I’ve been work­ing on a three part arti­cle for the last few days called “Pimp my Treo” but now I’m not sure I’ll post it. In short, it’s how to use Kinoma Play, Sky­fire and Win­ter­face to “mod­ern­ize” a Treo or sim­i­lar device to look and feel more like the “new hot­ness” devices from HTC and Sam­sung. It all works pretty well, but I’m doubt­ing now if it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve talked many times before about the Zen of Palm, the com­mit­ment going back to Jeff Hawkins to make Palm devices as easy to use as pos­si­ble. As it turns out, this is impor­tant not just in hand­helds, but all kinds of com­put­ers. Paul Thur­rott of the Win­dows Super­site had an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion on this recently (expanded a bit in this week’s Win­dows Weekly podcast):

Read­ing Mr. Carr’s arti­cle, it occurred to me that the prob­lem with Win­dows 7 is the same thing that’s the prob­lem with Mac OS X. That is, Microsoft is con­fus­ing “easy” with “simple.”

For exam­ple, Mac users have claimed for years that Mac OS X is “easy to use,” when in fact it is any­thing but. Mac OS X is sim­ple. As noted above, sim­ple is hard [to engi­neer]. And we should all give Apple credit for that. But sim­ple is not the same as easy. One basic exam­ple: The Mac OS X desk­top is a bar­ren place with no obvi­ous start­ing point. And the peo­ple who feel that it is easy are fooled because they are sim­ply used to it. Things that are famil­iar seem easy. But they’re not nec­es­sar­ily easy to those who are unfa­mil­iar with that thing or, in the case of poten­tial Switch­ers, are famil­iar with some­thing else. The Mac OS X desk­top is sim­ple. But it is not easy.

By con­trast, the Win­dows desk­top is easy in that it pro­vides an obvi­ous start­ing point (a Start but­ton) and because Microsoft and its PC maker part­ners go a bit over the top pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion to the user on first boot. Crit­ics will argue that this also makes Win­dows con­vo­luted. And they’re right, as it turns out. It’s hard to get the right mix of sim­ple and easy. Apple errs to much on the side of sim­ple, in my opin­ion. But Microsoft errs some­where else: They over­whelm the user with func­tion­al­ity in a bid to make sure it works for every­one. All too often, the result is some­thing that works for very few people.

Sim­ple is not the same thing as easy. Jeff Hawkins under­stood this, and made the orig­i­nal Palm devices easy to use. But as many of us Palm vet­er­ans know, there was a lot of power in those early devices, too.

Thanks in large part to the iPhone, we’ve seen a flood of “sim­ple” user inter­faces on Win­dows Mobile devices recently. TouchFlo3D on the new HTC devices is only one, Sam­sung and O2 and Veloc­ity and many oth­ers have fol­lowed suit with their own spins on how to sim­plify the Win­dows Mobile expe­ri­ence. But are they right?

One of the exam­ples Thur­rott men­tioned in the pod­cast was old school com­mand line Unix. Here we have a sys­tem that was sim­ple, but not easy. Most Unix com­mands do only one thing, it doesn’t get much sim­pler than that. Grep finds text match­ing a search term, noth­ing more. But you had to know what they were, how they worked, and what kind of out­put they’d give you before you could string them together in shell scripts to do com­plex things. Def­i­nitely not easy.

The more I tweaked my Treo to work more like the new devices on the mar­ket, the more some­thing started to bug me. It seemed slower. It seemed a lot slower. And it was, because I was dis­card­ing fea­tures designed for ease of use for things that made the expe­ri­ence “sim­ple”. It was sim­pler to have con­tacts mixed in with my appli­ca­tions in Win­ter­face, but it was actu­ally eas­ier to get to them by typ­ing directly on the Today screen. I’ll bet my Treo can do any­thing a Touch Pro can do in a frac­tion of the time, even with a slower proces­sor. Because it’s easy to use, not simple.

