Schrödinger Sessions II Debrief

One month ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the Schrödinger Sessions II (SS2), a "science for science fiction writers" workshop at the University of Maryland (UMD), organized by the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and focusing on quantum physics. The workshop was free, including lodging in a UMD dormitory and breakfast and lunch every day, and it was totally worth paying for my travel there and back.

I first got interested in quantum mechanics (QM) back in high school, when I'd had enough math and science education to grasp how subatomic physics actually worked. Well, that's what I thought. Quantum phenomena are super weird, you guys. But they are incontrovertibly real, even if they seem non-intuitive; as several of our SS2 lecturers mentioned, QM is possibly the most well-tested experimental science, and the results are reproducible and undeniable. We don't know why the universe works this way, but we know that it does.

#jqi

A video posted by Curtis Chen (@sparckl) on Jul 30, 2016 at 9:14am PDT

If you want to try deciphering my notes, here they are in one massive Google Doc.

This may actually be the best explanation of antimatter I have encountered to date. #jqi pic.twitter.com/zzxBDPs2nI

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

And here are some excerpts from others' blog posts:

"JQI is what they call low energy quantum mechanics. This involves quantum computation, low temperatures, superconductivity-- all of those sorts of things we can do in a relatively small lab. High energy quantum mechanics and physics, those things done at the Large Hadron Collider and supernovas, aren't done at JQI. That didn't prevent us from asking about it."
— Steven Popkes (day 2, day 3)

"And lest any of the participants leave the U Md (College Park) campus without their brain having exploded, we also covered -- bonus material -- some cosmological speculations and the recent first detection of gravitational waves."
— Ed Lerner

"FYI: Next year, 2017, JQI plans to offer a similar seminar for a different professoinal group, Physics for Journalists, and then, pending funding, re-offer this same session as I attended, Physics for Sci-Fi Writers, in the summer of 2018."
— Sally Ember (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

BTW, the gravitational waves Ed mentions above were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is pretty freakin' awesome. That evening lecture by Peter Shawhan was also where I learned about "squeezed light," and like most things during SS2—laser cooling, ultra-cold Bose-Einstein condensates, and quantum computing algorithms, to name just a few—it legitimately blew my mind.

Looking forward to more of this today. #jqi #staywoke pic.twitter.com/XUPYlJ6KcS

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

I am definitely, as one person put it, "confused at a higher level" now. And I'm glad to know that even trained physicists continue to argue about the philosophical interpretations of QM. Nothing out of SS2 directly informs anything I'm currently working on, but I look forward to seeing what my subconscious does with it after a few months or years.

OH: "Why don't you just use the variance of the two quadratures?" #jqi #LunchBreak

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

Some of the other awesome writers who attended SS2:

• Carolyn Ives Gilman (a past Hugo and Nebula nominee!)
• Christine Taylor-Butler
• Dominica Phetteplace (YES HER)
• Greg Scheckler
• Guang Ming Whitley (who celebrated a birthday during the workshop)
• Heather Bouwman
• Jen Foehner Wells (who has the best Twitter handle)
• Jennifer Povey
• Kate Gorman (who creates locative fiction)
• Kristen Miller
• Kristina Yee (creator of the award-winning animated short Miss Todd)
• Sarah McCarry
• Terri Hughes Burton (now working on The 100)

Apologies to anyone I've forgotten to mention. You're all fantastic and I'm glad I got to hang out with you for a few days!

#jqi pic.twitter.com/WtYpgHO3Ft

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 30, 2016

EPILOGUE:

On the way home from the workshop, Southwest cancelled my Saturday night flight (unclear whether due to weather or computer meltdown) and the earliest rebooking was Tuesday morning. Fortunately, my high school pal Tony lives in the area, so I was able to stay with him, catch up on the last eight years of our lives, check out the Udvar-Hazy Center, and also meet up with some DC area Sea Monkeys for lunch.

Life finds a way.

