Jeepers! We’re living in the future!

We just installed a new Nest thermostat and are giddy with anticipation!

Photo of a Nest thermostat by James Britton from Flickr
Nest thermostat by James Britton from Flickr

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. – William Gibson

The thermostat we had when we got up this morning knew the temperature in the house (or at least in the living room downstairs) and because it was “programmable” it had some inkling of what we wanted the temperature to be. On the other hand it had no idea what the weather was like or was expected to be. It didn’t have a clue that a big winter storm was headed our way until the wind had already stripped away whatever heat was stored up in the walls.

It didn’t know if we were actually home or away, so we always had to remember to fiddle with the settings before we went away at Xmas.

It didn’t have any idea how long it would take our 100+ year old hot water radiator heating system to get up to speed or expend its heat. This meant that it often overshot, especially on cold mornings leading to sunny mild days.

It’s communication skills also left something to be desired, being limited to a small, unlit LCD display and four buttons. We keep a flashlight on a table under it specifically because it’s such a pain to to see, even in daylight, and we keep the instruction manual close to hand because the strange button combinations needed to alter the programming make emacs key combinations look positively intuitive.

And we had to be right in front of it to interact with it. If we left for vacation and forgot to put it on hold, well that was just too bad. And there was no way to tell it that we were an hour or two from arrival and it would be really swell if it could start warming the house up for us so we’d come home to something more welcoming than a furnished meat locker.

This afternoon, though, all that changed as we installed our new Nest thermostat.

We now have a thermostats that’s on the Internet. It knows where we live and knows that the sun went down a few minutes. It can access weather forecasts, so it knows how much the temperature is likely to drop tonight. And we can talk to it from anywhere we’re on-line. I can’t see it from where I’m sitting, but via this laptop I know that it reads the current temperature in the living room as 72F. And I can change its settings from this computer. Or my iPod touch. Or a computer at my parents’ house in Arkansas. We can provide an ETA and desired temperature from the road on the way home from a vacation, and the Nest can combine what it knows of our house, our heating system, the weather, and our request to figure out how to make it all happen.

WeatherGrrrl and I were giddy as school kids after we installed it and set up the accounts. We’d connect to it in different ways and alter the settings, and then look at the Nest and watch it respond almost instantly, and watch the displays on other computers update in real time. We giggled like we’d fallen into some strange episode of the Jetsons or Star Trek. And the crazy thing is that it hasn’t actually done anything yet, as the temperature’s still warm enough that we don’t actually want the heat to be on. Yet we sat there dreaming up scenarios and possibilities enabled by this splendid little device, and smiled and laughed and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

While we have no actual experience to report, I can say that the packaging was wonderfully elegant (very Apple-esque), installing it was no problem even for a unhandy person such as me, the set up was easy, and connecting on-line was a breeze. Now we wait while it learns things like how to recognize whether we’re home or now and, when the weather gets cold enough that we need heat, what our heating preferences are and how our aged house and radiator system respond to its commands. Here’s hoping it lives up to half of its potential!

On a related note, way back in grad school (late 80’s?) I had to good fortune to take a seminar from John McCarthy, pioneer of artificial intelligence as a field (and coiner of the term) and the man that developed the Lisp programming language. One of the most memorable moments was a lengthy discussion of whether a thermostat was intelligent; McCarthy argued that it was, much to the consternation of many of the grad students in the room. Without cracking the lid too far on that can of worms for the moment, it’s certainly clear that our Nest thermostat is a whole heck of a lot “smarter” than the programmable jobby we took down today, which was in turn muchly “smarter” than the old analog spring thermostat that was on the wall when we moved in.

Me thinks we just installed a bit of the future, and it’s whole tons of fun!

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Remembering Richard Crandall

This morning while frying an egg I picked up the latest copy of Reed Magazine, which had been sitting around the kitchen for a week or so, and was very sad to learn of the death in December of Richard Crandall, Reed alum and Physics prof for many years. I had a weird half relationship with Crandall in my time at Reed, which I remember with a combination of excitement and gratitude, also mixed with some regret.

Richard team taught the intro physics course I took my first year at Reed (where I learned that I was decent but not great at physics). On the strenuous recommendations of two good friends and physics majors (Peter Shirley and Neil Alexander) I later took the classroom part of second year physics from Richard. It was, as Peter had said, the best applied math course on campus, and Richard was a total genius with colored chalk, leaving the board covered with true works of art at the end of class. This was one of the most profound examples of the difficulty of capturing certain kinds of process in one’s notes, an issue I still struggle with as a teacher. Richard’s lectures were amazing to watch, but near impossible to wrestle into a notebook. I tried all sorts of things, including using colored pencils, to try to capture the glory of his board work, but it all failed. I suspect the only other person I had who’s lecturing was both as beautiful and as frustrating was Edsger Dijkstra.

More important than the classes I had with Richard, however, was his impact on me as a budding computer scientist. I’d taught myself BASIC in high school, but had never had any kind of instruction on programming or computing before my first semester at Reed, when we learned PASCAL in a series of labs in that intro physics course; labs which clearly owed their existence to Richard’s grasp of the growing importance of computation in math and science. Richard was friends with Steve Jobs, and it was through that connection and Jobs’ fond memories of his time as a quasi-student at Reed that Reed got an early Lisa, and then some of the first Macintosh computers. I remember playing with MacPaint on that clunky Lisa (I think with Peter Shirley again) and just being blown away – it was totally clear that we were seeing the future.

It was in significant part through Richard that I got to spend the summer of ’84 working at Reed designing fonts and programming for the earliest Macs. This was a very exciting opportunity, and I really felt like I was contributing to something. Probably my most notable achievement was the design of a bitmap math font (we’re just a little before PostScript here). Richard was very excited by the bitmap graphics on the Mac (taken for granted now, but still a novelty in the early 80’s), and as a scientist and mathematician he recognized the potential and value of not being tied to the ASCII character set that dominated computing at the time. So as a math nerd with computing interest and calligraphy experience (I was fortunate enough to take one of Robert Palladino’s last calligraphy courses at Reed in 1983), I was tasked with making a math font. This mostly consisted of designing a set of Greek characters, along with other common math symbols. It was hardly LaTeX (which would have been a nightmare to run on those boxes), but it was useful and widely used, and available for several years in big free font packs that you could get on a set of floppies from a fellow in (I think) Utah that had taken on the task of coordinating the distribution of free fonts. Those early bitmap fonts were, however, supplanted in short order by the much better PostScript fonts, and when I wrote my undergrad math thesis in MacWrite a year and a half later, I used the PostScript Symbol font instead of my own work. Sigh.

I also did some programming (I think I worked some on GriffinTerm, an early Mac terminal emulator), but my regret is that I didn’t make more of that opportunity. Richard was a strange guy who I at least found hard to read, but he was also clearly visionary and well connected. It’s hard to know what might have happened if I’d pushed myself more and made more of that opportunity. Sadly, I didn’t really understand the value of making things, and was mostly focused on “learning things” by taking courses and doing homework. I compare that to Thomas, who has done more extra-curricular “making” in his first year than I may have ever done at in my time at Reed, and it reminds me of why it’s so important to support our students at UMM in their “making”.

So farewell and thanks to Richard Crandall, a fellow who certainly made things, and who helped give me a great opportunity to make things.

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