Calm down, lib­er­als. Take a deep breath. I know that trust­ing your elected offi­cials and being skep­ti­cal of the press feels alien and wrong, but times have changed. It’s really okay. Ease down. You’ve blown the transaxle, you’re just grind­ing metal.

I woke up this morn­ing to a cacoph­ony of Chicken Lit­tling about the pos­si­bil­ity that Obama might not roll back the Bush tax cuts! OMG! How could he do such a thing?

Well, if you slow down and read the fine print, he didn’t. Here’s what he actu­ally said.

“Whether that’s done through repeal, or whether that’s done because the Bush tax cuts are not renewed, is some­thing that my eco­nomic team will be pro­vid­ing me a rec­om­men­da­tion on.”

So the ques­tion here is whether the tax cuts for the wealthy are repealed in 2009 or allowed to expire on their own in 2011. And he’s not say­ing he won’t repeal them, just that all options are on the table to be con­sid­ered along with the rest of our eco­nomic pol­icy. That doesn’t sound as scary. It actu­ally sounds kind of, you know, rational.

I’ve seen this hap­pen almost daily since the elec­tion. The media, and their audi­ence, is so used to every­thing going to hell sans hand­bas­ket that they imme­di­ately jump to the worst pos­si­ble con­se­quence of any­thing com­ing out of Wash­ing­ton. But the new guy is such a fun­da­men­tal change from the smirk­ing chimp cur­rently occu­py­ing the Oval Office that this approach doesn’t make sense any­more. I find myself in the dis­tinctly uncom­fort­able place (no, not the back­seat of a Volk­swa­gen) of hav­ing to trust the politi­cians and be skep­ti­cal of the press. Because every time I’ve seen this hap­pen, it sounds hor­ri­ble until I actu­ally read what Obama said and say, “Oh, well, that sounds okay.”

It really does come down to trust. I trust Barack Obama to be smarter than me and do the right thing. I’ve trusted Bush for eight years to be dumber than me and try to screw me over, but that dif­fer­ent. I know that Barack Obama knows every­thing about pol­i­tics that I know, plus a lot that I don’t know, even stuff, with apolo­gies to Rummy, that I don’t know I don’t know. And I trust him to weigh all of that against itself and make the right call for our long term pros­per­ity and security.

And the key to that is “long term.” Pol­i­tics is the sci­ence (and art) of com­pro­mise, and if we want the changes we get in an Obama admin­is­tra­tion to endure, a sim­ple numeric major­ity in Con­gress isn’t enough. We need Repub­li­cans who might, even though it looks more dubi­ous with every Sarah Palin photo op, be back in charge some­day to have some sense of own­er­ship over these changes.

Think about this like a chess grand­mas­ter, look­ing sev­eral moves ahead. Obama knows that his­tor­i­cally, our econ­omy has tanked after every tax cut on the rich and rose after every tax hike on the rich. But he also knows that we’re going to be run­ning a seri­ous deficit for at least most of his first term as we try to spend our way out of this reces­sion (the only proven way to get out of a reces­sion), so the money lost to the Bush tax cuts between 2009 and 2011 is just a fac­tor in the size of the deficit, not the cause of one. So if he extends this poten­tial olive branch to the Repub­li­cans (and their super-​rich con­stituents), does that grant some Repub­li­cans the polit­i­cal cover they need to step across the aisle and pass uni­ver­sal health­care or a new New Deal to rebuild our crum­bling infrastructure?

So stay calm, trust that Obama has his eye on the big pic­ture, and don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s going to be okay. Ratio­nal adults are in charge now, give them room to do their jobs.

“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.“
 – Han Solo

As a Win­dows Mobile user, I’m con­sis­tently amazed that peo­ple take the iPhone seri­ously as a smart­phone plat­form. Yes, my Treo has an old school 2003 inter­face and isn’t as shiny as newer smart­phones (includ­ing “black slab” iPhone wannabes like the Black­berry Storm and even WM devices like the HTC Touch Dia­mond and Sam­sung Omnia), but I’m also not ham­strung with arbi­trary limitations.

