive of WPI's global project centers.  Santa Fe also is the most popular of WPI's domestic centers. I will pay the price of such popularity by interviewing 60 students in three days starting next Monday -- a non-stop marathon from 7am to 10pm, with a student every half hour...
But I will get to see Nick and that will more than make up for it.  I really miss the man. We spent so much time together for the past couple of years that it's hard to not see him for a whole month.

As usual, I have a lot of irons in the fire, but I am managing to keep things from getting too hectic.  And I am squeezing in some fun times in there as well, as I am apt to do.

Nevertheless, even when one tries to live in the now, "clock time" ticks away incessantly...

Until the next now...

Shady business (Venice 3D)

After the recent release of the Google Sketchup 3D buildings for the entire city of Venice, all kinds of possibilities are opening up for us at the Venice Project Center.  We could map our numerous GIS layers onto the 3D city, as Kyle has done with our fountains dataset, but we can also start to attach information to each building as the fascicolo del fabbricato has never been able to really do.

More interestingly (albeit possibly less usefully), we can perhaps exploit the underlying 3D models to produce three-dimensional applications that we could only dream of before.  Steve and I toyed around with the idea of visualizing building data by projecting infographics onto the physical 3D model of Boston and even went as far as proposing a 3D, head-tracking, single-person viewer of a virtual 3D model of Boston.  I wonder if these are now feasible in Venice.  It may be great fodder for a fall IQP.  I'll have Ben check into the actual programmatic possibilities.
During the recent heat wave in Venice, I found myself walking around the city while purposely hugging walls and traipsing only where there was a cooling shade.  Some campi, like S. Maria Formosa and S.Zanipolo are mostly shadeless, and difficult to bypass without stepping out into the scorching sun, but I somehow managed to weave myself a variety of paths - variable depending on the time of day and the corresponding sun angle.  It made me think that a mobile app to steer one on the shadiest route would be "really cool" (pun intended).  Since in Venice we call a glass of wine an ombra, this app could appropriately steer wary travelers and locals alike from shade to shade by mixing the 3D projection algorithms of ambient pixel and redfish and the Google 3D buildings, while providing the location of "watering holes" both for water fountains (a la Kyle) or for wine and cicheti at the local bacaro.  It would be an interesting and marginally useful novelty that may steer tourists off the beaten path and into some of the more authentic parts of Venice...

Maybe we can combine it all with a Venitude app that might also buzz and divert the traveler when near places of interest, like public art or a visitable church or museum, as we have proposed in our Divertimi project with the EU, which we are still waiting to hear about.