I volunteered at Open Source Bridge today

And sat in on these great talks:

• "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Pelican: A Comparison of Static Site Generators" with Lucy Wyman
• "Hosting Events that the Whole Community Loves" with Meg Hartley
• "Teaching and managing for technologists" with Lennon Day-Reynolds
• "Universal Web Design: How to create an awesome experience for *every* user" with David Newton

...which actually represent a pretty good cross-section of my personal interests.

In related news, there's nothing like talking to a seventeen-year-old high school student who's coding his own distributed database system to make a prehistoric Perl hacker feel old. HASHTAG BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

That is all.

I Have Set a Dangerous Precedent

I missed blogging last Wednesday because I was driving to a writers' retreat, but nobody complained. (Maybe you were all distracted by the awesome new Puzzled Pint blog?) I will continue to make my best effort to blog weekly, but no promises, Mister Scott.

Anyway. A lot of terrible things have been happening lately, and we (as individual people) can't really do much about most of it. The world is full of systemic ills that require long-term solutions.

I can't tell you how to fix racism or improve disaster relief. But I can tell you how to make ringtones in iTunes, because I had to do this myself recently, and it was a bit of a pain to figure out.

1. Follow these instructions to change your import settings from MP3 to AAC.
2. Follow these instructions to create ringtone files, BUT...
3. ...BEFORE step 7 above, FIRST delete the .m4a library tracks (keep files on disk), THEN import the .m4r files

That's it.

I know, it's a tiny, small, insignificant thing, but the tallest dune begins with a single grain of sand. And it doesn't help with the problems of the day per se, but I appreciate anything that makes life a little easier. Even if it's a tiny, small, insignificant thing.

Big things take a long time to build. Big changes take a lot of little actions to bring about.

Meanwhile, as Abraham Lincoln once said: "Be excellent to each other... and party on, dudes!"

I Witnessed Orion's First Flight

It was beautiful and awe-inspiring, and I hope to see more space flights soon. Our future is up there.

Whether or not you believe all the #JourneyToMars hype, no matter how critical you might be of the Space Launch System (SLS)—if you don't feel something when you watch a rocket launch, please consult a medical professional, you freaking Grinch.

http://youtu.be/6Hn8qnsucwo

I cried when Orion lifted off—even more than I did when DeeAnn and I watched the STS-124 launch in May of 2008. Last Friday, when that Delta IV Heavy hit its second launch window, I was standing less than three miles from the pad. I felt the heat from the engines. For a moment, I honestly couldn't decide whether I should just watch the blurry scene through my tears, or blink and risk missing any of it.

Others in my NASA Social group got brilliant recordings of the EFT-1 launch—I didn't even try. Check out our photo pool on Flickr, some of which I daresay rival NASA's official images:

Favorite of the #Orion EFT-1 launch photos I took. You can see the shock diamonds in the rocket exhaust #NASASocial pic.twitter.com/sMGzxPjYsL

— Denny Atkin (@dennya) December 8, 2014

Don't even get me started on how great our amateur videographers are:

http://youtu.be/2siA3sOS61A

And for a real treat, listen to Danny Sussman's audio recording with headphones on:

But what I'm really looking forward to is Alison Wilgus' forthcoming comic about the event. Alison is a fantastic writer and artist, and she was one of my Clarion West classmates this summer. It was a complete coincidence that we both got into this NASA Social—we live on opposite coasts, and I didn't even know she had applied until we were tweeting at each other about the movie Interstellar and other space-related topics. Second-best surprise ever!

Just made travel arrangements for my 1st @NASASocial trip, can't decide if I'm more excited about seeing @NASA_Orion or @aliwilgus XD

— Curtis C. Chen (@curtiscchen) November 15, 2014

Alison drew a wonderful comic about her previous NASA Social rocket launch experience, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K (TDRS-K) launch in January of 2013. Incidentally, this is possibly my favorite single panel from that comic, because I'm a weirdo:

You can read the entire comic on Alison's web site. And if you enjoy it, sign up for Alison's newsletter to get updates on her future projects!

I don't have much more to say about my NASA Social week. It was amazing, informative, and incredibly inspirational. I brought back some souvenirs, but nothing compares to the indelible memory of seeing that rocket rise from the ground and disappear into the clouds.