Let me give you an exam­ple. Apple recently released the 2.2 update for the iPhone, which finally allows users to down­load pod­casts directly to the phone if they’re on the go. Sounds cool, right? I mean, it must be really good if Apple was will­ing to kill a pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion on the app store because they were about to pro­vide the same func­tion­al­ity in a bet­ter, Apple-​sanctioned experience.

Only it’s actu­ally pretty lame. First off, it doesn’t let you down­load any­thing over 10MB over 3G, because heaven for­bid you actu­ally use that high speed con­nec­tion for any­thing where you could actu­ally tell the dif­fer­ence between it and Edge. No, any­thing over 10MB (and most pod­casts are) can only be down­loaded via WiFi, which means you have to stay at the hotspot while you down­load. So much for “on the go.”

But it gets worse. It also doesn’t sync what you’ve down­loaded and played with the desk­top, so there’s no way to tell your iPhone to check all your sub­scribed pod­casts and down­load the new stuff. You have to check each one man­u­ally (through the same Apple iTunes Music store that should, the­o­ret­i­cally, know what you’ve already down­loaded) and remem­ber on your own what you haven’t heard yet.

So let me get this straight. Apple pulls a pop­u­lar app from the app store because they’re going to pro­vide that func­tion­al­ity in the base OS, but then their solu­tion not only doesn’t take advan­tage of inte­gra­tion with other Apple prod­ucts (iTunes, music store), but also imposes lim­i­ta­tions on where and how you can use it? And iPhone users have been brain­washed into think­ing this is a good thing?

On my junky look­ing, out­dated user inter­face Treo, on the other hand, I can install the open source and free Beyond­Pod, which allows me to import my pod­cast feeds from an XML file or from Google Reader, keeps track of what I’ve lis­tened to and what I haven’t, down­loads new pod­casts both à la carte and on a sched­ule (I have it down­load every­thing at 3am while I sleep) and has no lim­i­ta­tions on how much I can down­load, when or where I down­load, and can even stream pod­casts instead of down­load­ing. It can also option­ally delete each file as soon as done lis­ten­ing to it.

Or, if I want a “slicker” user inter­face, I can use Kinoma Play. It can also either down­load or stream pod­casts when­ever I want, as well as play media from Orb, Audi­ble, YouTube and lots of other ser­vices, all from the same mod­ern and con­sis­tent user inter­face. Or I could use Pocket Player from Con­duits, which also… well, you get the idea.

The iPhone is a great basic media player and inter­net ter­mi­nal, but until has the power and flex­i­bil­ity of Win­dows Mobile, or even Palm OS, don’t tell me it’s a smart­phone. It may not be pretty, but my Treo gives me options, not limitations.

I’ve seen lots of peo­ple on the left freak­ing out about Obama’s recent cab­i­net choices. Let’s review.

• Sec­re­tary of State: Hillary Clinton
• Sec­re­tary of Defense: Bob Gates
• Health and Human Ser­vices: Tom Daschle
• Home­land Secu­rity: Janet Napolitano
• Attor­ney Gen­eral: Eric Holder
• Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

All famil­iar names to peo­ple who remem­ber the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion. Hell, one of them is a Clin­ton. So is this change we can believe in?

Hell yes. Mal­colm Glad­well points out that it takes 10,000 hours to mas­ter any com­plex skill. Writ­ing, play­ing piano, or even run­ning a gov­ern­ment. 10,000 hours. If you work a 40-​hour work week and have two weeks off for vaca­tion, you work 2,000 hours a year. So we’re talk­ing 5 years at a reg­u­lar job before you’ve mas­tered it. I under­stand the need for fresh faces and fresh ideas, but shouldn’t some­one in the new admin­is­tra­tion already have those 10,000 hours under their belt?

Let’s take a look at each one of these choices and see if just maybe they’re not as bad as the hard core left is saying.