Venetian DNA: a first look

Readers of this blog may recall several posts over the years concerning our quest to trace the origins of the Venetians using DNA analyses (type "dna" in the search box on the right of the blog to see them all) . There are competing theories and references to the legendary origins of the Veneti (or Enetoi?).
We're either originally from Paphlagonia, or from Lusatia (Poland) and we may or may not be related to the Veneti of Gaul (Britanny) mentioned by none other than Julius Caesar (see detailed map online). Since we learned that a study of DNA haplogroups may shed light on these hypotheses, we launched our Venice DNA Project in 2008.
The idea for the project was born in 2004, after I read  an article on the Phoenicians in National Geographic magazine. I bounced around the idea with WPI faculty colleagues for a while, until my happenstance stumbling upon a brief mention of the Genographics project in Wired magazine in 2007, which lead to my decision to begin exploring the topic in 2008.  That fall, thanks to the enterprising team of WPI students, we began our collaboration in the Genographics Project, collecting our first sample from my mentor Count Marcello, and continuing the collection in the fall of 2009, with the last team of WPI students studying the Origins of Venice and its inhabitants.
You may also remember the big flurry of media attention that we inadvertently attracted to this project in conjunction with the Funeral for Venice of venessia.com.  We are hoping that the release of our results will quell any leftover smolders from that overblown controversy.  This past May, the Genographics project released the results of the DNA analyses conducted on the 156 Venetian cheek-swabs we had sent to the Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.  After two years of work, we were finally able to look at the DNA evidence which Kyle faithfully tallied up for a first look at where we stand, his Canadianess betrayed by the use of French labels in the maps. Out of  the 156 samples we collected, 57 were not viewable on the Genographic site for one of two reasons: 34 were Invalid (not enough DNA?) and 23 others (labeled Faulty in pie chart) simply failed to show up on the site.  We have initiated an inquest on these issues and we are hoping to retrieve at least some of these unusable samples.  "In the end" (as Adrian is fond of saying), the total number of valid samples thus far is 99.  Two thirds of these (66 out 99) show the genetic pathway in the map above, which we are told is a very typical "European" trace (blue pie slice), which confirms that Venice has been a melting pot, rather than the home of a distinct gens. Ironically, my DNA (probably of Spanish origin), that of my brother-in-law Alberto Gallo (clearly a Gaul)  and Kyle Miller's (a Canadian of British descent) all had the same exact lineage, which we shared with the overwhelming majority of other participants as shown in the map at the top of the post.
 Of more interest to me are the two sets of samples which show a path through the Balcans (labeled "Greek" in pie) and perhaps the most intriguing one which I labeled Paphlagonian in the google chart, which looks like the map down here. Unfortunately, only 6 of our samples display this genealogical profile, which skirts all four of our main target areas: Trebizond, the Veneto, Britanny and the Baltic.  A DNA pattern that could reconcile all theories and references in the literature... hmmm!
While I was in Barcelona in June to visit Prof. David Comas, I perchance met a young Polish researcher, Krzyszof Rebala, who - by pure luck - happens to be focusing his attention on the Venedi of Poland, which he has thoroughly studied without finding any distinguishing trait to clearly separate them from other European populations.  So far then, the Venetians we sampled  do not seem to have any really striking DNA patterns nor do they seem to be related to the Wends of Lusatia, which paradoxically might give fuel to the controversial Venetic theory of a pre-celtic settlement of Veneti across the heart of Europe.
Since the Genographic project is slated to wrap up next summer, I discussed with Dr. Comas the options we have left to complete our research project.  Here is the plan I sketched out in Barcelona:

1. Collect another 100 samples in small villages in the Veneto hinterland to seek out purer DNA strands for the ancient Veneti of NE Italy
2. Collect 100 samples in Paphlagonia, near the Turkish city of Trebizond, with the help of Jeremy Chapman, whom I met in Istanbul in June
3. Collect 100 samples in Brittany where the Armorican tribe of seafaring Veneti (aided by Asterix's own tribe, I am sure) put up a good fight against Caesar's navy in the battle of Morbihan
4. Then match all these samples with the samples that Krzyszof has collected in Poland and see what, if any, match we may find across the four geographical areas.

I think these are challenging but interesting follow-ups that are worth pursuing, but the logistics are tough (and possibly costly).  We could definitely use some grant support to pull it out.  This may well be the mission we assign to this year's Origins team.  We shall see what happens.
More details on our results and on the final plans for this project in an upcoming post.

A Mediterranean "tour de feu"

After finally arriving in Venice on June 13 and welcoming the arrival of Ben Lichtner (the Brown intern from Santa Fe I mentioned in a recent post), Nick and I quickly departed again for a whirlwind (working) journey around the Mare Nostrum.

But first we spent some time with the nonni (Wilma and Cino), the zii (Barbara and Alberto) and the cuginetti (Barnaba and Samuele), met some friends and business associates, moved into our semi-habitable house and enjoyed some homemade nonna meals.
It was a brief but welcomed respite before Nick and I embarked on another epic coast-to-coast voyage, this time from the Western coast of the Mediterranean (Barcelona) to the Eastern one (Istanbul), and across the Aegean from Kos (Greece) to Athens (after navigating our way through Santorini and Ios).  Barcelona was wonderful, as was Istanbul, in different ways.  Nick and I were in Barcelona alone, then were joined by Laura Sabbadin in Turkey with whom we drove through Thrace and the Aegean coast of Anatolia down to Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus, an ok place, hence yellow on map), hitting Troy (disappointing: red on map), Pergamon (good: green) and Ephesus (very good).  We were all positively impressed by the hospitality of Turkish people. Nice!

