The Boss

There is an interesting interview with Bruce Springsteen in Salon, apparently reprinted from Rolling Stone. Not sure if it's available online there, and too lazy to check. But if you're willing to endure the commercial before getting a free Day Pass to Salon, this is well worth your time to read.

Wind's Blowing, Lights Still On

The wind has picked up significantly the last couple of hours. Jeane is a tropical storm, and the center is farther from here than we dared hope a day or so ago, but it seems to be blowing harder than Frances did. We took a brief power hit earlier in the afternoon and I'm persuaded I need to buy a couple of decent UPS units for the G4 and the iMac. The weather wasn't that bad and I wasn't expecting the drop and sudden return of power, so everything was up and online. Nothing looks damaged, but it's a nuisance anyway.

I noted the release of Tinderbox 2.3 and downloaded the update. But my annual subscription expired a couple of months ago, so I wasn't able to really use it. I paid for the renewal yesterday but I don't expect a new registration code from Eastgate until tomorrow, so I can't really comment on it yet.

Alwin Hawkins and James Vornov mentioned they appreciated the automatic upstreaming feature of Radio Userland, and that no other product has reproduced that feature yet. I beg to differ. I host my weblog on my .Mac. My iDisk is mirrored on my local drive so exporting to HTML from Tinderbox takes seconds and then I can allow the Finder to automatically mirror the changes to my .Mac account or I can jump into the Finder briefly and prompt it to sync. In either case, it takes place in the background while I go on to other things.

It's blowing hard enough that the apartment building shudders with some of the larger gusts. That only happened once or twice with Frances, so I think we're getting more wind with Jeane. The lights are still on, and that seems to argue against that notion. I'll know more tomorrow when I see what people are reporting as maximums.

Well, better send this off. I have a feeling the lights won't be on much longer.

One More Thing

My Nokia 3660 crapped out on my on my trip. I'd been experiencing a problem with the Profiles application before I left, but hadn't investigated it to any great extent. Basically, it quit every time I tried to launch it, with an "app closed: Profiles" message. Profiles is the application that allows you to configure the phone's ringer and ring tone for various environments. Since I was in meetings all the time, I basically just turned the phone off since I couldn't select a profile that would have it vibrate or something.

During one of the breaks in a meeting, I was reading the Help info on the Profiles app. It didn't offer any clue to the "app closed: Profiles" problem, but it did say you could select a profile by tapping the power button. So I tapped and saw a list of profiles and selected "Silent." The phone then re-booted, and just kept rebooting. I powered it down and turned it back on and it came up with an alert "app closed: Phone," pressing a button brought another message to the effect "unable to start phone, contact retailer."

Crap.

I had a couple of hours between meetings at different venues, so I went to a T-Mobile dealer close to my next meeting location. They tried to be helpful, but they had to rely on Nokia's customer service, which appears to be non-existent, at least when it comes to technical support. We spent 30 minutes on hold and I was running out of time and patience.

They did the paperwork to have a new phone sent to me here in Florida, and I'll return the defective one. But that could take a week or more, and what was I to do in the meantime? Well, I probably did something stupid. I figured since this was my only phone, it probably would be wise to have a spare; and having an identical spare would probably simplify things to some extent. So I bought another Nokia 3660. This was possibly a very expensive mistake.

I got the new phone and put my SIM card and MMC card in it. None of my contacts initially appeared and the sales rep thought it was because I had saved them to the phone's memory and not to the SIM card. That turns out to be true, but I had backed up the contents of the phone's memory onto my MMC card, and later on I was able to restore my contacts. I was also able to restore my problem.

Before I restored from the backup, I tried the Profiles app, and it worked as it had before on the previous phone, before whatever glitch caused it to quit on launch. After I restored from the backup on the MMC, if I launched the Profiles app I got the "app closed: Profiles" message again. Ulp! At the moment, I'm pretty confident that if I select Silent via the power button I'll put this phone into the same non-responsive state.

I did some research on the web, and I haven't found this specific problem, but it doesn't look good. A number of people have been unable to resolve problems with particular applications. When I get the new phone, I'll just keep the original 16MB MMC card in it, and then sync my contacts from the Mac. Once I have a good, working phone without the problem that corrupts the Profiles app, I'll try to do a memory reset on the compromised phone. Right now, that phone works and I should be able to enter the proper keypad entries to reset the phone's memory. But I've read that many people have had no success using that reset code to resolve problems on their Nokias, so it's possible that I won't be able to recover from this particular problem, which leaves the phone in a compromised condition. If that's the case, then the next step would then be to use the power button to try and select a profile and see if I can't replicate the problem. At that point I take it back to T-Mobile and order another replacement. I'm also going to reformat the 128MB MMC card so I get rid of whatever is stored that's corrupting the Profiles app.

Somewhere in all this, I need to see if I can return the "new" Nokia. I rather doubt I can, since I bought it in Virginia and I'm pretty sure my Florida retailer will refuse. But I'm going to investigate that option. If I can return it, I will buy a different phone, and not a Nokia. I'm not ready to say avoid Nokia Symbian Series 60 phones in all cases, but it could work out that way. This seems like a pretty serious flaw in the platform, and not something you want to encounter if you rely on your mobile phone as your only telephone. It's also a hassle you shouldn't have to experience.

More to follow.

The New iMac

CompUSA didn't have any for sale, but they did have a 17" display model. Caitie loved it, and I have to say it does look better in real life than it does in pictures. It's still not an "oh-wow" design (well, it was for Caitie), but it's an attractive machine. I thought the sound coming from the speakers was not very good. Volume wasn't great, and the low end was non-existent. I'd say they're not even as good as the little Harmon Kardons in my iMac DV. But the computer was sitting on some sort of carpeted shelf, so that might have something to do with the weak audio, since they're designed to bounce the sound off the desk.

I think the 20" is the only way to go on this machine. Caitie says she wants one for Christmas. That, and a 12" Powerbook, not iBook, and an iPod Mini. In pink. That pretty much exceeds the entire holiday season budget. Sheesh.

I almost picked up a copy of Homeworld, but I'm too busy at the moment to play games. Maybe later. Plus, I'm broke after spending for the hurricane, Star Wars, and my trip north. I'll get my money back on the travel expenses, but at the moment my cash reserves are low.

So, what else is new?

Got back from my little sojourn up north and seemed to bring along a nasty little stomach bug. Thought I got rid of it yesterday, but it seems to be making another appearance today. Not as bad as before, but I'm bummed anyway.

Jeane was looking as though she was going to be a big deal for us, and so I hustled around trying to gather a few things that might make a week or so without electricity a little more civilized. Plus, I was worried about the house where my family lives. It's surrounded by trees.

Once the predicted track shifted west of us, it was unlikely they would evacuate the beaches. That was still something of an unknown Friday evening. By Saturday morning, it was pretty clear there would be no call for a general evacuation of the beaches communities. But it still looked as though we were looking forward to sustained winds greater than 60 kts, and that would mean widespread power outages of greater duration than we experienced for Frances. I have no canned food on hand in my apartment, and no way to heat food either. So I went up to CompUSA to look at the new iMac. It happens to be right next door to a Sports Authority, which would probably have some camping equipment that might come in handy. More on the iMac later.

Sports Authority had a large number of Coleman two-burner camp stoves, so I probably paid too much for one of those. Since I can't chop down propane, I also bought a large dutch oven. I figured if worse came to worst, I could build a campfire with fallen deadwood and heat food in a dutch oven. It was always the most fun part of boy scout camp-outs anyway. I also bought one of the hooks to lift the oven or its lid with. That's a detail you can overlook, but you'll be glad you have one after you burn through all your oven mitts.

Picked up a couple of large tarps at Ace Hardware, and a heavy-duty staple gun. Figured I could cover any holes in the roof at the house once the wind died down. Goes in the box. Picked up some chewable Pepto Bismol too, as my stomach reminded me that I was prone to more than just headaches sometimes.

Then it was off to Costco. I'd never been there before. Costs money to join, just like Sam's Club. In fact, inside it looks just like Sam's Club. Electronics selection is better and some of the prices were outstanding. I bought some canned soups, canned chicken, canned tomatoes and a big (not huge, not enormous, just big) bag of rice. Barring a hurricane, no one will ever eat that rice, but I figured it was cheap insurance. I also picked up the Star Wars DVD package. Probably not the best price anywhere, but it wasn't bad at, I think, $43.00.