Sec­re­tary of State: Hillary Clinton

This is the big one that no one can shut up about, least of which the peo­ple who keep leak­ing every step of the process to the press. Bill Clin­ton has agreed to do any­thing the Obama peo­ple want to make this hap­pen, so I don’t think he’s going to be the bag­gage peo­ple thought he’d be. The big ques­tion here is whether Clin­ton can and will be a faith­ful instru­ment of Obama for­eign pol­icy, the sin­gle point on which she and Obama seri­ously dis­agreed in the primaries.

I think she will be. Every­thing we’ve seen so far shows that Clin­ton is a team player. And we also know that Obama won’t hes­i­tate to replace her if she goes off mes­sage. More impor­tantly, Clin­ton knows that being very good at this job is a great step­ping stone to the Oval Office in 2016, since Biden almost cer­tainly won’t run at age 74.

Sec­re­taries of State have to be good at two things: talk­ing to for­eign heads of state and bypass­ing for­eign heads of state by talk­ing directly to for­eign media when nec­es­sary. Clin­ton can do both, maybe bet­ter than any­one else. Obama knows this, so he’s will­ing to give her the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

Sec­re­tary of Defense: Bob Gates

We knew there would be some Repub­li­cans in Obama’s post-​partisan cab­i­net, and as we pre­pare to get out of Iraq, con­ti­nu­ity of com­mand is impor­tant. Gates knows the cur­rent state of the mil­i­tary, and can enact a with­drawal plan faster than some­one who has to be brought up to speed. Plus, Gates has already taken a stand on secur­ing our nukes by fir­ing the top mil­i­tary and civil­ian heads of the Air Force over nuclear weapon safety. I think he’ll do a good job, and will prob­a­bly be replaced once the tran­si­tion out of Iraq is well under way.

Health and Human Ser­vices: Tom Daschle

He knows health care back­wards and for­wards and he knows how to get votes on the Hill. No one is bet­ter suited to drive leg­is­la­tion on uni­ver­sal health­care, not even Teddy Kennedy. Daschle knows where enough bod­ies are buried to get votes through on this, some­thing we’ve tried 4 times in a cen­tury and haven’t done. This time it will work.

Home­land Secu­rity: Janet Napolitano

Napoli­tano has been a voice of rea­son on immi­gra­tion and bor­der secu­rity, even rid­ing horse­back along the Mex­ico bor­der and walk­ing in the sewer tun­nels ille­gals use to cross over. She’s ide­ally suited to secure our bor­ders and ports, while not piss­ing off our legit­i­mate immi­grant population.

Attor­ney Gen­eral: Eric Holder

Yes, he was Deputy AG under Clin­ton, but he’s also the best man for the job. He knows Wash­ing­ton and he has an up close look at what Ashcroft and Gon­za­les have done to break the Jus­tice Depart­ment. He can put it back together.

Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

Every admin­is­tra­tion needs a DA, a Des­ig­nated Ass­hole. A Bad Cop to Obama’s Good Cop. Rahm Emanuel was born for this job. He’s the attack dog that Dick Cheney was for Bush, but hope­fully he won’t shoot anyone.

So to wrap up, what we can tell from Obama’s picks so far is that he doesn’t care where peo­ple worked pre­vi­ously. Work­ing for Clinton’s or even Dubya’s admin­is­tra­tions isn’t a deal breaker. What he’s look­ing for is excel­lence. Peo­ple who can do the job they’re given superla­tively. In a way, it’s a very anti-​Bush pol­icy. There will be no “Brown­ies” in this admin­is­tra­tion, no one given a job for polit­i­cal rea­sons what­so­ever. Instead, we’ll have the best peo­ple pos­si­ble in each posi­tion, lead­ing with competency.

And after eight years of naked patron­age, that’s change I can believe in.

