UPDATE: There’s already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.

I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this new category of applications, which I think is quickly reaching its tipping point. The concept is starting to catch on as people reach for more depth around their online interactions.

In fact – that’s the ultimate value proposition of interest networks – they move us beyond the super poke and towards something more meaningful. In the long-term view, interest networks are about building a global knowledge commons. But in the short term, the difference between social networks and interest networks is a lot like the difference between fast food and a home-cooked meal – interest networks are all about substance.

At a time when social media fatigue is setting in, the news cycle is growing shorter and shorter, and the world is delivered to us in soundbytes and catchphrases, we crave substance. We go to great lengths in pursuit of substance. Interest networks solve this problem – they deliver substance.t

So, what is an interest network?

In short, if a social network is about who you are interested in, an interest network is about what you are interested in. It’s the logical next step.

Twine for example, is an interest network that helps you share information with friends, family, colleagues and groups, based on mutual interests. Individual “twines” are created for content around specific subjects. This content might include bookmarks, videos, photos, articles, e-mails, notes or even documents. Twines may be public or private and can serve individuals, small groups or even very large groups of members.

I have also written quite a bit about the Semantic Web and the Semantic Graph, and Tim Berners-Lee has recently started talking about what he calls the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Tim and I are in agreement that social networks merely articulate the relationships between people. Social networks do not surface the equally, if not more important, relationships between people and places, places and organizations, places and other places, organization and other organizations, organization and events, documents and documents, and so on.

This is where interest networks come in. It’s still early days to be clear, but interest networks are operating on the premise of tapping into a multi–dimensional graph that manifests the complexity and substance of our world, and delivers the best of that world to you, every day.

We’re seeing more and more companies think about how to capitalize on this trend. There are suddenly (it seems, but this category has been building for many months) lots of different services that can be viewed as interest networks in one way or another, and here are some examples:

• Twine (my site)
• Friendfeed
• Strands
• Intuu
• SocialMedian
• Zimesh
• Popego
• YourVersion

What all of these interest networks have in common is some sort of a bottom-up, user-driven crawl of the Web, which is the way that I’ve described Twine when we get the question about how we propose to index the entire Web (the answer: we don’t.

We let our users tell us what they’re most interested in, and we follow their lead).

Most interest networks exhibit the following characteristics as well:

• They have some sort of bookmarking/submission/markup function to store and map data (often using existing metaphors, even if what’s under the hood is new)
• They also have some sort of social sharing function to provide the network benefit (this isn’t exclusive to interest networks, obviously, but it is characteristic)
• And in most cases, interest networks look to add some sort of “smarts” or “recommendations” capability to the mix (that is, you get more out than you put in)

This last bullet point is where I see next-generation interest networks really providing the most benefit over social bookmarking tools, wikis, collaboration suites and pure social networks of one kind or another.

To that end, we think that Twine is the first of a new breed of intelligent applications that really get to know you better and better over time – and that the more you use Twine, the more useful it will become. Adding your content to Twine is an investment in the future of your data, and in the future of your interests.

At first Twine begins to enrich your data with semantic tags and links to related content via our recommendations engine that learns over time. Twine also crawls any links it sees in your content and gathers related content for you automatically – adding it to your personal or group search engine for you, and further fleshing out the semantic graph of your interests which in turn results in even more relevant recommendations.

The point here is that adding content to Twine, or other next-generation interest networks, should result in increasing returns. That’s a key characteristic, in fact, of the interest networks of the future – the idea that the ratio of work (input) to utility (output) has no established ceiling.

Another key characteristic of interest networks may be in how they monetize. Instead of being advertising-driven, I think they will focus more on a marketing paradigm. They will be to marketing what search engines were to advertising. For example, Twine will be monetizing our rich model of individual and group interests, using our recommendation engine. When we roll this capability out in 2009, we will deliver extremely relevant, useful content, products and offers directly to users who have demonstrated they are really interested in such information, according to their established and ongoing preferences.

6 months ago, you could not really prove that “interest networking” was a trend, and certainly it wasn’t a clearly defined space. It was just an idea, and a goal. But like I said, I think that we’re at a tipping point, where the technology is getting to a point at which we can deliver greater substance to the user, and where the culture is starting to crave exactly this kind of service as a way of making the Web meaningful again.