Earlier in the morning, I took Caitie to Target because she needed a new backpack and some notebooks for school. I also picked up a couple of emergency "space blankets." Not because I figured I'd need to keep warm, but because I thought there might be some interesting things I could do with a couple of large sheets of aluminized mylar in a sunny, no-electricity environment. We may never know, but they're in the box. Target also had a very cute Hello Kitty transistor radio on sale, so I got that for Caitie who is very much into that whole Hello Kitty thing. Also bought a couple of large luggage straps to go with my collection of bungee cords. Also bought some insect repellant and another one of those large butane lighters. One thing I was looking for but couldn't find was one of those small battery powered stick-up lights. One of those in the bathroom at night would make life easier as a housekeeper. I'll get one eventually.

At some point this week, I'll pull out my box and inventory its contents and share them here. Not because I think I have any great insight into this sort of thing, but it might inspire some useful thinking on a reader's part. Who knows?

Dodging a Bullet

Looks like Jeane is going to be on the same order of destructiveness as Frances was for those of us in northeast Florida. Perhaps a bit less, depending on how large the windfield is, the track and its degradation over land. Which is to say, quite a bit less than we'd been expecting when the predicted tracks had it passing just to the east of us, then slightly westward with each subsequent prediction.

I'm a few hundred dollars more prepared now than I was for Frances. Still haven't found my AGM ~80 amp-hour battery yet, though I did look at a couple of places yesterday. These things are expensive, as batteries go, probably 3 to 4 times as much as a conventional "starting" battery. And shipping on a battery adds another 10 to 15% to the cost, so you're better off finding one locally. I expect we'll have power outages tomorrow, possibly tonight, but I don't foresee them lasting longer than we experienced with Frances. In some ways, Frances reduced some of the risk by taking down a lot of the weakest trees closest to power lines, but the ground is saturated and so more rain means less wind will be required to take down some of the stronger trees. I think there's even a chance we won't see power go down at all, the track is that far west now.

After Hurricane Andrew in '92, building codes were modified in Florida to improve the structural integrity of homes, especially the roof-wall connections. I expect we'll see further changes as we assess the lessons learned from this season. Property losses in the state are likely to exceed Andrew, even adjusted for inflation, and Andrew caused a near exodus of insurance underwriters from Florida. I expect insurance rates are going to spike as well.

This hurricane season will probably cost something greater than $20B in property damage. Loss of life will be disproportionately smaller, thankfully. Yet the property losses due to acts of nature in six weeks will likely be greater than all the property losses to Americans as a result of acts of terror in the last 60 years combined. Yet there will be no knee-jerk expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars in response on the part of the federal government. Though I think a case can easily be made that there are several infrastructure improvements that could be made that would reduce the effects of hurricane damage and the suffering they leave in their wake.

Part of Interstate 10 was washed out due to Ivan. That's a critical artery in that part of Florida and the gulf coast. we need to make sure that doesn't happen again. We need to take another hard look at the power grid and see what we can do to make it more robust. Maybe we need to put more lines underground, perhaps something else. But getting electricity back quickly is the key to getting the economy moving again. We've learned something about fuel supplies in the state, though I'm not exactly sure what we're doing about it, or what we'll plan to do about it. When some of our ports are shut down due to hurricane damage, critical supplies can't make it into the state. We need a way to quickly implement alternatives, recover quicker from the storm's effects, or have greater inventories of needed commodities in-state prior to the onset of hurricane season.

I'm not sure what we've learned from the evacuation efforts, but I'm sure we've learned something. I don't recall reading a lot about the kinds of massive traffic jams we had for storms like Floyd back in '99. Same thing for shelters.

It should please the paranoid that infrastructure improvements that reduce the effects of hurricane damage also improve our capacity cope with acts of terror. I suspect a virulent flu season will help point out the weaknesses in our public health infrastructure, which would probably benefit from significant re-capitalization as well.

There are also millions of individual Floridians who are now more prepared to cope with the effects of a hurricane. Of course, even if every house had a generator, it wouldn't help the overall economy if stores and businesses were without power. And those generators won't be of much use if there's no fuel in the state, and no way to pump it out of the ground. But individual citizens, not all of them to be sure, and perhaps not enough of them, but individual citizens will be more proactive in the face of subsequent hurricane seasons that are likely to be just as active. These are average people, not the paranoid nut-job survivalists who manufacture drama in order to avoid paying attention to the mundane details of their existence. These Floridians will have a real experience with drama, and most of them will respond appropriately. Some of them will even leave the state, which is probably appropriate for many of the elderly. Arizona, I foresee a strong uptick in your housing market.

Anyway, if you've stuck with me this long in this post, you must really be bored! These are just some of my meandering thoughts, coping with the stress of "hurry-up-and-get-ready" for another potential disaster. Which only points out that you have to "be" ready, because "getting" ready, gets expensive. Both in terms of time and money, and your state of mind.

Time to Fly

I'm going to be out of town for a few days, and I didn't manage to assemble all the files and make all the necessary changes to allow me to post "from the road," as it were. It's one of the many things on my to-do list, but it's not a high priority.

Saw Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow yesterday evening. I don't know if it was a problem with my theater, but it seemed like it was an awfully dark movie. I mean dark as in I can't make out what I'm looking at. That was a little disappointing. Story-wise, nothing to write home about. Visuals were outstanding (apart from the aforementioned darkness), and of course, that's why you'll go. A couple of quibbles. I'm guessing the Warhawk was chosen for its lines and fit with the period, but it wasn't the best performer of its time. I would have preferred a P-38 Lightning, but that's just me. Same vintage, but higher performance (speed and altitude) and longer range, which makes flying to Tibet seem a little less tedious. I thought the B-24 Liberator in the hangar at Sky Captain's headquarters was a little anachronistic, but I checked and the prototype flew in 1939. Cool. Second, at one or perhaps two points in the movie, someone mentions "World War I," but this movie is set in some indeterminate date in the late thirties, early forties, before WW II. Before WW II, WW I was called, "The Great War." Angelina Jolie looks hot in an eye-patch. Maybe it was the Talk Like a Pirate Day influence.

Saw a great quote in a book yesterday that goes along with the misunderstanding of authority theme: "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one else can take for us or spare us." Marcel Proust.

Later.

Yet Another Diversion...

I wanted to get back to Values and Choice, but I read something this morning at Scoble's weblog that I wanted to comment on first.

In a piece called, "No hope of an audience? Hogwash" Scoble offers, "But you can be an authority too!"

Once again, we're playing with words when we don't really know what they mean, and we sow confusion in our wake.

We misuse the word "authority" too much. Authority is much more than simply having a given amount of expertise on a subject, or a sanction to compel action on the part of someone else. In fact, "expert" is probably the word that should most often be used when people write "authority." Authority, in its most comprehensive and useful sense, is one third of a trinity of words that together describe one of the concepts that govern our social structures. Authority goes along with responsibility and accountability. If you are neither responsible, nor accountable then you are not an authority. Do not seek to become an authority unless you are prepared to embrace those other two words as well.

I am an engineer by training, but I'm not allowed to call myself an engineer in the state of Florida. That title has a very specific meaning, and one has to be a professional engineer in order to represent oneself as an engineer in any sort of professional context. A professional engineer is licensed by the state he practices in, and by virtue of that license has the authority to sign blueprints and offer expert testimony. A professional engineer is responsible to live up to the standards of conduct of professional engineers, and a code of ethics. He is accountable to the state for his professional performance and his license may be revoked if he fails to live up to his responsibilities. In this manner, those who would avail themselves of the services of an engineer have some reason to believe that the advice and counsel they receive are trustworthy and unlikely to lead to undesired outcomes.

The same or similar can be said for other professions, like doctors and attorneys and there are likely others that are unfamiliar to me.

Perhaps it's growing tedious, but I frequently offer my personal disclaimer that I am an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking. I do this because too often people believe what they read and then rely on the author's thinking instead of their own. This doesn't often amount to much, but sometimes it can lead to misunderstanding and suffering. Sometimes it can be abused by the people putting themselves forward as authorities, and reaping some reward for it while bearing no burden of responsibility or accountability. We call some of these people, "confidence men," or "con artists."