One. More. Time:

http://youtu.be/afWAw1cmJJU

If you have a couple of hours to spare, I recommend watching our Orion pre-launch briefing, which was video-conferenced between several NASA facilities around the country and included a lot of great information. My fellow NASA Social attendees asked some excellent questions about the future of America's space program.

Finally, I threw together a slide show of my own photos from last week. They're neither spectacular nor comprehensive, but should give you an idea of what the trip was like:

I was born after the Apollo missions ended. No people have walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I hope I live long enough to see human beings land on Mars. I really do.

@NASA_Orion @ExploreSpaceKSC @NASA #Space #ToBoldlyGo #OrionSplashdown pic.twitter.com/Jf8R5KGuBU

— Joe D (@Tooboldlygo) December 5, 2014

I'm going to KSC!

Last month, I submitted my name for one of NASA's #JourneyToMars promotions—specifically, the Orion Test Flight "Boarding Pass" shown above, where they'll etch your name into a computer chip that flies aboard the spacecraft.

While I was poking around the web site, I also registered for the associated NASA Social event, because why not?

And I got in.

So I'll be at Kennedy Space Center the week after Thanksgiving with a bunch of other folks from the Internet to watch the Orion launch and tour some NASA facilities and meet people working on the project and I don't know what else.

Even better, I'll be rooming and carpooling with my fabulous Clarion West classmate (and NASA Social veteran) Alison Wilgus! Follow us on Twitter if you dare. :)

Just made travel arrangements for my 1st @NASASocial trip, can't decide if I'm more excited about seeing @NASA_Orion or @aliwilgus XD

— Curtis 小說作家 Chen (@sparCKL) November 15, 2014

I Kinda Wish I Had Seen This Sooner

TL;DR: Don't buy Western Digital or Seagate hard drives.

"Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014" from the Backblaze blog

Setting up new external HDD, hope this one lasts more than 2 years, should probably just shell out for RAID/NAS next, wheeeeeeee

— Curtis 雪國列車 Chen (@sparCKL) September 5, 2014

I Really Want You to Install This App

Like I said last week, go check out the SafeTrek app. I like having it for peace of mind, if nothing else.

Now here's my legwork on what the people behind SafeTrek have done so far in 2014...

In late January, The Maneater, the University of Missouri's student newspaper, ran a story titled "Student-run SafeTrek app gains popularity," which stated that the app had been downloaded over 5,000 times. Another story, "Failing Forward," appeared in the university's alumni magazine MIZZOU in late February.

The SafeTrek app is now free, but it didn't start that way: the original price point was $5 (late 2013), then $2 (Jan/Feb 2014), then $1 (April 2014). The makers made it available for a lower price or for free as temporary promotions a few times during that period, but it's been free for everyone since early May of 2014.

So how does SafeTrek, the company, plan to make money if they're now giving away the app for free? This segment from Good Morning America offers a clue:


http://youtu.be/9J5AL5Ve8Z8
Original: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/safe-trek-app-alerts-authorities-feel-unsafe-23317306

In April, SafeTrek co-creator Zach Beattie received the University of Missouri System's 2014 Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which includes $2,500. In May, the app was recommended by Kansas State University in "Safety options, services for students on campus, off campus" and highlighted as an Apptimize case study for increasing app store reviews.

Finally, to close the loop on that funding question: a May 21st interview with Beattie in Missouri Business Alert explains that "SafeTrek intends to sell data collected from its thousands of users as its main way of making money." So there's a potential privacy issue there, and it'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

I Want You to Install This App

Because though I hope you'll never need SafeTrek, I don't want you to ever suffer for want of it. Free download for iOS or Android.

The basic idea is this: start the app when you're traveling through an area where you feel unsafe. Hold your finger down on the screen until you feel safe again. When you remove your finger, you have ten seconds to enter a PIN. If the correct PIN is not entered, police are notified of your GPS location.

I learned about SafeTrek last week on Beth Revis' Tumblr. She had reblogged it from lillianloverly, where it appeared on March 16th.

