Think Again

Is obesity a problem in the United States? I think the consensus opinion is that it is indeed a problem. I don't know if the consensus opinion is right or wrong, but I know obesity is a problem of some kind for obese people. (Disclaimer: It bugs me, but according the usual interpretation of the Body Mass Index, I am an obese person. So it's a problem for me too.)

Reading about obesity, one finds a number of reasonable opinions put forward as to why obesity is a problem for so many Americans. Part of the problem is related to our sedentary lifestyle. We spend a lot of time sitting in front of computer screens. Part of the problem is the easy access to plentiful and inexpensive, good-tasting-if-not-especially-nutritious, food. Part of the problem is the way our physiology and psychology are programmed to relate to food and food intake. I won't go into all the details here, but it seems as though, in general, you put people in an environment where there's a lot of food to eat, and not a lot of physical labor to expend those calories, they're going to get fat. Sound reasonable? I think it does.

So let's think about something else for a moment, shall we?

Now, I'm just spit-ballin' here. I'm going way out past anywhere I might even claim to have something approaching even an informed opinion. Call it a hunch. But it "feels" right.

Let's think about what the consequences might be for human emotional health, and the health of the communities they must physically exist in, not virtual communities, the real ones, of an environment where people have easy access to plentiful and inexpensive emotional experiences.

Human beings must live in groups, we can't survive as individuals. I think I'm on pretty safe ground there. In order to exist in groups, we've evolved a set of behaviors that are connected to our psychological/emotional apparatus to help us adapt to living in groups, or communities. There are certain physiological rewards that drive us toward certain interactions which help promote the success of the group and the survival of individuals. We behave toward one another, when we're in close physical proximity, in complex ways that have us simultaneously competing for rank, and seeking rewards from social interaction. These physiological/behavioral systems are tightly coupled to the aggregate behavior of groups. In some measure, I think, human emotional and psychological "health" is optimized for interacting in these, perhaps relatively small, groups; as they likely evolved early in our history when the small group was our most common mode of existence. The success of the group is tied to the health, both physical and emotional or mental, of the individuals in the group.

A bit of an aside is probably in order at this point, if you've been reading the things I've been writing for very long. Ordinarily, I'm very skeptical of our facility for acting as members of a group. I think there are significant disadvantages to living a good life (we'll try to define that some other time), if one is not aware of how one's behavior is influenced by one's role as a member of a group. But I also know that we must exist as members of groups, so it's probably wise not to neglect thinking about how groups may best function. So keep in mind, all my reservations regarding group behavior and individual behavior as members of groups are still present, they're just not especially relevant to this meditation right now.

I think that what we have today in terms of psychological and emotional health and the health of communities, is somewhat akin to the situation with obesity. Before the advent of electronic media and the enormous bandwidth they offer, our experience of our life was shaped mostly by our social interactions with people in our immediate proximity, usually members of the same group. This was expanded to some extent by the advent of movable type and universal literacy, and we could share other people's experiences by reading. Reading is a solitary act, but the number of books and the time available to read them were more limited before the industrial revolution and the arrival of electric lighting, and electrically powered labor-saving devices.

With the arrival first of radio, and, more especially, television, we had access to a much wider range of experiences. We need not rely on social interactions exclusively to receive some of the peak rewards our brains' neuro-chemistry offered in return for certain social interactions. We could listen to comedians on the radio and enjoy a good laugh. We could listen to westerns and soap operas and science fiction shows and experience thrills and suspense and excitement. When television came along, the visual aspect of the medium perhaps added even more intimacy to the experience. But it wasn't genuine intimacy. Perhaps we still mostly relied for physical relationships, maybe mediated by the telephone, for that.

Then along comes the internet. Not only do we still have radio and television to stimulate and titillate and drive our behavior, we now have a vastly larger array of experiences to sample online. Need I say, porn? And now weblogs. My weblog has brought to me a number of very valuable friendships, and by way of e-mail and instant messaging and voice chat and now video chat, I can achieve a level of intimacy that approaches that of physical relationships. The only thing missing is the sense of touch and smell, and I would be somewhat surprised if someone weren't working on those.

So now the situation is one somewhat akin to what we have with food. I can enjoy whatever sort of relationship most pleases me through my online interactions, I dare say even more easily than I can go buy and consume a package of white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies! The difference is, I understand the consequences of eating those cookies. I'm not sure I understand the consequences of these online relationships.

It's important to note that this is emphatically not to say that online relationships and friendships are inherently bad. Any more than white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies are bad. But we know that eating too many cookies can have undesirable consequences for my individual health. What is less certain are the consequences not only for my emotional and psychological health from online relationships, but the consequences for the groups to which I must be a member.

I'm certain I'm not the first person to think about this. I know others have written about the undesirable effects of online infidelity in marriages, where no physical intimacy takes place, but there is a compromise or betrayal of emotional intimacy. And others have examined the possible adverse consequences to the ready availability of pornography. But I think there are larger issues as well, and it's not clear to me we understand ourselves well enough yet to see those issues clearly.

Which is why I think I must suggest to all my online friends who so vigorously extol the virtues of online friendships and of small pieces only loosely joined, that perhaps there is some reason to pause and reflect; that it might be in all our interests to think again. Isn't it just possible we may be developing and experiencing adverse consequences which are manifested all around us, for which we haven't yet made a correlation to the technological changes influencing human behavior?

Random Utterances

Loren appears to have done well through his surgery, and Leslie is making updates on his progress. (I'm not sure how Loren will feel when he learns that the blogosphere has been kept informed of the status of his bowel movements! Go Loren! (There's kind of a pun there...)) We'll keep hoping for a speedy recovery.

I'll say it again because this thing is called Groundhog Day and it bears repeating, technology changes how people do things, it doesn't change what they do. What I do is up to me; how I do it is a function of the means at my disposal.

Leave it to marketers to take a perfectly wonderful purely social interaction like a conversation and try to warp it into some mechanism for advancing mercantile activities. Once a marketer, always a marketer, don't you agree? Didn't think so.

Al Hawkins has received some of his own on the health front. We send him our best wishes in adapting to this new set of circumstances.

Stavros tells a good story.

Keep to the middle path.

I installed the latest security updates to Mac OS X, no problems observed. I've also installed iLife 05. My iPhoto library seems to have imported with no probem. I haven't really made the time to sit down and play with it very much, so I don't have any real impressions of anything, other than to note the interface to iPhoto has changed somewhat significantly.

Bought Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on DVD. Beautiful movie. Weak story. The extras detailing the story of the movie were pretty interesting.

The Dummies series now has these little $1.99 pocket books meant to be sold at the checkout counter. They cover topics like weight loss, time management, memory improvement. They need one on controlling impulse buys. Oh, wait...

Denial

There are moments when my mood would make Schopenhauer seem like an optimistic, upbeat humanitarian.

When I'm fortunate, I recall that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. Indeed, the only way it can be. My mood is a product of denial.

Talk is cheap, and the truth is never what it appears to be.

If you're inclined to watch Groundhog Day next Wednesday, try to think about denial and Phil in the opening scenes in the movie. Practically every word out of Phil's mouth is a statement of denial, except when he's "on," and then it's not authentic.