Ben Lichtner caught up with us in Kos (not so good = yellow) and tracked back with us all the way to Athens (disappointing/red), by way of Santorini (good) and Ios (even better).  The markers with a black dot on the map signify overnight stopovers. We had fun adjusting to each culture, language and food, at times feeling like real tourists (i.e. slightly overcharged for inferior food or taken advantage of by suspicious taxi drivers), but generally adapting to the local mores with unexpected ease.  The trip had three work-related stops, each of which will be the subject of future posts .

1. In Barcelona, I finally met Prof. David Comas of the Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra whose research group has analyzed the 166 DNA samples of Venetians we collected in 2008 and 2009 for the Genographic project.  We discussed a joint research project.
2. In Istanbul, we met Jeremy Chapman, a recent WPI graduate and friend of Kyle's, a turcophile who has been living in Constantinople for a while and will be helping us organize future DNA collections in the Trebizond area of northern Turkey -- formerly known as Paphlagonia -- where the Veneti (or enetoi) are supposed to be coming from, according to authoritative, albeit not-necessarily-reliable, sources such as Homer, Titus Livius and Strabo.
3. In Kos, Greece, Ben and I were the last (dulcis in fundo or cherry-on-the-cake) presentation at the second annual WIT conference on the Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Forest Fires. The sandtable demo that Ben put together on the fly (after learning that Steve couldn't make the trip) awed and inspired the audience several of whom may follow-up with Simtable.

Since our flight back to Venice left from Athens, we were forced to visit the disappointing capital of Greece, whose only redeeming qualities, besides the Acropolis and the Archelogical Museum, is the absolute must-see of any Athenian tourist: the changing of the guards (every half hour or so) in front of the Greek υπουργείο of ανόητος  περιπάτους, which probably inspired the eponymous Monty Python's skit (or viceversa)...

Teşekkür-ler!  παρακαλώ!  Chencooyi!  Yakshemaz!

Oxford Energy Futures

After leaving the US on June 6th, Nick and I first stopped in Oxford, UK, where we spent a week at Rawlinson road with Kseniya, Adrian, Masha and Kiril (Karen was away in France on a wine-gathering tour).
While Nick enjoyed the local skateboarding scene, Adrian and I prepared for our joint lecture at the Oxford Energy Futures conference hosted by the Oxford University CPD center at Rewley House.  The conference was really interesting, spanning the gamut from wood-derived energy to nuclear fusion and everything in-between - solar, wind and tide energy being still the primary technologies of promise.
Our dual presentation was very well received, especially the Energence web site demo by Adrian and my shameless plug for Bump which entailed handing the Droid phone I got from Google I/O to the audience so they could shake the phone and see the beautifully hypnotic accelerometer display that Josh Thorp endowed the application with.  We met a number of notables at the conference and it appears likely that Adrian and I may be invited back to lecture at Oxford in the fall.  Quoite Noice!

