An Occasional Interesting Person
August 30, 2007 - Marissa Mayer
When you write about Marissa Mayer, start with the big items. She's the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google. That means her fingerprints are on pretty much everything Google produces. She's also maintains a busy public speaking schedule describing Google's approach to development, innovation, and its vision for the future.
Next, focus on a few details. Both Mayer's B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science focused on artificial intelligence. She was Google's first female software engineer and 20th employee. She's an unrepentant workaholic. In addition to her work at Google, she teaches undergrad computer science courses at Stanford.
Finally, deal with the elephant in the room. Marissa Mayer is a beautiful woman. If you say it with too much enthusiasm, you're a starstruck dork geek. If you don't say it at all, you're jealous of beauty, ashamed of beauty, or a starstruck dork geek. I suggest, "Marissa Mayer is a beautiful woman." Like my wife has said, "There's nothing wrong with being beautiful."
On the web:
August 20, 2007 - Chihiro Ogino or Sen
Chihiro proves that you don't have to be alive to be interesting. Hell, you don't even have to be real. She's the 10 year old hero of Hayao Miyazaki's fantastic movie, Spirited Away. The movie starts with Chihiro's family driving to a new home, leaving her school and friends behind. She feels sorry for herself and whines in the back seat. When her parents stumble on an abandoned amusement park, she gets scared and refuses to explore with them.
What happens next changes Chihiro forever. The amusement park changes after dark. Under the direction of a greedy, callous witch, its bathhouse and restaurants open to pamper the spirits. Chihiro's parents turn into pigs and she's forced to work for the witch, Yu-Baaba, to survive. Yu-Baaba steals her name and leaves her with the simple name "Sen".
I won't try to describe Miyazaki's spirit world (It's impossible anyway.), but I'll say that it's a bizarre, beautiful, and slippery place. Sen struggles, makes friends, and navigates challenge after challenge in a world that expects more from her than anyone has before. If she hopes to save her parents and reclaim her full name, she must leave her self-pity behind and grow strong.
As a parent, I love a story where a child discovers their hidden abilities and learns to work in an environment with totally new and frightening rules.
On the web:
August 06, 2007 - Robert Trivers
Robert Trivers is an unusual polymath currently teaching at Rutgers University. He is best known for papers he published in the 1970's arguing that social behaviors such as altruism, a parent's investment in their children, and a child's competition with its siblings or parents could be explained as genetic expressions that added to the fitness of shared genes. These papers, along with the work of William D. Hamilton and E.O. Wilson, launched the controversial idea of sociobiology.
Trivers also studied why self-deception may be genetically advantageous and what happens when the genes in a single organism disagree.
For better or worse, Trivers is also well known for his extreme personality. At 14, he taught himself calculus in 3 months. He abandoned hopes of being a lawyer and pursued biology after a nervous breakdown made admission to law school impossible. When Harvard wouldn't make him a full professor, he quit publishing and took a position at UC Santa Cruz. There he met the incarcerated chairman of the Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton. They became friends, Trivers joined the Black Panthers, and Newton became godfather to one of Trivers's daughters. His political opinions still create a bit of controversy as described in this article from David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine.
On the web:
July 27, 2007 - Alice Waters
Alice Waters is the executive chef and owner of Chez Panisse, a fine dining restaurant in Berkeley, California. Since 1971, she has focused on serving artfully prepared, amazing food that is grown, caught, or foraged near Berkeley.
Some of Alice's food is organic. Some is local. She is credited with creating California cuisine and is involved with the Slow Food movement. Beyond these labels is the simple and elegant idea that just because you can import any food from anywhere during any season doesn't make it a good idea. Alice's food celebrates the uniqueness of place. It takes the responsibility of food quality away from large shippers and returns it to local, vested food producers.
Most recently, Alice started teaching local students how to grow healthy food in their own school gardens and prepare it in re-vamped school kitchens. The Edible Schoolyard is the pilot collaboration with Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School and a model for schools throughout the world.
On the web:
July 19, 2007 - Karl Iagnemma
Karl Iagnemma is a robotics researcher at M.I.T. His work with roving robots in difficult terrain is described in over a dozen publications.
He is also a well-reviewed and prize winning fiction writer. His first book, On The Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, is a collection of short stories featuring current, would-be, and ex lovers struggling to understand the bounds and rules of love. His first novel is finished and will be published in winter 2007.
While most people consider themselves either more rational or more artistic, Iagnemma embraces both. This gets me curious. Are the skills used to solve rational problems really all that different from the skills to solve artistic problems? Is the rational-versus-artistic division artificial?
On the web:
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Scatterbright is Corbin March's personal site. I'm a software developer from Saint Paul, MN who's interested in more things than he has time for.
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