Once we get past denial, if we get past denial, there's usually bargaining. There's a lot of bargaining going on in the blogosphere. "This changes everything." We don't have to change, because we've invented a new technology that makes changes for us! We can like what we like, and exclude what we wish to exclude and still be just super people. So, make the world look the way we want it to look, please! Look, I'll even add tags, and no-follow. And I'll add Skype! And trackback! And... and... Technorati! (The authority that is no authority.) See! This changes everything! Sure, the world still sucks, but really, it's all about to change! Just think good thoughts! Get with the program! If it's "not working for you," well, I'm just too sorry about that.

Then there's anger. I know anger. Lots of anger out there in the ol' blogosphere as well. Just like in the "real" world. The one we like to edit out with tags and Technorati, and no-follow and spam filters and iPods and Lexuses, and gated communities. "Unsubscribed!" Lots of anger out there too. But when we tire of anger, or when we begin to feel despair, there's always bargaining again! Someone has just invented a new technology that'll change everything! Yea us! Happy days are here again!

Unless you go ahead and enter the wasteland. Depression. I know depression. Lots of depression out there in the blogosphere. Not as much as denial and bargaining and anger, but enough. Hardest part of the journey. A lot of folks don't make it. More don't even try, they choose to stay with denial, anger and bargaining. Watch Phil in the wasteland, see what gets him through.

If you make it through the wasteland, there's acceptance. You've returned to where you've started, as someone once said, only to see it as if for the first time. And everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. And you'll see Phil discover that moment as well.

But it's just a movie. A distraction to fill a box to occupy some time to take us away from all that we don't want to confront. But as distractions go, it's a worthwhile one.

Because everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. What that really means is kind of up to you. In martial arts, it is sometimes said that it's the white belt that's the hardest to earn.

Despair

Picture me pounding my head into my desk, over and over and over again.

Galactica

This series seems to be finding its voice pretty quickly. It's still a little rough in spots, and it seems like the episodes would fit better in a 90 minute format; but what it is, is damn good. I have a lot of technical objections, but they aren't show stoppers. (Like, they're probably going to run out of Vipers and Raptors long before they run out of pilots. But hey, nothing a little deus ex machina can't solve when the time comes.)

Starbuck is a very compelling character (this should please many female sf fans (cough) Shelley! (cough), and Olmos as Adama is the center of gravity. I really like these characters. The president and the XO are each compelling as well. Apollo seems like the weakest so far, for such a central role. Last week's episode was fairly strong for him, but again, I think 60 minutes (or whatever it is without commercials, 44?) wasn't enough to really establish his character. But it's still early.

Tonight's episode, Act of Contrition was excellent. There is so much potential for this series.

And Galactica (the ship) is just beautiful.

Okay, I've waxed rhapsodic long enough.

This is really some of the best sf on TV in a long, long time. Well, since Firefly anyway.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Like Panasonic, it would appear that I am just slightly ahead of my time.

Check out this and this, and then recall this and this.

That's about as far as I go, patting myself on the back. It's just a coincidence, but the dopamine is welcome nonetheless.

BTW, I won't be appearing on any major network broadcasts, if any of you were, you know, worrying that I might be and you might miss me. Not that any of you are, I know. But just in case. Better safe than sorry. I won't be on TV. So don't look for me. Okay? Are we clear? Okay.

Loren Webster

If you have a moment, try to spare a good thought for Loren Webster as he undergoes surgery for prostate cancer today. If you've been reading his weblog, you know this is his third bout with the "Big C." I think it must be a singularly lonely battle, but maybe we can help him fight one "C" with another - connection. Can't hurt, can it? Keep Loren in your thoughts today and tomorrow and the weeks to come as he recovers.

Heads Up!

Groundhog Day is a week from tomorrow. If you act now, you can probably order the DVD from Amazon and have it in time for the holiday.

It's a wonderful story about a man who was trapped in his own narrative, until it was interrupted one day. Sadly, it's only a movie. But, if you pay attention, just about everything you need to know is right there.

It's a wonderful movie.

Back in the Dojong

I've finally resumed my regular practice of attending taekwondo lessons. I got off to an erratic start earlier this month, and managed to skip a few classes just because I felt like it.

I'm glad I did because, while all the assorted aches and pains have returned, along with a couple of new ones, I actually feel better. It's great therapy for coping with the long, cold nights of the Dark Ages.

No Shit

File this under Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious: The brain can't ignore angry voices.

Photographs and Reflections

I often find myself disagreeing with Jeneane Sessum, especially on matters like authenticity, but I think this post of hers illustrates a point I was trying to make in Virtuality.

She offers her impression of the photographs from the event, while the attendees write about their reflections on the event. They are not the same impressions, despite the fact that they both relate to the same event.

A Small Dose of Heraclitus

(First noted 12/9/04. Pulled from The Cooler, and edited for posting.)

I think the fact that so little of what Heraclitus is believed to have written actually survives adds to his appeal and his mystique. For all I know, were he alive today, he might be just another right wing, talking-head, know-it-all. "Tonight at eight! The Heraclitus Factor!"

Somehow though, I think not.

Here's something apropos to topics of discussion of late; chiefly, the utility of "the web as world," "markets are conversations," and other romantic ideas. Whether it advances or retards the discussion is left as an exercise for the interested and motivated reader.

Since mindfulness, of all things,

is the ground of being,

to speak one's true mind,

and to keep things known

in common, serves all being,

just as laws made clear uphold the city,

yet with greater strength.

Of all pronouncements of the law

the one source is the Word

whereby we choose what helps

true mindfulness prevail.

Lookin' for a Connection

Starfish Connection

Pretty Cool

Heroes all around us.

Video Card

My PowerMac G4 MDD 867/DP (my, that's a mouthful), shipped with the Radeon 9000 video card. Up until now, I haven't seriously considered upgrading the card because, for the most part, the rest of the computer isn't really up to the task of keeping up with the 9800 in things like games. It can't move data fast enough to take advantage of the speed of the graphics card.

But...

Things like parts of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Keynote 2 are starting to require a video card that can support something called ARB Fragment Programs. Naturally, Tiger and Keynote 2 will run on machines with lesser graphics cards, but they won't support all the bells and whistles. And what's life without a few bells and whistles?

Metaphilm

Dave Weinberger pointed to this site the other day. There are some interesting things to read there. I recommend this one on I (heart) Huckabees; and this one about The Big Lebowski.

iLife 05

I received my copy of iLife '05 today. I plan to do the installations tomorrow after I backup the photo library. I started playing around a bit with GarageBand last weekend, and I'm more intrigued.

I ordered the upgrade to Final Cut Express HD, which includes Soundtrack, which is somewhat related to GarageBand. One interesting feature about that is that Soundtrack includes thousands of loops, the building blocks used to create songs in GarageBand and Soundtrack. The specifications I recall reading before indicated that Soundtrack shipped with 4000 loops, but the current web page only indicates "thousands." Hopefully they don't overlap too much with GarageBand and Jam Pack 1, which I also have. In any event, looks like there'll be some interesting audio stuff to play with in the weeks ahead. I promise not to inflict anything I create on anyone.

Rated R

(Mom - skip this post. Thanks!)

((Like that's going to happen. Right.))

This is probably a little racy for the usual Groundhog Day post, but a friend and I were having a conversation the other day and it occurred to us that the male penis should be regarded like any other power tool - not to be operated while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

I'm sure others have already had that insight, probably Tim Allen among them, but we thought it was pretty funny. We're so easily amused.

