Life among the Famous

So, I’m standing next to Yo-Yo Ma who’s saying to Herbie Hancock that Herbie’s new outreach program is tremendously exciting. So, I say to Yo-Yo … absolutely nothing. I stand there like a dork. Totally appropriate behavior.

I expect to have many more C2D (Celebrity-to-Dork) non-encounters over the next few days. I’m at the TED conference, this odd confab of digeratti, entertainers, media types and then the rest of us.

I missed yesterday’s sessions and arrived in time only for the opening cocktail party, a self-consciously “elegant” affair that pretended that holding a martini automatically makes you sophisticated. I took a tour of the jammed ballroom when I got there and realized that I was literally the only person not talking with someone else. I am not good at meeting strangers. In fact, I get depressed in crowds of strangers, especially if they’re enjoying themselves.

Eventually, however, I fell into a conversation with the guy who was demoing the Alias/Wavefront Portfolio Wall touchscreen device. “Touchscreen device” seriously understates it. It’s a gorgeous, large flat panel screen that responds to gestures, very much as Bruce Tognazzini‘s “Star Office” video envisioned it years ago. Watching people walk up to the screen it seems that there are maybe three gestures that people naturally use (pointing to select, dragging to move, waving to turn a page) and after that, we’re going to have to make up more. The gestures Alias/Wavefront have invented seem completely obvious once they show you. (The company has looked at American Sign Language as a source.) The demo Alias/Wavefront has put together is stellar, including a seemingly pointless sketching app that spins out swirly, fading designs as you move your hands … sort of like what you saw when your chemcially-whacked brain watched your hands waving in air. You know your product demos well if it actually causes an acid flashback.

I started talking with the demo guy who turns out to be Tom Wujec whose third book, “Return on Imagination”, will be out in April. (His previous book was the felicitiously titled Pumping Ions.) We spent a half hour talking about visualization software, the effect of the Web on real world self-understanding, gestures, and the like. Better than a martini.

The trip from Boston to LA was surprisingly fun because I happened to be seated next to the illustrator David Macauley (“The Way Things Work”) who was also on his way to the conference. I’ve long been an admirer of his work. What a gift he has. And what a good guy. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, funny. He’s just at the beginning of a project that will take him 2.5-3 years: a book that describes visually the building of a human being, system by system. This will be fascinating not only because of its topic but because Macauley is reflective about how to convey information … not to mention that he draws real good, too.

As if to round out my day of the Varieties of Famous Experience, at the LA airport where I volunteered to be bumped from an overbooked flight (in place of a guy who said he had an important meeting … that afterwards turned out to be with the national Meat Association, causing my vegetarian heart to momentarily have misgivings) who was standing next to me at the counter but Ben Stein. Those of you not immersed to your pineal gland in pop culture may not know that he’s the whiny-voiced, dull-looking actor who also was a law professor and on Richard Nixon’s legal team. In our little Celebrity Encounter he was actually quite nice and self-effacing. Unlike with Yo-Yo and Herbie, I did not feel speechless.

More reports on Fear of the Famous from the conference later. Who knows, I may even blog about the content.

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