Geekery

Sergei Brin & Larry Page

Posted on 29. Apr, 2009 by Jake.

You know youre doing well when your company’s name becomes a verb for the service it provides.

Before the Internet, people used to look things up, during the days of Web 1.0, they searched. Now, if you want to find something on the Internet, you Google it.
The men who changed the way we use the Internet are Google co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. The pair met while they were enrolled in Stanford Universitys PhD programme; Google was actually born out of Page’s search for a topic for his thesis.
Page’s interest was the mathematical structure of the World Wide Web. Understanding the Internet as a huge graph, Page hit upon the idea that web pages could be ranked based on the number of other pages that linked to them. Brin’s focus, meanwhile, was on data-mining techniques.
Combining their research, the pair built a Google prototype on Stanfords intranet. Once they realised that their prototype worked, they followed in the footsteps of so many geek gods by suspending their PhDs, leaving university and founding a company.
The company they founded, Google Inc, has since become one of the most widely respected and publicly visible companies in the world. They regularly head the Fortune list of best places to work and have been held up as a shining example of a new way of doing business, headlined by their simple motto You can make money without being evil.
Had they simply founded a massively successful Internet company, Brin and Pages places in the geek pantheon may not be guaranteed. However, it is their remarkable commitment expanding and cataloguing the sum total of human knowledge that makes them figures worthy of worship.
Not content with just making the Internet easier to use, Brin and Page have steadily expanded their reach, making it easier for us to find each other, via Google Maps and Google Earth, easier to keep in touch, via GMail and GChat and easier to make ourselves heard, via Blogger and Youtube.

Their quest to create an online version of the worlds greatest library, the Library of Congress, is admirable both in its scope and its significance, while their constant search for innovation has tech geeks around the world waiting with baited breath for the latest offering from Google Labs. Not yet convinced? How about the fact that they offer every one of these amazing services for free?
Recently, Page and Brin have begun to branch out. Page is a major investor in alternative energy, while Brin has recently turned his attention to genetics and the Human Genome Project. Having helped make the world a smarter place, theyre now trying to make it healthier too.

Thats good news for everyone, geeks included.

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Steve Jobs

Posted on 25. Mar, 2009 by Jake.

I can still remember when the only people who cared about new gadgets were slightly awkward men (always men) with too much time on their hands.  

Times – though, those men won’t have haven’t noticed, being so absorbed in the latest twelve blade Kevlar-tipped razors or whatever – have changed. And one man – and a product of singular, simple genius – is probably more responsible for this change than anyone else.

To realise that Steve Jobs isn’t your typical suit, look at the genuine anguish? from geeks around the world when it was announced that Jobs wouldn’t be appearing at the opening of Macworld, the annual Apple trade show.

They had reason to be worried. In 2004, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a disease that is usually deadly. Fortunately, Jobs had a rare, less aggressive version of illness, and he made a full recovery.

Jobs was born in the San Francisco, the world’s counterculture centre, in 1955. After spending a bit of time at college and a stint working at Atari, Jobs went to India to find himself. He came back a Buddhist. Whether this included a disavowal of all worldly good is hard to say, considering Forbes estimates his personal wealth at $3.4 billion.

In 1976, Jobs and his friend Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computer. Today we take for granted just how revolutionary Apple’s graphic interface and point-and-click functionality were.  PCs dominate the market, but as Wired puts it “it is fair to say that every personal computer these days is essentially a Macintosh clone, even if it runs Microsoft’s Windows. Windows, after all, is the sincerest compliment Microsoft has paid to Apple.”

We can see this again today with the invention of the 2000s, the Apple iPod. Other companies offer portable music players that are cheaper, have fewer annoying quirks or come with better service. But none of these are so damn cool or so pretty. For any but the most bluntly practical it’s iPod or nothing.
Apple and its beautiful creations have made gadget aficionados of us all.

Of course, you don’t get to the top tech dog by always being Mr Nice. Fortune, which in 2007 named Jobs the most powerful man in business, once referred to him as “one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs”. More recently, though, Jobs was described as no less than a ‘national treasure’.

Typing on a shiny Mac, I can’t disagree.

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Marie Curie 1857 – 1934

Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by Jake.

In 2005, one of the finest economic minds of his generation was forced to resign as head of one the world’s great universities.

Larry Summers, who has just been made Barack Obama’s chief economics wonk, had to step down as Harvard president after suggesting that the reason there are so few women in engineering might be because actually they’re no good at it.

Ok, it was more subtle than that. He was speaking off the cuff, he was trying to provoke a debate, and what he actually suggested was something he called “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” Basically: men are, statistically, either real schmucks or super smart. The smart ones become scientists. The rest sit around drinking beer and writing blog posts.

It’s a subtle point, because you need more than one or two really smart women to show that it’s wrong. But it’s a start.

Take Marie Curie, for example. The only person awarded Nobel prizes for two different branches of science, she coined the term ‘radioactivity’.

Nuclear power is the quintessential scientific concept of the 20th century. When we think about it, grand men like Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer come to mind – and the destructive forces they wrought: The Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, Chernobyl.

Curie was no less of a path-breaker. She did innovative research with poor resources, she was the first woman professor of general sciences at her university, she even isolated radium.

But her passion for radiation’s power lay in its ability to heal. During World War One, she insisted on the widespread use of portable radiography machine to treat injured soldiers. (She was so that the machines became known as ‘petites Curies’.) And through her research, powerful cancer treatments could be developed.

And although she had moved to France, she never forgot her native Poland. In 1932 she founded a laboratory for studying radium in Warsaw, headed by her sister.

Curie’s dedication to the uplifting effects of science is easy to idealise. But her modesty, insight and accomplishment are such an impressive example that we need to ask ourselves if the lack of women scientists is just a statistical quirk – or society’s great loss.

It is a cruel irony that Curie’s life passion ultimately killed her. She died in 1934, almost certainly the result of exposure to radioactive materials.

Here is a link to the speech for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903

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