Talk is Cheap

You don't "speak truth to power." That phrase misunderstands speech, truth and power.

You don't "speak truth to power." Talk is cheap, and the truth is never what it seems to be.

You live authentically in the presence of power.

The only power there is, is the power to choose. We choose to follow other authorities, or to follow our own. To live an authentic life, you must become the authority in your life. The "power" you confront is the power of people living inauthentic lives in the service of other authorities. That's no power at all. That's just the weather.

Always keep this in mind: Everybody gets to die. Not everybody gets to live.

You want to honor the dead? Honor their memory? Keep faith with them? Then live your life! Not "your life according to somebody else's manifesto." Not your life in the service of some group. You must serve everyone or you serve no one. This can be hard, and things may not always be as they appear to be. Sometimes a good service to someone is to oppose or resist them. But in a thousand little ways, every day, you can keep to this path, if you try.

You should not seek authority over others unless you are prepared to embrace responsibility and hold yourself accountable, and very few of us are able to do that. You must not seek authority over others for whom you cannot be responsible. You can have an opinion, and offer it. But don't pretend to be something you're not. You'll end up having to work too hard, just to fool yourself.

This has been a public service announcement from the gnomes and trolls at Groundhog Day. As always, we're authorities on nothing, we make all this shit up. You are strongly encouraged to do your own thinking. It's the only thinking that matters.

We now return to our regular programming. (Lest anyone think we take ourselves too seriously around here.)

More Thoughts on "Conversation"

Maybe it's just me. Perhaps I'm just dense, or ignorant or slow. Maybe all three. I don't know. But here are just a few more thoughts on the "conversation" metaphor.

"Markets are conversations." I might as well say, "Elephants are birds." Why not? To dispute this is to ignore all the delightful "birdness" of elephants. They are animals. They inhabit this planet. They breathe its air. Each is somewhat intelligent and territorial. Each relies on sounds to communicate. There are many ways elephants are birds. As the Blue Rajah of Mystery Men once said, "If we could just step out of our literal minds for once..."

Of course, markets aren't conversations. Conversations are social activities undertaken for their own rewards. Markets are transactions of authority; while not exclusively zero-sum, much of the activity in the marketplace is a zero-sum game. Every sale one marketer earns is a lost sale to another. What sort of conversation do you suppose they're having?

How many conversations have you ever had that began with a manifesto? A manifesto is a statement of authority. You can either subscribe to it, or you can disagree with it. Or you can ignore it. I'd prefer to ignore it, but it keeps popping up. You can start an argument with a manifesto. You can start a discussion with a manifesto. You can probably start a revolution with one. But it's unlikely you're really going to have a conversation.

Conversations are shared thoughts with no particular objective or goal, other than the enjoyment of sharing. Conversations may influence the one or both of the conversants, but that's certainly not the goal. Once you include the intent to influence, you're no longer having a conversation.

Ah, but what about establishing a relationship? Certainly, any conversation necessarily engenders a relationship between the two conversants? I think that's true. But if your purpose in entering into a conversation is to establish a relationship that you hope to exploit later, then I submit you're not engaging in conversation so much as subterfuge. To what extent are you able to extend reciprocity? If you are creating a relationship for the purpose of influencing another to conduct a significant transaction of value (or authority), and you are unable to likewise conduct a reciprocal transaction of value in return at some point, then it's essentially a zero-sum game in terms of the value of the relationship.

Markets are not conversations. They're not even really like conversations in any significant way that matters, any more than elephants are like birds. But it serves someone's purpose for you to think about them that way.

There's a certain obliviousness to irony in issuing a manifesto to declare that markets are conversations.

How many conversations have you enjoyed where the person you were chatting with said something that ended with the phrase, not offered in any sort of jocular way, "Deal with it." That sounds to me a lot like a phrase I would use to end the conversation, if indeed we were even having one.

"Markets are conversations" is less a metaphor or an idea than it is a badge or a flag. It's a sign we can attach to ourselves to identify ourselves as a part of a group. It's not a helpful way of thinking about something. In fact, it's very much a product of the very sort of thing it purports to overturn.

Assertions are seldom the kind of thing one makes if one is looking to enjoy a conversation. If one wishes to have a discussion, or a debate, or to provoke an argument, then they're quite useful. But when one is hoping to have a conversation, then one leaves a little room for the other person to have and share a thought as well.

But listen, it's all about hierarchy and hierarchy is based on authority. If you want higher rank in the hierarchy, you have to attract attention and act like an authority. You don't even have to do it consciously, it's part of our behavior. So making a statement like "Elephants are birds," will garner you some attention because it defies our expectations. As an assertion, it is an expression of authority. Even to question it goes some way toward legitimizing your authority.

Watch closely, as their hands never leave their sleeves...

This has not been a conversation.

The Lost Art of Conversation

If there's one metaphor that's worn out its welcome in the "blogosphere," it's the whole "conversation" metaphor.

Markets aren't "conversations." The news isn't a "conversation." You and I aren't having a "conversation." It's unhelpful and tiresome and irritating.

The most recent example is, once again, brought to us courtesy of the titanic ego and monumental myopia of one Jeff Jarvis, would-be arbiter of all things media related, and insufferable attention seeker.

In this post, he invokes the conversation metaphor in trying to make some feeble point about partisanship and weblogs. He opines:

And Andrew's right that this medium facilitates that kind of thinking precisely because it is a conversation; it's not about writing a weekly sermon from a pulpit of type.

The "kind of thinking" Jarvis is referring to here is supposedly non-partisan, nuanced and rational. From his statement it seems fair to conclude that a "conversation" is not a "sermon from a pulpit of type."

That's probably an accurate statement. Most "conversations" that I have are usually pleasant affairs. If there is disagreement, it's usually good-natured and taken in good humor. Otherwise it's an argument. Conversations are not zero-sum games, arguments are. Conversations are not specifically about changing people's minds, or scoring points, or puffing ourselves up at the expense of others; they're more about enjoying each other's company.

The "blogosphere," especially Jarvis' neck of the woods, is nearly nothing but a zero-sum game. Disagreements aren't merely the basis for arguments, they're the basis for name-calling and histrionics and all other manner of boorish behavior. In fact, it is the exceptional Jarvis post that isn't a "sermon from a pulpit of type."

Case in point - on the same day as he blogged the pean to the gentle art of conversation, and pointed out his own meritorious open-minded purpleness in a seemingly partisan red-blue world, he offered this post which includes this paragraph:

Prof. Pondscum will never hang his head in shame. He says on his site (no permalinks) that he "became suspicious of the original site when they mysteriously attacked" -- that is, dared to disagree with -- Cole. He continued the insult: "Being dentists, of course, they don't know their way around the British archives and don't realize that secondary works aren't exhaustive." Prof. Pondsnot.

That's quite the piece of conversational prose, wouldn't you say? Unless by "conversation," Jarvis means he gets to sit around and "shame" other people and call them names for our entertainment and edification. Perhaps we're all supposed to be in on the joke and feel some sense of mutual superiority as we enjoy our intimate little "conversation." Jarvis likes to shame people. Too bad he has none for himself. Perhaps someone could return the favor for him. One of his peers perhaps. Someone he might regard as an authority. Someone who receives more attention than he does.

