Bhutan | Michael Hawley | Talks at Google

So welcome everyone. We are kicking off today what's hopefully going to be a continuing series of distinguished speakers coming in to talk to.

Us here at Boston.

You've seen some announcements of authors at Google, which is a program that we have worldwide in a number of our offices. We sort of have Mike under that.

Label because he had a book and.

It'S a good way to get funding to purchase lots of books. But Mike is much more than an author, as I've said in the email.

That I sent out.

And this talk series is much more.

More than about offers, it's really about.

Bringing in people to delight and entertain us from a whole number of disciplines. Science, technology, arts and authors, of course. And so I'm pretty tickled that we've got Mike as our first speaker because he has disciplines that cross a number of those boundaries. I've known him for probably about a.

Decade, since he was a professor at.

Meeting up on a roommate of mine who was working on a PhD under him. And Mike has continued to do a number of things that have impressed me over the period of time that I've known him. And I'm excited to hear him talk to us about going to the extremes because he's certainly somebody who's done that. And we're also going to apologize. The projector is blurring some of his absolutely stunning images.

So after the talk, feel free to.

Come up and grab one of his book, see the images, much higher resolution and there'll be a sign up sheet. If there aren't enough books, we'll get books for people that can't get them here today.

So Michael, thank you. Very gracious introduction. It's nice to be here. Better than nice to be here. I mean, it is such a pleasure to be able to sleep in my own bed and walk six blocks to give one of these talks instead of schlepping myself across the country. I didn't think about this as a distinguished lecture. I thought of it more as distinguished Q and A. I'd much rather meet you all and have a conversation, but I have a little bit of show and tell stuff that I'll try and plow through quickly, maybe a little more quickly because of your mangled projector situation. But basically two subjects, an old project and a new project. The old project had to do with the Bhutan stuff. It's in the past. But it was interesting from a whole bunch of perspectives, photographic, various technical points, some of the social and humanitarian consequences and personally important to me. And the future project is sort of looking at the Opposite, it's not a rural expeditionary technological undertaking. It is looking at urban extremes and finding ways to understand the intensely urban future. That really is the biggest kind of mega trend that will reshape our planet in the next 50 years. So as I sort of said, I'm going to tell you basically how I met my adorable dog, how I came to adopt a teenage girl from Bhutan. I don't know that I was ready to be an instant father of a teenage girl. Very brief context setting. In our checkered past at mit, we fiddled around with toys and embroidery machines. These were early experiments in computer embroidery. We built languages called post stitch to convert postscript into stitching. Some of the students stitched with the first electronic thread so you can embroider circuitry into clothes. Fiddled around with dancing shoes and strange computerized appliances. First electronic nose. I was actually part of a project to begin to think about what it might mean if you had codified smell both for input and output. Sort of the same way we can sample images through pixels and radiate them back out. Or audio samples hasn't been done yet for smell or taste. And when it is, computation will enter a much more sensual realm. That, by the way, was the very first scratch and sniff computer that I'm aware of. So scratch the orange in this evil scientist looking smell synthesizer would emit orange smells. And if you poked the baby, you'd smell infant oriented odors, laser cut fruit and vegetables. Cross country cycling. Actually we were the first team that I know of to put a serious amount of computation on a bicycle to record all the data we could think of capturing. And the students for their final exam pedaled it across the country from Seattle to Cape Cod, somehow turning a 3,000 mile ride into a 4,000 mile ride. But that's MIT for you. First on the body instrumentation, both for sports figures and for jewelry people evil bathroom scales that would record your weight and identify you from your footprints. Little things in photography like being able to know where you actually took a picture by pounding a GPS into the camera. This is all work that was done more than 10 years ago. Mostly. The data camera dated from 19. This slide was taken in 1996. So let's get into the rural stuff. And again, to sort of pull you forward into the Bhutan work, we developed a tranche of research programs at the laboratory that were expeditionary in nature. And this was a time before all sorts of nimble little personal gadgets. It was just after the into thin Air disaster years on Mount Everest. This girl, by the way, lives in the shadow of Mount Everest. And we wound up proposing to DARPA to undertake a number of expeditions. In the proposal, which was a charming read, there was a schedule to deploy, whatever it would be. We weren't sure what we were going to make yet in a variety of vicious circumstances. We propose to look at arctic extremes, desert extremes, tropical extremes and underwater stuff. And just to give you an idea of the underwater thing, we did some early work on coral reef bleaching, looking at reefs in Indonesia. This was before it became kind of the canary in the cold mine for environmentalists. But the fact of the matter is there's very little apparatus that helps you to take a census of the life forms on a reef. Now, I'm not sure how many of you are scuba divers. A few of you, probably even the most experienced scuba diver, is sort of awestruck when you're floating above a coral reef. The parade of bizarro life forms, where these things come from is just mind boggling. And the first thing you would do if you were an astronaut would be to start taking a census. And yet there's very little apparatus to help people do that. And if you really want to understand the dynamics of life on the reef, you have to understand what's on the reef and whether it's coming or going. And all of that stuff has really been done so far by seat of the pants observation, talking to local fishermen, kind of alarmist science, if you will. And a great deal more creative technological investment and scientific investment needs to be made. So that was one piece. And let me just show you some pictures. I'm going to try to go through these quickly because it's, it pains me as much as it pains you to see things at less than full fidelity. The Everest work we did in 97 and 98 and 99, 97 was the end of thin air year, if I'm remembering correctly. And MIT was the science leader on what was really the first big technological expedition to Mount Everest. We partnered with the Museum of Science right around the corner, which was founded by Brad Washburn. Brad was the man who mapped Mount Everest, an extraordinary figure in the history of our corner of America, really the guy who invented the modern science Museum. And Yale and NASA and some others were involved. We did a number of things. For instance, with Brad, we surveyed Mount Everest using GPS. That exposed bedrock is at 25, sorry, 29,000ft, about 30ft below the summit. Roughly. It's the highest bedrock in the world. Swept clean of snow and ice by winds from the Nepal side. We screwed A permanent steel bolt into that rock and used gps. In those days it was pre selective availability. But we had special surveying instruments that integrated over time and gave you a fix to within about a spherical millimeter. And the value of this was that you could, I think I got one more little picture. There's a close up of it. Essentially measure that spot year after year and see how the mountain deformed. And Mount Everest was the last missing survey point in a chain of peaks that stretched all across the Nepalese Himalaya. And the idea was to watch the whole Himalayan range as it changed. It's one of the more active mountain ranges in the world and you could literally see Mount Everest grow. And with this measurement, the summit height of Everest was refined. It used to be 29,028ft high. I'm happy to report, if you haven't heard, that it's actually 29,035ft high. So an extra seven feet. We looked at telemedicine and climatology. That for instance, was a satellite weather probe, which was very much a novelty in those days. Ran on batteries for about a year, blinked