I also made time for a bit more work on our Energence enterprise, which (in a nutshell) is a company that Adrian and I founded to allow municipalities to monitor compliance with CO2 emission targets, based on the  "Merton Rule", which is named after the London Borough of Merton, where Adrian and I concocted the idea of a "Merton Gauge" while he was the chief environmental officer there and I was advising a team of students from WPI, while on a stint at the WPI London Project Center. The Merton Rule is now a national standard adopted by all local governments in the UK and Adrian Hewitt, FRSA, is Mr. Merton Rule (also known as "the green evangelist").  In abidance to the Merton Rule, new buildings throughout Great Britain now have to produce 10-20% of their energy on site, using renewable technologies, in order to contribute to the abatement of the carbon footprint of the town as mandated by a national law.  Energence provides a simple, web-based system that makes it possible for city officials to check whether these installations actually meet their targets once the buildings are occupied and the renewable equipment is in operation.
Together with Constantin Windisch-Graetz, our chief financial officer who happens to be the descendant of a Styrian prince, Adrian and I traveled to Beaconsfield (inexplicably pronounced Baconsfield, a feature of British language that continues to puzzle those of us who aren't native speakers) to discuss municipal leasing programs with Ken Hunnisett and David Cranmer of Cranmer & Lawrence.
The confusingly palindromic duo of Chris Martin and Martin Watson of EMC (the Energy Monitoring Company) who are providing us the hardware necessary to monitor energy production (and soon consumption too) at our building sites (appropriately starting in Merton, of course) were also in attendance at C&L.  Given the potential for a huge demand for these web-addressable, GPRS energy data loggers, we are discussing with EMC how to ramp up production and streamline installation.  Later in the week, I also finally met Ed Cotterill, our chief of operations, who had replaced Adrian as the chief environmental officer in Merton, after Adrian left for the private sector.  I think we have a very good and complementary team of people who are also fun to be with and pub-worthy.
Our initiative is shifting into high gear and picking up some real momentum. On this very day, a short month after Nick and I spent that week in Oxford, Adrian, Constantin and Ed are hosting a major workshop at the City of Westminster on Victoria Street, London. Half of the boroughs of London are in attendance, as well as representatives of the Energy Saving Trust (EST), the Local Government Association (LGA) and the acronymically anagrammatic Greater London Authority (GLA).  Down in Santa Fe, Redfish -- or more accurately John Guerin (Steve's dad) in Phoenix, Arizona -- has put in extra time to make sure that we have as many devices as possible on line in preparation for the event, which could be a major turning point in our own Oxford Energy Future.

In bocca al lupo!

Halfway home

July 2nd is the 183rd day of the year...  the midpoint of 2010.  It's an opportune time to catch up with some blogging after some pretty busy time at our halfway house in Spencer.  Since the last blog post, Nick and I have spent a fruitful month of May in Massachusetts, where Nick signed up for his first semester at the Quinsigamond Community College and I tied a few loose ends at home, wrapped up the Bump project and attended the 2010 commencement at WPI.  I even managed to squeeze a quick trip to UNH for an update on the DEW project and a concomitant trip to Maine to help my friend Jonathan put his wooden boat in the water.

 The highlight of that trip was an evening cruise on Jonathan's Lyman Runabout from Georgetown to Boothbay (a 15 min. boat ride vs. a 50 min. drive!) for dinner at Scoop's house there, with John Meehan and Evelyn Ansel, a talented young lady who is following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather by building her first wooden boat while on a semester-long hiatus from Brown University.  It seems likely that she may become the second Venice intern from Brown in the summer of 2011, after her fellow brownian Ben Lichtner of the Santa Fe Complex, who is in Venice this summer as part of the SantaVe exchange, whose alumni now include Tyler White, Kyle Miller, and Ilan Shomorony, who collaborated with Ben on a great piece of interactive art in the summer of 2009.
From the porch of the McAskill's cottage in Boothbay - which I had last visited approximately a quarter century ago - we witnessed the most triumphant moonrise "ever-ever" (as Nick would say)  and then proceeded to circumnavigate Southport island to cap the evening.

Sublime!
Immediately thereafter, I attended the second annual DSO weekend at Hampton Beach and even saw a very powerful Michael Franti & Spearhead concert with Scoop and Brenda on Lansdowne street, in the former home of the mythical Metro club of yesteryear.  Franti's reggae is extraordinarily energetic, and his message, attitude and persona are among the best I have witnessed firsthand.
Right before leaving Massachusetts again, I met up with Adrian on US soil and spent an afternoon visiting with the New Urban Mechanics duo (Chris and Nigel) and then meeting up at Thoughtbot with my old ATΩ pal James McElhiney and his Haitian business partner Rousseau Aurelien of FutureFridays, a very exciting entrepreneurship incubator company they started after successfully launching gazelle.com.  Over a very special homemade Negroni, we discussed how Adrian and I will be able to contribute to their goal of starting four new successful companies every year.  I am very grateful to Jamie's wife, Louisa Bertman for being such a great artist and for including me on her mailing list for her open studio, which allowed me to reconnect to Jamie, another "brother" that I had lost touch with, but whose professional life has much in common with mine.
The next day, Adrian and I attended the wedding of our de-facto Energence legal counsel Jason Cofield with lovely Twilight Seward at Boston University.  Finally, Adrian, Nick and I got on the same plane and traveled to Oxford together for the start of our European working vacation, which will be the subject of the next few summer posts from Venice, where Nick and I will be until the end of July, after my real meno uno birthday...

