More on my recent trip to California... The primary reason for my visit was to sell a patent I was awarded a few years ago. In my earlier post I mentioned that I visited Google. Google wasn't the buyer of the patent... or to be precise, I don't know who the buyer was, as it was kept confidential. I am moderately happy with the sale, for several reasons. The sale price was more than twice the highest previous offer. I had had the patent for several years and hadn't had much serious licensing interest (although admittedly I had spent little time actively looking for licensees). It is a business model patent, which the courts have not been very keen on recently. And it probably would've cost a couple million to defend against any infringers (although I'm not aware of any infringers). The claims are extremely broad, which is great, but as with any patent there's no guarantee that they'd hold up in court.
The patent is for what I think is a truly revolutionary idea for streamlining online transactions. It's not obvious that the idea will work; on the surface it seems like it probably wouldn't work, but after a little thought most people I've talked to agree that it has some chance of working. The key point is that if it does work, it could be truly huge. Critically, for the idea to be successful it would require massive scale, on the order of millions of transactions a month. The potential buyer might be able to reach this level, but I was pretty sure that I couldn't. I do hope that the buyer makes the idea work. If they use it to build the next ebay or amazon, I would be very satisfied both that my idea was implemented on a large scale and that it resulted in increased efficiencies for the world's transactions, and only slightly jealous and regretful that I wasn't the one who made it happen.
I'm glad I went through the process of patenting my invention. The patent didn't take very long for me to put together, so on a per hour basis it netted me more per hour than I get in my day job. Although the process was an interesting one to go through once, I don't have any plans to patent any of the other ideas bouncing around in my head. The fun part was coming up with the idea and then trying to figure out the details of how it might work. The writing of the claims required a part of my brain I had never used before, and reminded me why I'm glad I'm not a lawyer. Working with (against?) the patent office to get the paperwork completed and to persuade the examiner that the claims should be approved was pretty unpleasant and could've only partially been outsourced to a patent lawyer. Like my experiences with the isolation tank, skydiving, and drugs, it belongs on my list of things worth doing once or twice but not making a habit of.

Random videos of no particular importance:
Stairway to Heaven by the Beatles
Amazing soccer skills demonstration
My favorite pianist
This guy has way too much free time.
Magic tricks explained

Here's a little game I just made to test your knowledge of medicine. Your task is to guess which of the following are possible side effects of the ten top-selling drugs and which are possible side effects of drugs from Prescott Pharmaceuticals, the drug company endorsed by Dr. Stephen Colbert. Click on the Comments link to see the answers.
goiter
tremors
difficulty speaking
dyspepsia
cardiac arrest
fungal infection of the mouth
breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue
taste perversion
gastrointestinal hemorrhage
enlarged abdomen
Arthralgia
Scruffula
mild heart explosions
hairy uvula
restless torso syndrome
mild Hulkism
Phantom Hand Syndrome
Spontaneous Pregnancy
vivid dreams of self-cannibalization
Late Onset Albinoism
monkey lung
spontaneous and uncontrollable gum growth
clown-foot
increased risk of vampire attack
wandering genitals syndrome

During my trip last week I had an opportunity to visit Google's campus. I had never been there before, but as a customer (Adwords), vendor (Adsense) and shareholder I thought I should visit, especially since I was going to be in the area anyway. Like most internet companies, mine is very dependent upon Google. Until recently I thought of my business as serving three constituencies: its users, its advertisers, and its employees. Now it's users, advertisers, employees, and Google. Google impacts us even more than our direct competitors do. Such a business model is dangerous, but Google has consistently smiled on us (mostly because we play by the rules) and so it's worked well for us so far.
Not surprisingly, I was very impressed by the visit. It felt like a college campus, but with much better food in the cafeteria. Not all of their employees are brilliant, but a lot of them are, and the average employee there is probably smarter than at any other large company in the world. If I was just now graduating from college, this is the company I'd want to work at (although with the skills I had straight out of school I don't think I would've made the cut). They offer the types of perks I wish I could offer my employees, but unfortunately my company's annual revenues aren't a million dollars per employee the way Google's are.
Overall, I really like how they run their business. They're innovators not only in their products but also in their approach to running the business. Internal processes are continually improved and become pretty close to optimized. I like how they ignore Wall Street and think long term, not being in any particular hurry to monetize new tools. They do sometimes seem to be moving in a hundred different directions and a lot of their products never catch on, but they've been very careful not to kill their golden goose, search, and indeed they continue to improve it and distance themselves from Yahoo, Microsoft and the other also-rans. The growth will obviously slow in the coming years, and there will certainly be challenges ahead for them, but it's a big world and there's still plenty of room for them to grow. I would be surprised if they weren't much much bigger and more profitable in the future, and if I had to take one guess at what company would have the largest market cap in twenty years, my guess would be Google. (But I'd still put the chances at only about 15%. More likely it will be some company that doesn't exist yet.)
When I first started my company I gravitated toward technology, but in recent years I've come to appreciate why Warren Buffett generally avoids technology when investing. As with everything else, he turned out to be right, and I'd be better off today if I had blindly trusted him rather than having to learn the lessons myself. If I were just starting a company now and my goal was to build an entity with enduring value (as opposed to, for example, wanting to work on cool projects) I probably wouldn't do anything in technology, because it's very hard to build a lasting moat in tech. This is also the reason I don't have much technology in my portfolio, but I've made an exception for Google. With most companies, the closer I look, the less impressed I am. The reverse is true for Google.

