#188 man

[the18-8man]

Yes!  Dave Stewart + my book, "Beyond Genius - The 12 Essential Traits of Today's Renaissance Men"   -Scott

Read the article here

[the18-8man]

Definitely an 18/8 Man...I don't care what his hair looks like. - Scott

Come Tuesday, weather permitting, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner will attempt to be the first person to break the sound barrier in free fall.  

The mission will take Felix 23 miles above Earth in a small space capsule. 

He will then step out of the capsule and plunge to Earth hoping to reach speeds that exceed 690 mph. 

The vessel is rigged with 15 cameras so that the entire Red-Bull sponsored event can be broadcast live online.  

It's an unthinkably dangerous stunt that will test the limits of the human body in one of the most brutal environments: Air pressure is practically nonexistent and temperatures can sink to negative 70 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Click here to see how it will all come together.

[the18-8man]

Ask Alexa - Adore and Adorn

Men want to be appreciated; women want to be adored, but also adorned. It’s that simple. But what does it mean to adore? And, what does it mean to adorn a woman? Adore may be a term most are more familiar with and an easier subject to understand. Adore is the way your eyes light up when you look at her; the things you do to make her feel special; how you listen; how you hold her hand in public because you are proud of her; how you’re willing to change to show your flexibility. You may think these gestures are old fashioned, even corny.  But women still love it, because all we really want  to know is how much you care. What makes us the happiest is when we know you think about us more than yourself and we feel as if you believe that our happiness is your peace of mind.

‘Adorn’…that’s a little more complicated. So what does it mean to adorn that special person in your life? The definition of adorn is ‘making something more beautiful or attractive’. Maybe you interpret adorn as buying her something expensive. However, although women greatly appreciate nice gifts, that will not win or keep her heart. The true meaning of adorn comes from giving something of yourself that she can keep – because it is a piece of you.  And because it was special for you it will be very special for her. It all comes down to the meaning of things and the value it brings. Some things may have no financial value, but it is the story and heritage that makes it priceless.

For example, a few years ago one of my friends received this piggy bank sculpture from her boyfriend. His brother had made it and it was beautifully decorated with puffy paint in small swirls forming a very intricate pattern; so perfect and precise it was hard to believe it was handmade. Clearly an amazing piece of art, the result of many hours of hard work. When she received this gift she couldn’t have been more appreciative, having described it as the most special gift she had ever received from her significant other. She knew how incredibly important the art piece was to her boyfriend and the fact that he had chosen it as a gift for her. The gesture had more meaning and more value than any expensive present she could’ve received.

So back to you, my 18/8 Man.  Do these things.  Never cease to adore her and give her something special from your heart so she feels adorned. 

I promise that you will feel appreciated and you will have a deep and enduring love.

-Alexa

[the18-8man]

Sebastian Thrun: What's Next for Silicon Valley?

Our digital future isn't all Facebook and iPhone apps. Meet the engineer behind Google X.

Hewlett-Packard is laying off 27,000 people. Yahoo is treading water. Facebook IPO shares got flipped and then flopped. Has Silicon Valley reached the end of the line? Will everyone just develop me-too iPhone apps?

I knew just the guy to prove otherwise.

The entrance to his building is littered with the gaudy red, blue, yellow and green bicycles that Googlers tool around on. I'm at the secret headquarters of the not-so-secret Google X, where the way-out-there projects of the search giant turn into reality. The gregarious play master, Sebastian Thrun, leads us into a well-worn conference room. The chairs are a shade of green not found in nature and the disrupting clang and cheers from a rousing foosball game waft in through the door. Mr. Thrun, 45 and slight in stature, is sporting a gray T-shirt of a local start-up and speaks softly with German-English diction.

"I feel I jump from an ocean liner and then learn how to swim," he starts. Oh, this is going to be interesting.

Mr. Thrun earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Bonn, "the 53rd of 53 German computer-science schools," he adds. His focus was on artificial intelligence, a field that failed in the 1980s with a rules-based approach—because humans could never come up with all the rules a machine needed—but then flourished in the mid-90s when machines had to learn the rules by themselves, by trial and error, almost like an infant.

Ken Fallin

He eventually found his way to Stanford, leading the university team's entry in the 2005 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) Grand Challenge to create an autonomous vehicle that could navigate 132 miles through a desert. He insisted on a blank slate, letting student imaginations run wild as opposed to proving that some professor's arcane research actually works. "It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind," he says. Stanford won by 11 minutes.