Because I'm a research nerd, I did some legwork on the people behind it. I was also curious about how the police notification part of it worked, and what the company's business plan was. Here's the first part of a brief SafeTrek timeline, from its inception through the end of 2013, gleaned from online public records:

The earliest mention of the app I found was a branding presentation dated April 22nd, 2013, by Portguese designer Frederico Cardoso. I couldn't discern an obvious connection betwee him and SafeTrek's creators, but I did find two news stories from May of 2013, about SafeTrek winning an app design competition. Both were from University of Missouri student news sites: "App designer student codes winning smartphone app" and "Public safety app wins RJI student competition."

Later, in August of 2013, the Columbia Business Times reported that SafeTrek was "aiming for a release date of Aug. 1 for the MU campus" and "[t]he app will make its debut on Windows 8." Well, neither of those things appears to have happened: the iOS version first appeared in October of 2013, and no Windows version appears to exist at all—I could find no mention of it anywhere, not even on the official SafeTrek web site.

Speaking of the official site, the current SafeTrek team appears to be five University of Missouri college students: Zach Beattie, Zach Winkler, Nick Droege, Aaron Kunnemann, and Derek Provance. The articles from May of 2013, identify the original app creators as "Convergence Journalism senior Natalie Cheng, Business Administration senior Zach Beattie and Information Technology senior Zach Winkler" (my emphasis).

It's a bit disheartening that there appear to be no women currently leading SafeTrek development, when young women would seem to be the people who stand to benefit the most from this app. (I won't speculate about why Natalie Cheng left the SafeTrek project, but she has since co-founded another company, Quirks Consignment.)

Things got much more interesting for SafeTrek in 2014. I'll blog about that next Wednesday! Meanwhile, please install the app, try it out, and let me know what you think.

I'm Made Out of Meat

That title is, of course, an homage to Terry Bisson's classic short story "They're Made Out of Meat." If you haven't read it, click over to his site and do it now. It's less than a thousand words; shouldn't take more than ten minutes. I'll wait.

All done? Good. Let's begin.

I am made out of meat. The "I" writing these words now is a transient thing, a momentary spark of consciousness supported and sustained by a fleshy engine. There is no mind without brain, and the brain does not live without a heart and lungs to feed it oxygen and sense organs to provide stimuli for contemplation. We are all made out of meat, and we can never escape our corporeal prisons.

Sometimes I wonder if our sentience is some weird side effect of evolution, a freakish emergent phenomenon caused by the complexity of being such large, multicellular organisms. Because (per Stephen Hawking) it is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value, and being smart enough to wonder about cosmology doesn't mean we can do a damn thing about it.

I suppose that's where this entire train of thought starts, decades ago: with a small boy lying in his bed at night, staring into the darkness--literally--and also figuratively gazing into the abyss of his own inevitable death.

I don't remember precisely how old I was when I first grasped the enormous fact of capital-D Death. That it would take us all, sooner or later; that each of us would cease to exist forever after that--that even the universe itself will, someday, end. I think it took me a little while to really process that, to understand it completely, and when I did, it totally freaked me the fuck out.

To be clear: I wouldn't say I've ever feared death, precisely. More like I still haven't made my peace with the Reaper. And especially when I was younger, the knowledge that I would someday stop just felt like a terrible injustice, like a punishment I didn't deserve. I liked being alive, and why did that have to end someday? It all seemed so unfair.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Get a helmet, kid. And I don't know what I would tell my younger self, if I had the hypothetical opportunity now. Make the most of your time? Don't waste it on things that don't make you happy? I'm not sure younger-me would give much weight to those platitudes, especially in the middle of a nighttime panic attack. I suspect facing death with dignity is one thing we all have to learn the hard way.

Don't worry, this is not something I've kept bottled up for forty years; I have talked about this, with my parents when I was younger, with my wife more recently. They all made reasonable counter-arguments, including possible future prospects for prolonging human lifespans (giving me more time to come to terms with my own mortality, I suppose) and the fact that I simply won't even know when I'm dead, and will therefore be unable to feel anything at all about it, one way or another. What's the point of worrying about something you can't change?