But that's never going to happen. Which ought to explode the myth of the self-correcting nature of the "blogosphere."

So why do I read Jeff Jarvis if I find him so insufferable (and I do)? Because he's a good example. He exhibits so many of the worst characteristics of would-be attention-seeking authorities. To quote him, I use him as an example because, "I value this medium's ability to teach by example by pushing to make itself better."

Not that I have any illusions about success.

Opportunity Cost

I still haven't quite decided what to make of Worlds Apart. I suppose it's not all that important. At the moment, I'm inclined to believe it's kind of like the difference between the reflection in the mirror and the image in the photograph. I think I look better in one than in the other.

I do have to wonder, though, about the extent to which we try to manage or manufacture or control our experience of the world. I used to live in a development with a homeowners' association. I served as vice president and president for a period of time. I'd have to say that a homeowners' association exists to maintain a certain homeowning experience for the members. People weren't interested so much in their neighbors, as they were in whether or not their neighbors were violating the covenants and deed restrictions. And they're very sensitive about this too; but that didn't seem to stop them from complaining about their neighbors.

Yeah, we'd do a couple of social events a year; but if it weren't for the free chow and the moonwalk for the kids, I'm not sure how many people would actually show up. We were friends with some of our neighbors, but not all of them. We were the subject of complaints by some others as well. I gather they still are, since my son is in a punk band and they practice out of the garage.

I remember sort of lamenting one night at a meeting that people were more concerned about the diligence with which their neighbors adhered to the standards of the association, than they were with the quality of their relationships with their neighbors. That got me a lecture from one of the board members about how they bought into that development just because of those covenants, and everyone was aware of the rules when they bought their houses! And, by God, they were entitled to have those covenants enforced!

We don't like to have our experiences disturbed.

I only see my neighbors in my apartment complex in passing. When one of the hurricanes blew down the power lines earlier this year, I got to see a lot more of my neighbors. With no television or internet to experience, I guess we all decided to share our experience of the hurricane with one another. I actually took a walk and had a conversation with one of them. But the power was only out for several hours. Back when Floyd blew by in '99, I got to experience life up-close-and-personal with a whole bunch of people I didn't even know at an evacuation shelter for a couple of days. Can't say I was a stellar example of enlightened humanity at the time. In fact, Maria did much better than I did, able to communicate comfortably with a homeless woman. Chris had the experience of a kid stealing one of his valuable Pokémon cards. Mostly though, people were nice to one another and it was an interesting experience.

You know, the most enduring friendships I have are from high school and my first tour aboard ship. I expect it has something to do with shared suffering and enforced proximity for prolonged periods of time. Even in those friendships that haven't endured, my affection for the people in those times is probably greater than for any other period of my life. Doesn't always work that way, witness my marriage.

Right now the iPod is the current craze, and we can walk around with our own private audio experience. If the technophiles are right, pretty soon we'll be able to carry around our own customized video experience too. That way we only have to see and hear the things we want to see and hear, even outside the boundaries of our homes and our mobile homes-away-from-home, our cars.

Good thing? Bad thing?

Don't know. Can't say.

Dead Air

Apple informs me that .Mac will be down for maintenance from 10:00 PM, Saturday, 22 January until 6:00 AM, Sunday, 23 January. Those times are Pacific Standard. I'm not sure if that actually affects the web page, but in case it does, you've had a heads-up.

Worlds Apart

This stuff gives me a headache, so I'll try to be brief. I'll probably fail, but I'll try.

There's a guy in the apartment across the hall from me, I think his name is Brian. He used to be a Marine, and he works with or for his dad. That's about all I know about him. I helped him carry a piece of furniture down the stairs one day. There's an old woman in one of the apartments below me, I don't know her name at all. Al Hawkins is a critical care nurse who lives in Oregon, and I know his back has been bothering him, he has sleep apnea, two girls, a wife and two greyhounds. His mom is still alive, and I think he has a brother. Dave Weinberger is a guy with a Ph.D. in philosophy who's written a few books, who lives in a house that has had a lot of electrical problems and who's now doing a fellowship at Harvard. His father or father-in-law, I don't recall which just now, is a Mac user because Dave got tired of dealing with all the crap involved with keeping a Wintel box on the web.

If something happened to the old woman the apartment below me, or the guy across the hall, chances are, I'd never know unless I happened to be here when emergency services arrived.

As human beings, we crave contact with other human beings. We want to share our stories, and we want to hear about other people's lives. But we're also lazy and vain. We like to believe things about ourselves that make us feel good about ourselves even if they aren't 100% true. That probably should come as no surprise to anyone.

Perhaps it started with radio, but it made the big leap forward with television. Television gave us sight and sound, it pretty much looked like the world. It also gave us soap operas and crime dramas, and situation comedies and "reality" TV (an oxymoron that ought to displace "military intelligence" forever), and Springer and Oprah, and "professional" sports, and Dan Rather and 60 Minutes. We could sit in the comfort of our homes and satisfy our craving for other people's stories without ever getting out of the Lazy Boy except to get another cold beer. Television is a medium, and we use most mediums to look at ourselves because we're fascinated with ourselves. In that respect, many mediums are like mirrors and what we see in them are not the things themselves, but merely their reflections.

The automobile is a medium. All mediums mediate your experience of the world. Who I am in the world, seems to vary according to how I am experiencing the world. When I'm behind the wheel of the car, I experience the world mediated by the automobile. I'm wrapped in an envelop of steel and glass, and powered by an engine that can propel me and my iron horse at speeds impossible for any human being to experience short of falling without the assistance of a machine. I'm behind the wheel with places to go and people to see, and I share the road with hundreds or thousands of other people in very similar circumstances. Yet behind the wheel, I was, and still am from time to time, a perfect asshole. I'd like to say I'm completely cured of this, but unfortunately I'm not. I'm much more aware of it now though, and I can usually "arrest myself" before I do anything too foolish. I was quick to take offense if someone took advantage of the space between me and the car in front of me to move ahead of me. I'd get angry and call them a name, or flip them the bird, or blow the horn or ride their bumper. None of which made the situation any better. And in no other place but that "world" would I, as readily or regularly, exhibit that degree of volatile behavior. But wrapped in my steel cocoon, with all that "power" at my disposal, I was in another "world" where I was the center of the universe.

On the internet, in Groundhog Day, I'm someone else. From time to time I indulge "my own bad self" and rant powerlessly about something. Sometimes I just tell my stories about myself. Sometimes I affect a thoughtful and careful analytical discussion of a particular topic (kind of what's going on here). Sometimes I carry on a brief exchange with another weblogger I "know." I used to have some fairly ambitious, if not exactly carefully thought out, goals for writing a weblog. Now I've got some different ones, perhaps only slightly "better." I'm not trying to "change the world," anymore; other than to disabuse others of the notion as well. I'd like to think I'm trying to change myself; but I'm not exactly sure how true that is either. I suspect I'm mostly trying to fashion a model of myself to inhabit this other world that Dave Weinberger talks about.

