1997 was my last visit to the Santa Fe Insti­tute as a grad­u­ate researcher, as I recall. I spent a few weeks in the Fall, fin­ish­ing (I imag­ined) my Ph.D. research and work­ing up a first pre­sen­ta­tion of my research on fit­ness land­scapes, mul­ti­ob­jec­tive opti­miza­tion in phar­ma­co­log­i­cal design, and the phi­los­o­phy of func­tion in struc­tural biol­ogy to the Biol­ogy Depart­ment at my home institution.

[Not long after, they allowed how it must make a very good com­puter sci­ence or math degree or some­thing, because they couldn’t fol­low it at all. So the next time I vis­ited SFI, it was as an Entre­pre­neur; that was more com­fort­able, to be hon­est. In a way. My advi­sor started a com­pany about then doing what… well, things sim­i­lar to what I was also doing, we’ll say.]

But those were nice days. Nice place, SFI. We all miss it — it’s dif­fer­ent now, I hear.

Aside from the mul­ti­ob­jec­tive stuff, and the ori­gin of life sims, and the grammar-​​based chem­istry stuff, and the Tierra fork Simon Fraser wrote, and this and that neat research, I made wind chimes out of hard drive disks, and helped set up Ian Malcolm’s SFI web page (he was fac­ulty at SFI, accord­ing to Michael Crich­ton) … and one day in Octo­ber I tried to morph all the peo­ple in the build­ing into a sin­gle image.

That one never got very far. The soft­ware for the Mac was crap back then: all PICT based and kludgy and full of Sys­tem 7 (!) good­ness. I think I was work­ing on a Quadra 900 at the time; shared the desk with Ken Arrow.

But now, ten years along, I’ve lost the names of some of the peo­ple whose por­traits I took. Should teach me for not tak­ing good notes, when I know I rarely fin­ish any­thing within a decade.

Well, any­way. These aren’t sin­gle peo­ple:

And I don’t know who some of these com­po­nent (actual) peo­ple are at all. Some I do, of course: Stu Kauff­man (who was my advi­sor), Cyn­thia Breazeal (who was using Post-​​Its for Kismet’s ears back then), some of the staff. But some of my best friends on staff and peo­ple with whom I had long late-​​night con­ver­sa­tions about phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence and the world as it should be? Nada.

So mem­ory, she does me no good.

Maybe that’s what social net­works are for. Dis­trib­uted stor­age and processing.