In Zen, there is a saying, "The finger is not the moon." This means that what an authority offers you is not the same thing as the thing itself, for which you are ultimately responsible. For instance, if you built a bridge and you relied on the plans a professional engineer signed, and the bridge fell down, you would still be responsible. So would the professional engineer, if it proved that the plans were flawed, but that's of small consolation. Most of the time, that's not going to happen. But plans are not a bridge, and the finger is not the moon. I find it helpful to think of it this way: "The finger is not the moon. Nearly all authorities are giving you the finger." And I am too.

So I would say, first, don't seek to be an "authority" unless you have spelled out what your responsibility is, and to whom you will be accountable. Second, I would say that it is always in your own interest to regard all authorities with some skepticism, especially those who cannot tell you what they are responsible for and how they are accountable for it. Which is almost certainly virtually all weblogs.

This is all just my own opinion, informed by my own experience and what thinking I've done about the subject. I am an authority on nothing. You are invited and encouraged to do your own thinking. I am not responsible for what you think or choose to believe, and I'm not accountable to you in any meaningful way. I'm just a guy with an opinion.

More Editorial Comments

Housekeeping seems to be my main task today. At least, I'm doing it and not feeling resentful about it. That's a rare thing and I'm trying to make the most of it.

I'm also copying files from the iMac to the external USB 2.0 HD via the iBook and it appears to be going quite quickly. I'm not timing it, but it's not going to be a terribly long process either; judging by the hundreds of megabytes copied since it started a few minutes ago. The iMac's HD is making all sorts of discomforting noises, so perhaps this is a timely move. Once I have everything backed up I'll try and reformat it and see if that doesn't improve the situation.

My downstairs neighbor had a little get-together last night with a few of his friends. I know because they gather on the little patio beneath my bedroom window and chat with one another in very loud voices till, oh, about 4:00 a.m. This isn't the first time. I'll be speaking to the apartment management about it; but this morning about 9:00 a.m. I cranked up iTunes playing The Battle from the Gladiator soundtrack from the iMac in my bedroom, which ought to be right above his bedroom. I made sure the iSub volume was maxed out and I enjoyed listening to that while I vacuumed my bedroom floor. I can be such an unevolved being sometimes.

Back to the chores...

Editorial Comment

This whole truth, values and choice thing has got my poor little head working overtime again. I need to go back and edit the previous post to clean it up a bit, and I've got another longish piece expanding on it sitting in The Cooler until I can muster the mental energy to sit down and try to work on it. I feel as though I've left folks with the impression I might have painted myself into a corner, but I don't think I have and I want to examine that a bit. Not that what I write matters that much. It mostly just matters to me.

In a less cognitively-demanding vein, I've been thinking about getting some sort of application for my Nokia 3660 phone to record my expenses. I haven't had much time to look for one, and truthfully, I haven't been looking forward to typing in stuff on my phone's keypad. Then I had what is, for me, a flash of inspiration. Both my phone and my Clié come with voice recorder capabilities. When I make the transaction, I can just record a voice memo to either one (preferably, I'll settle on one device so I become habituated to the action). Then, at some later time, perhaps once a week at a regular time, I can sit down and transcribe the transactions from my audio records to the spreadsheet.

Ideally, I would do this using the Clié by typing the data directly into my spreadsheet via the Documents to Go function right after the transaction. This would then sync up with my Mac on the next HotSync. But it's darn awkward to be thumb-typing immediately after leaving the checkout counter (or, I could use the Grafitti input option as well), compared to just pushing the record button and speaking, "Publix, $7.93, groceries." I believe the recorder application applies a date-time stamp to the recording, so I don't need to note that either.

The weak link will be making time to sit down and do the transcription, but it's not a tremendous hurdle and I'm kind of motivated to do it. And the functionality has just reminded me about a number of other ideas I've had about recording data from my life that never seemed to get anywhere because it's just never convenient to start writing or typing. I bought a notebook to record recollections of my dreams to kind of review and reflect on their content, but I never manage to make myself fumble for the light switch, find the pen and start writing. I might be able to persuade myself to use the phone to do it. I put my cell phone right next to the bed each night anyway, since I don't have a hard-line. I've just got to configure the UI so that the voice recorder is a one or two-button operation. Same thing with recording what I eat. I did that several years ago when I got my first Newton MP 120. It really helped me realized just how much junk I was eating.

So I'm going to play around with that for the next few days and see how talking to myself works out!

I also hope to go battery-hunting this weekend. Jeane was looking like a real threat at the 1100 prediction, but now it looks like a non-threat; so I guess it's really too soon to tell and we're still only a little past the halfway mark of the season.

Values and Choice

I probably shouldn't write first thing in the morning; and writing now, late in the night, probably isn't much better. Which seems to suggest it would probably be better if I didn't write at all, since these are the only times I seem to have. Be that as it may, I want to try to elaborate a bit on this morning's meditation on choice and values.

Implicit in the act of choosing is some means of discriminating between alternatives. I am persuaded that the vast majority of the time, what we might wish to believe are choices are really little more than behavior. I rely on the work of Dr. Antonio Damasio, and his thought as he puts them forth in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. As a truth claim, its reliability is supported mostly by Dr. Damasio's authority as a neurologist; but I find its utility to be the strongest dimension, it seems to explain a great deal about the nature of how we make choices.

Dr. Damasio, if I'm not misinterpreting him, suggests that much of the part of the brain that deals with making choices is centered around the same area that seems to deal with emotions. When nature provides us with a seemingly large list of possible alternatives, we have a kind of memory map that is constructed out of feelings associated with similar situations, that prunes most of the alternatives so that our rather limited cognitive faculties can cope with a much smaller set of alternatives. Indeed, for most of our daily activities, little is required in the way of cognitive effort to effect them. Each weekday morning I get up, and I don't need to sit down and think about whether or not I should go to work. Indeed, if I get up late, I'm immediately feeling a kind of negative emotion that will usually only be alleviated by hurrying up and getting to work as soon as possible. I don't have to think about it. There is no cognitive effort here, no need to weigh the pluses and minuses of the alternatives. If I don't go to work, I'm going to feel damn uncomfortable.

Now, there are cognitive paths we can take to alleviate those feelings, but most of the time the circumstances are going to be such that there is little reason to make the effort. It's easier just to get to work.

If you read the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini, one gets a similar sense that much of what goes on between our ears with regard to making a choice has little to do with any sort of rigorous, cognitive, rational analysis, and much more to do with our "feelings."

Furthermore, the evidence from history and psychological experiments like the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, and the obedience to authority experiments of Stanley Milgram, suggests that we seldom rely on our cognitive faculties to make choices of any kind. We come equipped with a range of behavioral responses that are quite sophisticated and complex, and which seem to be fairly sufficient to be a fully participating member of a human society without invoking any significant amount of our cognitive ability. If we seem to find this notion a little unsettling, it's because we happen to have a belief that we are fully autonomous, independent actors, completely in control of our choices and therefore utterly and uniquely responsible for them. We value this sense of autonomy, even if it isn't very accurate.

I think it's safe to say that all American elections are decided on the basis of emotion. Some voters might make some effort at a dispassionate analysis of the relative merits of the various candidates. Most people, however, will, consciously or not, vote based upon how they "feel" about a particular candidate. If asked for an explanation, they will offer something more explicit than a "feeling," but to whatever extent this represents a cognitive effort, it is nevertheless nothing more than "reasoning backward from our feelings."

An interesting question might be to examine to what extent somewhat abstract notions like "values" influence our feelings, or to what extent our "feelings" inform our "values." I've read that it seems we are all endowed with an innate sensitivity to equal treatment. That's not to say we're all innately "fair;" rather, we're all keenly aware of when we might be being treated unequally. Does the more abstract notion of "fairness" arise from this undesirable feeling of being treated unequally? I'm not certain, but it would not surprise me. In a similar vein, it's interesting to think about to what extent does the idea of a nation's "inherent right of self defense" stem from the strong feeling of an individual for either "fight" or "flight" when attacked?

All of which is simply to suggest that before one gets too engrossed with the idea of embracing values as a means of discriminating superior choices from inferior ones; one must have something of an appreciation for how all of the rest of the mechanism might work. This would seem to require a degree of self-knowledge which might be difficult to obtain for many people in a world and a culture filled with distractions, and organized to create distractions in order to monopolize attention.