And they're right, of course. It's more productive to worry about things I can affect, like how happy I am with the work I'm doing right now, maintaining my health for the next fifty-plus years of my life, et cetera. But I can't help worrying about more than that. I think about what I'm going to leave behind, and I wonder what people will remember of me, and for how long after I'm gone.

I suppose that's ego, wanting some recognition that extends beyond the grave and beyond my immediate family. But it's also wanting to make a difference in the world, in some miniscule, brief manner--to be a part of the world, to feel connected to the seven billion other lives on this tiny, shining planet.

Even if all we are is meat, at least we can all be meaty together.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

SnoutCast #197: Think, Think, Think

In which we do not tell knock-knock jokes. Not a single one. Nope. Zero.

[ Download mp3 - 23 MB ]

00:59 - "cerebral"
23:17 - The End

Linkage

• Curtis' Ignite Portland 12 talk: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
• 2010 Stanford study: "Decoding Temporal Structure in Music and Speech Relies on Shared Brain Resources but Elicits Different Fine-Scale Spatial Patterns"
• 2009 UCLA study: "The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief"
• 2012 University of Iowa study: "A neuropsychological test of belief and doubt: damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex increases credulity for misleading advertising"
• Puzzled Pint has debuted in London and is coming to OMSI After Dark!
• It's the off-season on Puzzle Hunt Calendar

It's been four years! Should we continue podcasting? E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast to tell us what you think!

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "I Feel Fantastic" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

 

SnoutCast #179: Teckmologiez

We're very forward-thinking here at SnoutCast. Well, at least one of us is. More or less. It's okay.

[ Download mp3 - 23 MB ]

00:59 - "technological"
02:57 - times change; cf. Shinteki Aquarius Remix
04:23 - what is a Luddite, anyway?
06:31 - wardriving was totally a thing
09:23 - using mobile SSH apps for WarTron's BUGME interface
13:47 - tracking teams with Google Latitude in 2011, vs. custom GPS hardware in 2001
18:05 - augmented reality: Yelp, Ingress, Halting State, Google Glass, etc.
22:22 - IN CONCLUSION
24:16 - The End

In other news: The Doubleclicks continue to be awesome.

http://youtu.be/s4Rjy5yW1gQ

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "You Ruined Everything" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

 

SnoutCast #97: Neuroplasticity

This is not our best podcast.


[ Download mp3 - 26 MB ]

00:59 - "brainy"
01:17 - "For a Healthy Brain in Old Age, Start Early" (NPR, January 4, 2007)
03:20 - "Stay Mentally Active" (Alzheimer's Association, 2011)
05:14 - "Nine Stubborn Brain Myths That Just Won’t Die, Debunked by Science" (Lifehacker, December 12, 2011)
08:57 - in which DeeAnn goes for walks to not step on salamanders
12:00 - Curtis attempts to define "real" and/or "meaningful"
14:22 - let's talk about engagement
16:00 - in which DeeAnn's nieces and nephews only like "fun" games
18:52 - let's talk about complexity
23:11 - IN CONCLUSION
26:47 - we love listener mail!
28:29 - The End

Got a comment or question? E-mail podcast@snout.org or post at snout.org/podcast!

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

 

Postcard #46

Adam is my editor at ProgrammableWeb and the author of Map Scripting 101. He's also very tall.

Speaking of PW, I'm taking a break from my API news blogging right now to devote time to NaNoWriMo and some other projects. I expect to be back on the blog-horse before the end of the year.

Also, "Back on the Blog-Horse" is the name of my bitpop OK Go cover band.

Mars Stowaway

My tax dollars at work:



You, too, can send your name to Mars!

Book Report: Wireless

It's a good collection, showing a great range of Charlie's work, and including the 2010 Hugo Award-winning novella "Palimpsest." For more, I direct you to Strange Horizons' 2009 book review.

Buy the book: Powell's, Amazon (affiliate links)

The Hump Day Report

Woke up early-ish this morning to take Tye to the vet for another ECG (result: he responded normally to atropine, so apparently he just has a slow resting heart rate), then played hooky in the afternoon to go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World--which, as I tweeted, totally f**king rocked or whatever and stuff. Go see it. You'll be happy you did.