Tracking Home

Since the last post, Nick and I drove back from Santa Fe by way of Las Vegas and San Francisco and got busy with our "other" lives in Massachusetts as soon as we got back, hence the radio silence on the blog channel for this past month.

It was an epic coast-to-coast adventure.  Especially the California detour.  After paying another visit to the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas (we are now "frequent liers") to see Jackie, who was half-way through her grueling Bikram instructor bootcamp, we headed to San Francisco, hitting Death Valley and Sequoia National parks along the way.  Un-be-lie-va-ble!
As desolate as some of these landscapes are, they are the next best thing to traveling to other planets.  Since they escape description, one must see them to understand what I am talking about.  So go see Death Valley and definitely go see the giant sequoias.  The "biggest" trees on earth.
At a height of 85 m, General Sherman is smaller than the "real" bell tower of Saint Mark (100m), though taller than the fake one at the Venetian.  It is not the tallest tree in the world: Hyperion, a California redwood, a little further north on the coast of California is twice as tall.  A "mere" 2700 years old, General Sherman is half the age of Methuselah, which is also in California.  Except for the widest tree, which is a baobab in South Africa (where, as an aside, the FIFA Soccer World Cup is about to start), California is home to all of the other tree record-holders in the world, and General Sherman is the biggest by volume...  Humongous both in height and girth.  And unexpectedly very soft - kind of spongy - to the touch.  Really weird texture, much like mulch.
Whereas on the way down to Santa Fe in March we recorded timelapse videos of our entire drive, this time around we did less of that, but we compensated by recording "tracks" using the BUMP application, which is now working quite well, as can be seen from the map below, which is a composite of thousands of GPS and accelerometer readings across the entire continent... Impressive! (more on this later)


View Larger Map

We are now about to leave Massachusetts again to head to Europe on June 6th.  We'll be back on this side of the pond on August 2nd.  We are real nomads... Nick and I.  Our travels are testing the limits of Dopplr.  We bounce around like Bedouins, set up tents in far-away places like Tuaregs.  Like Berbers, we are without a real home.  We might as well live in yurts (which for some reason is one of Jackie's unfulfilled fantasies).

As much as he likes the excitement of travel, Nick is starting to complain about it a little.  He misses his SVS friends.  Conversely, many of our friends and colleagues complain that we're not around enough...  It's tough to have to leave, but, then again, if I had never left Venice in the first place, I would have never met any of my American friends.  If I hadn't left Spencer to go south and west, I would have never met my great friends in Santa Fe, like Steve and Josh who now miss me (as I miss them) when I go back east...  You just can't win.

Tonight, a  census volunteer finally caught up with me in Spencer after trying several times.  He is a retired Indian Ph.D. physicist whom I vaguely remembered having showed up (as an abutter) at one of our planning board meetings a while back.  "What am I gonna do?  Stay home and watch TV?" is his reasoning for volunteering to be a census-taker.  My kind of guy.  When he asked me if I was in Spencer on April 1st 2010, I had to think about it.  Then I remembered that April Fool's was when I quit smoking (again) in Santa Fe.  "So, is this your home?", the Indian scientist asked.  "I guess so..." I said hesitatingly.  If I am going to be counted anywhere in the US, I guess Spencer is the most appropriate place for me to call home.  I am here about 5 months of the year, these days.  But I don't like to pick "favorites".  In my mind, all of my haunts are "homes" in equal measure.  After all, as I am equanimously fond of saying:  "I spend half of my time in Spencer, half in Venice and half in Santa Fe".

Robert Frost said that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"...  That implies someone else is home to let you in.  Who are "they"?  Now that Jackie is gone, nobody was home in Spencer to let us in, and the castle felt abandoned (as real castles often are). What if you own the house and let yourself in with the keys?  Is that home too?  Or is it where you keep your clothes and lawnmowers?

