Week #379

Last week of June. Horribly hot in Madrid and lovely sunny in Reykjavík (sorry Al). This week has been focused in our usual projects: Alberto made a bunch of work in Bazaar and Qstion while I was coding in Stage and Verkami. Average, calm week at Linking Paths.

I’ve been fortunate enough this week to take a small 3-day break from my usual -crazy- schedule to participate as volunteer in PopTech Iceland 2012. As I’m writing this, the morning sessions of the second day are finishing and we’ve had tons of interesting talks, all of them approaching this edition’s topic -resilience- from different perspectives.

I think that as we keep adding complexity to our societies, the problems it creates will have more ramifications and subtle implications. Since understanding the problem is half the solution, multidisciplinary approaches will be increasingly important to evolve as civilization. I like to bring this philosophy to everything I do (from self-learning to hobbies) and I think is a good model for conferences too. In this two days I’ve been listening to:

• How collective memory in whales allows them improve resilience through generations.
• How safety systems in Nuclear plants sometimes don’t make the installations safer.
• How important is to create cheap computers with embedded development tools so kids can access programming more easily.
• How cities develop in a sub-linear scaling regarding infrastructure but in a super-linear scaling regarding creative thinking and how this relates to the animal kingdom or even to companies. (Watch Geoffrey West explaining this here).

I enjoy a very healthy mental reboot every time I attend this kind of conferences to the point I think I’d really enjoy to create one… umm…

Have a great weekend.