All that being said, it gets back to compassion. Even if one were so self-aware, and so gifted with the resources of time and attention, and the cognitive gifts to devote to a rigorous analysis of a particular choice on the basis of one's values, themselves presumably analyzed and vetted to ensure they have a purely rational basis and not an emotional one, even if all this were the case, it very likely won't be true for the vast majority of other people.

No, for better or worse, we mostly rely on feelings when we make what we believe are cognitive choices; and most of what we do is simply behavior, not the result of some serious headwork. There are exceptions, but in the main, I think it's a true statement. The good news is, most of the time it works pretty well. For all of us.

It occurs to me that I haven't made the point I had in mind when I started this. I'm not sure if the point I've left you with it particularly useful. Maybe I'll have more to say some other time.

But as always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. I'm probably wrong. Do your own thinking.

Between the Drama and the Dharma, Again

Dr. James Vornov has been posting a lot of short observations or thoughts on philosophical topics recently. Here's another one:

Both the abstract view of truth and the materialist abandonment of truth are unsatisfying in part because the try to be value neutral. If there is a single truth, it should transcend culture and religion. If there is no independent, abstract truth, then every culture and religion has an equal claim. If the world is fundamentally complex and uncertain, then values are needed to make any choice superior to any other. Without values, all choices among alternatives are of equal utility.

The one I pointed to yesterday I characterized as a restatement of Nagarjuna, author of The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. The one I've quoted above is similarly, if more obliquely, related.

I would disagree with part of this, "If there is no independent, abstract truth, then every culture and religion has an equal claim." This seems to contain a contradiction. Every culture and religion has an equal claim to, what? What I infer Dr. Vornov is stating is that every culture and religion has an equal claim to "the truth" - in the abstract sense we've posited in the conditional part of the statement. But we've also just posited that doesn't exist, so the assertion is false. Some of the difficulties we face in our world seem to stem from the same idea, that there is some single abstract "truth" and that each group's claim to it is just as valid, and therefore just as worthy of defending, to the point of death and destruction it would appear, as every other. This is the statement that explains extremism on all sides.

Of course, absolutists would be quick to point out an implied "independent, abstract truth" claim of the assertion that there is no independent abstract truth. And then we would have to get into a long discussion about contingency, which can be pretty rough going, even with very concise restatements like the one Dr. Vornov wrote.

It is the sense of a single truth that creates drama in the world. Zell Miller believes John Kerry would not be tough on terrorism, and that in order to see to the safety and security of his family, he must be disloyal to his party and renounce his publicly stated "friendship" with John Kerry, and his assertion that he is an authentic American hero. This is dramatic stuff, it grabs our attention; and the first step in the exercise of authority is to seize attention.

It is this reliance on drama that is fueling the descent of our politics into "the mud." People believe, falsely, that the stakes are so high, that any effort to defeat their political opponents is appropriate. Each side believes it has an equal claim to a singular truth, and that the consequences of the failure of that view to prevail are extremely dire.

Now, it would be interesting to reflect on how this reliance on drama, or a claim to a singular truth, is itself an emergent property of a species that has succeeded based on its ability to organize into competing groups on the basis of differing belief systems. The effect of the process seems to promote the most fit beliefs for the purposes of ensuring the survival and success of one group over that of its competitors. Further, it would be interesting to consider what the possibility might be for a single set of beliefs to be shared by the entire population of human beings, given what appears to be an evolutionarily-derived biological predisposition on the the part of nearly all individuals to pursue the role of an authority, which necessitates making truth-claims that are purportedly superior to other truth-claims within a given belief system.

In other words, I wouldn't look for this to change any time soon. Or ever.

Now, I want to consider another part of this observation, "If the world is fundamentally complex and uncertain, then values are needed to make any choice superior to any other. Without values, all choices among alternatives are of equal utility." Here we trip over the word "superior." Perhaps "more desirable" would be a better choice. "Superior" seems to require, again, at least in one sense, a singular claim to "the truth" that is non-contingent and unconditional.

In this sense, we discover that all we are doing is positing the existence of a certain, presumably unique, set of beliefs, whose truth-claims cannot be established in any absolute, abstract sense, which can be relied upon to keep us from running aground upon the shoals of moral relativism. We've simply substituted a different compromised notion, perhaps one level of abstration removed, for another one.

Now, what is the truth-claim to the notion of "superiority?" Interestingly, "superiority" has to rely to a great deal on the temporal dimension of truth claims. Can we agree that the "superior" value is the value that most promotes "the good?" If so, this seems to require us to have knowledge of what "the good" is. This seems almost trivial, because we can usually intuit "the good" from any given circumstances. But that seems to rely on a fixed universe because what may be "good" in one moment, might be "bad" in the next. Can we call on the ancient Taoist farmer? The farmer has a horse, and it runs away. Neighbors all say, "This is bad." Farmer's father says, "Who knows? Perhaps not."

Horse hooks up with barbarian horse of fine stock and returns to farmer and breeds a line of strong horses making the farmer wealthy. Neighbors say, "This is good." Farmer's father says, "Who knows? Perhaps not."

Farmer's son is out riding fine horse, falls and breaks his hip, leaving him lame. Neighbors say, "This is bad." Farmer's father says, "Who knows? Perhaps not."

Emperor's men come to village and conscript all the able-bodied men to go off and fight the barbarians, except for the farmer's lame son. All are killed.

You get the idea, I think.

An event does not exist in some isolated context in time. A "bad" event might yield a later "good" outcome. Unfortunately, we exist in the field of time although we have zero length in the time dimension. We cannot clearly see the future, nor can we clearly recall the past. We choose what we wish to give our attention to in these two directions, and it's impossible to say with any certainty that we can clearly perceive what was "the good," or "the bad." In "truth," each relies on the other, because everything is contingent. There can be no "good" without the "bad" to make it so. And because we inhabit the field of time, there is no present wherein we might not imagine a future that is more desirable, and therefore suffering will always exist. Suffering being the difference between the way things are and the way we want them to be.

So, I would just caution us to be skeptical about relying on values to save us from anything. I think the fundamental wisdom of the middle way is to avoid all extremes, and to have compassion for one another because of our ignorance. Faith is the capacity to embrace the moment as it is. Fear is the capacity to reject or deny it. We have a choice there as well. In some ways, it's the only real choice we have.

Random Noise

I saw Paparazzi over the weekend. It sucks. Don't waste your time. The one redeeming feature is a funny cameo by Mel Gibson, the producer.

To elaborate, the villains and the hero are caricatures; the bad are really vile, the good are really saintly, and the innocent... well, they're really innocent. Everything is black and white, and the bad guys really get theirs. It's a western, basically; and certainly consistent with a certain mindset in America these days.

My Kensington TurboBall, which I've been using for almost five years, is kaput. One of the support posts has broken off again, at the joint where I super-glued it the last time it failed, a month or so ago. I really like that trackball. I bought it on a clearance table at Office Depot for about $15.00 as I recall. The Kensington System Preference module has been giving me fits forever, but for basic pointing and clicking, it was the greatest. I'm using my Logitech MX 510 right now, but I'm not a big mouse fan anymore. I'm going to have to look for a replacement trackball, but I doubt I'll find anything that worked as well and cost as little as that TurboBall.

I've ordered the retail box .Mac product from Amazon because it's cheaper than renewing automatically by about $27.00. ($79.99 and no sales tax from Amazon, versus the 7% I'd pay the Apple Store for my $100.00 renewal.)

No word from Mark/Space on a fix for memory stick desktop mounting in The Missing Sync. I'm being patient.

I haven't had much opportunity to play with my Kodak 6490 because it's been raining practically every day since hurricane Frances, and it looks like we'll get more of the same from Ivan and Jeanne. Jeanne doesn't appear to be shaping up to be much of a threat yet.

Printed some t-shirt iron-on transfers with Caitie last weekend. It worked rather well. I was pleasantly surprised, Caitie was really pleased. Used HP paper, maybe that matters. I might print up my own political t-shirts. If I were a political kind of guy, that is.