up bits to a polar orbital satellite. The Argos network is what it's called. So about 10 times a day you could flick up 32 bytes worth of weather data. And that meant you would carefully code several hours of weather data into one little packet. It would blink off the satellite and arrive at the Internet. Well, why was this interesting? For a couple of reasons. First of all, the advanced high Altitude Sherpas took these probes and deployed them at altitude in advance of the rest of the team, kind of staging up to reach the summit. And we were down at Base Camp with satellite access to the Internet. We had to have that because the climbing season on Everest is April, May, which is final exam season at mit. And in order to yank these damn students out of their classes, we had to get permission to let them take their calculus finals via satellite. And you know, at 17,500ft at base camp. But when they weren't taking their tests, they could log back into mit, see the up to the minute weather data, and then radio the guys up at Camp 3 and say, hey, it looks like it's 45 degrees and sunny up at the next stage. Go for it. Of course, the more interesting thing about an experiment like that is it gave us a year's worth of weather data. And all of us who looked at it, none of us were climatologists particularly, but several did use the data to write reports. We were stunned by how warm it actually was on Everest. And I think there's a common misperception that these places are cold. The reason they feel cold and they do feel bitterly cold is because there's no oxygen. And your body needs oxygen to break up carbohydrates and burn them to generate heat calories. So in the absence of oxygen, you get cold much quicker. And that in fact, is most of the reason why climbers on Everest use supplemental oxygen. It's because it prolongs their work day. Otherwise they get too cold too quickly and too tired. Anyway, the satellite probes gave us a picture of just how warm it was starting to get on Everest. And here's a few random pictures trekking across gorges. That's the scene at base camp. And these are some of our graduate students fooling around in the Khumbu icefall. That's actually not Everest. This was the prototype weather probe which we tested out on Mount Washington, where I can tell you it is much colder than it actually is on Mount Everest. And that was our one hole golf course at Everest Base camp. Challenging line. This is a little project we did in Iceland. One of the students was training for the marathon and wanted to take up cross country skiing in the winter. I made the standard advisor student bargain. If you can figure out a way to get a thesis out of cross country skiing, I'll pay for it. And he proposed to build a skiedometer, Kind of a little widget that would measure how fast and how far you'd skied. Not an easy problem. Everybody who's building cross country skis sells them based on style and marketing. You know, should you use the red ones or the blue ones, the wax ones or the wax. Well, there isn't a lot of real numbers that tell you what sort of miles per gallon you would get on this kind of cross country ski. So they took some of the very first MEMS chips and built them into little bricks that actually measured all that stuff. The only problem that year was that we couldn't test it out in New England. It was a terrible snow year in January that year. Air tickets were way too expensive to go to Colorado. But we got lucky. Iceland air introduced a two for one deal. You could fly to Reykjavik for $299. Two people. Apparently nobody goes to Iceland in January. So we sent the whole damn team there. And it didn't cost that much. We used the DARPA money for this. And it was a very interesting experiment, but one of the sort of stupid things you learn. This was amusing. This is actually in the next country over, Northern Norway, where the Laplanders entertain themselves by holding onto reindeers and hauling ass across the ice. We can tell you that these animals trot along at 62 kilometers per hour. We did measure that. One of the kind of obvious gotchas was in this prototype rig. There was a bundle of wires going up from the sensor brick through your trousers leg to a computer in the backpack. Really a pain in the neck if you have to take off the skis and ease the call of nature, let's say, because you have to drop trousers and all the rest. And it's really not good if you're sort of a newbie on cross country skis and it's slippery anyway, use your imaginations. The point is that for the second version of this, we snipped the wires and built sensor networks that transmitted data via radio. First time that was really done and the students were sick and tired of freezing their balls off or whatever anatomy they were freezing. And so instead they spent the last of the DARPA money and went off to Hawaii. And this was the experimental study site, A crater at Kilauea Craters national park on top of Mauna Lea. If I remember the right mana. The problem was a very rare plant. There were only 200 of these little weedy things growing. They only grew here. And kind of the technical piece that was needed was a sensor block that could measure a day, a week, a sort of year in the life of those plants. And because this is a national park, you don't really have the luxury of stringing orange jacketed cable all over the place. So our students worked with the University of Hawaii team and disguised this stuff to look like little logs and rocks. So here are the logs being strapped to trees. They actually scanned the bark on these trees, kind of a Hawaiian oak tree, laser, printed it out on polymer and wrapped it around PVC pipe. Not pretty, but the rocks were better. They looked like tephra. They looked like rocks that had been blown out of volcanoes. We actually called this network tephranet. And there were little sensors hidden in them, sort of like Disneyland. You know, if a tourist tripped over one of these, they'd see a wad of strange alien electronics and probably freak out. But the kind of cute thing was this was the very first field deployment of a mesh network. A network that kind of works in a self organizing gossip fashion. So to deploy the network, you'd drive around in a jeep and basically chuck a rock out the window. The seeds of that work. And really the only reason I'm mentioning it kind of sprouted. Andy Wheeler, shown here, one of our students and Rob Poor spun out and started a company which is still chugging along in Boston called Ember, which is one of the real pioneers of this brave new kind of networking, really kind of a game changing technology. And there are three rocks. Two of them are actual rocks and one of them is actually one of our supercomputing sensor nodes. So that's all Bayway background. I'm sorry to bang on so long about that, but Bhutan came about because we wanted to get better at photography and I had been there afterwards, you can ask me why it's not important for this talk. And I was very struck by the country. I think I've got some maps here. I'll situate you. Bhutan is there. It's at the same exact latitude as Disney World in Florida, which is 27 degrees north, but the elevations are more like aspen and up. The actual country is tiny. You can think of it as the Switzerland of Asia. In fact, it's almost exactly the same land size as Switzerland, 40,000 km. But interestingly, the southern border here is at about 1,000ft above sea level, and the northern frontier and the high Himalayas gets up to 25,000ft. And this distance in between is about 150 miles as the crow flies. So you get an astonishing compression of ecological zones. The other thing that's interesting is the culture. This is one of the last intact cultures in the world. They've been very slow at permitting tourism to ramp up. So still only a few thousand people a year go in. 10,000 ish now, in fact, I thought it was fun because we used these old Russian maps to fly across the country in a helicopter that we borrowed from Nepal. And most of the map is basically a blank. It says, relief data incomplete, like everywhere. And if you were to land in a different valley, you'd discover that people speak a different language. There are 20 different languages spoken within Bhutan. It's one of the most intensely polyglot countries in the world. The reason for that is that these big rivers come roaring out of the Himalayas and they carve bottomless kind of lost horizon valleys. It takes kind of half a lifetime to walk across the country. So people don't. Yes, it seems like India and China care about every square foot of land in that part of the country, in that part of the world. Why don't they care about. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. For the same reason that Switzerland remain kind of naturally independent. It's really a pain in the ass to bring your elephants over the mountains. And ask a Roman. Bhutan enjoys that relationship with China. So China could just walk right into Tibet and nobody paid any attention. They can't just walk right into Bhutan. It's a problem. And long ago the Bhutanese developed a kind of happy arm's length relationship with India, a friendly and cordial relationship. And so they've never been threatened by India and things seem to be stable enough that it's going to be an independent country for a long time. The British tried and failed to conquer Bhutan as they were tromping around in India in the 1800s. They tried half a dozen times and they found it to be just a really unpleasant place to try to shoot people. But it's a beautiful place to travel around. These are sort of beauty shots of the Himalayas. That's the most lovely base camp I think I've been to. That is a shot of Mount Jamilhari, which is a 25,000 foot mountain from base camp, which is at about 14,000ft. But you have the ruins of an ancient medieval monastery and prayer flags fluttering on the hills, tigers running around in the woods eating yaks. It's a beautiful place. This is far eastern Bhutan. Little slice of architecture, unusual architecture. It's kind of Chinese Frank Lloyd Wright. It has an oddly Shangri La contemporary feel to it. This is a fantastic building, by the way. It's perched on a cliff that has a sheer 3,000 foot vertical drop. And it happens to be the temple that was built about 1,000 years ago in which Buddhism really took root in Bhutan. It's called the Tiger's Nest. This was on a trek in the Far East. The culture is Tantric, Buddhist and some of the. It's basically been allowed to flourish without interruption from wars for about a thousand years. And some of the dances that you see are among the oldest dance forms performed anywhere in the world. These rituals have been going on literally for a thousand years. And if you're traveling in the country and you wander off the road a day or two and get to a little village, you can probably convince yourself that you were the first Westerner ever to go there. And sometimes you'll be right. It's that kind of country. What we did was we organized a series of half a dozen research expeditions, really to push on photography. This was at a time when digital cameras were just barely starting to happen. But people didn't think they'd overtake film anytime soon. So we wound up shooting the whole country, about 80,000 photographs. We were aggressive in our use of GPS kind of tagged every picture. Half of the stock was shot on film. Half was shot on a whole Ringling menagerie of digital cameras. And we wanted to understand when the tipping point would occur. And more important, we wanted our teams in the field to be able to bring back a compelling visual record of what they'd done. Because our photographs were sort of sucky. And to let you know what a nuisance it was, when we went to Mount Everest, it was all film photography. You shoot, I don't know, 6,000 pictures on Fuji Velvia slide film. First thing that happens is the color laboratory mislabels the slides, which is a real nuisance. And then a graduate student carrying the tray of slides trips and falls, and it's like losing your whole deck of computer punch cards, which I know is meaningless to you, but it's not meaningless to me, Really a pain in the ass. And it was that experience. Oh, it costs a fortune to film. You're paying 70% profit margins to Fuji or Kodak. The processing is expensive. You all know this because everybody plays with digital cameras. But in those days, it was more, shall we say, manly work to get out there and try to push past these little skids. So we gave cameras to kids like him. He was one of our photographers. Gail say Lode. He's the son of a high lama and a very remote village in the east of Bhutan. There's a little girl I'll tell you about later. She's the one I'm putting through school. Interesting faces, you know, just. I'm not really a photographer, but it's kind of like what Louis Pasteur used to say, Chance favors the prepared mind. Chance also favors the prepared finger. And if you put yourself in an interesting circumstance and you keep pushing the button, sooner or later you get an interesting picture. And out of all the pictures we took, I'm most struck by the faces of people. Kind of the same way, I guess Brad Washburn was struck by the mountains that he flew over when he was doing aerial photography. I think faces tell you a great deal at many levels about the nature of one's community and culture. And I'm very captivated by the faces in countries like Bhutan. So we had the kind of paradigm early on of giving cameras to kids and taking kids with us everywhere we went. In retrospect, that really feels to me like one of the luckiest ideas I've ever had, because I've traveled many places, but I've never had more fun than I had on these projects in Bhutan or similar. Ones we did in Cambodia. No matter how charming and nice I try to be, I'm basically a big ugly white guy from somebody else's country. But if a young person leads you by the hand into their home, all of the dynamics change and suddenly you're a guest and there's stories and there are moments that you'll remember vividly forever. And it sure is nice to be able to take pictures of those. That's a trip. And all of us who participated in these Bhutan trips were infinitely fortunate to have benefited from that. This girl Choki is the one that's going to school here. She's putting on a pair of headphones in a Nepali helicopter. We had to borrow from the head of the Royal Nepal Air Wing to get across the country quickly. Takes about three or four days to drive across on a spaghetti road that's hacked out of the Himalayas at 12,000ft. But it takes an hour and a half to zip across in a helicopter. And time was short. On one of our trips, the kids got to meet the living national treasures of the country. That's Gelse talking to Aji Kunzang, who is the kind of the caretaker of Bhutanese folklore and culture. Also the foremost expert on the yeti. And we wanted to make sure that if there was a yeti to be found, we'd get the first picture of it. The abominable Snowman. These are Cioki's grandparents faces full of character. They're among my favorite portraits in the whole set and among the nicest people I think I've ever met in my life. Infinitely adorable kids. Charming native dress. Girls wear full length dresses tied tightly. The dress is called Akira and there's a brocade jacket that's always turned up with colorful cuffs. So even though these things are woven out of local wool, they wind up being just incredibly both simple and disarmingly elegant at the same time. Little boys, colorful dances. Let me just pop through this stuff. Oh, she's got rotten teeth. Because like a number of older people, she chews betel nuts, which stains your teeth and gives you mouth cancer and all sorts of other nasty stuff. The kids, like Choki and her sister Tsering, have fantastic teeth. I was always embarrassed to smile in these pictures because I kind of have the Austin Powers dental gene. My descendants were British type people who would feast on spotted dick and treacle and all sorts of buttery, sugary glop. There's none of that in Bhutan. The kids will eat an apple or an orange or a banana and just radiant smiles Although funnily enough, Cioki may have to have a root canal next week. But that's the story. This is me doing photography inside one of the Zongs. In terms of the way Bhutan is organized, there are roughly 20 dzongs, which are large medieval style fortress monasteries that were built 600 years ago roughly to kind of both be a stronghold for the monks. The monastic religion basically was the backbone of the country, but they also served a military purpose to fend off Tibetan invaders and other problems. So as a result, you get this very feudal and medieval backdrop in which villages cluster around these giant old castles. It's really a fairy tale kind of setup. And I do want to tell you quickly the story of how we met. I know I'm throwing a lot of anecdotes at you left and right, very few of which have anything to do with technology, but hopefully one or two are interesting. It was November of 2001, and I was photographing in Tronxa. I was the only Western person there for a dance festival. And this lovely girl came up to me. She was maybe 12 years old, 13 years old, and in very demure English, she said, excuse me, excuse me, sir, you're from America? And I said, well, yes, I am. And by the way, in Bhutanese schools, English is the medium of instruction. So all classes are taught in