Business

Like Silicon Valley only better

Posted on by John

I’m in Durham, North Carolina this morning, part of  Research Triangle. Last night I spoke at a Research Triangle Analysts meeting and this morning I’m giving at talk at RTI.

Just like Austin and Salt Lake City, Research Triangle wants to be another Silicon Valley, only with lower taxes and a lower cost of living.

It appears the Silicon Valley wannabes are doing well. I don’t know whether they are drawing companies away from Silicon Valley, but they’re growing.

Silicon Vally’s sales pitch is that geography matters at lot. You need to be where the venture capitalists, other tech companies, and lots of potential employees are.

Areas like Research Triangle make a more moderate argument. They also want to say that geography matters. If geography doesn’t matter, then why move to Durham? But they also want to argue that geography doesn’t matter so much that you need to pay California taxes and rent.

I think the future is on their side. Geography matters, and always will, though not as much as it used to. It’s not necessary (or even possible) to have everyone you work with in one area. I expect Silicon Valley will continue to thrive, but more affordable alternatives may grow faster.

Abelian consulting and Lévy consulting

Posted on by John

Eric Jonas once asked me on Twitter whether I was an Abelian consultant. The pun is an allusion to Abelian groups, groups in which the group operation commutes.

No, I’m not an Abelian consultant. I don’t have a regular commute. I’m more of a Lévy consultant. A Lévy distribution has heavy tails. That is, it is often near the origin, but occasionally takes very long excursions.

I vaguely remember a couple papers about the Lévy distribution, one saying that whale migration follows such a distribution, and another saying that human movements do too.

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Interview with Sacha Chua

Posted on by John

I spoke with Sacha Chua last week. We talked about entrepreneurship, Emacs, having eclectic interests, delegation, and more.

Navigation cons from Sacha's blog

J: I ran into you by searching on Emacs topics. When I look at your blog, I see that you do a lot of interesting things, but it’s a little hard to get a handle on exactly what you do.

S: Oh, the dreaded networking quirky question. What exactly do you do?

J: Yeah, people have said the same thing to me. Not to put you in a box, but I was curious. I see from your site that you do graphic art—sketching and such—and it doesn’t create the impression that you’re someone who would spend a lot of time in front of Emacs. So I’m curious how these things fit together, how you got started using Emacs and how you use it now.

Image by Sacha Chua

S: So my background is actually fairly technical. I’ve been doing computer programming for ages and ages. In high school I came across a book Unix Power Tools, which is how I got interested in Emacs. And because I was interested in programming, in open source, a little bit of wearable computing as well, I got to know Emacs and all these different modules it had. For example, Emacspeak is amazing! It’s been around since the 1990s and it’s a great way to use the computer while you’re walking around. Because I love programming and because I wanted to find a way to help out, I ended up maintaining PlannerMode and later EmacsWiki mode as well.

When I went to university, I took up computer science. After I finished, I taught. Then I took my masters in Toronto, where I am now. Emacs was super helpful;—being able to do everything in one place. After I finished my masters, I did a lot of software consulting with IBM. I did business consulting as well. Then in 2012, after saving up, I decided to go on pretty much the same adventure you’re on. I’m completely unhirable for the next five years! Most businesses struggle for the first five years, so I saved up enough to not worry too much about my expenses for the next five years. I’m one year in, four years to go, and that’s where I am.

At networking events, I like to shake people up a bit by telling them I’m semi-retired. I’m in this five-year experiment to see how awesome life can be and what I can do to make things better. I’ve done technical consulting, business consulting, sketching, illustration, writing, all sorts of things. Basically, my job description is context-dependent.

J: I understand that.

S: I use Emacs across all the things I do. When I’m doing technical and business consulting, I use Emacs to edit code, to draft documents, even to outline comic strips. And when I’m doing illustration, Emacs—especially Org Mode—helps me keep track of clients and deliverables, things to do, agenda, calendar, deadlines.

J: I’m basically running my life through Org Mode right now. When you say you use Emacs to draft documents, are you using LaTeX?

S: I used LaTeX when I was working on my master’s thesis and other papers, I think. Now I mostly use org mode and export from there.

J: Are you using Emacs for email?

S: I used to. But I’m stuck on Windows to use drawing programs like Sketchbook Pro on my Tablet PC. So it’s harder to set up my email like I had it set up when I used Ubuntu. Back when I used Ubuntu, I was very happy with Gnus.

J: Do you work entirely on Windows, or do you go back and forth between operating systems?

S: I have a private server that runs Linux. On Windows I run Cygwin, but I miss some of the conveniences I had when I had a nicely set-up Linux installation.