For a variety of reasons, I decided I needed (well, "would like to have" is probably more accurate) an external hard drive to facilitate some maintenance and projects I'm trying to work on. The Navy Exchange had the Western Digital 160GB USB 2.0 external for $10.00 less than Amazon, and they have a 14-day return policy, if it doesn't meet my needs. The iBook G4 has 2 USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire port, so a USB 2.0 drive isn't out of the question. The only problem is that neither my G4 MDD 867DP nor my iMac DV have USB 2.0 ports, and one of the maintenance issues relates to the iMac. But then I figured I could boot the iMac into Firewire Target Disk Mode, connect it to the iBook, and connect the external HD to the iBook and just use the iBook as a bridge to move the data through. USB 2.0 is also appropriate because the iBook only has one Firewire port, so I can have the external HD attached while I'm using a video device in the Firewire port. Rationalized that one to a fare-thee-well, I say. An extended replacement warranty is $16.95 through the Exchange, and I'll probably spring for that if I'm happy with it. I used it to back up my iBook this evening and the data throughput isn't bad. I wasn't able to time it, but what I was able to observe appeared to move pretty quickly.

After having the power go out for 15 hours last week, I decided I'd like to have a modest source of 110v AC for recharging my laptop, the Kodak 6490 and the Gameboy Advance SP. Running a light would be nice too. Did some research on the web, and basically I'm building something similar to this device, for a little less money and a little more battery capacity. My inverter is only 800 watts, but it will meet my needs. I'm going to look for a battery in the 80 amp-hour range, vice the 60 this thing ships with. I like the wheels built into this box. I bought a small luggage cart rated at 75lbs, which may be a little less robust, but it was only $10.00. I may look for a different chassis. I bought a 15 watt neon light bulb that offers the same illumination as a 60 watt incandescent. A guy I work with threw something similar together during the outage with some used UPS batteries and a 300 watt inverter he had. He was able to run a neon light, a small portable TV and DVD player and a small fan for more than an hour, which seems pretty impressive. I asked him why he didn't just use his HP laptop which actually has a bigger screen than his 13" TV, and it never occurred to him.

My thought is, if I have to evacuate, I can bring something like this with me and even if I can't get a spot in the shelter near a 110 outlet, I'll still have power to charge my iBook and run a few convenience devices. The one issue I might encounter would be an objection from a shelter authority about having a lead-acid battery inside the facility. I will be using an Absorbed Glass Mat battery which is safe for indoor use, and spill proof even in the event of fracture. I'm not sure I could persuade anyone else of their safety, but I'm not sure anyone really knows it isn't terribly safe to use a conventional wet-cell lead-acid battery in an enclosed space. When it runs low on power, I take it out to the car and charge it up while I sit in the car and listen to the stereo. I need to do some more research on the best 12v charging strategy. There's a lot of data out there, mostly for solar power applications, and there are right ways and wrong ways to charge a lead-acid battery. AGM has some advantages over a Gel-cell when it comes to charging. For those who might consider doing something similar, car batteries are not a good option. You want a deep-cycle battery, like the ones used for a golf cart or trolling motor application.

I also bought a Belkin 140 watt AC Anywhere inverter for a bare-bones, least capability option. I can use it to charge the iBook and my other gadgets in the car.

Guys I work with went out and bought generators, which probably aren't a bad idea if you're into maintaining them, and stabilizing stored fuel and stuff like that. When I get around to buying another house or condo, I'm going to look at a larger battery/inverter solution using a fixed bank of several batteries and I'll investigate whether or not there may be a portable/temporary wind generator option I could use to help charge the battery bank. There was no shortage of wind in the days before and after Frances. Right now that's just an exercise in imagination.

Vornov Restates Nagarjuna

Everything is contingent. Everything is connected.

"I'm not bullshittin' back here..."

Just because I feel like it, a blast from the not-too-distant-past:

Save Me Somebody

That's where I want to go

I want to go to that riverside

I want to go to the river of life

I want to go to that river of love

I want to go to that river of faith

And that river of hope.

Tonight I want to go to that river of transformation

Where you go to be changed.

But you got to work at it -- that's right!

I want to go that river of sanctification

Where all life's graces and blessings fall down upon you like rain

But you got to work at it.

I want to go that river of resurrection

Where everybody gets a second chance

But you got to work at it.

Tonight I want to go to that river of sexual healing -- and companionship

I want to go find that river of joy and happiness.

I'm not bullshittin' back here.

But you don't stumble on those things by accident.

You got to search them out, seek after them.

And that's why we're here night after night after night after night.

'Cause you can't get to those places by yourself

You got to have help!

That's where I want to go tonight

And I want you to go with me

Because I need to go with you--that's why I'm here.

A Little Help

Shelley Powers over at Burningbird needs a little help to keep her web sites online. Do yourself and the web a favor, and click on the Donate link.

And Another Thing...

In the synchronicity vein, I forgot to point to this post by Kurt over at The Coffee Sutras. One of the things that attracted me to Zen was the experience I had in counseling. Some of what counseling involves is examining the utility value of things we believe are "true." I'm not sure counselors would acknowledge that statement at first, but I think they would after a bit of thought. One of the things I had to work on was the belief that other people could "make" me angry, or unhappy. It didn't take a lot of reflection to discover that that was not true, but it had to be suggested to me, it wouldn't have occurred to me on my own. Such is the nature of largely unconscious beliefs that nevertheless govern much of our lives. But the question naturally arises concerning why I believed such a thing.

This goes to the utility of false beliefs. The shared belief that we have the power to govern others' emotions, at least those to whom we have some emotional relationship, facilitates efforts at control and the exercise of authority. When a parent says, "Don't make me angry," they're teaching their children that they have some power over their parents' emotions; and that when a parent gets angry, that it's somehow the child's responsibility. When a spouse says, "You hurt my feelings," that spouse places responsibility for their feelings on their partner. Both are largely unconscious efforts at control. It's also part of our culture and our beliefs about love. "You made me feel so very happy," suggests that our happiness is out there, somewhere, if we only found that one person who has the power to make us feel, "so very happy, baby." It adds an element of drama to how we perceive our emotional lives. We're all "holding out for a hero."

Zen is about discarding beliefs that have no real utility, or worse, utility that obscures and confuses one's perception of one's own life. A life of Zen has much less drama; or, at least, the drama occurs on a much smaller scale and is grounded more closely to "reality." This is not to say that Zen Buddhism isn't itself burdened with beliefs that have utility values that serve the purposes of maintaining some authority structure within Zen Buddhism, it is. And like any imperfect human endeavor, it's sometimes worse than that. But if you have no need to embrace authority in order to embrace the truth, it's possible to avoid the worst of it. But that's just me talking. I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.

Wealth and Status

This is something else I was thinking about the other night in the context of an e-mail I was composing to an online friend of mine. He was concerned about another individual's interest in accumulating wealth and status, and how that interest was affecting him in an adverse way.

I'm not sure I helped him at all, but it occurred to me as I was trying to think of what I could offer him that the pursuit of wealth and status is really about seeking authority over others. Money is a form of authority, while status is kind of a surrogate for authority. It's kind of an implied authority. If one is perceived to have status, or rank, then presumably one has some authority attendant to that status or rank. It's the weakest form of authority, but we're so given to following authority that it works surprisingly well. When it doesn't work, the people who are trying to exercise it are often heard to exclaim, "Do you know who I am?! Do you know who your dealing with!" And the answer is almost invariably, "No, and I don't care." Much frustration ensues.

But wealth is a pretty universal and unambiguous source of authority over others. You can pretty much get somebody to do anything for enough money.

But here's the thing that occurred to me, even though I'm not sure it helped my friend. People pursue wealth and authority at the expense of their own relationships with others because they don't have authority over themselves. This is that feeling of powerlessness, although it is often experienced as anxiety or anger or depression. Things happen that upset us, and we don't like and can't control the feelings; so we seek enough authority to be able to control events so that, presumably, the bad things that cause the bad feelings don't happen, or we can ignore them. This is ultimately futile, but many times we don't discover this fact because we're locked into the pursuit with the notion that, "It'll get better when..." Only it never gets better. At least not if you're looking for a promotion, or a new house, or a new job, or a new spouse, to make "it" better. Because "it" is "you." Your life, your experience, your feelings all belong to you; and "it" won't get better until "you" get better. If you can't learn to begin to exercise authority over yourself, if you can't begin to discover the power to choose, then no amount of wealth is ever going to ensure your happiness.