English. And as a consequence, most of the kids now speak English, which throws off a lot of people who aren't expecting it anyway. She asked if I was from America, and I said, yes, I am. And she said, oh my goodness, are sir's friends all right? And I said, what do you mean? And she explained that in her village, Trung Tse, they had one television and all of the kids in school had seen on TV what happened when those airplanes hit the buildings in New York City. And she said, we're just very sad and very, very scared. And I'm wondering if your friends back home are okay. And we didn't even know each other's names yet, but I said, look, I have to tell you, I had a friend named Danny Lewin who started a company called Akamai in Boston, and he got on a plane that morning and it was one of the planes that hit the building in New York. So he was killed that instant. So our friends are not all okay and the world is not all okay. And she said how sorry she was, and she asked if I needed a friend in Bhutan, and she reached into her Akira and took out an orange, and I made a note of that and we Sent a few postcards back and forth, and on subsequent trips to the country, I'd knock on the door and see how Choki and her sisters were doing. And it was more than a year later that we had the idea of doing the ambitious photographic work that I described. And I thought, gee, it would be a lot of fun for young people like Choki to tag along with MIT scientists and see their whole country. Most kids never get out of their own village. And so I knocked on the door and her father answered. I had not met him before. And through an interpreter, I introduced myself and I said, you know, I'm a professor from mit, which is a big. It doesn't really matter what it is. And I showed him the letter I had from the King of Bhutan that said it was okay for us to take pictures in their country and explain that we were taking a great journey. And if it was all right with Cioki's teachers and her parents, we'd love her to join the trip for two weeks or so. And he lit up and said, well, that's fantastic. Of course she can go. If you need more kids, she's got three brothers and sisters, so take them too. We only took her, but that's her. Doing photography with one of our little GPS camera rigs, and I'll just sort of highlight this for you. We developed an evening ritual where we had an ensemble of photographers, six or seven cameras. The chips would come funneling in and we'd pound them through our little import stage, integrating with all the GPS data that had been taken. The GPS trick was simple enough, it's now widely known, but it was sort of a novelty in those days. Basically, we had one gps. The team more or less traveled as a group. We weren't going to the four Corners, so it sufficed to have one GPS unit ticking. And we synchronized all the camera clocks to GPS time. And in the evening, you just look at the date stamp on each photo, pull out the relevant coordinates, stamp it in, find the local atlas, put it in, drop in a link to a map or whatever. Incredibly useful, because after the smoke had cleared, we'd shot almost 80,000 images. It's the world's largest archive of images of Bhutan. And when you wanted to go back to a place, place, you need to search by locale, and now you can, and you need to cut through all these pictures taken by all these people. And this system made it very easy for us to do that. And it's all online on a server. It's our intention to try and Plant that. In Bhutan, we've always wanted to create a national image treasury, conceived as a sort of permanent depository into which anybody who takes a picture can place their images and they'll be preserved for eternity. Bhutan, I think, is a wonderful test tube in which to do that because it's a small enough country that you can. And it has a spectacular enough country that it needs to be captured because in 50 years the pictures that are taken, you know, they'll be like Audubon bird prints. Half of them will be extinct. Those ways of life are going to change. And I can show you very quickly, I think, yeah, this, this is actually online and it's a couple of terabyte server off at MIT again, we set that up long before it was fashionable. And here's 5,000 pictures I took on a small personal trip in Bhutan about two years ago. Each one of these kind of big sections is a day. Each frame within the day is a different location. And I just want to sort of skip ahead and give you a quick feel for this. This software is now almost 10 years old. It stopped changing about five or six years ago, I think. And yeah, this is a good day to look at. Might take a moment to load these, depending on how fast the network is and how slow my computer is. So this day is expressed as I think 400 images. And I'll put up the thumbnails and hide the metadata and step through a few and it's nice and quick. That girl, 21 years old. Jangchuk is the local health care worker. And we're walking up to the tiny little Zong here. She's dressed properly because when you set foot in a religious place, you have to be. And this is one of these far flung outposts. It really is tiny. There's just 17 young monks who study here. And as you can see, it's really sort of nice to be able to just zip through the pictures. It's all coming over the net and it's almost like watching a movie because we do the caching properly and all that. I don't want to dwell on it, but it still irks me that things like Iphoto and Picasa are, you know, kind of clunky. And this solved a great problem for all of us because later on, when we needed to digest the pictures and figure out which ones should go in a book, a dozen photographers were sprinkled around the world. But they could all just kind of go online and make their decisions. So let me get back to the picture show and I want to tell you a little bit about the genesis of the giant book and then talk to you a bit about the urban projects that we're concocting. So one of the things we wanted to do was find a way to use the photographs to benefit the kids and the schools there. There's no resources, there's no libraries, there's no books. There were no computers in those days. And we had hoped when we began the project that we might find a way to publish the photos and produce a book that would raise a little bit of money. The problem was I kept getting thrown out of publishers offices because they'd say, Bhutan. Who the hell cares about Bhutan? Nobody in this country has ever heard of Bhutan. Nobody's going to buy a book about Bhutan. People don't buy photo books anyway. We make our money off of royalties from Harry Potter. Thanks. Have a nice day. And I mean literally. I met with the chairman of Scholastic and you would think that he could have organized a philanthropic gift from Harry Potter, but no. And I happened to be sitting next to, at a meeting, the chief technology officer of HP and I was tin cupping as usual and he couldn't find any quarters in the cushions of his couch. But I came back to my office one day at MIT and there's this huge printer, a big eight foot long crate. It was the biggest inkjet printer that HP had ever made. It's kind of the MIT version of junk mail. This crap just shows up on your doorstep. And I thought, what are we going to do with that? And we started popping out these five by seven foot stand and they were really nice. And we did a fair amount of work on image processing to take best advantage of where their inkjet was at. And became among the very first people, I think, to do large format fine art inkjet printing. And I'm going to just pause on this map for a second and explain. We couldn't figure out a way to sell this stuff because I'm not a photographer. As I said, I'm not wired into the fine art photo sales community. I'm just, you know, I'm a hacker like most of you guys. So we tried sort of the obvious things. We tried to pitch gallery shows, but you can't make any money off of gallery shows. MIT even turned us down. They wouldn't let us hang these beautiful prints around the inside rotunda at Lobby 7 because there was no precedent for putting art there. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that with pictures that big, we sort of needed Fenway park or Someplace really large, the fleet center, to hang them. So it was inefficient. One of our Italian design graduate students, Leonardo Bonanni, proposed just jamming them together into a big book. And I said, you know, that would be a lot of fun. So we had the printer just spit out 100ft of paper one night and folded it up and stuck it in a kind of folio. And it was really, really cool. Everybody smiled when they saw it. And I thought, let's go for it. Let's just make, make a big book. And the big book needed a big something, a big end page to inspire you as you opened it. And I ran into a guy named David McCauley, the way things Work Illustrator. And he offered to doodle it up for us. So we began iterating on maps. One of the things I loved about working with David was that he's the best terror upper of things I've ever worked with. He, he'd slave away for a week or two and come up with some drawing. And I'd say, it looks great, except we could lose the bomb site over Bhutan and maybe make that part of the world a little bigger. He'd say, no problem, tear it up and come up with another idea where you'd sort of put Bhutan over the rest of the world at a funny angle and have little sketches from an artist's book kind of pinned around the edges. And I'd say, that's great, I love where it's going. He'd tear it up and come up with a different approach, kind of a big Bhutan with a map of the world and insets and things. And I'd say, great, stick with that. And he'd come up with another one and I finally told him to quit screwing with it and we colorized it. But all of these insets and cartouches are things that travelers to the country would be familiar with. So there's the famous base camp at Jamilhari, or the Nepali stupa, or the yaks or what have you. And so here, for example, is the tiger's nest I mentioned earlier, tucked song way up on that cliff. And that was the photo that turned into David's drawing. Here's the main courtyard, which was sort of plopped into the map. All the little sort of cartographic doodads, 19th century styles were kind of put in here, but they were drawn from the kinds of experiences that a really lucky traveler would have. And part of the display challenge was getting really big pictures like this, life sized people to look as good as they possibly could in this funny format. And the way the piece actually works, it stands up on an easel. It's printed from 400ft of paper, continual inkjet printing, and then accordion folded like an Asian book, gathered in the spine so you only get a crease down the middle. You never have an alignment problem or an issue when you're looking at one open spread. And because of the way it's folded, it stands up in the easel. We even wrote a very charming patent on the method and apparatus for, for making ridiculously large books. There's a blueprint for the whole thing. It takes about three days and six gallons of ink and 400ft of paper to spew one of these out. And here's how it's assembled over in Charlestown at the Acme Book Bindery. By the way, I wish I could say I was some kind of genius and knew exactly who to call to bind this contraption, but what I am is tenacious and persistent as hell and also just kind of, you know, first principles. I literally opened up the yellow pages on paper, looked under book binderies, took the first name off the list and it was Acme. And they were about a mile from my front door. So I called them up. I walked in with this prototype and I could see them looking at me like, you know, get the Net, he won't come back. But I kept going back and they eventually fell in love with the project. It turns out ACME is the world's oldest continually operating book bindery because they cater to all of the research libraries here in the Boston area. And if any of you are involved in Google's book unbinding problem, you should go and visit Paul at Acme. It's a fantastic operation and they work with a lot of treasured things. Anyway, the book has to be assembled by hand because it's so big and unwieldy, using 300 year old tools like bone folders and. But it's built to last. It'll last longer than Audubon's bird book. And it turned out to be very large. I got a call from the Guinness World Records people and they said, congratulations, you get a medal. And I said, that'll come in handy because I didn't know how to sell these books either. And I called up somebody who does. I called Jeff Bezos at Amazon, emailed him actually, and basically said, jeff, I think you really can be the world's largest bookseller. And he said, I already am. I said, no, no, no, no. I mean, really, this was my 15 minutes of fame when I turned up in Ripley's Believe it or not in the Sunday papers. The two kids who helped us most with photography traveled around the world with us as we showed this book in different cities, different countries. Really the trip of a lifetime. And this is in Japan at Harry Winston, of all places. We'd done that jewel. You might have seen a jewel flash by early on. That was a Harry Winston project with mit. But these kids were the best ambassadors any country could ever wish for. That's Choki giving her business card to the Japanese press, which caught these people off guard. Anyway, it's been a great project. And what's that? Is there a question? Anyway, it's a $15,000 book on Amazon, but the cute thing about it is that that's well within the range of fine art acquisitions. An oil painting would cost you 15 grand. For this one, though, you get a $9,000 tax deduction because the cost of goods is $6,000 and the balance goes into the nonprofit charity. So if you sell 100 books, and we just about sold 100 books, you raise a million dollars, and that goes a long way. And it's because of my long term connections in Bhutan that I wound up with Bhutanese puppy. She's a Tibetan mastiff. She's now eight months old. But there are only eight of these dogs in the United States. And it is interesting to me how one's life is a series of dots connected over time. And often the things that kind of get you in your gut at one point resurface. Years later, I was on a trek way up in the Himalayas and in a remote village, saw these beautiful working dogs, kind of like malamutes of that part of the world, taking care of yaks and yak herders. They fight off the occasional snow leopard. And it sort of stuck with me. And eventually, you know, the right dog came along. That's her mom saying goodbye to her. And that's me and Nina with Tasha a little bigger. And here's little Chokey. You know, stuff happens in life. I got a heartbreaking phone call from her two years ago. Two weeks before Christmas, her father died. He was 37 years old. And. And it was sudden catastrophic kidney failure. You have never heard such a heartbroken, devastated person on the phone before. Just, you know, what's going to become of me? My family has no money. My mother is uneducated. You know, I'm the oldest daughter. And I said, don't worry, we'll find a way to work things out and just Monday of this week was her first day of school at Miss Hall's out in Pittsfield. And it's hard to express in words how. How fortunate I feel to be able to give her a chance. Nobody put me through high school. We were too poor to go to private school. Things work out. Oops. That's not supposed to be in here. You guys know about Brewster Kahl's bookmobile project? I forgot to take this out. He had the notion of for about 20,000 bucks, you can outfit a minivan with a printer and a WI FI connection and satellites and about a million books and a little terabyte disk drive so that it's kind of like an ATM for books. Kids come up, pick any copy from a million, the stuff gets spit out, and they bind their own book. There's never a book fine. There's never anything that needs to be checked out from the library. So it's a great project, but very slow to gain traction. I want to talk very briefly about what's coming. I know I've burned up about 45 minutes on Bhutan. So this is a subject that is big, and if I can find it, has been a topic of some discussion with your cohorts in Mountain View, Megan Smith and John Hanke and that gang. Almost. Let's see if this comes up on the right display. Huh? Wrong display. Bear with me just one second. This should fix it. So the code name this is 1920 21. The thing to think about is 19 places that will have populations of 20 million or more in the 21st century. The story is the rise of super cities. And when you begin to look at the numbers. I'm just going to talk while this stuff rattles by. I can't even remember what's in this damn presentation, to be honest. But you'll get the gist. For the first time in history, last year, there were more people living in cities than living in the countryside. That tipping point has just been passed. By 2015, 27 of the 30 biggest cities in the world will be in the developing world. These will be the economic, cultural, kind of social hubs that move the world forward. The rise of intense agglomeration urbanization is without question the biggest megatrend that will change the map of the world's economy and cultures in the next 50 years. The world is not flat. The world is a bunch of rising peaks. And those peaks are really going to change the shape of things. So my old friend