Today’s Links

Do you ever have the feel­ing that you’re leav­ing some­where to which you’ll never return? You’ve been coast­ing along in the present, then all of a sudden—the future! Is here! There’s no going back, no mat­ter how much you want to.

You walk out of the apart­ment and shut the door for the last time. You leave the uni­ver­sity cam­pus after years of study. You change jobs and say farewell to the workspace.

That place was so impor­tant to you, but now it’s no longer part of your life.

If you ever do go back, it’s never the same. You might feel like a con­quer­ing war­rior (“I remem­ber when I first arrived here, and look at me now!”) You might feel sad or regret­ful (“I wish I had…”), or you might have only good mem­o­ries. Either way, change is the con­stant, and things are going to be dif­fer­ent from now on.

***

Some­times you don’t even see it com­ing. It just hits you all of a sud­den: change is ahead! Be aware that this moment is pass­ing soon, and your life will never be the same. Sorry, but you don’t usu­ally have a choice in these matters.

When say­ing good­bye to a per­son or place, some think it’s best to leave things unsaid, or walk away with­out reflec­tion. I’ve learned that this is usu­ally a mis­take, at least for me.

I say: hold on to the moment as long as you can. Fight for it if you have to. Get up early and stay up late. Be brave. Choose the raw emo­tion, even the awk­ward­ness if nec­es­sary. If we must go on to some­thing else, let’s at least think about what was and what could have been.

The more intense the feel­ing, the bet­ter. If syn­chronic­ity and the feel­ing of being part of some­thing mean­ing­ful comes with sad­ness, lone­li­ness, and dis­ap­point­ment, so be it. I just know that I don’t want the alternative—mediocrity, rou­tine, the safe and the comfortable.

***

I often get this feel­ing when prepar­ing to leave places as I roam the planet, even if I wasn’t that attached to them while I was there. Two years ago I went to Easter Island, thou­sands of miles out and six hours by air from South Amer­ica. I enjoyed the visit, but as a tourist des­ti­na­tion, it’s a long way to go for a small island with lit­tle to do.

I’m not buy­ing a sec­ond home in Easter Island, in other words. But then—on the eve of my depar­ture, I looked up at the sky and real­ized how far I was from every­where else in the world. I also real­ized I would likely never return and thought, I’d bet­ter remem­ber this.

I joke about col­lect­ing coun­tries the way some peo­ple col­lect post­cards, but really I’m col­lect­ing expe­ri­ences like these. “Is it worth it to spend so much money on travel?” I’m some­times asked. I don’t really think of it as pay­ing for travel itself. I’m pay­ing for mem­o­ries, and when it comes to spend­ing on mem­o­ries, I say yes. Most def­i­nitely. I have no credit limit for memories.

I felt this way while leav­ing Tbil­isi, Geor­gia a few months ago. It’s truly a beau­ti­ful city, and one of the best in Europe, no doubt. The inten­sity of it all was almost over­whelm­ing to me.

I wasn’t ready to say farewell, but I also knew that stay­ing another day wouldn’t make it any bet­ter. I ran ten kilo­me­ters the night before I left, try­ing to process the expe­ri­ence. The next morn­ing, I rode in the mini-bus to Arme­nia, my next stop, and thought about it fur­ther for a good six hours or so.

I had been read­ing Don Miller’s new book on this trip. Among other things, Don says that mean­ing­ful lives do not just hap­pen by acci­dent. They require con­flict, risk, striv­ing, and over­com­ing. A good char­ac­ter in a story has to strug­gle, and so it is with all of us.

That’s why I think it’s good to embrace the tran­si­tion points. Don’t go to sleep to dream. You can dream all day long with­out ever clos­ing your eyes.

After mak­ing it to the next hotel, though, I laid down on the bed for a short nap at 4pm. I woke up 10 hours later, still feel­ing dis­ori­ented. I made cof­fee and did some writing.

Inevitably, I know that we all have to look for­ward instead of back­wards. In the pur­suit of growth, it’s bet­ter to choose the new than the old. But some­times it’s also good to hold on to some­thing for a while, and then you can trea­sure it as the mem­ory it becomes.

Embrac­ing real­ity may be exhaust­ing, but I can’t imag­ine the alter­na­tive of avoid­ing it.

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Image by Dariva

One way to do indis­pens­able work is to show up more hours than every­one else. Exces­sive face time and candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it’s pos­si­ble to lever­age it into a kind of success.

But if you’re win­ning by cheat­ing the clock, you’re still cheating.

The prob­lem with using time as your lever for suc­cess is that it doesn’t scale very well. 20 hours a day at work is not twice as good as 18, and you cer­tainly can’t go much beyond 24…

What would hap­pen if you were pro­hib­ited from work­ing more than five hours a day. What would you do? How would you use those five hours to become indis­pens­able in a dif­fer­ent way?