Just saw this on the book­shelf at my local gro­cery store. Haven’t read it and don’t endorse it (it’s pretty easy to find on Ama­zon if you’re inter­ested), but I found it intensely inter­est­ing that we have a pres­i­dent (or will, on Jan­u­ary 20^th) that inspires with his ora­tory skills.

Unlike the cur­rent guy, who just embar­rasses.

I wasn’t sure they could top Casino Royale, and I”m not sure they did, pre­cisely. What they did with the new Bond movie is con­tinue the story from Casino Royale with­out miss­ing a beat or drop­ping the inten­sity. I won’t give too much away, but I will say I was damn impressed by how smoothly this tran­si­tioned from the first film. As a fan of the orig­i­nal Ian Flem­ing nov­els, I’m also amazed at how they were able to recap­ture the sense of no-​nonsense (there is no Q, and very few gad­gets) bad-​assery in a post Cold War world. Make no mis­take, this Bond doesn’t quip, doesn’t waste time mug­ging for the cam­era. These are seri­ous professionals.

That said, some lessons learned.

• Do not build a build­ing out of hydro­gen fuel cells. You’re just ask­ing for trou­ble. Oh, the humanity.
• If some­one implies that they’re watch­ing you, for god’s sake, don’t get up and storm out of the opera.
• Never, for any rea­son, pull over at a Boli­vian traf­fic stop.
• Oh, and don’t give James Bond a rea­son to want you dead.

One of the folks at COPTUG (Col­orado Palm­top User’s Group) tonight has a brand new AT&T Fuze, a vari­ant of the HTC Touch Pro. I’d already taken a look at Sprint’s ver­sion, so it was nice to com­pare and contrast.

• The key­board lay­out might be bet­ter than the Sprint ver­sion. No num­ber row, but I like the ded­i­cated Win­dows and OK keys.
• The back is faceted like the Euro­pean Dia­mond, which isn’t nearly as obnox­ious as it looks in photos.
• I still hate the D-​pad.
• Love the way the screen and key­board back­light fades in and out. Classy!
• VGA is gor­geous. I’m so jeal­ous, even though the 320×320 on my 800w is noth­ing to sneak at.

France Smart­phone posted the two images you see to the right today as a pre­view of what’s to come in Win­dows Mobile 6.5. In case you missed it, Motorola let the cat out of the bad a cou­ple weeks ago when they men­tioned 6.5 as one of the OSes they had in their new slimmed down lineup for new devices. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer con­firmed the exis­tence of the oper­at­ing sys­tem last week (seri­ously, why do they let him any­where near a micro­phone?). 6.5 should should appear early to mid next year, and pave the way for Win­dows Mobile 7 by early 2010.

How­ever…

Take a good look at these screen­shots. While they’re cer­tainly good look­ing, they’re also cer­tainly fakes. The biggest tip-​offs are the color of the Start flag (col­ored in on one shot, white on the other) and the posi­tion of the sig­nal strength and bat­tery icons, which swap sides from one shot to the other. So while this might be a very good guess at what 6.5 might look like, it’s only a guess, and not leaked from Redmond.

Now that we know they’re not real, let’s see what they do tell us. The first one, a pro­gram launcher of sorts, uses the hex lay­out famil­iar to table­top RPG folk instead of a more tra­di­tional rows and columns grid. Can you say track­ball nav­i­ga­tion? We know some of the new Moto devices use a Blackberry/​G1-​style track­ball instead of a d-​pad, and this is just the kind of UI I’d expect to take advan­tage of that. But since I don’t think most of the new devices are going to be trackball-​based, I think we can skip that one.

But the sec­ond shot is far, far more inter­est­ing. Here we see the stan­dard Win­dows Mobile Today screen, but laid out and nav­i­gated far more like the Zune inter­face. This makes sense, since we know that Microsoft plans to bring the Zune soft­ware plat­form to both Win­dows Mobile and X-​Box even­tu­ally. If that effort were far­ther along that we thought, this would be a very cred­i­ble look for Win­dows Mobile, a com­bin­ing of the Zune UI with Win­dows Mobile 6.1 Standard’s “slid­ing pan­els” home­screen interface.