I'm back from my trip. Did you miss me? I spent last week reconnecting with a dear friend, sipping bottled poetry and communing with John Muir's ghost. In case you haven't already guessed, I was in (and around) San Francisco, the city with the lowest ratio of (time I spend there / time I want to spend there). The trip's original purpose was pseudo-business-related (more on that in upcoming posts) but I decided to take off the full week and turn it into mostly a vacation. Like the best vacations, I got three discrete doses of happiness from it: the anticipation beforehand, the being and doing during, and the memory afterwards. Unlike prior vacations, I found that I was able to almost completely avoid thinking about work. I only checked email and voicemail once on the entire trip. The fact that my job existed probably only passed through my head once or twice a day, and only for a few minutes. I don't know if I've gotten better at controlling what I think about, or if I care less about work now than I used to, or if I care just as much but simply worry less, or if my subconscious brain has found that I don't have as many good business-related ideas these days and so intruding upon my consciousness with random business-related thoughts isn't as likely to be productive anymore. I'm still getting caught up at work so I don't have time for a longer post, but I'll post a couple more notes about my trip in the next few weeks.

Stuff worth checking out:
PBS Special: Bush's War
Podcasts from top universities
Examine your concept of morality, with Steven Pinker's help
How to slow down aging
What constitutes a meaningful life?
As a quick programming note, I will be off the grid next week (hopefully doing blogworthy things) and won't be able to post again until the following week.

Over the weekend I had my first experience in an isolation tank. I like exploring my own consciousness and I'm willing to try just about anything once, so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I had heard that experts recommend no more than one hour for first-timers, but I wanted to make sure I felt the full impact (whatever it might be) and so I opted for two hours. It wasn't total sensory deprivation, but it was very close. The water was the same temperature as my skin and had epsom salt to make floating effortless, the tank was almost pitch black, and I wore earplugs to block out any sound. I was intermittently aware of my breathing and could occasionally sense my heart beating, but other than that there were really no external sensations reaching my brain.

I didn't know quite what to expect. Not being under the influence of psychedelic drugs and not planning to spend 20 or 30 hours in the tank, I wasn't expecting a visit from the Earth Coincidence Control Office. But I was optimistic that I would learn something about the relationship between sensory information and consciousness. I thought it would probably help me to cleanse the doors of perception, and figured I had an outside chance of feeling the sensation of an out-of-body experience.

Overall, the time in the tank was somewhat disappointing. I thought that in the absence of any external stimuli my mind might start manufacturing auditory or visual hallucinations, but it didn't. For the most part, it was as dark in my mind as it was in the room. I was self-aware for most of the two hours but my mind still felt localized in the place where my head was. After the first ten or fifteen minutes of thinking random thoughts as I do in everyday life, my mind became very quiet and I was able to avoid thinking of anything in particular. Thoughts did periodically enter my mind unbidden, but I was able to observe them passively and non-judgmentally, as Vipassana meditation recommends, and they quickly faded away, as if they knew their attempts to command my attention would be futile.

Time did get a little distorted. When the two hours were over I felt like it had been about an hour and a quarter. I'm very confident that I didn't fall asleep at all, but in such a state it's difficult to claim anything with certainty. I'm fairly good at judging the passage of time in ordinary life, so my incorrect guess about the passage of time was somewhat surprising, but the discrepancy wasn't so great as to be startling, and it seems reasonable that in the absence of anything occurring, the mind wouldn't be very good at judging how quickly time was passing.

As I said, my experience in the tank was somewhat disappointing. But once I emerged, I discovered that my mind had indeed been altered from the experience. I was initially tempted to describe the change as merely a recalibration: after two hours of not getting any sensory input, I figured my brain had simply turned the knobs up. But there was more to it than that. The differences weren't just quantitative, but also qualitative. It wasn't just that I perceived the light as brighter and the sounds as louder. Colors were more colorful, and sounds were, for lack of a better word, soundier. On the way home, the breeze on my skin felt breezier. Space felt as if it had more depth... not that it was more than three-dimensional, but rather that I was realizing that in ordinary everyday life it was a little less than three-dimensional.

