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Jonathan Endersby, Recovering Technologist

Archive for category Philosophy

Who invented the lightbulb?

Aug 20

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Philosophy, hacking | 3 Comments

Lets get one thing straight. Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the lightbulb.

This story requires context:

  • In 600AD the greek writer Thales of Miletus started writing about Electricity. Mostly this was all about rubbing Amber together and noticing static charge
  • In 1760 French physicist Charles-Augustin Coulomb starts actually making sense of electricity.
  • In 1779 Alessandro Volta builds the first true battery.
  • In the late 1700s and early 1800s every scientist, tinkerer and hacker is playing with electricity.
  • 30 years later, in 1809, Humphry Davy builds the first true electric lamp. This is 38 years before Edison is even born.
  • 50 years later, in 1860, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan builds an electric light bulb and starts tinkering with carbon-filament incandescent electric bulbs (The same stuff Edison eventually used).
  • Ten years later in 1877, the American Charles Francis Brush manufactured carbon arcs and was lighting public parks and office blocks.
  • In 1879, three years after Brush already had electric light in office blocks, Thomas Alva Edison discovers that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb was able to stay glowing for up to 40 hours.
  • Two years later some dude named Lewis Howard Latimer makes a better filament.
  • 20 years later another guy called Willis R. Whitney invents a process to stop the globe getting dimmer as it got older
  • Seven years later, in 1910, a guy called William David Coolidge invents a tungsten filament that lasts a lot longer than the carbon ones.

Thomas Alva Edison - Douchebag Extraordinaire

So all that Edison ever “invented” was that a vacuum increased the lifespan of the filament.

So, the next obvious question is, why does everyone think that Edison invented the light bulb? The answer to that question is an interesting one because it has more to do with propaganda than it does to do with invention.

A lightbulb is useless without electricity, Edison knew that… and like many clever businessman Edison knew that real inventors are generally very bad at making money out of their inventions because they’re always too busy working on version 2.

Edison realised that the only way to make real money was to get electricity into people’s houses so that you could sell them lightbulbs, and electricity… This was brilliant because it’s the “Give away the razor, sell the razorblades” plan except both lightbulbs and electricity are consumables… so its more like “Give away the connection and sell the lightbulbs and the electricity”. Edison also wasn’t the first person to figure this out, he was just really really good at marketing… Or really really bad at marketing, depending on how you feel about Elephants.

Topsy the Elephant

Another person who realised that Electricity was going to make a lot of money was a rich businessman called Westinghouse. Westinghouse had become friends with an eccentric Yugoslav scientist called Nikola Tesla who had been experimenting with electricity his whole life. When Tesla wasn’t busy building Tesla Coils or trying to harness the power of lightning (or trying to harness energy from outer space, I shit you not) he worked with Westinghouse to build electricity generators and plan electricity distribution systems. Tesla knew more about electricity than pretty much anyone else alive at that point and early on had realised that Alternating Current (AC) was far better at distributing electricity than Direct Current (DC). So Westinghouse and Tesla started generating and distributing power to the rich and famous.

Edison didn’t like this. Not only were Tesla and Westinghouse competitors, but they were also proposing a different, better, system (AC) that Edison knew would eventually win the battle. Edison had managed to market himself as the father of electricity — a magician and folk hero — and he was getting incredibly rich.

Nikola Tesla - True Genius

So Edison did what any self respecting douche-bag marketer would do… he started publicly torturing animals… and filming it. Thomas Alva Edison, the “inventor of the lightbulb” went out into the streets and publicly electrocuted, to death, animals in a bid to show the public that Alternating Current was far too dangerous to be in their homes. And yes, in case you’re wondering, that reference to elephants earlier is because Edison even electrocuted, to death, an adult elephant.

Of course AC isn’t really any more dangerous than DC and Edison knew that… While there are some issues with AC’s 50-60 Hertz frequency being closer to that of your heart, both AC and DC are equally able to kill elephants and small children.

Sadly the public was gullible and Tesla was devastated… He went from being an eccentric socialite magician to being that guy who wants to murder small children and animals. Westinghouse had thicker skin and managed to keep his chin up, but Tesla became a recluse and started working in isolation on increasingly crazier ideas like harnessing power from the stratosphere. Tesla believed that it would be possible to get this power so cheaply that it would become free. Whether Tesla was onto something or whether his eccentric genius mind had finally snapped will never be known… In 1943 he died, alone, drowning in debt, in a hotel room.