At the Darpa challenge he met Google founder Larry Page, who would attend the races hiding behind dark sunglasses and a hat. Mr. Page hired Mr. Thrun and his team at first to work on StreetView for Google Maps. But his role soon evolved: "Larry frequently had me to dinner and every time, Larry would dream something up that was completely crazy. My gut reaction was that this makes no sense, it can't work, it's completely flawed. And I'd go home, do some calculations and a day or a week later I'd apologize and say: You were completely right."

One of these ideas was for a self-driving car, not through a desert, but on the streets of San Francisco and beyond. Crazy. But Mr. Thrun and 12 engineers created a car that could drive itself down twisty Lombard Street without a human driver. How did they do that? "We should question all the rules—we should break the rules," he says. "I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position. There's so much baggage we take on. Why is that so? We should have the courage to put everything overboard."

But, I wondered out loud, why would Google do this? "I think Google's position was we have a responsibility to do something amazing for the world. Never once did we talk about how this would make money for Google."

I actually think the reason is as much for internal motivation. To show those biking Googlers that on the cheap—only 12 engineers, which I guess means spending under $50 million for the whole project, or more than 1,000 times less than the $80 billion Detroit bailout—you can change an entire industry.

Telling Google engineers that their Google projects destroy cable TV or book publishing by making them obsolete should be much easier, certainly easier than building a driverless car. But, Mr. Thrun insists, "it is a great challenge that benefits society"—because it could save thousands of lives that careless or imperfect human drivers take on the road every year. So "how could we not do it?" His auto autos have since logged hundreds of thousands of miles without human hands on any steering wheels.

At Google X, Mr. Thrun brought in University of Washington Prof. Babak Parviz to create a set of eyeglasses that are capable of displaying Web and Google search results. Not easy—yet another cross-discipline challenge to make the device ultra lightweight and natural to use. It was announced recently as Google Glass. It works like bifocals in that you look up to see the display so your normal vision below is never blocked. "We discovered this is not some crazy moon shot, this is real. It turned out we were closer to something interesting than all of us thought." Every geek is itching for a pair.

I tried to get the scoop on other Google X projects, but without much luck. Mr. Thrun did say that "they have to be a science challenge. The preconditions are they have to have massive influence on people, they have to have a path to become real, and we have to have massive challenges." Smartphone apps are too easy. "Larry Page always encouraged me to aim high."

If you can't tell already, Mr. Thrun is a restless sort. "I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view."

Yet there is one project he's happy to talk about. Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig's) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. "I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care."

In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education—way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10 times cost advantage to drive change.

So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. "What I see is democratizing education will change everything," he says. "I have an unbelievable passion about this. We will reach students that have never been reached. I can give my love of learning to other people. I've stumbled into the most amazing Wonderland. I've taken the red pill and seen how deep Wonderland is."

"But Wonderland is also crazy!" I interrupt.

"So?"

Ah, another Thrun project that can radically disrupt the old way of doing things. "But isn't that exactly what we should be doing? I'm going part-time at Google to pursue this. I really care. Isn't this the American history? Can't you pinpoint almost everything that happened back to some technological breakthrough?" Indeed, this is going to disrupt public schools and teachers unions and universities and tenured professors and so on, Mr. Thrun effectively interjects: "The dialogue always focuses on what's going to happen to the institutions. I'm totally siding with the students."

I ask why he always takes on these quantum changes instead of trying something incremental. "That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground—to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light."

Now Mr. Thrun is talking like a true Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "The AI class was the first light. Online education will way exceed the best education today. And cheaper. If this works, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of society and the world. If you think Facebook is neat, wait five to 10 years. So many open problems will be solved."

I've met a few others like Sebastian Thrun. When you ask them why they took on a huge challenge, they ask: Why not?

Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author most recently of "Eat People" (Portfolio, 2011).

[the18-8man]

A little slice of Giverny – Salute to Monet

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his family rented a house and two acres from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend and the surrounding landscape offered many suitable motifs for Monet's work. Giverny is the spot where Monet painted his famous paintings of the water lilies.

The water lily series are extraordinary. Large canvases, beautiful, soulful, depths, layers of paint.  Music on canvas.  If you listen very closely to these paintings, you can hear God whispering…”Life is Wonderful.”

A couple of photos from our backyard.  Loretta, my wife, and full time gardener (when she is not cooking), has worked over the years to cultivate our pond, with lilies, ferns and waterfall.  Call it ‘Giverny-lite’.  Sitting outside with a book on a warm spring day, a slight ocean breeze, Campari and soda with lemon…nothing could be finer.