I was writing an e-mail in response to an e-mail from Dave when I wrote something I never saw coming and that made me feel very uncomfortable after I wrote it. It was this:

To the extent that the web may be viewed as "world," it is because, as a medium, it reflects, with far greater fidelity than any other medium before it, those parts of the world we most closely value, I think; and that is as you rightly point out, our connections to others. But it is only a medium, and so what you are afraid of losing is not the "things" themselves, but merely their reflections, and therefore you have nothing to "lose," and so nothing to fear. To some extent, I think the fidelity of the web at reflecting those parts of the world we most closely value, thus giving it the appearance of "world," actually diminishes our role in the "one world" and we are, in turn, diminished ourselves. While I may value and greatly enjoy my online friendship with you and Jonathon Delacour and Shelley Powers and others, are those relationships as rich, as valuable, as "real," as relationships I might develop with people in much closer physical proximity to me? The web allows me to enjoy some facsimile of the real world without the inconvenience of having to comb my hair, or drive to some other location, however nearby, or coping with all the less pleasant realities of real, physical relationships. Yet it is those physical relationships I turn to when I need help in "the world," as when I travel and I need someone to look after my cats.

It occurred to me just how much time and energy I expend in this other world, against whose existence I'm arguing so strenuously. It occurs to me now, just how much time I spend looking in the mirror.

There's an old woman who lives in one of the apartments below me. And I don't know her name.

Which Pill?

Virtuality

Here's an odd thing, or perhaps not: When I look at myself in the mirror, I'm much better looking than I think I appear in a photograph.

Go figure.

Mac OS X, Finder, iDisk and Goliath

Every now and then, Finder gets hung up trying to talk to my iDisk, which is a kind of virtual disk stored on Apple's .Mac web servers using the WebDAV protocol. Normally, it works very well and I don't have to think about it. I write something in Tinderbox, export it as html, then click on the little sync button next to my iDisk icon in Finder. Bam! Updated web page. There isn't even much rejoicing as it normally "just works."

Sometimes, though, something goes awry. When it does, one of two things happens. Either you get the Spinning Pinwheel of Infinite Futility, or the computer appears to lock up, it becomes unresponsive to either the keyboard or the mouse. When the former happens, sometimes the fix is to just relaunch Finder, which you can do by selecting Force Quit... from the Apple menu. When the latter happens, you have to restart the machine by pressing and holding the power button. Not cool. Sometimes either one will resolve the problem with being able to access your iDisk.

In very rare instances, neither thing will resolve the problem with iDisk, and you'll just be presented with another instance of either the SPIF, or rebooting. In that case, launch Goliath. Cancel the first dialog it presents you with, and select Open iDisk Connection from the File menu. Somehow, Goliath is able to negotiate a connection with your iDisk that Finder cannot; and furthermore, Goliath's connection will resolve whatever is impairing Finder's connection and Finder will finally be able to mount your iDisk.

Then there will be much rejoicing.

"This is this! And not something else!"

"The finger is not the moon."

The world is the world; and our experience of it, is our experience of it. There is only one world. There are as many different experiences of it as there are people. Different experiences do not make different worlds. We all must share one world. It would do well to try to understand one another's experience; perhaps it would also be helpful if we tried to understand that the world is the world.

To try to discern those shared elements of experience that allow us to profit from our relationships with one another, we rely on a number of things, the most important is probably language. Now, I'm not an authority on any this stuff. I'm neither a linguist, nor a cognitive scientist, nor a philosopher, and I can barely punctuate a sentence; but I don't think this is too difficult. At least, not at first. (See? That wasn't even a sentence!)

Language consists of words, vocal utterances that stand for things and ideas. They are defined. But the world is something we experience, which is terribly difficult to define. So sometimes we struggle to make words mean something that may reflect more of our experience than their definition might allow. Sometimes this works. Other times, it merely muddies the water. Probably about as often. (Another non-sentence! And another! And so on...) Sometimes we press words with broad, sort of mushy definitions into service to describe something that it wouldn't ordinarily describe, at least not usefully, and here we get into a bit of trouble.

This is about something Dave Weinberger wrote at his weblog about The Web as World. This is a kind of philosophical discussion, I suppose, and it's come up before with people describing the World Wide Web as a "place." Places are in the world. Naturally, they are where we experience the world. I'm experiencing the world from my apartment, which is unquestionably a place. But I can load a piece of information into my computer, via the internet, that puts me into nearly immediate contact with Jonathon Delacour in Australia; or immediate contact with my parents in upstate New York. Australia and upstate New York are both places in the world. How I am allowed to experience a connection to those people in very distant places is by means of a medium, in this case the internet.

A medium is a means or an avenue for information to move from a transmitter to a receiver. When we speak, the air is the medium as our minds, lungs, mouths and vocal cords convert thoughts into mechanical energy which is transmitted into the air where it is received by our ears and converted back into electrical energy which our brains interpret as meaningful sounds. Electromagnetic energy is a medium, and we employ it to transmit information as radio or television signals. The printed word is a medium, where information is conveyed by marks on a surface which can be visually perceived and interpreted by our brains to decode the meaning. A road is a medium, so is a ship or a plane, or even a spacecraft. It is a way of conveying information from one place to another place.

In general, I believe it is safe to say that we cannot change a medium. The existence of a medium is a function of the physical makeup of the world. As long as there is mechanical energy or electromagnetic energy, information can be conveyed using those forms of energy, provided the sender and receiver have access to the appropriate technological means to exploit those physical characteristics of the world.

To use these media efficiently, human beings generally agree to do so in consistent ways. As a result, a VHS video tape recorder works pretty much the same everywhere in the world. Sometimes we don't agree, and things don't work that way, like in the way analog television signals are encoded and displayed. A TV that works in the United States won't work in places where they use a different standard. We use something that goes by the acronym NTSC, while other places use something that goes by the acronym PAL, and they don't understand each other. They essentially use the same medium, but they use it in different ways. We've agreed to drive our cars on the right side of the road, except in those places where they've agreed to drive their cars on the left side of the road. The point is, we all agree on driving our cars in a similar fashion so that we may use the medium of the road most efficiently. That doesn't change the medium, it changes how human beings use the medium.

How human beings share their experience of the world is by means of connections with other human beings. Part of their experience of the world is the experience of these connections. In the not very distant past, the number of these connections, their frequency and duration, were very limited in space and time due to the nature of the media at our disposal. I could write a letter to someone, and the postal system would deliver it all the way around the world if I wanted them to, but just to one person. If I wanted to write to 100 people, I would have to write 100 letters. So, needless to say, our experience of sharing connections with others was somewhat limited by the available technology. As a ham radio operator, I could communicate with people very far away, but since I only had a Novice Class license, I could only do so by Morse Code, which again limited the nature of the connections.

The internet is a new medium, and it facilitates vastly more connections and the limitations we run up against now are limitations of human time and attention, more so than limitations of technology. This new experience of the world, has led some people to associate the medium with being a world. Presumably, describing it as such helps to convey the experience. But a medium is not a world. It is a part of the nature of the world, but it is not a world. By making the medium into a world, we displace or lose sight of the world, and we introduce all the problems of the world, into something for which they are inappropriate.

For instance, Dave Weinberger believes the web can be thought of as a world that is different than a medium; and since it is different, some people understand it and others don't. Naturally, those that understand it are the authorities in this other world, and those who do not should subordinate themselves to those who do. In the world, I live in this apartment. My experience of this apartment is unique to this apartment. This apartment may burn down, or otherwise be subject to entropy, that is to say, it is constantly changing and will eventually pass away. The medium of the web is relatively constant by comparison. The characteristics of the world we rely on to exploit the web will be here long after I and this apartment are long, long gone. Unless we stop creating the technology to exploit those characteristics (Which we may. Buggy whips, anyone?), the medium of the web will always be available to us.