Thomas Edison was no doubt a very clever man, but he was also ethically a disgusting person who thought nothing of destroying others to elevate his own fame.

Single handed sailing is not for the faint hearted.

Jul 1

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Philosophy, Sailing | No Comments

knox_johnston_golden_globe

Robin Knox-Johnston on board Suhali

I’ve become increasingly fascinated by single handed (solo) sailing and specifically single handed circumnavigations. The first person to sail around the world single handed was Joshua Slocum in 1898. His journey took 3 years and he made many stops along the way.

Sixty eight years later Francis Chichester, who Later became Sir Francis Chichester for obvious reasons, decided to try his hand at the journey. He left Plymouth on August 1966 and returned 226 days later after stopping once in Australia. He was 67 at the time and was the first person to circumnavigate with only one stop.

This meant there was only one thing left to do… Circumnavigate, single handed, without stopping. Two years later, in 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston left Falmouth and 313 days later arrived back in Falmouth to much fanfare.

It’s far too easy to romanticise these journeys but reading the books written by these men is both inspiring and scary. It’s often in the minutia that the true risks involved in these kinds of endeavours are exposed.

I found this in the “Pilot’s Notes” section at the back of Knox-Johnston’s book “A World of My Own”:

“There was a small diver’s lifejacket on board, but again I did not use it. It got in the way for one thing, and if I had fallen overside, although I would have swum in the direction of the nearest land, one has to be realistic, and it would probably have been best to get it over quickly.”

I think those two sentences sum it up better than any book every could.

Defining moments

May 13

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Hiking, Life, Observation, Philosophy, Sailing | 1 Comment

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about defining moments. Those splinters of time that shape who we are and act as decision making references for the rest of our lives. I find it odd/sad that some of the people I talk to don’t have defining moments or perhaps they do but just aren’t aware of them.

Here are mine:

Fishing
I was probably about 8 years old. We were on holiday at the Brede River. Like most boys that age, I really wanted to catch a fish. We had tried unsuccessfully from the jetty but firmly believed that the real fishing was out on the boat, after sunset. The dads had made promises that always seemed to dissolve into comfortable couches and post-braai bliss… and it was our last night there. I decided that I was going to go and catch a fish off the jetty, and, in the absence of bait, I decided that bread, mooshed up onto the hook, would have to do. The parents were understandably sceptical, but I was adamant and marched down to the jetty in the dark and cast my line into the water. A few hours went by and I had caught nothing and eventually started falling asleep and decided it was best to go back inside.

I remember walking back into the house thinking how awesome it would have been to be carrying a huge fish! At that very moment, thinking about how great it would have been to catch a huge fish, it dawned on me that no one ever catches a huge fish unless they put their line in the water. You have to be in it to win it.

Bravery
I haven’t witnessed much bravery in my life. I’ve never seen someone run into a burning building to rescue a puppy or lift a car to free a trapped driver. Sometimes however bravery takes the form of personal courage. Courage to stand up and do the right thing, even if doing so may make you look like a loser in the process. I was 15 and my little clan of nerd friends had a favourite whipping boy called Andrew. Andrew was often the butt of our jokes. One particular day, in the absence of Andrew, the jokes got progressively meaner. Then someone piped up and said “Come on guys, that’s not cool… lets stop”.

I realise that that might seem trivial when compared to rescuing puppies from burning buildings, but if you’ve been a teenage boy you probably know that sticking up for the “loser” isn’t the cool thing to do. In that moment I realised how brave my friend was, and more importantly, how I wanted to be like him.

Your happiness is your responsibility
I think I was about 19 years old. I had recently broke up with my girlfriend, it was New Years Eve and all my friends were out of town. I got so bored and depressed that I decided to just drive around. I wasn’t suicidal or even close to tears… but in that uber-pathetic moment I decided that I was the only one responsible for my happiness. Simple.

Web Based Accounting Software
After many years working as a developer in a bunch of different industries I found myself working on a web based accounting package for a British company. It was painful work and the boss had overcommitted and we were working stupid hours with pizza as “overtime”. One evening, while working late, I decided that this wasn’t for me. I’d only been there for 3 months, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been putting my heart and soul (and life) into other people’s businesses all over the world for the previous 5 years and I was finally done. I resigned in the morning. I was never going to let a job take priority over my life again.