Richard Saul Wurman in Newport proposed the idea of a blitz project to look at 20 of these places in a five year run and produce output through kind of five obvious channels, web stuff. You want to kind of build a web compendium of each place. Television, books, if that's still relevant. I think it is. And exhibits and events. And to give you an idea of one slice of that, our working group is basically a small production company. We proposed to Mayor Bloomberg in New York that it might be an interesting time to convene a summit meeting of the world's mayors. Sort of like the urban version of the G8, because as the years go by, it will be the mayors of the world's mega cities that hold sway over the daily lives of more people. The national elected figureheads will come to mean much less, I think, in world affairs. And to our surprise and amazement, the mayor's office said, yeah, that's a great idea, let's do it in October. And they told us that at the beginning of August, but it was impossible to organize the event by October. So we're going to try to do that in New York in March or April. And you can understand why that is likely to be a watershed event and, and the first of many in a series of critically important dialogues about the growing pains that all of these places face. The slide is sort of telling you that what used to be a national geographic patchwork of cultures and countries is now becoming a planet that is a network of super cities. That's basically the transition we're going to move through and in the generation that kind of connects us to our grandchildren. So if urban life is our future, we better get really good at it. And we're not very good at it yet. The good news is that the footprint of these places is very promising from an ecological standpoint. Cities have synergies. They make much better use of natural resources and power and all the rest. They could do vastly better in those regards. But basically they are the tool that you need to survive efficiently as a large community. That's why they exist at all. It's very inefficient by comparison to sprinkle people around in the countryside and telecommute. Just it's extremely wasteful of resources when you really start looking at the numbers. So let me just see if I can find a couple more data points in here that are maybe of interest. Well, you know, I just want to show you one thing that's not connected to this project, but is one of the coolest pieces of work that I've come across in recent years. How many of you are familiar with Steve Seitz's work on photo tourism. Just show of hands. Nobody. Okay, well, I'm very happy to show this to you, Steve. Really? You're not just sort of making me feel good? Okay. Is this a photo stitch? Better than that. This was first shown at SIGGRAPH in 2006. Rings a bell now, how many have seen this work? Okay, I'm going to show it to you again just because it's great to look at and we hopefully have a few minutes for Q and A. But I'm showing this to you now because I think it's a nice thing to think about after what I've said very briefly about the problem. And while this is loading, you know, the problem is we have Google Earth, but we don't really have Google City. We've got lots of little slices and ways of kind of looking at data, but in a kind of cartographic nirvana, Google City hasn't happened yet. There's no way to kind of interestingly compare these places and understand the risks they face, the kind of growth that they have underway, the different trends. Until recently, most cities weren't even mapped to the same scale. And Google Earth made that easier since you could kind of bird's eye in. But that's not the end of the story. So you really need a tool for assimilating what a city is about and being able to kind of compare them. And what we're trying to do with this project is organize a structure whereby roughly a dozen corporate partners can plug in fund the thing to make it go as a. Think of it as a kind of multimedia publishing enterprise. But what has to be humming in the middle is kind of a Silicon Valley style startup that's really building the database into which information about cities goes and building a framework that lots of people can kind of paint into. And although we can all see the seeds of that, I think this project has the potential to be a galvanizing force. And part of my discussion with Megan and with John has been to see if we can find a way to get Google charged up enough to do a blitz assault and just shine every little technological piece of light you can on 20 cities over a five year period, so that at the end of five years, we'll have pushed that ball a lot farther. Anyway, here's one possible slice. It just occurs to me this has audio, so I'll talk over it. The old way of looking at pictures is what we're too used to. You know, you crack open a window and there's a lot of postage stamps and you poke at things and you know, that's good for some things but not for others. This is kind of the new way. And that's a view past the Trevi Fountain in Rome. There's a point cloud representation of the building behind it that is synthesized from all these little photographs down below. And the system lets you kind of zoom in. And basically what it does is it starts by bundling up all the pictures that are tagged in Flickr with Trevi Fountain. Then it does a kind of image by image comparison to find common elements and begins to find lines of perspective that connect them and in effect builds a three dimensional reconstruction and locates where each of the pictures was taken. And the kind of crossings of those pictures give you the point cloud, the 3D point cloud in the background. I think it's absolutely a fantastic notion to think that you could squeeze a group of pictures on the web and pull out really a three dimensional map of a place. It's a mind blower. And it has all the properties that are near and dear to your own gene pool because it's from the roots and lets the talents of many people feed a much greater synergy. And the thing is showing you that you can kind of very quickly compare different views, different times of day. It's just fabulous. And I'm not going to bore you with the rest of it. It's not boring at all. In fact, here's an interesting thing that's I think Google esque. Actually two things can't resist. Pictures were carefully taken around Prague and they used the images to build a little mappable piece that you could drop onto a Google Earth slice. And then came up with some other techniques to make it compelling. Like they would blur the photographs of the buildings in the background so that you still had a sense of what was there. Almost as if you were in town looking at something in the foreground. But there was a blurry sort of vista in the background. And that component provides sort of the rest of the model. Even though it's imprecise, it's like a de resed 3D background that you can use to flesh out the rest of the rendering. And I want to show you just a little bit of the Notre Dame work because that gets into keywording and looking at sub elements. They kind of went the extra step and played around with the notion of tagging elements of a picture. So this is showing you going in and putting little keywords onto bits of statuary carved into the facade of Notre Dame. And the neat thing about that is that once you do it with one picture, the keywords can propagate to all the rest of the pictures because you've done the scene analysis. So that's a different image, but it still knows which regions were marked up by. By some authority. And it's smart enough to know when something's been occluded, so it will just find you the bits that it can find. I don't know that I'd call that smart. It's just finding all that it can. So I think this is a brilliant piece of work and it reminds me very much of the early startup days of keyhole systems, when they were first stitching together satellite photos and making a blue dot browser, which is now, I think, one of the loveliest things that anybody's done with a computer computer in the last 10 years. I think the seeds of that potential are in Steve's work, but it's one of many thrusts that need to be uncorked into a project to really understand the world cities. So that's all I have to say. We're one minute shy of four o'. Clock. I really didn't mean to talk so much, but I'm more than happy to take time for questions. I know it was probably a different kind of talk than the one you guys were expecting, not terribly technical, but you can ask me technical things if you want or whatever. I'm here anyway. Let me thank you all for showing up and making applause, But I'd be much happier if there were questions. Yeah, I think one of the things.