I think that interest networks are a huge market opportunity for many startups thinking about what the future of the Web will be like, and I think that we’ll start to see the term used more and more widely. We may even start to see some attention from analysts — Carla, Jeremiah, and others, are you listening?

Now, I obviously think that Twine is THE interest network of choice. After all we helped to define the category, and we’re using the Semantic Web to do it. There’s a lot of potential in our engine and our application, and the growing community of passionate users we’ve attracted.

Our 1.0 release really focuses on UE/usability, which was a huge goal for us based on user feedback from our private beta, which began in March of this year. I’ll do another post soon talking about what’s new in Twine. But our TOS (time on site) at 6 minutes/user (all time) and 12 minutes/user (over the last month) is something that the team here is most proud of – it tells us that Twine is sticky, and that “the dogs are eating the dog food.”

Now that anyone can join, it will be fun and gratifying to watch Twine grow.

Still, there is a lot more to come, and in 2009 our focus is going to shift back to extending our Semantic Web platform and turning on more of the next-generation intelligence that we’ve been building along the way. We’re going to take interest networking to a whole new level.

Stay tuned!

Slideshare is a site where people post and share their Powerpoints. You can watch the powerpoints quickly with a little viewer widget that let’s you click through them in your browser. There are some really interesting, creative, and informative presentations there. It’s addictive, I’ve been looking at presentations all morning. Can’t stop. (Thanks to Peter Royal for telling me about this).

Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O’Reilly (in that order). It’s a good panel and I recommend the video, however, the folks at Web 2.0 only filmed the presenters; they didn’t capture what we were showing on our screens, so you have to use your imagination as we describe our demos.

An audio cast of one of my presentations about Twine to a reporter was also put online recently, for a more in-depth description.

What a week it has been for Radar Networks. We have worked so hard these last few days to get ready to unveil Twine, and it has been a real thrill to show our work and get such positive feedback and support from the industry, bloggers, the media and potential users.

We really didn’t expect so much excitement and interest. In fact we’ve been totally overwhelmed by the response as thousands upon thousands of people have contacted us in the last 24 hours asking to join our beta, telling us how they would use Twine for their personal information management, their collaboration, their organizations, and their communities. Clearly there is such a strong and growing need out there for the kind of Knowledge Networking capabilities that Twine provides, and it’s been great to hear the stories and make new connections with so many people who want our product. We love hearing about your interest in Twine, what you would use it for, what you want it to do, and why you need it! Keep those stories coming. We read them all and we really listen to them.

Today, in unveiling Twine, over five years of R&D, and contributions from dozens of core contributors, a dedicated group of founders and investors, and hundreds of supporters, advisors, friends and family, all came to fruition. As a company, and a team, we achieved an important milestone and we should all take some time to really appreciate what we have accomplished so far. Twine is a truly ambitious and pardigm-shifting product, that is not only technically profound but visually stunning — There has been so much love and attention to detail in this product.

In the last 6 months, Twine has really matured into a product, a product that solves real and growing needs (for a detailed use-case see this post). And just as our product has matured, so has our organization: As we doubled in size, our corporate culture has become tremendously more interesting, innovative and fun. I could go on and on about the cool things we do as a company and the interesting people who work here. But it’s the passion, dedication and talent of this team that is most inspiring. We are creating a team and a culture that truly has the potential to become a great Silicon Valley company: The kind of company that I’ve always wanted to build.

Although we launched today, this is really just the beginning of the real adventure. There is still much for us to build, learn about, and improve before Twine will really accomplish all the goals we have set out  for it. We have a five-year roadmap. We know this is a marathon, not a sprint and that "slow and steady wins the race." As an organization we also have much learning and growing to do. But this really doesn’t feel like work — it feels like fun — because we all love this product and this company. We all wake up every day totally psyched to work on this.

It’s been an intense, challenging, and rewarding week. Everyone on my team has impressed me and really been at the top of their game. Very few of us got any real sleep, and most of us went far beyond the call of duty. But we did it, and we did it well. As a company we have never cut corners, and we have always preferred to do things the right way, even if the right way is the hard way. But that pays off in the end. That is how great products are built. I really want to thank my co-founders, my team, my investors, advisors, friends, and family, for all their dedication and support.