What one experiences on the web is a connection to another person's experience, and it's not something unique to the web, apart from the frequency and duration, or the ease of use. Take file swapping for example. Before the web, people traded files. They made cassette recordings of vinyl albums and shared them with their friends. Cassette tapes and roads, and the mails, were the media we relied on then; and it was inefficient and inconvenient, so it didn't happen very much. But it did happen. With the greater efficiency of the web, we can have that experience much more frequently, which itself is an experience of the world. And doing so has changed the experience of the world for people like the recording industry. It hasn't changed the world, it has changed their experience of the world. In the world, they see real effects. Now whether or not they are directly attributable to the web is a different debate, but their experience of the world has changed, and changed for the worse in their view. They've lost something, and they stand to lose more. Or, so they fear anyway.

From their fear, they are motivated to change the way we use the medium. This is, essentially, little different than changing the rules of the road, like lowering the blood alcohol content standard necessary to be charged with driving while intoxicated. It doesn't change the medium, so much as it changes how we agree to use the medium. Because there are roads and cars and booze, there will always be drunk drivers. But the consequences of drunk driving can, and have, changed. The same is true for the web. As long as we can move data digitally, there will always be file sharing on the web. As long as we can move data digitally, there will always be a web. The web is not a product of its technology, its a product of human experience (making connections), in the world, reflected in a new medium, that permits many more connections than any medium before.

By viewing the web as a world, instead of a medium, conceptually, it becomes something different. It becomes a thing. Something that can be lost, something that can be taken away. In truth, the medium relies on things that can be taken away, or lost; cars are stolen or impounded every day. But the medium of roads has been with us for several thousand years and is unlikely to go away anytime soon. So too with digital communications. But by making it a thing, and not just anything, but a world (One imagines inhabitants of this imaginary world, raising little imaginary families, growing imaginary gardens. All of it threatened by a collision with a giant asteroid called RIAA.), we can fear loss and thus be motivated to act out of our own fear, and I don't think this is helpful. To expand on the imaginary world idea a bit, because it is a metaphor, we can project on our imaginary web world all manner of desirable things, making it much more attractive than the world, and I think you find this happening a great deal all over the web. It's part of the great "this changes everything" wish.

But the web isn't a world, it's a part of and a product of the world. As such, it reflects all the characteristics of the world, not just the ones we like. There is hierarchy and inequality and competition for authority. There is theft, there is deception, there is fraud. There is all of human nature from mob behavior to enormous demonstrations of generosity and good will. It is what it is, and not what we wish it to be. One reads a great deal about how mainstream media (what used to be called "the press," itself a reference to a particular medium that was dominant for centuries), is being changed by webloggers. This is particularly egocentric thinking, I think. The same technological change that afforded the creation of this new medium, and therefore webloggers, is what is driving the change in mainstream media. There is no particular or essential virtue in being a weblogger, as is made manifestly evident by the nanosecond, since webloggers are human beings. And the sins of mainstream media are sins of human nature, sins of the world, not sins unique to mainstream media or to some mainstream media world, from which all webloggers are immune. But don't let that little nugget fog your rose colored glasses. ((cough!) Jeff Jarvis (cough!))

In the world, one of the significant motivators of human action is fear. It is part of human nature, itself a part of the world. Authorities are always finding ways to depict the world in a frightening new way, so that people will act in ways that are congruent with an authority's wishes. Sometimes that's appropriate, and it saves lives or makes something better. Sometimes it just promotes the selfish interests of the authority in question. The RIAA fears the web, so those who think of themselves as inhabitants of a world called the web fear the RIAA. The RIAA uses its authority, leveraged by fear, to try to take action to change the way we use the new medium, and the authorities of the supposed other world use their authority, leveraged by fear, to oppose them in the world.

And fear is what makes the world go round.

At least until such time as we begin to understand the world, and our nature in it.

In other words, I suspect Marshall Mcluhan may have been wrong. The medium is not the message. At least, not the one we ought to be paying attention to.

Galactica Notes

Just something that may be my imagination, or maybe the folks doing the CGI are sf fans. In the early part of the movie where the Secretary of Education is learning she has cancer on Caprica, we see a number of ships in the air around Caprica city. I could have sworn I saw a Firefly class vessel among them.

Near the end of the movie as the civilian ships are jumping from the depot station, the last ship to jump looks just like one of the Rebel Alliance transports evacuating Hoth.

Yeah, I know. I need to get a life.

Exploding TV

Jeff Jarvis, often writes about "exploding TV." Well, I was on my way to the house where my children live to pick up my son's mufflers to return them, when my mobile phone rang. (I almost said "cell phone" but Russell Beattie says we Mac folk don't get the significance of mobile phones and I didn't want to appear ignorant.) Anyway, it's my daughter Caitlin in tears telling me the TV fell over and exploded and could I please come home right away?

As it turned out, I was just entering the neighborhood, so I was at the house in about a minute and a half; and as I was walking up to the door, the phone rang again with Caitie asking me to please hurry. I told her I was at the front door, and she met me there, still crying and obviously very upset. I walked back into the TV room, and there was something you don't like to see very often - a 32" television lying face down on the floor in a pile of shattered glass.

Maria arrived just then and my son came downstairs to help me clean up the mess. We loaded the carcass into the little yard wheel barrow and rolled it out to the curb. I swept up what must have been close to thirty pounds or more of glass into a tripled-up garbage bag and lugged that down to the curb too.

The entertainment center the TV rested in was rated for a 32" television, but the shelf supports were made of plastic and exhibited plastic deformation failure. The little posts that stuck out and into the sides of the cabinet had been stretched and bent vertically, and they left a nice indentation in the soft pine of the cabinet as they failed and made their descent. Fortunately, the DVD player and VCD on the shelf below appear fine, as all the weight from the TV pitched forward and onto the floor before it could damage anything on the shelf below.

I think it was the noise the frightened Caitlin the most, but all's well now. Enough excitement for one day.

Back to the Dojong

I took about three weeks off from taekwondo, but I was back in the dojong yesterday. In the immortal words of someone, "Big mistake!" Well, let's just say it's remarkable how much you can decline in three weeks. Hopefully recovery will be swift, if not painless. I don't think I'll be taking any more three week breaks anymore. I'll be attending more classes this year as I work toward my instructor certification. In fact, I'm out of here in about 15 minutes.

Battlestar Galactica

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, because I didn't see the mini-series (i.e. "two-part movie") when it first aired though I did see the latter part of it much later, but this movie was damn good! Better than the original by a lot. Whoever wrote the dialog for the scenes aboard Galactica had some acquaintance with real navy vernacular. I really liked Edward James Olmos as Adama, and none of the other characters reached the level of caricature, though it was a near thing a couple of times. No, it's not art; but it'll be an entertaining series. I'm looking forward to it.

Wherein I Opine on all Things Apple

(Editor's note: First, there is no editor, just me. Second, I wrote this yesterday, then got distracted ("Ooooh, shiney!"), then this morning Comcast was giving me fits. So here we are, better late than never.)

Today was the keynote, and it was good. I am well pleased.