For about a year I floated around doing odd freelance dev jobs, I even got a job as a barman so I could meet cool people… I made a lot of friends, I managed a band, I lived in a digs with some cool people and some psychopaths. It was fun.

I can be a Butcher
About mid way through my year “off” I decided that I could do anything. Nothing was above me, and similarly, nothing was beneath me. Not that I consider butchers to be at the bottom of some food chain, it was just that being a butcher was probably the furthest thing from what I had done up until then. I never did become a butcher, but I’m pretty sure I could be flippen awesome at it if I wanted to.

A loaf of bread or a pie
At about the same time as the “I can be a butcher” moment I found myself rather broke. There was a shoprite up the road from where we were staying. I walked there, hungry, with only a few rand in my wallet. I had to decide whether to buy a loaf of bread or a pie. I bought the pie.

Many people would consider that reckless. It was reckless I guess, but, I wanted a pie. I had faith that tomorrow would somehow bring more money or feed me. I’m still here so I guess I was right.

I don’t want to make light of it, but I also know what it’s like to live off almost nothing. I know that I was incredibly happy during that time, my life didn’t suddenly fall apart the minute I cancelled my medical aid and couldn’t afford to buy one of the “nice” toothbrushes. That realisation has helped me be a little more willing to take bigger risks in life. In it to win it.

Water
I really like hiking. Especially on Table Mountain. I’m not nearly as fit as I should be, as my waistline is testament to, but I do occasionally just go for walk. It was during one of these spontaneous walks that I ended up about 6km away from my car without any water in the middle of a ridiculously hot summer’s day. (This was on the contour path near Platteklip with my car parked at Kirstenbosch). I came across this tiny little trickle of water, seeping down a rock. I was so hot I ended up basically licking the mossy rock to try and get some moisture out of it. I spent a good 30 minutes getting water in tiny little doses. (I just want to make sure it’s clear here, I was never in any real danger… I was just hot and tired… worst case scenario was some sunburn.) I was incredibly grateful for the water and in the heat I got all philosophical about water and nature’s provision. I started off again towards the car. About 300m down the path I came to a river. Not exactly the Holy Ganges, but enough water that I could actually fill my water bottle will real water, not sandy moisture. What did I learn from this? It’s tough to explain. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is to just say that sometimes in life you need to be make sure you’re not being an idiot by walking a little further down the road.

Death at Sea
Almost 2 years ago I went on a little sailing trip. Myself and another guy sailed a tiny little yacht from Hout Bay to Knysna, and then back to Mossell Bay. (It’s a long story). The reason we couldn’t go in at Knysna was because a huge storm had kicked up and the Heads were closed. The boat didn’t have a functioning radio, life raft or EPIRB. The flares were old and our engine was dead. At sunset, when we realised the storm wasn’t going to die down, we decided to sail to Mossel Bay where the harbour was protected by a breakwater. The swells were picking up and at some points our tiny boat was pretty much dwarfed by the water around us. We were sailing a yacht designed and built for the Vaal Dam in some of the strongest wind and biggest swells I have ever seen. We were being pushed around like a matchbox in a pool full of cannon balling fat kids. The boat’s keel was creaking as if it wanted to snap off (something that would result in almost instant sinking) and then suddenly, in the pitch black, howling night, we hit something. HARD. The entire boat stopped dead for a second. I still don’t know what it was but I do know that I have never felt closer to dying in my life. I imagined myself floating in the middle of the sea, with my tiny life jacket trying to get dodgy flares to work even though the chances of someone seeing them were pretty much zero. The keel didn’t break and after 5 days at sea we eventually got to Mossel Bay in the early hours of the morning.

What did I learn? I don’t know… But I want to do it again. It was fucking awesome.

Do what you love, No excuses!

Apr 9

Posted by arbitraryuser in Philosophy | No Comments

Finally got around to watching this video…

“Listen to your users, absolutely. But giving a shit about your users is way better!”

“We only get to play this games once… one life…”

My favourite Dr Seuss quotes.

Mar 15

Posted by arbitraryuser in Life, Philosophy | 3 Comments

I think the world would be a better place if we replaced all the self-help books with Dr Seuss.

You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So… get on your way!

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go. Oh the Places You’ll Go!

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Today you are You, that is truer than true.
There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you’ll move mountains.

I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ’cause you’ll play against you.

Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. Oh! The places you’ll go!

Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.

I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.

I want that last one read at my funeral.

Who are you?

Dec 28

Posted by arbitraryuser in Life, Philosophy | 2 Comments

2010 promises to be an incredible year. I am now officially employed by my own company. I can come and go as I please — as long as the work gets done… that’s an awesome situation to be in, however it is simultaneously terrifying.

The buck stops with me. There is no leave, no ‘office hours’, no room for failure. The project can’t get shut down by ‘higher-ups’ and there are no bosses to blame, no archaic “that’s-the-way-we’ve always-done-it”s to get in the way. If something isn’t 100% perfect it’s my problem and my job to fix it. The important business decisions are made by myself and the other directors. There’s a certain arrogance that is required to walk into a situation like this and even though I’m generally quite arrogant (ask my friends), I am truly humbled by it.

All these changes naturally found me updating my About Me page and I was reminded of something that I was asked by my Zen Master (yes, I had a Zen Master) a few years ago. “Who are you?”. I went through the process of listing off a bunch of traits and characteristics, eventually resorted to rattling off qualifications… The whole while he sat quietly, saying nothing. When I eventually stopped talking he again asked “Who are you?”.

“Jonathan Endersby” I replied, hoping that perhaps he had forgotten my name. “Correct!” he said happily.

At the time I didn’t get it… but over the years it has become a profoundly clear truth. Traits and characteristics are just our (very human) way of trying to identify the similarities between ourselves and other people. We do this purely for the benefit of others… We reduce ourselves to labels so that they can make assumptions about us. Obviously this isn’t a bad thing. If you’re a medical doctor it’s far easier to say “I am a doctor” than to say “I am Gregory House”… especially if someone is bleeding to death and needs help.

The important thing is to make sure that you never let those characteristics define who you are… In other words: You are You… Characteristics are just words that describe you… You must never confuse the two… If you think that the word “entrepreneurial” is a good way to describe yourself, that’s great… but be careful never to let the label have an influence over who you are or what you do. When you let your labels start to have an impact on your thoughts or actions you’re on the first step to becoming generic, boring, useless even.

Why does this matter? I believe that introspection is a very important part of life. Knowing who you really are… What you stand for, what makes you tick etc… These are the things that we should be drawing on when we need to make tough decisions. Knowing who I really was helped me get to where I am now and will continue to help me make the tough decisions I need to make in the future.

So, here’s to 2010 and knowing who you are. May they both be the start of many great things!

Learning Photography

Dec 4

Posted by arbitraryuser in Philosophy, Photography | No Comments

This started as a comment on Joe’s blog post about one of the courses at the Cape Town School of Photography. I do not consider myself a good photographer by an stretch of the imagination, but I do have fun and right now I’m happy with that. One day when I live on a farm I’ll get past step 3.

I think the best way to learn is to:

  1. Learn the absolute basics of photography – Buy a book on photography… If the book pre-dates digital it’s a good thing!.
  2. Figure out how the basic photography concepts map to your camera.
  3. Take lots of pictures. Set yourself goals like “Today I’m going to take pictures of straight lines” etc.
  4. Repeat step number 3 for 6 months to a year.
  5. Consider going on an advanced course but it must be a *photography* course, not a DSLR course… Aspiring writers don’t go on MS Word courses, neither should you.
  6. Try and find people on websites like flickr whose stuff you really like and examine it in depth… figure out exactly what it is about a certain photograph that you like. Try remember that stuff next time you’re taking photographs.
  7. Start critiquing your photographs. A tiny bit of over exposure, slightly off composition etc. If you can, get other photographers to do the same for you… unfortunately you might not agree with what they have to say… everyone has their own style.
  8. Apply the critique and tighten up your technique.
  9. Ask yourself the question: Am I trying to be a photographer or take photographs that capture something, say something, do something?
  10. Do whatever it is that makes step 9 a reality.

Murray and Goethe

Nov 9

Posted by arbitraryuser in Life, Philosophy | 5 Comments

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”

- W. H. Murray

ps. I’m engaged :)

Let The Police Eat Cake

Jun 14

Posted by arbitraryuser in Life, Philosophy, Service | 1 Comment

A few months ago we had some hassles in Obs with criminals stealing car wheels. Eventually it was happening almost nightly. The Neighbourhood Watch (I’m a member, how responsible of me!) started ramping up their patrolling and putting pressure on the police to catch the guys. Within a few days a sharp eyed policeman spotted something trying to hide next to a car with a wheel spanner in his hand. Within minutes they had 4 guys in custody… I was out on a patrol at the time, ironically one road up from where the guys were eventually caught. That night at the Woodstock police station I promised to organise some cake for the police to say thanks.