Today, we showed our smiling new baby to the world, and the world smiled back.

And tonight , we partied!!!

News Flash!

My company, Radar Networks, is coming out of stealth this Friday, October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. I’ll be speaking on "The Semantic Edge Panel" at 4:10 PM, and publicly showing our Semantic Web online service for the first time. If you are planning to come to Web 2.0, I hope to see you at my panel.

Here’s the official Media Alert below:

(PRWEB)
October 15, 2007 — At the Web2.0 Summit on October 19th, Radar
Networks will announce a revolutionary new service that uses the power
of the emerging Semantic Web to enable a smarter way of sharing,
organizing and finding information. Founder and CEO Nova Spivack will
also give the first public preview of Radar’s application, which is one
of the first examples of “Web 3.0” – the next-generation of the Web, in
which the Web begins to function more like a database, and software
grows more intelligent and helpful.

Join Nova as he participates in “The Semantic Edge” panel discussion
with esteemed colleagues including Powerset’s Barney Pell and Metaweb’s
Daniel Hillis, moderated by Tim O’Reilly.

Who:   
Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack

When:   
Friday, October 19, 2007
4:10 – 4:55 p.m.
   
Where: 
Web2.0 Summit
Palace Hotel
Grand Ballroom
2 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco,  California  94105
   

Steorn, the Irish company that claims to have invented a mechanical device that generates unlimited free energy with no fuel, is scheduled to demonstrate their device publicly for the first time in London tomorrow. A panel of 22 independent world experts has been recruited to study the device. It should be an interesting demo!

If you are interested on what computer user-interfaces are going to feel like in the future — you must see this video of a demo of a new multi-touch computer monitor. This is amazing technology — and the various demos themselves are interactive artworks in their own right. For more information about the researchers and projects behind this, click here. I want one of these NOW!

Check out this very impressive user-interface prototype for a desktop that works more like a real desk — a messy desk in fact. Very delightful design work that makes want to use it now!

An invetor in Japan has created the world’s first glass CD. Because of glass’s exceptional clarity and durability it not only provides better sound quality than plastic, it lasts "forever." The catch: it costs a hefty amount yen to buy one since they are presently made by hand.

I know, I know. I’m several years late to the party on this one, but I have become quite obsessed with the television show, Lost. It’s possibly the most addictive show on TV. Ever. You have to start from the beginning though. Sign up for Netflix if you haven’t already, and be prepared to not leave your house until you run out of discs to watch…

I got the TiVo Series 3 box today and installed it. It takes 2 cable cards and can record simultaneously on two channels at once, in HDTV. It also connects to my wireless network instead of using regular phone lines. Nice. Unfortunately one of the cable card slots was defective — this apparently is a pretty common defect with these boxes according to my cable guy who spent an hour trying to get it to work and has already encountered the same issue for 3 other customers of his recently. So TiVo is shipping me a replacement box. Anyway it looks like it will be worth the hassle. Prior to getting this new toy, I had a generic DVR from my cable provider and it sucked so bad by comparison I’m surprised they even bother. TiVo has a vastly superior menu system, and the recommendation features can’t be beat. 

I’ve been listening to a lot of music today. Two other albums that I have that I highly recommend are the Magnolia soundtrack by Aimee Mann, and Colour the Small One by Sia. While we’re on the subject, if you like these, you’ll probably also like Dummy by Portishead, even though it’s quite different from them.

This online video preview of the upcoming Web-based organizer, Scrybe. The app has an unusually elegant and innovative AJAX interface. It’s beautifully designed. Watch the video.

This is a nice, VERY dated commercial for the C-64 computer starring none other than William Shatner!

The online music recommendation service Pandora is really cool in all ways but one. Due to what they report as a requirement of their music license the user is only allowed to skip a small number of songs per hour. This can be a problem since the whole point of Pandora is that you give it feedback as it plays songs for you and it learns what you like. If you’re like me and you rate a bunch of songs and quickly skip ahead to keep rating more of them (while avoiding the songs you don’t like), then Pandora’s present rule is a bit frustrating. (Note: a workaround was suggested by a reader below — but it’s still kind of a pain.) (Note 2: See the extensive and informative comments added by CTO of Pandora, below, as well).