J: When you’re running Emacs on Windows, I’m sure you run into things that don’t quite work. What do you do about that?

S: Most things work OK if they’re just Emacs Lisp, but some things call a shell command or use some library that hasn’t been ported over yet. Then I basically wail and gnash my teeth. Sometimes I get things working by using Cygwin, but sometimes it’s a bit of a mess. I don’t use Emacs under Cygwin because I prefer how it works natively. I don’t run into much that doesn’t work.

J: So what programming languages do you use when you’re writing code?

S: I do a lot of quick-and-dirty things in Emacs Lisp. When I need to do some XML parsing or web development, I’ll use Ruby because a lot of people can read it and there are a lot of useful gems. Sometimes I’ll do some miscellaneous things in Perl.

I love doing programming and putting together tools. And I quite enjoy drawing, helping people with presentation and design. So this is left brain plus right brain.

It does boggle people that you can have more than one passion, but others are, like, “Yeah, I know, I’m like that too.”

J: I think having an interest in multiple things is a healthier lifestyle, but it’s a little harder to market.

S: Actually, no. I finally figured out a name for my company, ExperiVis, after a year of playing with it. People reach out to me and we figure out whether it’s a good fit. I don’t need to necessarily guide people to just this aspect or another of my work. I like the fact that people bump into these different things.

J: When we scheduled this call, I went through your virtual assistant. How do you use a virtual assistant?

S: One of the things I don’t like to do is scheduling. I used to get stressed out about scheduling when I did it myself. I’ve always been interested in delegating and taking advantage of what other people enjoy and are good at. I work with an assistant—Criselda. She lives in the Philippines. I found her on oDesk. She works one to four hours a week, more or less, and keeps track of her time.

J: What else might you ask a VA to do?

S: I’ve asked people to do web research. I’ve had someone do a little bit of illustration for me. I’ve had someone do a little bit of programming for me because I want to learn how to delegate technical tasks. He does some Rails prototyping for me. I have someone doing data entry and transcription. It’s fascinating to see how you can swap money for time, especially for things that stress me out, or bore me, or things I can’t do.

Every week I go over my task list with my VA to see which of the tasks I should have delegated. Still working on it!

* * *

Later on in the conversation Sacha asked about my new career and had this gem of advice:

Treating this as a grand experiment makes it much easier for me to try different approaches and not be so scared, to not treat it as a personal rejection if something doesn’t work.

Related post: People I’ve interviewed and people who have interviewed me

Personality vs experience

Posted on by John

Be careful about saying that something isn’t a fit for your personality. Maybe it’s just outside of your experience. Several times I’ve mistaken the latter for the former.

There’s a story that when someone asked George Burns whether he could play violin, he replied “I don’t know. I haven’t tried.”

Cruise ship versus battleship

Posted on by John

I heard someone ask an audience once

Would you rather spend a couple days on a cruise ship or on a battleship?
Would you rather spend a year on a cruise ship or on a battleship?

Presumably most people would rather spend a couple days as a passenger on a cruise ship rather than working on a battleship. But after a while, having no purpose and no responsibility becomes miserable. You can only play so much shuffleboard before you go out of your mind. (Relaxation can be its own purpose for a couple days, but not for a year.)

Related post: After two days, I’d turned into an idiot

Geeky company names

Posted on by John

I started a discussion on Twitter this evening about consulting company names. Here are some of the names.

  • Turing Machine Computing: If we can’t do it, it can’t be done.
  • Heisenberg Consulting: You can have speed or quality, but not both at the same time.
  • Perelman Consulting: Please don’t pay us. We don’t want your money.
  • Gödel Systems: Your job is done but we can’t prove it.
  • Gödel Consulting: because no one is supplying ALL your needs.
  • Lebesgue Consulting: We’ve got your measure.
  • Noether Consulting: We find the conserved values of your system.
  • Fourier consulting: We transform your world periodically.
  • Zorn’s Consulting: Your choice is axiomatic.
  • Spherical Computing: Without parallel.
  • Markov Chain Consulting: It doesn’t matter how we got here.
  • Dirac Consulting: We get right to the point.
  • Shannon Consulting: We’ll find a way to deliver your message.
  • Neyman & Pearson Consulting: No one is more powerful than us.
  • Complex Conjugate Consulting: We make your product real.
  • Hadamard Consulting: Real solutions by complex methods.
  • Zeno Consulting: We’ll get you arbitrarily close to where you want to be.
  • Hilbert Consulting: You think you have a problem?
  • Riemann Hypothesis Consulting: When your job is on the line and everything is critical

Here are footnotes explaining the puns above.