Finished a puzzle prototype for next month's Puzzled Pint, met my writing quota for the day, then did a bit of research on home automation. D helped me locate a stash of X10 hardware--the appliance modules are what I was looking for--so I only had to order the computer interface module (which, mercifully, now uses USB instead of RS232) in order to have all the hardware we need to switch the cats' auto-feeder over to full computer control.

Now D's playing Dragon Age: Origins - Awakenings while she continues to recover from last week's migraine, and I'm going to see what's playing on Netflix streaming--which, amazingly, hasn't totally sucked the last few times I've tried it. Though tonight I think I'll pick something a little less depressing than No End in Sight.

Book Report: WWW:Wake

I have issues with Robert J. Sawyer.

He's a good writer, and he tells a good story, but sometimes his prose becomes a patchwork of pop-culture references bordering on fanfic-wink-wink: if you don't get what he's talking about from the quotation or oblique description, you're not in the club. And all too often, said references seem to be piled on gratuitously, simply to remind the reader that she should feel good about being in the club.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not my favorite style. Also, some of the expository chunks are blatantly look-at-my-research didactic; to Sawyer's credit, though, he always manages to stay below my OMG-teh-LameZors threshold, and I did learn quite a few things from this book.

A few final nitpicks: I'm pretty sure there's no way to actually visualize the whole Internet all at once, even theoretically; his Chinese dialogue is a heartbreakingly loose translation written by someone who clearly doesn't speak the language; and geez, could you make the last line any more of a cliffhanger?

All that said, it's a good read, and I'm curious how he's going to tie his disparate story threads together in the remainder of the trilogy. Here's what the man had to say for himself, last year at Google Waterloo:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z-UqsF5HYY

Buy the book: Powell's, Amazon (affiliate links)

Book Report: Drive

This made for an interesting companion book to Free, which I also read recently. Where Free looks at how businesses can make money off zero- or low-cost offerings, Drive investigates the other side of the coin: asking what motivates people to do things--often for free--which can be good for life as well as business.

The oft-repeated theme of Drive is the gap between "what science knows and what business does." And Pink puts his money where his mouth is--there are plenty of studies and research to back up his conclusions about "Motivation 3.0" and the things which can help any organization get the most out of its members; to wit, recognizing that people will work harder when they have autonomy and purpose, and in pursuit of mastery of a skill, than when they're just in it for the money.

At its core, Drive advocates dismantling traditional management structures in favor of more "bottom-up" team building. Open source software projects and Wikipedia are cited, as they were in Free, and Pink also discusses several of my former employer's initiatives, like 20% time, peer rewards, and 360-degree performance reviews. (Not all of those were as successful as they could have been, but that's another post.)

Read this book. If you're lacking in time or money, you can get many of the salient points from this excellent 11-minute video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Buy the book: Powell's, Amazon (affiliate links)

Book Report: FREE

Anyone who spends any amount of time on the Internet already knows about many of the topics Wired editor Chris Anderson discusses in this book, and probably knows more about some of them. At less than 300 pages (including a sizable index and the business-book-obligatory "executive summary"), there's not much space to get very deep into any specific business model or case study.

One odd thing: the "free books" section mentions Neil Gaiman's American Gods giveaway experiment, but says nothing about Cory Doctorow's career-long habit of giving away all his books under Creative Commons, even though Anderson quotes directly from Doctorow later on and talks about the fictitious Whuffie economy depicted in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Maybe Cory's too much of an edge case?

Anyway, the publisher also offers a free, abridged audio book version--in exchange for your e-mail address. Which is ironic, since Anderson spends much of the book talking about removing roadblocks to the Internet's highly efficient, "near-zero marginal cost" of distribution. Maybe they've abridged that part out of the audio version.

Buy the book: Powell's, Amazon (affiliate links)

Friday Flash Fiction: "Wrong Number"

Yes, I have seen Avatar, but this idea was around long before James Cameron started dreaming about giant blue cat people.

Read "Wrong Number" at 512 Words or Fewer