Jeff Jarvis abandons his self-declared expertise on media to tell us all what the "entire point" of the iPod was, and that was control. It must be so, because he put "control" in italics. Actually, the entire point of Jeff Jarvis is to attract attention to himself. Which I happily give him. Later today he promises us to attract more attention to himself by opining on Apple's lawsuits against weblogs and the guys who posted a Tiger beta on a torrent. I can hardly wait.

iLife 05 looks like a nice upgrade and probably worth the cost if you use any of the iLife 04 applications a great deal. I'm not too excited about the high definition video options at the moment. Maybe in a few years it'll matter more to me, but for now I'm content with ordinary television resolution for video. iPhoto is the major application in the suite for me, with iMovie being the second most useful app. I hope to get more into Garageband at some point. I have little musical training, and so I have some difficulty understanding the application; but I am somewhat motivated to try to learn a bit. One of these days...

iWork is less compelling for me. I will probably buy it because the price is reasonable, and I do like Keynote. I like to have it handy against the day that I'm invited to give a presentation at a blogger conference of some kind. Hey, it could happen!

iPod shuffle is pretty cool. It's kind of an accessory for your iPod. I like the absence of a display because it reduces the player to its essential form; and for something with a feature set as limited as a 512MB or 1GB MP3 player, less is more.

But the really cool announcement of the keynote, for me, was the Mac mini. This is the computer for my daughter's room. This is the Mac for my kitchen. Yes, the price does go up as you add keyboard, mouse, display, and memory; but the form factor is what makes it so appealing. Small 1024x768 LCD displays are becoming quite affordable, and for a secondary computer in the kitchen or bedroom, that's probably enough. It's by no means a gamer's machine, not enough cpu or graphics processor for that. But it'll play most games up to last year or so just fine, and how much 3D power do you need for solitaire or Mah Jong anyway? I've read in a weblog that it has two RAM slots, but I can find no mention of that in Apple's tech specs, and all the RAM upgrades are single module upgrades. Looking at the one small shot of the internals on Apple's web site suggests to me there is only one RAM slot, which makes a 1GB machine a bit more pricey. Also Note 5 in the tech specs says memory must be installed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider. I suppose that's only if you care about voiding your warranty, and most folks do. OS X will run fine with 512MB and it'll run with 256MB, so it's not that big an issue; but it will be a criticism.

I don't know if it'll be a home run, but I think it's a solid double. It'll bump Apple's marketshare a few tenths of a percent overall, but I don't think anyone is going to stop saying "Apple is dying" anytime soon. What else would they have to talk about?

Now, having said that I don't look forward to the day when the computer is wedded to the television, it'd be interesting to marry this box up with something like the elgato eyeTV 200 or one of their other systems. (Can't seem to get through to their servers as of 0730 1/12/04.) Not for the living room, but for the den, or the bedroom or the college dorm. Use an external USB 2.0 HD for bulk storage, and have it built to order with a DVD burner for archiving, and that's a pretty nice little media center. I've already got a 160GB USB 2.0 external drive.

Finally, I note that I can upgrade Final Cut Express to Final Cut Express HD for $99.00, which gives me the HD capability I don't care about; but also affords SoundTrack, which used to cost $199.00 at the Apple Store. Another music creation application I probably won't grok, but the price is right! It also includes a video typography app that I have no clue about, but it sounds like it might be interesting.

And now, the Dark Ages...

This is the time of year that I'm least fond of, for many reasons. There's the inevitable post-holiday crash, dealing with the after-effects of stress and bad diet. The inevitable glitches in gift giving purchases. The much too-short days, though I am always comforted by the notion that they're getting longer. And the inevitable Mac-bashing that accompanies MacWorld.

Not to sound superficial or anything.

Really, it's a suck-ass time of year, especially this year. Bush II is about to be coronated, I mean, re-inaugurated (in what will doubtlessly be a restrained, modest, and tasteful celebration). There's the suffering of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, due to the tsunami. There's the cheerful news that more people die each year in the regions affected by the tsunami due to a lack of clean drinking water, most of them children, than died in the tsunami; all of which somehow seems to escape our notice and our attention, the all-seeing, all-knowing, self-correcting, self-promoting nature of the "blogosphere" notwithstanding.

I am cheered, however, by the extent to which Jeff Jarvis spares no effort to keep us informed of which broadcast media program he will be appearing on next. Not that I ever watch or listen to him; reading him promote himself cheers my inner misanthrope in ways a sunny Florida day never could. They say youth is wasted on the young. I say humanity is wasted on humans. But what do I know?

I was reading the always insightful and witty Robert Scoble the other day, expounding on all the ways the computer could be wedded to television; and how his corporate masters were poised to seize the high ground of the American living room. Oh, what an inspiring vision of the future that must be!

I say this having spent a couple of hours helping my parents get a simple DVD player that I gave them as a Christmas gift, to play movies on their TV with the dialog audio. It seems reasonable to believe that most DVD players default to a 2-channel audio setup, especially when you're using the analog audio ports; but no, I guess not. We were able to get audio on Shrek 2 by using the features menu in the movie itself. But Master and Commander offered no special audio setup, so we had to rely on the on-screen prompts and that miserable excuse for an owners' manual provided by Toshiba. Which is probably what we should have done when we were trying to fix Shrek 2, but the manual is maddening and I was grasping at straws. I'd like to meet the guy who approved that manual. Now there's a guy who really hates people. I'm sure we'd have a lot in common.

So you can't imagine the thrill I experience when I envision the day when I'll have to reboot my television three or four times to watch the news, which keeps getting interrupted by pop-up commercials, due to some malware my MS "media center" has been infected with. Yes, there's a bright future for us in media entertainment, all brought to us by Microsoft! The really smart guys who gave us "Clippy" and "Bob" and the Blue Screen of Death. I can hardly wait.

This is a post that should probably get dropped in The Cooler. "Become the change you wish to see in the world," and all that. Take it as impaired judgment inspired by a dark mood inhabiting a dark time.

Spring can't come too soon.

NoteTaker Update

NoteTaker for OS X, as it is now called, has been updated to version 1.9. Haven't played with it much yet, but I use NoteTaker as the repository for articles I capture from the web on subjects I think I may write about later. I do far more capturing than writing.

Brain Matter

Following up on the Beliefs post, here's a report from Science Daily Magazine about the role of the amygdala in instantly recognizing fear in facial expressions.

Department of Redundancy Department

While not strictly a DRD issue, Wes Felter notes, "I've discovered that I tend to re-use words or phrases in bursts when blogging. (See if you can discover today's example.) I'm not sure why this is; perhaps some sort of verbal cache in the brain?"

I've been aware of the same thing for some time. I agree that it's probably a sort of cache or stack thing. I don't recall when I first discovered it, but it's something I try to "listen" for when I do my usual half-assed job of proof reading.

Foggy Morning

Happy Birthday

Birthday greetings to my old man who is starting to become something of an old man, Sailor Jack. He's 78 years old today, although I'm sure if I asked him he'd assert, as he always has, "I feel like I'm sweet sixteen and never been kissed!"

I love you, Dad.

Beliefs

Today in Wired News there's a brief article about Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink. It's about our facility for making nearly instantaneous, accurate judgments about situations for which we have what seems to be very little data. I'm sure it'll be an interesting read. The Wired News piece gives me enough to -blink- want to draw your attention, once again, to Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which describes how the mechanism in Blink might work.