I pinged a few of the more active neighbourhood watchers and a few agreed to help out financially… Then I though about Charly’s! If you want awesome cake you have to go to Charly’s, but it’s not cheap. I mailed Charly’s and asked if they’d be willing to give us a discount for a good cause. To my surprise they said they’d give us cake for free!  This was brilliant. We used the additional funds to buy other stuff like samoosas and coke etc. To our absolute surprise, when we went to go and collect the cake they had even decorated each one with a police theme!

All in all a nice little party (we actually had two parties to cover both shifts). A big thank you to Charly’s and the other ONW members who helped out.

cake_burglerP4160050cake_detail

The coming revolution…

Dec 17

Posted by arbitraryuser in Aggregate This, Life, Philosophy, Tech | 1 Comment

The internet, for all it’s vices, has made the world an incredibly small place. I buy books from Seattle, business cards from London and storage space from San Diego. I chat with friends in New Zealand, India, Finland and Joburg on a daily basis. At ground level the online economy seems pretty stable. Online businesses are lean, mean, fighting machines forged in the dot-bomb furnace. Compared to the sumo wrestling auto industry we’re Ethiopian long distance runners. (Enough with the analogies now)

The offline world however is in a crisis, big corporations are falling over on a weekly basis… most of them failing due to fat cat, short sighted management, while others are just innocent victims of the carpet bombing that is this economic train wreck.

Then I read things like this. George Oates, one of the key people and designer at Flickr, got let go by Yahoo, who bought flickr a few years ago. It’s not so much the fact that they let George go, but rather they way they did it… Basically getting her manager to call her while she was overseas and read a message to her from a scripted “cheers” letter. Her blog post about the ordeal is brutal. Within 14 hours of the call she had lost all her privileged access to all that was flickr; something that had been the centre of her life for many many years.

George’s story is the logical conclusion of the ‘corporatised’ world that we’ve all bought into… and I think the world is starting to see the folly in supporting a system that can turn around and kick you out when you least expect or deserve it.

I have this sense that people are starting to dislike, and distrust, big corporations. In the 50′s and 60′s corporations were the saviours of the failing economy, hell, if you could work for a corporation you were sitting pretty… Working for a corporation meant you had a stable job and even though all you got for 50 years of service was a hundred dollar watch (who needs a watch when you’re retired anyway?), you were happy to have had the job.

But the world is different now, for whatever reasons people expect more from life than just ‘having a job’. We want to have fun, be challenged, enjoy working, laugh, be successful and get home on time to have make supper for our smiling kids and watch 30 Rock on Tivo.

So where does this leave the workforce? Well, the internet is making *not* working for a corporation easier and easier. Now days your small print shop in a side street of London can turn into an international brand with customers from Tibet to Texas, but, most importantly, that small print shop doesn’t need to become a overweight corporation in order to carry on being successful. It’s the long tail global customer effect. Hell, you could sell clothing for conjoined twins on the internet and still swing a profit.

Perhaps more interestingly though, the internet has made running your own company a lot easier. Re-read that last sentence. The internet has been around for almost a gabillion years now, but it seems like only in the last 5 years has the promise of “running an online business from your garage” come true.

Perhaps the supreme irony of the situation is that Yahoo itself was once a small company that got big, and in turn bought up flickr, the blood, sweat and tears of a small team, most of whom have subsequently left Yahoo or been fired. How different life would have been for all those people who gave birth to flickr, if they’d just stayed a small team who focused on being the best and staying happy while doing it…

Corporations have been holding the workforce hostage… but the distributed client base and self organisation of the internet is starting to make it harder and harder to not start your own thing, or join a small company with big vision.

Similarly customers are more and more looking for micro providers, buying local produce, supporting up and coming manufacturers and looking to identify themselves as unique by buying products that weren’t made in batches of a million. Perhaps it’s the inherent knowledge that the companies that are producing t-shirts in batches of a million are run by the same kind of people that will fire you from the very company you helped start and feel nothing while doing it.

You’re a person… let the machines be the robots. The revolution is coming, and it won’t be televised, it’ll be broadcast.