After you hit your skip-limit you have no choice but to sit through the songs you don’t like because you can’t skip them. Eventually the count is reset and you can start skipping again. This is an odd limitation and I can’t quite understand why it makes sense for Pandora or the music companies — it would seem that the more music a user listens to and rates the greater the chance they will buy something, which is how both Pandora and the record companies make money. So they should be encouraging all forms of use — including skipping songs to find other songs you like. At least when users skip songs they still stay in the site — if they are forced to sit through songs they don’t like they are more likely to leave.

If it weren’t for this one frustrating limitation I would really use Pandora all the time to discover and buy new music. There is one more feature of Pandora that I would like — a way to pop the client into a small floating window, or even a desktop client so I don’t have to keep my browser sitting there all the time.

I’ve already used Pandora to discover and buy music — and I would use it even more if the above issues were solved in later versions. However, even with these limitations it is still one of the best and most enjoyable ways to discover new music that matches your interests. I think the potential of this app (and the Music Genome Project, that it’s based on) is huge, and I can’t wait for future versions.

My Treo 650 has been an endless source of frustration. It’s probably one of the most annoyingly bad devices I’ve ever owned. First of all, the form factor is such that it’s almost impossible to grab it when it rings without dropping it or flinging it across the room. There’s no traction on the surface and it has odd curvatures which seem to be optimized for dropping it. But that’s just the beginning. The darn thing crashes just about every other day, usually when I’m answering a call or driving or looking something up. And then there’s the truly bad email program that ships with it. OK, I know all about reinstalling, updating it in every way, and believe me, I’ve done it all, in spades. It’s just a sucky device and the software is buggy. So that’s the bad news part of this story.

Now the good news: The damn thing crashed for the last time this week. I did my nth hard-reset to restore it to factory condition, wiping all my data, but this time it didn’t work. I got the screen of death — an endless loop that there’s no way to get out of. It won’t let me finish the reset process. And I don’t care, because I bought a new Blackberry and I’m much happier now.

But here’s the fun part – I have been waiting for my Treo 650 to legitimately crash so bad that I could get rid of it and not feel any guilt. And now that day has come. But I don’t want to just throw it away: I want revenge. And I’m going to have it.

I want to destroy my Treo 650 in the most creative and entertaining, and destructive, way possible. And I want your help!

Please comment on this message with your proposal for a truly funny, destructive, epic, and creative way to completely obliterate my Treo 650. Ideally you and/or your friends and/or my friends will video the actual process of destroying my Treo and then we’ll put it up on YouTube. I’ll put up a budget of $200 for any supplies or equipment necessary to fund the winning proposal. Whenever I or anyone has a future mobile device nightmare we can then watch this video and feel a moment of poetic justice. People: 1. Devices: 0.

This is cool — the next generation of touch screens will touch back —

Immersion’s new TouchSense Technology for Touch Screens combines vibro
feedback with finger-position recognition and interpolation to deliver
tactile feedback on standard touch screens. This feedback can register
as bumps, low vibrations, ticks, clicks, slides, you name it. All of it
is coupled with audible feedback to enhance the experience.

Japanese cell phone company KDDI is offering a new GPS-enabled 3D navigational tool to their 17 million subscribers (see article and picture). Their system helps consumers navigate city streets and even within buildings, using an innovative 3D map and audio directions. This system is similar to (but possibly more advanced than) the in-car navigation systems we are familiar with, such as Hertz "Neverlost" or the Magellan products (note: I have a Magellan aftermarket nav system in my car — it’s one of the most useful things I ever bought!).

