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I remember my first time witnessing a hologram. In my case it was the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World when I was six. As the slow-moving roller coaster progressed, we peered down on a vast ballroom beneath us with dozens of ghostly figures appearing to dance in front of the physical furniture that adorned the room. Walt Disney World - Ghosts in the Haunted Ballroom I asked my brother to explain how the illusion worked. He had a book on optical illusions that we would pore over, fascinated and bewildered. How does that still image appear to be moving, I wondered? I could see the two distinct parts of the illusion if I covered either of my eyes. But it appeared to come alive and move with depth when seen with both eyes open as my brain assembled the parts into a synthesized whole. In elementary school, I went to a science museum to learn more about holographic film. Holographs are easy to create in static film. It’s the perspective of having two eyes with an extrapolated...

During college I read Stephen Jay Gould’s books on natural history in the animal kingdom with fascination. He writes extensively on the many different paths distinct species took to develop eyes through successive enhancements in different branches of the tree of life. The development of eye designs and uses were randomly selected for benefits conveyed over time in enhancing survival traits for those species with them over lesser complex traits of their predecessors as biological competition increased over time. In science workshops as a youth, I designed pinhole cameras simulating the pupil of the eye and enjoyed taking apart old cameras to study how their shutters worked. When planes land, I’d notice inverse images of the ground projecting on the ceiling of the plane’s cabin, like a retina image, through the pupil-like windows. I’d study and ponder about General Relativity, the cosmic limits of light’s speed, and its implications about the nature of the cosmos and its origins. With t...

 Long ago when I was studying French, I came across an idiomatic means of expressing a question about a word or thing. If you want to ask a French speaker to help you with defining a word’s meaning, you can ask, “What does it want to say?” (Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?) I liked the idea that the word actually is personified as a willful entity in this question’s framing. The word has a desire or a will that needs to be considered. Over time, I used to think of technology problems in this way. If a computer wasn’t functioning properly, I’d frame it as “What is the computer wanting to say/do? And how am I seeing it try to do that? And what’s the result? If you ever have a strange behavior of an app or computer process, walking through the steps to diagnose how they communicate will sometimes help you troubleshoot. By narrowing down the steps in their way of reasoning/acting, you can often isolate the problems and facilitate the process such that the device can achieve it’s goal, which...

I conducted my MBA during a fascinating time in our world economy. We’d endured through a pandemic that shut down significant portions of our economy for nearly a year followed by surging interest rates as government response to the pandemic resulted in significant inflation and subsequent layoffs in my region. While this was a dramatic time for the world, it was a fascinating time to return to academia and evaluate the impacts to the global economy of natural and artificial stimuli. For our masters thesis we were asked to identify an opportunity in the economy that could be addressed by a new business entrant. In discussing with several of my MBA class cohort, we decided to focus on the blood supply shortage that resulted from the end of the pandemic . Why would the US go into blood crisis at the end of the pandemic we wondered. Shouldn’t that have been expected during the peak of the pandemic in 2020 or 2021? But it turns out that during the pandemic surgeries and car crashes dropped...

Six years ago, Meta launched the first consumer version of its VR headset, the Oculus Rift CV1. I had my first experience of that new media interface at San Francisco's Game Developer Conference (GDC). Oculus technicians escorted me into a sound-proof dark room and outfited me with the headset attached to an overhead boom that would keep the wires out of my way as I experienced free motion simulated environments that were crafted in Epic's Unreal Engine world-building game architecture. (This is the same developer environment that was used to create The Mandalorian TV series.) The memory of that demonstration is strong to this day because it was such a new paradigm of media experience. As I moved in a simulated world, parallax depth of distant objects shifted differently relative to those objects near. Everything appeared a bit like a cartoon, more colorful than the real world. But the sense of my presence in that world was incredibly compelling and otherwise realistic. Yester...

I am one of those people who searches slightly outside the parameters of the near term actual with an eye toward the long term feasible, for the purpose of innovation and curiosity. I'm not a futurist, but a probable-ist, looking for the ways we can leverage the technologies and tools we have at our fingertips today to achieve adjacent potential opportunities leveraging those tools. There are millions of people at any time thinking how to address new applications of any specific technology in novel ways to push the technological capabilities toward exciting new utilities. We often invent the same things using different techniques, the way that eyes and wings evolved via separate paths in nature, called convergent evolution. I remember going to a Google developer event in 2010 and heard the company announce a product that described my company's initiative down to every granular detail. At the time I wondered if someone in my company had jumped the fence. But I then reali...

My mother introduced me to a wide range of topics when I was growing up. She had fascinations with botany, ornithology, entomology and paleontology, among the so-called hard sciences. As she was a teacher, she had adapted certain behaviors she'd learned from studying child development and psychology in her masters degree program on the best way to help a young mind to learn without just teaching at them. One of her greatest mantras from my childhood was "Let's look it up!" Naturally she probably already knew the Latin name for the plant, animal or rock I was asking about. But rather than just telling me, which would make me come to her again next time, she taught me to always be seeking the answers to questions on my own.  This habit of always-be-looking-things-up proved a valuable skill when it came to learning languages beyond Latin terms. I would seek out new mysteries and complex problems everywhere I went. When I traveled through lands with complex written scrip...