Being a vagabond has its pluses and minuses, like anything else.
Like Homer, our mobile apps can help us track the odyssey that is our life.  Like Ulysses (which for a while was my acronymically witty middle-nom de plume), I may some day return to my Ithaca: a place I will call home.  Like Marco Polo in Calvino's Invisible Cities, perhaps I just find my hometown everywhere I go.  All of these places are "almost but not quite entirely unlike" Venice as Arthur Dent (or Douglas Adams) would say...  Some subtly so, like the Sequoia of Saint Mark, some more blatantly so, like the Venetian.
In this very Frostian quote, Calvino expresses our struggle with ubiquity in space and time:

"Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in the square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches." 

My answer to this existential conundrum is to be both the man that watches and the man who sits in the square, in an attempt to live out as many possible futures as I can -- simultaneously.

That's me:  ubiquitously omnipresent (yet everabsent) Fabio Polo.

Santa Farewell

It's been a very successful term here in Santa Fe.  The seven weeks flew by and it was snowing here on this May Day 2010, just like it was when the students first arrived in mid-March.  We had a couple of final dinners at the Cowgirl and at Maria's and everyone flew back home on Sunday.  Nick and I will start our drive back shortly.

Last Thursday, the two WPI teams presented their results at the Santa Fe Complex.  The presentations, which made front page news on the Albuquerque Journal North, were well attended by local city officials (including a city councilwoman), as well as representatives of NGOs, friends of the Complex, and even some WPI officials (former trustee Karen Bean) and alumni (Paul Kalenian).  Mayor Coss, who had already attended a set of preliminary presentations, could not be there in person, but sent a very nice letter instead (click on image).
The first project, that explored the feasibility and desirability of developing a Municipal Electric Infrastructure, received more attention in the press, since the issue has been somewhat controversial over the years.  Our team successfully developed an estimate of the replacement cost for all the components of the Santa Fe grid ($100M), and explored ways in which the city can meet its Sustainable Santa Fe goals.  They concluded that the city could afford to own and operate the local grid with little or no increase in the electrical rates for the citizens and businesses.  It is a solution that could even help attract new businesses to the area, in addition to reducing the city's carbon footprint through the use of renewable sources of energy.  It would open the door to innovation...
The second project, on the redevelopment of Saint Michael's Drive, also received good media attention, especially because of our collaboration with young students from the De Vargas Middle School, with whom the WPI team collected and organized a baseline of GIS layers and other data pertinent to the  redevelopment of St. Michael's Drive.  Using skillful, multi-projector presentations that simulated the potential applications of a fully ambient and interactive room, the students persuasively demonstrated how such a platform would facilitate the process of participatory planning and urban design.  The team succeeded at conveying the feasibility and desirability of an interactive urban platform that would allow city officials, planners, professionals and all citizens to visually assess the socio-economic impacts of specific design choices affecting the physical, economic or regulatory systems within the city.  We hope that this project will convince the city to fund the Complex to develop the first "real" prototype of the Santa Fe Ambient Platform, patterned along the lines of the Venice Table and the sand table applications developed by Simtable, perhaps with a bit of EventFlow, borrowed from the Redfish applications in Florida, San Francisco and the UK.
It's been a nice term overall.  Great weather, as always... Great students!  Good progress on our Bump and NASA DEW projects.  A paper accepted at a "Greece Fire" conference.  Better clarity on the "killer platform" for urban information harvesting.  Great new accommodations with awesome views at Las Vistas on Gonzales.  Great high-altitude exercise regimen!  And I even stopped smoking again.  On April's Fool day a month ago.  It was easy.  Pesce d'Aprile!

I like Santa Fe.  I like the fact that I could go snowshoeing and cross-country skiing just yesterday!  It's nice to be able to extend the snow season until now.
But we have to get back to the East Coast now.  Time to go...
Farewell Santa Fe!  Until the next time... (August maybe?)