But then I also would want to call to your attention this answer from Edge's Annual Question 2005, first brought to my attention by Jonathon Delacour in this post. Roger Schank believes people make irrational choices based on emotional memories. That's pretty close to what I believe, except I believe that most of the time they're not strictly irrational; but also that nearly always we reason backward from our feelings (rationalizing). And again I would wish to note that most of the time, this works just swell. But it's important to understand how it works, and to be aware of when it might not work so well, which is probably at some very important moments. I can also think of examples when we might go awry by not allowing it to work. Life can get pretty complicated, so it helps to pay attention.

Anyway, the Gladwell and Schank things are interesting when you consider another answer at Edge from Steven Pinker who believes the brain has many specialized cognitive systems directed toward particular tasks. This is different than sensory specialization, this has to do with cognition - thinking, reasoning and making choices.

All of which are related to something else someone answered at Edge, Donald Hoffman, who has the rather radical belief that consciousness is all that exists. I'm unwilling to embrace it whole-heartedly, but I am very sympathetic to that view. It echoes, in a sort of oblique way, some of the thought of Nishida Kitaro.

Though Hoffman's view is balanced by that of Nicholas Humphrey's view that consciousness is a trick of nature; a view that also has a certain Buddhist appeal to it.

And I would be remiss if I didn't point out the answer from Philip Zimbardo who believes the guards responsible for the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility in that situation. I believe that Zimbardo perhaps overstates the case a bit, but I think he's largely correct. How we behave as members of a group is different from how we behave as individuals, sometimes markedly so. Again, this is a trait of human nature that has worked well for us in the past, but it's probably important to understand it and how it may fail in important situations.

Many more interesting, if unprovable, beliefs there.

Buddha in the Grass

I'm growing some grass in my apartment. Weed, man. It's, like, for my cats.

Saw this at the pet store the other day. It's a small plastic box filled with some crap that acts like soil and grass seeds. You add 2.5 cups of water and let it sit for a few days. Then serve to your cats. I don't know why, but I think it's kind of cool. The instructions don't mention if you should, you know, harvest it and kind of serve it like a salad, or just let them forage in it. Maybe I should put it in some baggies, or something...

"Dave ain't here, man..."

Briefly

This MacWorld on Tour thing looks pretty cool. I can actually afford to run down to Kissimmee, and maybe even stay over night. I'm looking forward to it.

There's a new version of Spell Catcher out. Cool.

OmniOutliner 3.0 is out of beta now. I think I'll upgrade to the Pro version.

Department of Motes, Eyes and Beams: It is wrong to politicize the tragedy in south Asia as if it should be seen as anything other than a humanitarian crisis without sides.

Blogger Franco Aleman exposes Spanish stinginess -- and sneakiness. Much of its "aid" is essentially in the form of discounts on buying Spanish products, he says.

I also note that Jeff Jarvis shamelessly "exploited" the tsunami to promote himself (his own "side") and weblogs against mainstream media (two other sides). Not that I think a tragedy of this magnitude makes any government, or weblogger, suddenly immune from criticism.

I don't watch Fox News at home, but it's often on in many of the places I frequent. I swear to God, sometimes the things I hear coming out of their talking heads' mouths sound just like something George Orwell would write. They ought to just rename it the Ministry of Propaganda Network. I'm sure opinions like this bar me from membership in the so-called "reality-based" community; but reality and perception are two different things, and I can smell manufactured perception a mile away.

Tech Support

I gave my parents a DVD player for Christmas this year. Of course, after I'd sent it, I worried that their 14 year old TV might not have the appropriate inputs for a DVD player. So I sent them a check to buy a new TV as well. Shipping costs for TVs are expensive.

As it turned out, they planned to buy a new TV anyway, as Dad was no longer able to clearly see the scores on their old set. So they bought a new Toshiba 32" set which was favorably reviewed by me, and which went with the Toshiba DVD player I'd sent them. (Parenthetically, I note that I didn't send them nearly enough to buy a 32" TV. I sent them enough for a 27" set, but it certainly helped a bit.)

32" televisions weigh more than my parents can safely handle, so they had Sears deliver it for them. The delivery guy only connects the TV to the cable, nothing else. As it turns out, he doesn't even plug it in, which seems kind of odd. But before it was delivered, I was worrying a bit about how complicated TVs and remote controls have become of late, and whether or not my parents would be able to sort it all out on their own.

Fortunately, we have iChat AV, and so I was able to talk them through the connections between the TV and the DVD. What made this effort somewhat successful at all was the availability of the manuals for both the DVD player and the TV on the web. I was able to download the manuals and understand what my mom was looking at, as she looked at the various connectors (and there are many) and buttons on the remote. Had I not been able to download the manuals, I don't think we'd have managed to get everything connected.

On my advice, they purchased a set of component video cables. I wasn't able to see the picture on the TV clearly through iChat (it's on the opposite side of the room), but once we got everything connected the way we thought they should be, my dad remarked that the picture looked awfully pink. I thought perhaps one of the cables hadn't been fully seated, so Mom checked again and said they were all firmly seated. Dad had mentioned that it appeared as though the package had been opened, but they were the only set available at the store where they went to purchase them. It's pretty clear now that one of the cables is bad, and that they had been returned by a previous customer and merely put back on the shelf, perhaps thinking it had been the customer's error; after all, what could go wrong with a cable? So I walked Mom through connecting the composite video cable and now everything works as advertised, though I've assured them they'll have a much better picture from their DVD if they get a set of component video cables.

Controlling the DVD via the remote was challenging until I downloaded the manual. You'd think we'd settle on a standard for remote controls of media playback devices. We very nearly have, but it's just different enough to make it very confusing. Even looking at the picture of the remote in the manual, it didn't seem to work the way I expected it to as Mom worked the controls. We were able to sort out the basic functions, but I'm going to have to study the manuals to help them understand some of the more useful advanced features. Even doing something as simple as scene selection didn't work the way I expected it to.

The good news is Dad can read the scores of the games he watches now, and they'll (well, mostly Mom) be able to enjoy watching movies on DVD. Dad's birthday is the 7th of this month and he'll be 78 years young. I'm going to be sending him a couple of DVDs for his birthday that I hope he'll enjoy.

Good Advice

Al Hawkins would probably endorse this bit of advice for the new year.

But What Does It Mean?

Interesting article about studies of long term meditators in the Washington Post.

"...but they've always worked for me."

He wrote a lot of poetry (it wasn't his strong suit) and began to turn the violence, cruelty and psychopathic behavior he'd witnessed...

Thanks, Jonathon. Sounds right up my alley!

(I know this takes the "fun" out of it, but the title of this post is an obscure cultural reference to Hunter S. Thompson.)

My Predictions

Happy New Year. My predictions for 2005? As the title of this pointless exercise in futility would suggest, I predict more of the same.

I've been reading a lot of "this changes everything" posts, mostly related to either weblogs or internet-enabled fundraising.

But I also read an interesting quotation from Schopenhauer at Hal Rager's Blivet 2.0: "Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Which sort of illuminates that whole "everything" bit very nicely.

I also noted another interesting quotation: "We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."

Again, Just Because

Just Because II

Just Because

Dan Bricklin

Read this article this morning and immediately thought of Dan Bricklin. Though, in truth, I've been thinking about Dan Bricklin's essay for days now.