That really surprises me about urban education.

Is I sort of expected with increased global telecommunications that it would be the opposite effect.

And so why do you think that.

That trend happens when telecommunications exist? Well, because forming groups make us more robust individuals, period. And telecommunications has to be seen as one tool to connect people. But it's not necessarily the primary tool. The primary tool is sex and. And the secondary tools are forms of community that basically bring you together. You know, it is a little side anecdote. A study was done in Texas on heart patients who were going in for elective heart surgery. The doctor says ask them two questions before their operation. Number one, do you have a spouse or a significant other? A confidant? Someone you hug every night? And number two, do you have a group that you hang out with? Boy Scout, troop leader, bowling league, synagogue? Well, the patients who answered no to those two questions do you have a buddy and do you join a group? Were the patients who died, basically. And the patients who answered yes had a Factor of seven. Greater life expectancy factor of seven. And yet no doctor asks questions like these of their patients to assess how robust they are before surgery. And any such doctor ought to write them instantly a prescription for a new, you know, G phone or iPhone, you know, free cell phone service for you. Please call some people. Because it's the friends and family and the human basic connections in your life that give you reasons to live and make you robust. And on a larger scale, it's cities that do that for communities and cultures. So that's kind of a primary force. And I think telecommunications, as vital as it is and as much of a nervous system and a massive industry as it is, is an extension of that fundamental instinct. There was a question over here first. Yeah, one here. Sure. Yeah. It's about that.