A Grand Family Adventure

This past weekend, the Carreras took an unforgettable family trip from Santa Fe to Las Vegas and back.  Jackie had come to visit Nick and me in Santa Fe on her way to a 3-month Bikram Yoga instructor training course in Las Vegas.  Since neither Jaq nor Nick had ever seen the Grand Canyon, we drove together from Santa Fe to Flagstaff, and then circumnavigated the whole thing in a 750 mile counterclockwise loop that brought us to Las Vegas and eventually back to Flagstaff by way of Hoover Dam.  For the occasion, I sported my telegenic Jedediah-the-Amish look, as one can see from the photos and videos from this adventure.


View Grand Canyon in a larger map

Wow! what a trip!  I had forgotten just how sublime the whole experience can be.  I saw the Grand Canyon with Nonno, Nonna and Barbara in 1979, after graduating from Chicopee Comprehensive High School. Thirty years seem such a looooooooooong time ago, when measured by the yardstick of my personal timeline...  Yet, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where the Colorado River is still carving its way through stratum after stratum of geological layers, is at least a couple of billion years old!  Humbling to say the least.  We are so insignificant in the bigger scheme of things...  All the more reason to dare, no?  If we carpe every diem for our entire existence, the whole thing will be less than a blink of an eye in geological time, even when measured with a creationist hourglass in lieu of carbon dating.

The Grand Canyon is so big that I could actually feel my brain wavering between extreme interpretations of its puzzling scale.  At one moment it felt immense, eternal and majestic, and the next minute my brain seemed to also entertain the paradoxical plausibility of its being actually very small and toy-like.  This mile-deep gash into the earth's crust is ten times longer than the Venice lagoon, and about 1000 times older.  It defies comprehension both spatially and temporally.  To paraphrase Ram Dass: "if you think you're so important, go spend a day on the Grand Canyon"... or a weekend in Las Vegas.
The whole drive was "epic" as Nick would say and, appropriately, he cued up some epic Ennio Morricone music at key moments of extreme landscape intensity.  I have never felt so engulfed by geological ambiance in my life.  I could really "feel time" as I drove on across the ever-changing, other-worldly landscapes of the Arizona Strip and on semi-abandoned stretches of the mythical Route 66, in hog-heaven (I think I will come back here on a Harley).  Many times, I felt I was driving along the bottom of an ancient ocean or cutting across a prehistoric riverbed, half-expecting a dinosaur or an alien spaceship to surprise me as I rounded the next corner...  Phenomenal!
Saturday was an extraordinary day.  We should have days like that more often... We woke up in Flagstaff, had breakfast at Macy's on Beaver Street, drove to the South Rim, stopped at many lookouts along the Kaibab trail  and on Desert View Drive, then crossed the Colorado river at Navajo Bridge to enter the Arizona Strip on our way to Vegas.  At the end of long day characterized by awe-inspiring natural beauty, we drove into the fakest city in the world (a veritable Futurama) at midnight on a Saturday and we went to sleep right in the heart of SinCity ... at the Venetian.  Of course.  I think I will ensconce into a separate blog entry my personal considerations about this unique piece of architectural  kitsch that may teach us something about the real city that we know and love.  It was all Nick's idea, and Jackie and I loved it (albeit reluctantly).  Nick skateboarded around the strip until 6am.  Whatever else happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas...
It was the perfect way to end a Grand day for our crazy family.
As Jackie said: "From Canyon Road, to the Grand Canyon to the Grand Canal, in the space of a day".

Grand indeed.

James Brody - archipelago in the sky

On Sunday, James Brody, a Santa Fe composer, teacher and friend died in a car accident in Minnesota.  He was an active participant at the Santa Fe Complex where I had a chance to interact with him briefly, as we collaborated on a sonic tribute to Venice on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Venice Project Center.  All I really did was to make available to James the Sounds of Venice recordings that a group of WPI students collected in Venice a few years back, which include over 100 characteristic sounds that are unique to Venice.  James quickly created a medley of the sounds and then proceeded to produce a more sophisticated set, that he named Archipelago Venice.


In case we needed another memento mori, James premature departure from this earth ought to remind us of our impermanence and instigate us to be bold to the point of recklessness in our self-expression...
What are we so afraid of?  What's holding us back?
Memento Audere Semper!

Thank you, James, for being insatiably creative...  We will miss you!