So while I’m con­vinced these shots aren’t real, I do think Microsoft should take a good long look at them as an exam­ple of how they could mod­ern­ize the Win­dows Mobile expe­ri­ence with­out chang­ing it so much that it’s not Win­dows Mobile any­more. After all, those of us who choose to use Win­dows Mobile today know the iPhone and Android are out there, and we picked Win­dows Mobile for a reason.

So NaNoW­riMo was a bust for me this year, as I’ve given up only ten days in. Why did I wash out this year when fin­ished in 2006?

No one to race against. One of the big moti­va­tors for me in 2006 was rac­ing against my writ­ing part­ner, Josh Curry of Max­i­mum Geek. Josh sat out this year, pre­fer­ring to spend his time doing school­work for his degree, like higher edu­ca­tion is impor­tant or some­thing. So I was pretty much going it alone, and couldn’t rely on any­one else to push me.

Lack of incen­tives. Other than keep­ing the blog going, I didn’t really have any­thing to reward me when I did well, nor any neg­a­tive con­se­quences if I didn’t make my quota. Again, this is where self-​discipline should have kicked in, but if I had strong self-​discipline, I might be fun­da­men­tally unqual­i­fied to be a writer.

And there’s one rea­son I thought might be fac­tor, but I won’t use: lack of time. I’ve had time if I’d really wanted to write. In the past week, I’ve installed OneCare on both my desk­top and lap­top, cloned and then recon­sid­ered the Win­dows 7 user inter­face on XP (I’ll do a writeup of this later), how to blog in OneNote, rebuilt my phone around Kinoma instead of Beyond­Pod and Audi­ble­Player, then back to Beyond­Pod again, watched nearly all three sea­sons of “How I Met Your Mother” and found lots of other ways to waste time I could have spent writing.

Too afraid to screw up a book I care about. This is the big one. I know now why Chris Baty makes it a rule not to use pre-​existing mate­r­ial for NaNoW­riMo. I was rules-​lawyering my way around that pro­hi­bi­tion by start­ing an entirely new draft of Ghost Ronin, but I’ve had this story devel­op­ing in my mind for damn near two decades now. I’ve done years of research for it, have the 17 chap­ters of the book planned out in some detail, and oddly, that very prepa­ra­tion is what killed me.

NaNoW­riMo is based on what Anne Lam­ott calls “shitty first drafts,” some­thing that no mat­ter how much I under­stand the con­cept intel­lec­tu­ally I can’t man­age to inter­nal­ize. I kept freez­ing up, not want­ing to get any­thing “wrong”. While I know I have to work through this even­tu­ally if I want to ever fin­ish any­thing, I doubt it’s going to hap­pen this month. Ghost Ronin’s firm struc­ture and abun­dant research and back­story will make it great for writ­ing at my own pace, but they also served as con­stant road­blocks for the silly aban­don that is sup­posed to char­ac­ter­ize NaNoWriMo.

I’ll try again next year, and I have ten­ta­tive com­mit­ment from Josh that both he and his girl­friend will be join­ing me. I’ll pick a story con­cept that I don’t already have much invest­ment in, but one that seems excit­ing enough to carry me through 50,000 words. I’ll set up a sys­tem of rewards for hit­ting cer­tain mile­stones, and try to really enjoy the ride. For now, though, I’ll keep plug­ging away at Ghost Ronin at my own pace and try to get it fin­ished before Script Frenzy next spring.

I’ve been think­ing a lot recently about Obama win­ning the elec­tion, about my writ­ing, why I washed out of NaNoW­riMo this year (more on that later), and the pass­ing of one of my favorite authors last week, Michael Crich­ton. I’m also reread­ing Juras­sic Park, my favorite Crich­ton novel. And in so doing, I’ve come to real­ize some­thing. My whole life, I’ve served two mas­ters. Worse, two seem­ingly mutu­ally exclu­sive masters.