Aren't there studies that show people in cities are more isolated than people in suburbs or.

I think they're looking at a different phenomenon. It's sort of the lonely in a crowd problem, where, you know, the flip side is that cities and kind of modern lifestyles give you the luxury of not depending on families. You can just depend on Domino's to deliver pizza through a crack in the door. And so, yes, there's a large segment of the population that isn't thriving for kind of that reason. Yeah, Less technical. I found myself, as you were talking about the time, completely fascinated by the human element. Yeah, I kind of want someone to write jokey story now, so I go read that. Did you, I guess, has the response to the book. Have you gotten that sense that the response to the book is, you know, people are very interested in the human element? And going into the project, did you expect that? Did you expect to find these great, very human stories and come out with something as powerful as what we heard going into it? We never expected to come out with what we did. It was just a much more interesting place on so many levels than. Than we expected. And the work that was done, I think, rose to the occasion and was just really nice. I'm very proud of what we accomplished and consider it to be one of the lovelier chapters of my career in terms of heightening awareness. It is a fact that before we published a giant book, Bhutan was not on anybody's radar. Nobody really had heard of the place. And ironically, the day the book was introduced in New York at The Explorers Club, December 15, 2003, was also the same day that Bhutan really hit the newspapers because a small war flared up. There was an Indian separatist fundamentalist group that encroached into Bhutan and was camping down in the jungles and they had no home in India. Anyway, suddenly Bhutan was in the news and it became known again as the place that was preaching an economic doctrine based on Gross National Happiness instead of Gross national profit. People began to remember that it was the last country in the world to get television in 1999. And then the following year the King turned Bhutan into the first non smoking country. So it's kind of. And now they're turning into democracy. But basically our book came along just as the country began to open up. And because it was such a crazy novelty about such a fantastic place, a lot of people kind of perked up and signed up for trips and began to pay attention to this place. And now it's regarded as a sort of trip of a lifetime, fantastic vacation destination. But I think everybody has the sense that there's a lot more you can get out of a visit to a place like that in terms of recalibrating one's sense of scale, scale in the world and in communities. And I'd like to think that our work has helped increase awareness of that.