Skip to main content

C100, Facebook, and the Valley: Bittersweet.

I had a great opportunity to participate with thec100.org over the past two days as they ran their fourth "48 hours in the Valley" program.

We had a great showing of Canadian Facebook employees on a panel this morning, and covered topics from how to best engage with Facebook, to the culture of both Facebook and the Valley.

One question from the audience was "what would it take for you to come back to Canada?"  And the answer was uniformly "I won't." The reasons had nothing to do with Canada (someone mentioned that they would not go LA or anywhere else either), but had everything to do with the unique appeal, energy, and community in the Valley for anyone in tech. 

The bittersweet part of this was: I agree.  I would love to head back to Canada - it is home.  But, I won't.  The advantages of being here in the Valley (much more obvious to me now that I am at Mozilla) are just too strong.  Sigh. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.
Read more

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...
Post a Comment
Read more