Go ahead, try it. Just for a week. See what hap­pens. Even if you go back to ten, you’ll dis­cover you’ve changed the way you compete.

Seaglider drones col­lect valu­able data as they travel deep underwater.

Researchers are employ­ing iRobot’s Seaglider unmanned under­wa­ter vehi­cle (UUV) to mon­i­tor the dam­age caused in the Gulf of Mex­ico by the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon Oil Spill. The six foot long autonomous robots are capa­ble of oper­at­ing for 10 months on their own, mon­i­tor­ing water con­di­tions down to 1 km (~3300 feet). They peri­od­i­cally resur­face to trans­mit data via satel­lite. Cur­rent Seaglid­ers in the Gulf are track­ing tem­per­ture, salin­ity, dis­solved oxy­gen, and pres­ence of organic com­pounds (oil). Data analy­sis and tech­ni­cal sup­port is being han­dled by Ver­non Asper of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Mis­sis­sippi and Craig Lee of the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton. Seaglider data may prove to be a valu­able asset in deal­ing with the ongo­ing envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis in the Gulf.

The scale of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon Oil Spill is mon­u­men­tal. Mil­lions of bar­rels of oil have already been released into the Gulf of Mex­ico habi­tat, and more con­tin­ues to leak from sec­ondary holes in the sys­tem. While no one is able to pre­dict the envi­ron­men­tal impact this dis­as­ter will have on the region, there’s a nearly uni­ver­sal agree­ment among experts that it will have a seri­ous and neg­a­tive impact on marine wildlife, fish­ing economies, and coastal wet­lands. In order to respond to the cri­sis, sci­en­tists and lead­ers need up to date infor­ma­tion about where oil is headed, and in what quan­ti­ties, in order to coor­di­nate coun­ter­mea­sure and relief efforts.

This pic­ture, taken by NASA, shows the enor­mous size of the oil slick caused by the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon Oil spill.. To give you an idea of the size, that’s the ‘boot’ of Louisiana in the upper left part of the image.

Robotic explor­ers like the Seaglider have become indis­pens­able tools for marine sci­ence. We’ve seen remote sub­mersibles in use at Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity, and under­wa­ter drones from UC San Diego will soon track huge regions of our oceans. Over 120 of iRobot’s Seaglid­ers are already in the field for use with var­i­ous research groups around the world. While under com­mer­cial license with iRo­bot, the Seaglider was orig­i­nally designed by the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton. Their, the UUV has already made sev­eral impor­tant excur­sions, includ­ing long range sur­veys under the Artic ice shelf. Craig Lee explains that mis­sion, and the use of the Seaglider, in this video from last year:

The Seaglider can last so long under­wa­ter (up to 10 months) because it doesn’t rely on tra­di­tional pro­peller sys­tems. Instead, it ‘glides’ through dif­fer­ent ocean strata using changes in buoy­ancy. It also col­lects data as it moves through these dif­fer­ent lev­els, allow­ing it to pro­vide valu­able insight into what’s hap­pen­ing far below the sur­face of the water. A few times a day, the UUV sur­faces and uses a meter long antenna to trans­mit data and receive instructions.

Being able to send an autonomous drone to mea­sure vari­ables at dif­fer­ent depths is of great use in this recent oil spill. Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon has released oil droplets through­out the Gulf, and the Seaglider has detected clouds of this crude as far down as 700 meters. Researchers like Asper and Lee can use an internet-based inter­face to con­trol the Seaglider and direct it to dif­fer­ent loca­tions and depths as needed to get a a bet­ter pic­ture of how the crude oil is dis­pers­ing. Mean­while mea­sure­ments of tem­per­a­ture, dis­solved oxy­gen, and salin­ity give the sci­en­tists some idea of how marine life would fair in the region even with­out direct mea­sure­ment of a species.

It will likely be many years before we fully under­stand the eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal impact of the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon Oil Spill, but much needs to be done in the short term to stem the dev­as­ta­tion it could cause. To that end, the Seaglider robot is a great tech­nol­ogy to assist in the response effort. More infor­ma­tion is always good in sit­u­a­tions like this. In the future, advanced tech­nolo­gies will become an increas­ingly vis­i­ble part of dis­as­ter relief and recov­ery, not only help­ing to col­lect valu­able data, but also direct civil­ian response. Mov­ing for­ward I hope that we use accel­er­at­ing tech­nol­ogy to not only react to ongo­ing crises, but help pre­vent them. With a lit­tle intel­li­gence (arti­fi­cial or oth­er­wise) many of these dis­as­ters could be avoided.

[image credit: iRo­bot, NASA via Wiki­Com­mons]