GPS-enabled mobile devices and the location-aware services they enable are definitely a "Next Big Thing" contender.  They have many compelling potential uses in the near-term and mid-term future. Below are some of my wild speculations on how this technology could be used:

• Personal navigation. Your device can help you find your way when walking, driving, or even on the water or in the wilderness.
• Location-aware advertising. Your device can get special offers from stores near you, as you walk or drive around, according to your permissions, preferences and profile of course.
• Location-aware storage, search and retrieval. Your device remembers where you were when you wrote a note, took a photo, or sent a message.You can later search for your stuff based on where you were — for example, "photos I took in Brazil" or "Notes I made at PC Forum in 2006" (for the best example of this, see the amazing product, EverNote — the next version of which I got to preview recently, it is mind-blowingly cool!).
• Location-aware photo-enhancement. When you take a photograph it is not only tagged with time and location where it was taken, but the content of the photo can be automatically tagged based on the orientation of the camera. For example, if you take a photo of the Empire State Building, your camera will someday be able to tag the photo as being about the Empire State Building, and can even detect and tag the shape of the building itself in the photo.
• Location-aware social networking. Your device can track people nearby who are your friends, family, colleagues, or who match your interests and want to meet you (for example: dating). This can be useful to find people at a crowded event, or to hook up with your friends while out on the town, or to meet people at a trade show or conference.
• Location-aware personal security. Your device can keep a transcript of your movements on a server. Parties you authorize can track you if they need to find you immediately, or in case you go missing. In addition, bulk alerts can be sent to people who happen to be in particular areas — for example, if a tornado is coming, people who happen to be in that vicinity can be warned.
• Location-aware information services. You can get news and other local info about the place you happen to be in. If you are standing outside a restaurant you can see reviews and discussions from people who have been there before. If you are already in the restaurant you can see recommendations of what to order from people who were there before you. Information can be virtually posted to particular places or regions — you can hang a virtual post it note in your doorway so that anyone who passes through it gets the note.

Check out the Scoobadoo — a new underwater scooter that lets anyone scuba dive, without wearing a mask, tank or weights… Cool.

Check out the photo and video of this cool new display right out of Minority Report. It detects multiple fingers at once, enabling a wide range of new gestural interactions.

After 11 years of painstaking research and inventor has finally achieved the "holy grail" — colored soap bubbles that don’t stain anything. But that’s just the beginning — his invention is based on a completely new kind of dye chemistry that could open the door to a wide range of new products. Read this excellent article, and also click here to view some pictures of these extraordinarily beautiful new bubbles.

This article just came in (via Kurzweil)

A little-known start-up has demonstrated wireless broadband 1000
times more efficient than WiMax – and claims the technique could also
make wireless LANs that will run for years on watch batteries.

xG
Technology, based in Sarasota, Florida, used a transmitter not unlike a
cordless phone base station, operating in the unlicensed – and crowded
- 900MHz band, to send a 3.7Mbit/s data signal to a radius of 18 miles
across the suburbs of Miami, using 50mW and an omnidirectional antenna.

The data rate and specifications don’t exactly match xG’s original plan, which we reported in July,
as the demo uses a narrower band and a lower data rate. However, with
an omnidirectional antenna, the demonstration appears to have
transmitted a signal at a power density other schemes would find
impossible. The company’s xMax technology uses a novel modulation
scheme, described at xG’s own site.

Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS — an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my own startup, Radar Networks, as well as other participating research organizations.

IRIS is designed to help users make better sense of their information. It can run on it’s own, or can be connected to the CALO system which provides advanced machine learning capabilities to it. I am very proud to see IRIS go open source — I think it has potential to become a major platform for learning applications on the desktop.

IRIS is still in its early stages of evolution, and much work will be done this year to add further functionality, improve the GUI and make IRIS even more user-friendly. But already it is perhaps the most sophisticated and comprehensive semantic desktop PIM ever created. If you would like to read more about IRIS, this paper provides a good overview.

Congratulations to the team at SRI for reaching this important milestone!

(Note: IRIS is a product of SRI. Radar Networks helps to develop IRIS, under subcontract to SRI, but our primary work is on our own commercial products, which have not yet been released, and which are not related to IRIS. Stay tuned.)

D-Wave, a Canadian startup, claims it will have a working quantum computer within 3 years. Unlike other quantum computer designs which are based on the principle of quantum entanglement, the D-Wave design is based on quantum tunneling. While this makes it less powerful, it is still ideal for complex calculations such as the "traveling salesman problem" and simulations of physical systems.

