DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I met a number of people at Etech whose work I’d seen before. Invariably one of my initial reactions was to think, you’re much shorter than I would have guessed. But I suppose this is to be expected, considering that I’m eight-foot-seven.

Steven Levy was at the conference. His 1986 book, Hackers had a huge influence on me in college. It was the first time I’d seen the expression, “Information should be free.” I have vivid memories of writing a paper about the Hacker Ethic for a philosophy class approximately 100 years ago. I spoke with Steven briefly, until he gave me a look like “I’ve gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo,” and I reluctantly let him go, pretending, too, that I had a really important meeting in my hotel room with the stained carpet and bacteria.

Another famous (not particularly tall) author, James Surowiecki, whose name caused everyone who attempted to pronounce it to stumble, gave a presentation on concepts from his recent book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book’s premise would have you believe that polling the approximately 500 conference attendees about the correct pronounciation of “Surowiecki” would, assuming you could filter and refine the answers through some sort of market function, result in the precisely correct pronounciation.

There’s a great transcript of Surowiecki’s Etech talk on Wade Roush’s weblog.