I especially noticed a change in music. The songs on the radio seemed more... songy. When I got home I played my guitar, and felt a desire to play slowly, at about half speed, in order to give each note a chance to exist in the fullness of time, knowing that the purpose of playing the song was to play it and not to have played it. ("It's the journey, not the destination"... "Be Here Now"... etc). Then I played some of my favorite songs on my ipod. My ipod is filled with two (partially overlapping) types of songs: songs I like because they demonstrate artistry, and songs I like because they move me emotionally. I felt a desire to listen to songs only in the latter category. And they sounded even better than usual.

My other senses were heightened as well. I washed a bowl of blueberries in cold water and the water felt... I'm not sure what word to use here... waterrific? I put a little splenda on them and ate them one by one, which at the time seemed to be the only proper way to eat them. Not surprisingly, they tasted great.

In addition to the overall vividness of my senses, I also had a general sense of well-being and connectedness with the world - benevolence, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity (which you might recognize as the four sublime virtues of Buddhism). I know that in some ways the description I've given sounds a lot like a drug high (maybe something like a mescaline trip, only to a far lesser degree). But it didn't feel like a drug high, and my cognitive functioning was enhanced rather than impaired. I don't want to overstate the magnitude of the changes. My natural state is to feel a little like this all the time, and this experience maybe moved me from a 1 to a 2 on the Buddhaometer. It was nowhere near nirvana, or even the feeling one would get from an empathogen like MDMA.

Alas, the change was only temporary. Several hours later I was no longer able to tell if it was having any impact at all, and by the next morning I was pretty sure that I was back to my pre-tank state. The next day, I wondered which mental state was the "correct" one: my ordinary state, in which my mind is bombarded by thousands of external stimuli and is constantly in overdrive, or my post-tank state, which required the equally unnatural condition of total sensory deprivation to achieve. Of course, even if I decided that my post-tank mental state were "correct" and desirable, I may not have the ability to consciously choose to make that my default mental state.

All in all, the experience wasn't life-changing, and I don't think it revealed some previously hidden truth about the nature of reality, but I'm glad I did it once. I am not specifically recommending that you try it, or that you don't try it, although my advocacy of the "try almost anything once" policy does seem to prescribe giving it a shot. Keep in mind, your mileage may vary.

And now for something completely different, my favorite recent nominees for the Bookseller/Diagram's Oddest Book Titles prize:
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, Julian Montague
I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen, Jasper McCutcheon
How to Write a How to Write Book, Brian Piddock
Drawing and Painting the Undead, Keith Thompson
Squid Recruitment Dynamics, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
How Green Were the Nazis?, edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium, edited by Robert Anderson, Juliet Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan Critchley
Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar
Bombproof Your Horse, Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden

Videos worth watching:
Fantastic look at what happens inside a cell
Bono talks about Africa
Profile of radical life extension advocate Aubrey de Grey
Sam Harris talks about religion, atheism, mystical experiences, and happiness
America: Freedom to Fascism

On Friday I had the opportunity to hear author Dan Ariely speak. Dan is an MIT professor on tour to promote his new book, Predictably Irrational. He made a strong case that people are, as his book's title implies, not just irrational but irrational in predictable ways. Some interesting tidbits:
- The herd instinct extends even to one's current self being inclined to copy actions one previously made (in this case, you can think of all of the prior "yous" as the herd). People often remember what they did before in similar situations without necessarily remembering the rationale or the outcome, and this can contribute to behavioral inertia.
- People are more likely to cheat when the benefit is abstracted, even if only superficially. The example Dan gave was an experiment in which people had the ability to cheat and claim they deserved more money than they actually did. When the payoff was in cash, people only cheated a little, but when the payoff was in tokens which could be immediately redeemed for cash, people cheated a lot more. (As a side note, I also took this as evidence that the pervasiveness of cash has made people forget that it is just as abstracted as tokens are.)
- In another experiment, people were given arbitrary numbers from 1 to 100 and each was first asked if he/she would want to buy a given item at that number of dollars, and then later was given the opportunity to bid whatever he/she wanted to on the same item. There was about a 0.5 correlation between the initial arbitrary amount and the bid amount, whereas for rational agents there should've been no correlation. Provided that the methodology was sound, such a high correlation implies that people's perceptions of value are extremely easy to manipulate.
- In another experiment, Dan let students specify their own deadlines for a series of projects during the semester, but with substantial penalties for missing their self-imposed deadlines. A strictly rational student seemingly should choose the latest date allowed for all projects, but students who spread their deadlines evenly throughout the semester turned performed better. (There are obviously potential confounding factors here, which I'm assuming Dan dealt with.) This is an interesting example of a person wanting to do what's best for his/her future selves while not trusting those future selves to behave rationally and therefore imposing restrictions on his/her own future behavior.
If you like this kind of thing, you might want to check out Dan's book. You might also like overcomingbias.com, a great site run by ultra-smart guys Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky which covers similar ideas.