NASA’s research on subvocalization technology is moving forward. Their system intercepts nerve signals to the vocal cords before the speaker makes a sound and then figures out what words they signify. This technology will enable people to speak silently on the phone or to their computers, without moving their lips or making a sound. It’s almost telepathy. I blogged about this last year when it first came out. It’s actually a technology I dreamed about a while back — "silent speech" is one of those things that has to happen in order to truly free humans from keyboards (although I must confess, I love to type).

Years ago I read about Persinger’s work on the induction of unusual states of consciousness using magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe and always wanted to try it — unfortunately the only way to do that was to go to his lab (assuming you could get invited). The Shakti Helmet brings this technology to the masses. The Shakti Helmet is a device for stimulating your brain using the same types of rotating magnetic fields that Persinger tested, via your PC. Very interesting. I want one. I just bought one. This is a must-have addition to my growing collection of experimental devices. What else have I got in my arsenal, you ask? I have a top-of-the-line Rife Machine, the best binaural sound and light machine, a device that detects REM sleep and stimulates lucid dreaming, and several other similar devices.

Sony has released its new Creation Box in Japan — it processes regular TV signals to make images clearer, flicker free, and more vivid — and it enables zoom functions. Pretty interesting idea — but why bother? Aren’t we all going digital anyway? How long a shelf-life will this product have? Still it’s a pretty cool idea.

Here are some more features that I wish the iPod offered:

Side-Trips From Current Playlist

When I’m playing through one of my playlists and I get to a song I really like, I wish I had the ability to take sidetrips to other related subjects, accessible from the trackwheel or menu button:

• After this song, side-trip to more songs by this artist (plays all songs on iPod by artist, starting with highest-rated, even if not in current playlist; when you end the side-trip it returns you back to the previous point in the playlist you were at when you started it.)
• After this song, side-trip to more albums by this artist (plays all albums on iPod by artist, starting with cumulatively highest-rated, even if not in current playlist; when you end the side-trip it returns you back to the previous point in the playlist you were at when you started it.)
• After this song, side-trip to a different playlist (plays that playlist; when you end the side-trip it returns you back to the previous point in the playlist you were at when you started it.)
• After this song, play related playlist. Since some songs are in multiple playlists, this fact can serve to implicitly relate playlists. (Gives you options to related playlists to segueway to).

Earmarks in Playlists

I wish there was a way to earmark at least one position in every playlist — which by default would be the last song played during the last session playing the playlist. I have some very long playlists and this would help me so that I don’t have to start from the beginning each time; instead I can just pick up playing where I left-off last time. This is also essential for audio books or recorded lecture series, so that you can pick up where you left-off each time you listen.

Playlist Display Features

When viewing a playlist on the iPod you can only see the song names, not the artist or album names. This is because the screen isn’t wide enough to display more columns of data. But this could be solved by allowing the user to "toggle" through different columns by clicking one of the buttons. Better yet, how about just having longer lines per row, and letting the user select the order of data fields in each row (separated by commas). And as long as we’re on the subject, how about having numbers prefixing each row of a playlist — would be really helpful in order to quickly find your place in a playlist. All that would be needed is a way to scroll horizontally along the row data in playlist — perhaps using the trackwheel with a "shift" function, such as by pressing the center button and turning the trackwheel simultaneously. Here are some row data fields that would make playlists much more useable:

- Index number; the number of the present song in the sequence of the playlist
- Song name
- Artist name
- Album name
- Rating
- Number of plays
- Date of last play
- Genre

Think outside your cable box! My long-time friend, the legendary Ken Schaffer, has finally come out of stealth with his new project, TV2ME. In a nutshell, it enables you to watch your own cable subscription channels live from anywhere via broadband over the Net. The system connects your cable box to a video streaming system that only you can access via the net. So for example, when you are on the road you can still catch your local broadcasts and home team games, right from your laptop! It’s a new spin on the concept of video-streaming and P2P. Instead of sharing your video with others, you are accessing your own video from anywhere. Read this article for an overview of TV2ME, and Ken Schaffer, one of the most colorful geniuses I know (picture Lenny Bruce crossed with Richard Feynman).