Now, studies have shown that people that have more money and wealth are often genuinely more happy than people who are less fortunate. The implication being that money can indeed "buy happiness." This is not surprising, nor is it particularly inconsistent with what I offered above. If you're someone who has developed a certain amount of authority over yourself already, then more wealth will almost certainly offer more opportunities to experience things that engender and facilitate feelings of happiness. And if you haven't, it is likely that more money will offer more distractions, and you won't have to be confronted by the things that can make you feel unhappy. We live in a culture that has made distraction into an industry, and we mass-produce it on industrial scales. I would probably disagree about the nature of the reported "happiness." You may want to ask yourself what the utility value of that particular bit of "truth" serves, though. Studies show, money can buy happiness! It's the truth!

The Consequences of Truth

There's a whiff of synchronicity in the air these days. Or perhaps it's just my imagination. I'm pretty certain I read something some a few weeks ago at Shelley's Burningbird weblog that had something to do with "the truth." It probably had something to do with the swift boat veterans thing, but I can't seem to find it just now. In any event, I took some time to draft a reply in her comments, and then I recalled my "no comment" policy, and decided not to post it.

A week or so later, AKMA wrote this brief essay called Theology and Truth; and again, I wrote a somewhat lengthy comment and then did not post it.

Today I read a couple of posts by Dr. James Vornov, most notably this one called Models and Truth, and again I'm motivated to offer a comment.

So perhaps it's not synchronicity. Maybe it's just the political season that causes certain minds to reflect on the nature of truth and comment on it. Whatever it is, I've decided to comment on it here as well.

I was pleased to read Dr. Vornov mentioning William James, as I discovered him at a particularly difficult moment in my life and found his writing to be a source of inspiration. I am indeed a pragmatist when it comes to the truth.

Before I happened upon William James, I was struggling with what "the truth" is, and how we may "know" it. I concluded that "the truth" is simply information that has been afforded a special status on the basis of a few particular characteristics. On any given event or phenomenon, there are a range of stories or accounts, which may, in some fashion, explain or illuminate certain aspects of the event or phenomenon, and place them in some larger context. I believe the characteristics that set "the truth" apart from all other accounts are these three: Reliability, utility, and some temporal aspect that I don't have a good name for.

If something is true, then many different observers of an event or phenomenon may be expected to give similar accounts. If I ask five people what color my shirt is, and they all say "green," then perhaps it's reasonable to conclude that an account of the color of my shirt being green is the truth. If one said green, and another said blue and another said yellow, then it's difficult to tell from that information what "the truth" is. But it's possible that all the accounts, while similar, are also wrong. So reliability alone isn't enough for an account to be considered "the truth." Information that is "true" must also have some utility. It must serve some useful purpose. Most often, that purpose is related to making reliable predictions, or in drawing conclusions or inferences that are useful in making certain choices. For instance, if my shirt is green, it probably won't match my red plaid slacks.

As another example, the information that Iraq was in possession of some quantity of weapons of mass destruction was rather reliable, if we are to believe what all of the authorities are telling us with respect to the state of intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs before the start of the war. On the basis of the "truth" of that information, we invaded that country and subsequently discovered that Iraq had no significant WMD stockpiles, and no credible programs to develop any. The "utility" of the pre-war intelligence was that America could reduce the danger it confronted in the world by invading Iraq and gaining control of its WMD stockpiles, programs, and personnel. Instead, we have not reduced the danger America faced because there was very little danger to begin with. If we had had better information before the war, then either we would not have invaded, or we would have had a very different debate before we decided to go to war. On the other hand, Newtonian physics was considered "true" for hundreds of years because of its utility at making reliable predictions about the behavior of physical objects in motion in a gravitational field.

When the utility of "true" information begins to fail, regardless of its reliability, we begin to suspect it is not true, or at least not completely true. Such was the case with Newtonian physics and its ability to describe the nature of the universe at very large and very small scales. This resulted in new accounts that were eventually equally reliable and of greater utility: Einstein's relativity theory, and quantum physics.

There is a temporal characteristic to "the truth." Some information is only reliable and useful for a certain amount of time. While it would be true to say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that truth has a certain duration, which may or may not be known or even knowable. Both reliability and utility are affected by the temporal characteristic of information which is regarded as "the truth."

Ultimately, I believe there is no such thing, at least no such thing that is "knowable," as "the truth." For something to be absolutely true, which is presumably what is must be to be "the" truth, it would seem to have to be an absolutely complete account; and the nature of information and entropy in the physical universe is such that we can never have an absolutely complete account. We lose information in the process of telling the story. Is that assertion "the truth?" Not in an absolute sense. It has a certain reliability to me, and its utility is that it helps to frame other pieces of information in a useful way while constructing my own, incomplete, picture of "the truth." Your mileage may vary.

One of the troubling features of this description of "the truth" is in the nature of utility. Utility is always in the service of something. At its best, it's in the service of "the truth" itself. Utility usually helps to develop new information that is reliable and useful. Often though, it is in the service of authority, rather than some abstract notion of "the truth." This is what I was going to comment on at AKMA's weblog.

What is the utility value of the account of the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus? These are reliable accounts, at least according to the authorities and the canonical literature embraced by the authorities. I believe the utility value of that information is in the creation and preservation of authorities within the church, and in creating a unique set of beliefs that separate one group of people from another, purely on the basis of something they believe, the objective truth of which is almost certainly unknowable. It doesn't appear to have much utility with respect to making one a better person. One might ask oneself if what Jesus wanted us to know requires believing in "the truth" of a virgin birth, or that he, uniquely, was both God and man, and that he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Myself, I'm skeptical. But I believe that people associate in groups, and groups require authorities, and authorities must have some claim to special knowledge, a better grasp of "the truth." So while it's somewhat disturbing, it's also unsurprising and probably unavoidable. Which is information that I also consider to be both reliable and useful, at least for me.

One of the reasons why I have a "no comment" policy (which I broke today on another weblog, so perhaps it's not "true"), is because I find I'm less wedded to my version of "the truth," than I was in the past. The nature of ignorance is such that we will simply never know what we don't know. Of what utility to AKMA is my version of what "the truth" is? Almost certainly none. He is an authority, and that's not a bad thing. These sorts of beliefs are the basis for his authority. He would no more embrace my idea of what "the truth" is, than I would embrace his, as it has less utility for me than my own. Does it matter to me what AKMA believes? At least in this particular regard, not really. So I offer this not because I think AKMA is wrong to believe as he does, just to point out how my beliefs differ and why. You're entitled to make up your own mind. I'll allow that AKMA may even be more correct than I am. But I don't think I'll ever know that, and so I see little point in jumping up and down about it, either way.

Crazy Ivan

Looks like it's shaping up to be a bad year for Florida and hurricanes.

Ron Kessler

Ron Kessler has a book out called A Matter of Character: Inside the Whitehouse of George W. Bush. I mention this because Al Hawkins noted the commentary Mr. Kessler had on NPR's Morning Edition this morning. It occurs to me now that perhaps this is why I woke up in such a foul mood this morning. I don't recall exactly what he said, but I recall lying in bed more than half-asleep and feeling angry about something that was on the radio about Bush and leadership. My alarm goes off at 5:00 AM, but some mornings I don't get out of bed right away, and this was one of those days.

When I finally did get out of bed, I grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down at the computer thinking I had to say something about Bush and leadership. Now I know why.

Of course, Mr. Kessler is being presented by those who endorse his opinion as a disinterested, objective observer. Even something of an authority, since he's a best-selling author. Perhaps he is. But I'm a bit skeptical.

Looking at his biography, we see a man who is fascinated by the rich and the powerful, with a particular interest in intrigue and espionage. He's also no fan of the Kennedy family, it would seem. Or at least the description on his website of his objective and disinterested book about that rich and powerful family, with their own history of intrigue, could give one that impression. So maybe I have some reason to be skeptical.

I also note that none of the subjects he writes about would seem to give him any special insight into the nature of leadership. Perhaps he has some insight into the unambiguous exercise of power, but that is not leadership; though it is a common misunderstanding.

No, I suspect Mr. Kessler is a guy who likes to sell books and hang out with rich, and powerful and intriguing people. And what better way to sell a lot of books and curry favor with the rich and the powerful than to perform a bit of hagiography on a president who is the object of at least as much well deserved criticism as he is unfair "bashing." And what better way to inoculate himself to criticism than to prop up the right's favorite scapegoat, the "liberal media." There was a sort of ironic saying we used to have in the Navy, mostly attributed to shore-duty pukes, "This would be a pretty good navy, if it weren't for all these damn ships." Well, it seems this would be a pretty good country if it weren't for that damn free press.