  • Turing: In computer science, Turing machines define the limits of what is computable.
  • Heisenberg: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that there is a limit to how well you can know a particle’s momentum and position. The more accurately you know one, the less you know about the other.
  • Perelman: Turned down prize money from the Fields Institute and Clay Institute after solving the Poincaré conjecture.
  • Gödel: His incompleteness theorem says that number theory contains true theorems that cannot be proved.
  • Lebesgue: Founder of measure theory, a rigorous theory of length, area, volume, etc.
  • Noether: Established a deep connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
  • Fourier: Known for Fourier transforms and Fourier series, expressing functions as sums or integrals of periodic functions.
  • Zorn: Known for Zorn’s lemma, equivalent to the axiom of choice.
  • Spherical: There are no parallel lines in spherical geometry.
  • Markov Chain: The probability distribution for the next move in a Markov chain depends only on the current state and not on previous history.
  • Complex Conjugate: A complex number times its conjugate is a real number. See xkcd.
  • Dirac: The reference here is to the Dirac delta function. Informally, a point mass. Formally, a distribution.
  • Shannon: Founder of communication theory.
  • Neyman-Pearson: The Neyman-Pearson lemma concerns most powerful hypothesis tests.
  • Hadamard: Said “The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.” That is, techniques from complex analysis are often the easiest way to approach problems from real analysis.
  • Zeno: Zeno’s paradox says you cannot get anywhere because first you have to get halfway there, then halfway again, etc.
  • Hilbert: Created a famous list of 23 research problems in math in 1900.
  • Riemann: The Riemann hypothesis says that all the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function line on the critical line Re(z) = 1/2.

Overconfidence pays

Posted on by John

From Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors who are better able to gain the trust of clients.

I believe Hanlon’s razor applies here: ignorance is a better explanation than dishonesty. I imagine most overconfident predictions are sincere. Unfortunately, sincere ignorance is often rewarded.

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Self-employment FAQ

Posted on by John

Today is my first day of full-time self-employment. Here are some of the questions people have been asking. Note that my answers are my answers as of today and subject to change.

Do you have health insurance?

Yes.

Are you staying in Houston?

Yes.

Will you be working from home?

I’ll be traveling more but commuting less. I’ll either walk to my study or fly out of town. No more spending 2-3 hours on freeways driving to work and back.

Will you come work for us as a salaried employee?

No thank you. Maybe we could discuss a retainer arrangement instead.

Will you be hiring other consultants?

I will be partnering with other consultants — trading favors, sharing leads, subcontracting, etc. — but I do not want to have employees at this time.

What kind of work will you be doing?

Anything I can do well that pays well.

Will you be doing mostly medical statistics?

I’m doing some medical statistics, but most of my consulting lately has been in other sectors: software, manufacturing, legal, etc. Applied math cuts across industry sectors.

My next endeavor

Posted on by John

After over 12 years at MD Anderson Cancer Center, I turned in my resignation last week. I’m leaving my steady job for self-employment.

I have done occasional consulting for 20 years, but I haven’t done it as my only source of income before, other than a salaried position I once had with a consulting company. I enjoy consulting, and I’ve wanted for some time now to do it for a living. Recently, my wife and I agreed that this was the time to make the leap.

I plan to offer consulting in applied math, statistics, and software development. At a high level, this means helping businesses formulate and solve problems, as well as helping them to interpret and apply the solutions. At a lower level, this means using Bayesian inference, number crunching, or whatever else it takes to get the job done. I am also available for speaking and training.

The hard part of consulting is finding enough work. I would appreciate your help in this. Please contact me if you would like to work together, or if you have suggestions for people I should talk to.

Efficiency could land you in jail

Posted on by John

A German postman recently faced criminal charges for coming up with using more efficient routes to deliver the mail. His supervisor had informally tolerated his initiative, but could not officially sanction it since his violated procedure. He got into trouble when his suspicious peers reported him. Fortunately he was not fired, only reprimanded for not following rules.

The source I saw (thanks Tim) doesn’t give much more detail. Maybe the charges against him were not as ridiculous as they seem. Maybe he violated reasonable safety regulations, for example. But I find it quite plausible that he simply got into trouble for using his brain. Even if the incident were completely made up, it would make a good story. It’s symbolic of bureaucratic punishment of efficiency. It’s easy to find analogous examples.

If this mailman were working for a small courier company, the company might reward him and ask him for recommendations for improving other routes. Of course a small company might also fire him. But large organizations, public and private, are more likely to punish initiative. And I understand why: large organizations have to maintain consistency. The clever postman must be reprimanded for the good of the system, but it’s maddening when you’re the postman.

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