On the one hand, I’ve always been a skep­tic, a ques­tioner. While I under­stand the his­toric sig­nif­i­cance of the United States elect­ing an African-​American pres­i­dent, I’m still baf­fled at the racism that, yes, still exists in the south where I grew up. To me, racism never made sense. I learned at an early age that the amount of melanin in one’s skin is a sim­ple genetic trait, not more sig­nif­i­cant to the organ­ism over­all than eye color or hand­ed­ness. Dis­crim­i­nat­ing against peo­ple for skin color was just as ludi­crous to me as say­ing that blue-​eyed peo­ple were nat­u­rally supe­rior, or than left-​handed peo­ple were pos­sessed by demons. It was only years later that I found out the lat­ter two asser­tions had also had their turn, and resulted in mil­lions of deaths. I still think it’s stupid.

I’ve always wanted to know why. Why any­thing. “Because we’ve always done it this way” is never a good rea­son to do any­thing as far as I’m con­cerned. I’ve always had a scientist’s nat­ural curios­ity and deter­mi­na­tion to find a ratio­nal expla­na­tion for things, even things that, like racism, aren’t ratio­nal. This was, I think, what drew me to Crichton’s books. Look­ing back over his col­lected works, includ­ing those I fun­da­men­tally dis­agree with like State of Fear, the con­stant thread that unites nearly every­thing Crich­ton pro­duced is a healthy mis­trust of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Not from a lud­dite per­spec­tive, but an aware­ness that with the won­ders of new dis­cov­ery and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment we must always keep a care­ful eye out to make sure it’s not acci­den­tally or even delib­er­ately mis­used. Most of Crichton’s books are about sci­ence gone wrong, about mod­ern day Daedaluses and Prometheuses reach­ing too far or play­ing with things they didn’t truly under­stand. I think this is an impor­tant theme, espe­cially as our tech­no­log­i­cal pace con­tin­ues to increase, and I hope some­one (even me) picks up where Crich­ton left off.

But the other rea­son I was such a big fan of Crichton’s work is that his books also reached out to the edge of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, push­ing the bound­aries of what we con­sid­ered pos­si­ble. and while part of me is a skep­tic, the other side of me deeply wants to believe. While I have a scientist’s thirst for ratio­nal expla­na­tions, I also have a storyteller’s sense of won­der and magic. And so I’m will­ing to give some things the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

Keep­ing in mind Crichton’s con­stant warn­ing that we never know as much as we think we do about the nat­ural world, I note that until one cen­tury ago, 1908, the gorilla was con­sid­ered a myth­i­cal crea­ture. So is the exis­tence of a fifth species of great ape, one more closely related to humans and fully bipedal, but which avoids us and sticks to the most remote parts of the world so hard to find pos­si­ble, if not plau­si­ble? Tales of rare encoun­ters with these shy crea­tures are so wide­spread and con­sis­tent that there must be more to them than myth. And, if they are descended from the so-​called “miss­ing link” they could fill in an impor­tant gap in pri­mate evo­lu­tion. So with all this mind, I’m inclined to believe these crea­tures exist more than not, whether you call them Big­foot, Sasquatch or Yeti.

For sim­i­lar lines of rea­son­ing, I’m also open to the exis­tence or con­tin­ued sur­vival of Mokèlé-​mbèmbé (what sounds like an apatosaur deep in the Congo rain­for­est where no human but pyg­mies has ever gone), mega­lodon (a 60 – 100 foot ances­tor of the great white shark that I think might be no more extinct than the coela­canth) and other things that “ratio­nal” peo­ple dis­miss as imag­i­nary. Because we don’t know. We can never know everything.

So as I bid farewell to Michael Crich­ton, I’m going to keep both the sense of dis­cov­ery and won­der he brought me over the years, and the warn­ing skep­ti­cism behind his books. And I thank him for help­ing to shape the reader, writer and thinker I am today.