Frankly, I'm disappointed NPR gave air time to this man. Perhaps it's all in the interest of appearing "fair" and "balanced." You know, just letting each side have their say without offering any critical examination of the claims and assertions. I really shouldn't criticize NPR, because I have very little recollection of the commentary, other than feeling as though I couldn't believe what I was hearing and becoming agitated as it went on. In any event, while Mr. Kessler may know something about the rich and the powerful, and may even know something about character, I think it's safe to say he doesn't know shit about leadership.

On Leadership

The mark of a great leader is great vision. When a nation suffers a grievous loss at the hands of other men, it is the duty of a great leader to help his country see past their suffering, past their fear, and to keep their attention on who and what they are and who they might become, as a great people.

Who we are is not defined by what we have suffered. Nor are we defined by those who see us as their enemies. Nor are we defined by what we fear. Unless we would have it so. A great leader would not have it so. A great people would not have it so.

It is not leadership to embody and act upon the immediate and base instincts of an aroused population. A leader must exhibit the qualities of who we would like to be under those circumstances, someone better than we are; and by doing so, allow us to be. By exploiting our suffering, by offering only bravado in place of real courage, by nurturing our fears for political gain, a bad leader diminishes us. And more, he diminishes the idea of America in the mind of the world.

By tolerating, or worse, embracing bad leadership for the sake of indulging our base instincts, and validating our anger and our fear, we diminish ourselves.

It is a myth, worse, it is a lie that George W. Bush is a great leader. He is a terrible leader. He is the worst sort of leader. It's not as though he tried to be a great leader and came up wanting. He lacked even the imagination and the courage to try. Instead, he took the easy path of the small man. He gave us platitudes and promises and preyed on our fears in support of the designs of other men and for his own political advantage. Since 9/11, we have not become a greater people, we've become a lesser one. A people that have allowed themselves to be manipulated, and controlled and governed by fear and anger; and to project all that fear and anger to the world, and to one another, in an offensive display of hubris. A people who would have the world know us by what we are afraid of. We should be ashamed.

George Bush and John Kerry are two flawed men. There is no guarantee that John Kerry will be a better leader than George Bush. But the best way to become again the great nation we could be, is not to suffer another four years of cynical manipulation masquerading as leadership at the hands of someone who has already proven himself to be a small and petty man.

Notes of a Chord

Should probably save that title for something else, but there it is.

I wake up every morning and wonder when I'm ever going to wake up and not have something hurt. Then I realize that that morning will be the one when I wake up dead. Till then, I console myself with the thought the aches and pains are just reminders that I'm alive, and I live. For those of you not so afflicted, you might do well to reflect and make an effort to remember what it feels like to get out of bed and feel good.

Karma isn't standing at the door scratching to get out, so her little adventure seems to have dampened her enthusiasm for going outdoors. For now, anyway. Squeaky seems a little bit miffed that she's back. I thought she was distressed because she was gone, and perhaps she was; but now she seems distressed because she's back. She's mostly hiding in the closet.

Keeping a close eye on Ivan. (Maybe that should be a "weather eye.") So far, it looks as though it might give us a miss, but it's too soon to tell. I'm not looking forward to the day when one comes ashore near here. I went through Gloria in '85 in Newport RI, and it was worse than what we experienced here from Frances, though Frances seems to have lasted longer in terms of lingering bad weather. Last night the TV was blaring tornado warning after tornado warning, which is fairly uncommon for this area. I don't think we actually had any, at least there are none reported in the local paper.

Well, if we rely on the human nose and taste buds for whether or not milk is spoiled, that didn't happen. It worked well enough on my cereal this morning. I think everything is going to be fine. I didn't have much in the refrigerator anyway, having just moved in and purged all the really old stuff guys tend to accumulate in their refrigerators.

The house where my kids live seemed to come through okay. There are a lot of old pin oaks and water oaks (whatever those are) around the house and I was concerned one or more of them would come down on the roof. They're probably not big enough to cause the kind of catastrophic damage that some homes suffer when old trees come down on them, but they could punch a hole in the roof.

Well, that's probably more enough about my encounter with Frances.

Passing the Time

"So, what did you do while the lights were off, Dave?"

I'm glad you asked.

I'd like to say I did a lot of the reading I've been putting off. Or that I finished organizing this mess that surrounds and adheres to my existence. Alas, I did none of the former and not enough of the latter. But I did play with my new Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP. Woo-hoo!

Nintendo lowered the price of the Gameboy Advance SP to $79.00 last week, and while I was out buying about $300.00 worth of "bug-out" (read: evacuation) supplies, I picked up this little wonder. I only have three games for it, two of them being Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2. If you imagine a kind of animé version of Command and Conquer or Starcraft, you get the idea. Except you don't build any buildings, you mostly just capture the ones you need. They're both quite fun, and time passes pretty quickly when you're playing.

The Gameboy Advance SP (Nintendo needs to reconsider its naming scheme - that's quite a mouthful) is a very nice little unit. It's somehow smaller than it looks in the pictures, or even when you try to play the display model in the store. It feels quite sturdy, it feels like it's worth more than $79.00, which is a neat trick these days. The backlight isn't that great, but it's enough to use it in the dark. I was sitting next to a window and had the backlight off to conserve the battery, and the display was quite readable.

Most of the game library is oriented toward kids, but the Advance Wars games can be quite challenging and entertaining for adults. At least, this adult.

Frances is Gone, Karma is Back

The electricity is back too.

It seems my flyers weren't utterly futile after all. A very nice young lady (with a much larger apartment than mine), called me a few minutes ago and said she had a cat that resembled what was left of the description on the flyer. I ran over there and sure enough, my little furball was there. Of course, she bolted up the stairs (I said she had a big apartment) as soon as her host opened the door. But a quick whistle and she stopped in her tracks and turned around to see who it was. She wouldn't come to me, perhaps because she wasn't sure what to do in that situation, but she let me collect her and carry her home. I'm a happy guy.

The power stayed on all day yesterday, with a couple of brief outages. Around 11:30 PM, I started getting a lot of flickering of the lights and one significant off-and-on episode, and I figured it was only a matter of time before the power went out entirely, or I fried my computer. Maybe both. So I shut everything down and hit the rack. About 20 minutes after I got into bed I heard two explosions about five seconds apart which I took to be transformers blowing, and then the clock radio went dead.

It stayed down about 15 hours, coming back on right around 3:00 PM. I don't think anything in the fridge has gone bad with the possible exception of the milk, but it's almost gone anyway. The freezer stayed pretty cold, the ice cubes didn't show any signs of melting, so I doubt we got above 32 degrees.

I took a little tour around the complex, and mostly I saw some limbs down. Some of the lower, ornamental bushes actually suffered more than the tall trees. Some came out by their roots, others split in the middle. A lot of standing dead wood came down. Driving to my old apartment to look for Karma, I saw a number of other trees down and they had already been sawn up into smaller pieces.

Frances was a big storm. We didn't see hurricane force winds, but we had some gusts in excess of 70mph, which are always interesting. Hopefully Ivan is going to give us a pass this go-around.

Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful

Well, it's pretty apparent Frances is a large storm. We've got a pretty steady wind, I'd guess about 25 knots, with gusts to about 35. It's supposed to get a little windier later today. Very gray, lots of fast moving clouds. I may set up the Kodak if the power stays up, it's blinked on me twice in the last half hour. There are just so many trees around here, and most of the power is above ground.

The really unhappy news is Karma's been missing since Friday morning. It was the second time I'd let her out to get acquainted with her new surroundings, and I went to call her back in after about 15 minutes and she was nowhere to be found. I've since gone back to the old apartment twice, thinking perhaps she'd found her way there, but no. I've done the flyer thing, though I'm pretty sure they'll be useless with this weather.

Cats sometimes take off for a few days, so I'm not too alarmed yet. But I'd feel better if it weren't such icky weather. And I won't entertain any lectures about not letting house cats outside.

I feel for the folks south of here, especially since Frances is taking her sweet time getting across the state. It's going to be a mess.

Fear

While I haven't watched any of the Republican National Convention, it's impossible to avoid hearing some of the stuff that comes out of it. Waking up to NPR in the morning ensures one gets a pretty hefty dose of it. I've probably got to re-think that whole notion. Maybe a nice CD would be a better idea.