The photo with the plants and CD’s is our vegetable garden. This is our second season of planting.  We’ll have a wonderful crop of a variety of tomatoes, Japanese cucumbers, zucchini, jalapeno peppers, Japanese eggplant, and of course…fresh spices.  So why all the CD’s?  Well, we have a problem with the birds in the area, particularly the crows, wanting to enjoy our crop before we do.  CD’s reflect light that frustrates the birds and sends them flying in the opposite direction.   I like to call it ‘Beethoven for the Birds.”o

[the18-8man]

OMG Meatloaf

OK, I admit it.  I’m obsessed with my new meat grinder and I’m now a passenger with the Mad Hatter's grinding device.

Adventure?  Or road trip with insanity?  That question, partially, will be answered tonight when we know about the results of a strange concoction that forever more will be known as “God Help Me Meatloaf”.

I’m also in danger of self rejecting myself as an 18/8 Man.  Would an 18/8 Man really conduct an experiment that is so wrought with strangeness and, well…pot luck?

OK – so what is this culinary chemistry act that fills me with such trepidation?

Below is the first act to this two act play.  I don’t yet know the outcome:

ACT ONE

I grind up about three pounds of pork loin and pork shoulder (the pork shoulder is so there is some extra fat, or else the meat is too lean for cooking).  I’m thinking that the ground pork will be turned into pork patties (we tried ground sirloin beef patties last week…phenomenal).

After grinding away, Chief Chef, aka wife, asks me with that ‘what the heck are you thinking of?’ voice, “what do you plan to do with the ground pork??”

Timid Chef - I respond with a defensive bounce in my voice…”pork patties.”

Chief Chef “Noooooooooo, won’t turn out well.  You need to turn it into meatloaf.” 

Timid Chef “Ok, I respond" and start to form meatloaf balls.

Chief Chef - “No, you’re not thinking…meatloaf needs lots of stuff to give it flavor.” 

Timid Chef - “Ok, why don’t you chop up fresh, de-seeded jalapeno, fresh oregano from the garden, scallions, and onions?”

Chief Chef chops away.  After everything is chopped, I proceed to mix, ready to form into  a meatloaf ball.

Chief Chef – “You’re not ready.  Meatloaf needs other meats to give it more flavor and texture.”

Passive Aggressive Timid Chef – “Whatever you say” – I'm now forming a quiet subplot to show Chief Chef who’s the real boss.

I proceed to grind up yesterdays grilled sirloin steak.  Then add minced spicy chicken left over from Thai restaurant.  Then add three Italian sausage links.  Then take a quarter of a loaf of three day old drying homemade bread.  The bread being the ultimate act of passive aggression…’because I feel like it.”  The bread as it grinds spews out of the machine like an insidious onslaught of asbestos.

I’m no longer consulting with Chief Chef.  I simply mix everything together into a meatloaf ball, put in preheated oven at 400 degrees…and pray.

Chief Chef – “Set for one hour.”

I set the timer for 40 minutes.  Chief Chef always overcooks meatloaf.  I do not mention this fact.  Worried, Timid Chef lives in fear to second guess Chief Chef.

Chief Chef – “what else did you add?”

Worried Timid Chef – “some leftover meat”.  A half lie.  Then I pray some more.

ACT TWO

Ok, just out of the oven….what does it look like? What does it taste like?  Oh God, please do not let this day go down in 18/8 culinary infamy…

Discreetly, I cut into the meatloaf to make sure it is not over cooked.  It is perfect - moist and juicy in the middle; a dark patina of crust on the outside. 

I take a bite to test the results…very discreetly, and fully ready to toss the experiment into the garbage can.

“Oh my God”…are the first words that leap from my tongue.  “Wow….This is incredible... extraordinary.”

Chief Chef – tastes, giving me the all knowing culinary eye contact.  “Scottie…this is really, really good.  This is the best meat loaf I have ever tasted.”

“Scottie” …that’s a good sign that I’m being stroked in adoring approval…I think.

Anyway, for a moment, I can bask in culinary glory and puff my chest knowing that God Help Me Meatloaf can be proudly rebranded as OMG Meatloaf.

A culinary tale with a very happy ending.

[the18-8man]

Air Powered, The Art of the Airbrush

"Air Powered, The Art of the Airbrush" was Scott's creation and first book.  As a scholarship student at Art Center College of Design (and later an instructor), Scott was an airbrush artist.  "I was absolutely passionate about airbrushing, and just loved the incredible posters and album covers of the time that were produced by airbrush artists.  To me they were rock stars.  Ironically, many of them worked with and hung out with rock stars.  Scott had the idea of a coffee table book on airbrush artists, and formed a company with two other young entrepreneurs to prepare the pitch.  Simon & Shuster, Crown, and Random House all bid on the opportunity with Random House winning.  The book went on to sell more than 250,000 copies, hard-bounded in three printings.

[the18-8man]

Truly an 18/8 Man