One gets the sense that the most important issue in this election is terrorism, and I think that's just wrong. What are we so afraid of, here in the "land of the free, and the home of the brave?" More than fifteen thousand Americans are murdered by other Americans each year. A similar number kill themselves, and more than 40,000 are killed in automobile accidents each year. We don't seem to have an hysterical fear of the car. Estimates of property damage losses due to Hurricane Charley run to more than $7 billion dollars, and I expect Frances will be equally destructive, if not more so. And we're only halfway through hurricane season. Where is the hysterical fear of the weather?

It's a problem of our perceptual systems, coupled with the way we've evolved to behave in groups. Terrorists are a novel threat, and would-be authorities have little trouble manipulating others' attention by seizing novel threats. To the extent that terrorism "works," it's because we pay so much attention to terrorist acts. And the disgusting thing is, both the terrorists and the authorities that compete with one another to protect us, exploit them.

There are many things we need to do to make terrorism no more of a political issue than the annual highway death toll, and the first thing is to stop paying so much attention to it. The second thing to do is to stop paying attention to the people who insist the only thing we need to worry about is terrorism, because when a serious threat to large numbers of human beings emerges, it most likely won't be from terrorists. It'll probably come from a farm in China, where pigs and chickens live in close proximity. Then we'll be wondering why we spent all those billions removing Sadam Hussein and not on public health measures. You want to see someone who harbors weapons of mass destruction? Check out Mother Nature, Mr. President. That's not an appeal to fear, it's just pointing out that there are other things we can do to help protect both Americans and other people in the world from potential threats.

Fear brings out the absolute worst in human beings, and we're seeing it in spades. Terrorists themselves operate from a position of fear. There's a great deal more to courage than talking and acting "tough," and using force for the sake of demonstrating "resolve." There's more to life than the fear of death. There's more to living than trying to prevent dying. Everybody gets to die. Not everyone who is alive really gets to live. Dying is easy, living is hard. So stop worrying about what's going to kill you, and instead try to think about how you can make the moments you're blessed with matter.

Of course, none of this will really occur to large numbers of people. We don't think that way. Most of us are reasoning backwards from our feelings, as we are predisposed to do, and mostly what people seem to want to feel is fear. Life is much more "dramatic" that way. If there is some drama, then perhaps that's a substitute for the emptiness we feel in the content of the meaning of our existence. Life is meaningless, you have to create the meaning - that's what living is for. Go read Viktor Frankl. It's why living is hard. It's about making choices when there are no easy answers. And when you surrender to the authorities who present you with easy, black and white, good and evil choices, you surrender your life.

This will not get better soon. I think it's likely President Bush will be re-elected. But even if he isn't, we will still have created more divisions within this country, and authorities will still be relying on fear to compete with one another. But I think as time goes on, and the futility of fear becomes manifest, perhaps more people will begin to see that there's more to life than the fear of death. That's something to look forward to.

It's All About Me

Of course it is.

Well, I'm still unpacking and trying to figure out where everything should go, and what I should jettison. Hurricane Frances bears watching and I went out and bought a new air mattress and large, sturdy plastic storage box last night. I'll probably review my notes from Hurricane Floyd and pick up a few items to put in the box in the event the beaches are ordered to evacuate. My intention would be to rendezvous with my family, though this would be our first experience in this circumstance since the separation. The latest projections have it moving ashore well south of here, which suggests evacuation from our location would be unlikely, although Charley reminded us projections are often incorrect and so I expect the evacuation order for Frances will cover a wider area than perhaps was the case for Charley.

The new apartment is much smaller than my old one, but it's less expensive as well. The act of moving always reminds me of how much crap I carry around with me. I've jettisoned some of it already, but there is still a great deal I could probably stand to lose. Some perverse thought in the back of my mind considers Frances a potential solution to that problem; but I'm sure that would only bring problems of its own.

The weather has been in something of a daily repeating pattern of late. Clear, sunny, very hot and humid mornings, followed by clouds beginning to build in the afternoon, then very severe thunderstorms through the early evening. Fortunately, all of my actual moving was accomplished during the dry periods. I've been taking a lot of pictures of clouds, I just haven't had any time to look at them.

I got the Canon Powershot A70 back in its unrepaired condition. I've found that the problem manifests itself most often in an inability to fully retract the lens, though it very nearly does so. Holding down the power switch will then turn off the camera. If I try to immediately turn it on again, it often fails to extend the lens and gives the same general E18 error. But if I wait several minutes, I can usually get it to turn on and extend the lens normally. Once the lens is extended, focusing and zooming are able to be performed normally. I can no longer hear anything rattling in the lens assembly. This is unrelated to the repair effort except inasmuch as as it stopped rattling the day I took it to the shop, so naturally when I told the guys you could hear something rattling, you couldn't. Anyway, what I now believe is happening is that some small piece of something is causing binding near the end of the retraction cycle. If you try to power on immediately after the camera tried to retract the lens, I'm guessing the battery voltage is too low from the extended/higher effort to retract the lens, to sufficiently power the motor to overcome whatever is binding in the gear train and extend the lens. If I give the batteries a few minutes to recover, then there is sufficient power to overcome the resistance and the lens will extend as normal.

Naturally, I tried to take the thing apart but wasn't able to get very far. I couldn't manage to get the camera body itself apart to remove the lens assembly and to try to take a closer look at it. Amazingly, I was able to get everything back together, and it all still works. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with it yet, but I did buy some higher capacity NiMH batteries the other day (2200 mAH), and I'll see if I can't get more reliable performance out of it, even in its compromised condition.

iMac G5

The design seems a little underwhelming to me. But then, I had no idea what they could come up with next that would really be new or innovative. I guess neither did Jonathan Ive. I mean, it's not even a Golden Section. Both models are nearly square, the 17" model being closer to a true square at 16.8"x16.9", the 20" model comes in at 18.6"x19.4".

I wonder if the design will bring about a change to servicing the machine. Although it's a bit heavy (though I don't know how much the stand contributes) for this sort of thing, the simple slab-like form factor would seem to be ready-made for boxing up and shipping to a repair facility, much like the way Powerbooks are handled under AppleCare.

There will be no shortage of bags to carry these things around with, I'm sure.

The specs look okay, although the graphics chip is also a bit disappointing if you're thinking of playing the very latest and greatest 3d shooters.

The 20" model seems to have a better display (greater brightness and viewing angle), just judging by the specs at Apple's site. If I buy one, it would almost certainly be the 20" model.

Do I want one? Well, it's certainly a compact machine and I've recently re-acquired a keen appreciation for the limitations of space that I haven't felt since I was on sea duty. In terms of pure "desire," it really makes me want one of the previous models even more. So much so that I may do something rash in the near future. Most of what I do on computer would be ably handled by a 1.25GHz G4 iMac. Although the thought of bringing that design in for service does give me pause.

Once you get into an "all-in-one" paradigm for computer design, it quickly becomes very apparent how much the display and heat management dominate all other design considerations. The last iMac DV model being perhaps the best design of an AIO machine that relied on a CRT as its display. (The eMac being a close second.) The iMac G4 adopted the LCD as the display technology, and I think one would have expected the current iMac G5 design to have been the first effort as the flat panel display so readily suggests it. I think the sunflower or Luxo-design of the iMac G4 was based on a resistance to pursuing the obvious by Apple. Unfortunately, either price, performance or design prevented the iMac G4 from being as big a seller as Apple had hoped. My guess is some combination of price and performance were the greatest reasons; but then there's also ample reason to believe that many people are reluctant to embrace something that exceeds the bounds of their own imaginations.

So I think we're at a point where we're not going to see much that's truly exciting or different in form factor for a while. I believe there's one small area of opportunity for innovation, but it remains to be seen if Apple will embrace it. That would be a battery-powered, tablet-like computer based on a 15" LCD display with some means of holding the device erect, much like a table-top picture frame, built into the back; and the capacity to switch automatically from landscape to portrait display orientation. Pick it up, and you use it with a stylus and InkWell handwriting recognition. Set it down on the desk like a picture frame and you use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Some type of protective, fold-over cover could double as the support mechanism with some clever engineering, and you then have a truly "book-like" Powerbook.

Other than that, I think all we'll see from now on are just larger and smaller variations on the "computer-in-the-display." I guess one last idea would be to have some sort of computer built into a projection display device.

I have a feeling the iMac G5 is going to be something of a disappointment to Apple, and they'd be well advised to have a couple more rabbits to pull out of the hat.