THE NORT SPEWS ~ News and Reviews

From the Annals of Cyber Monday

2011-11-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

When it's too late to take the stitch in time that would have saved nine ...

I've had better Mondays. Coming off the Thanksgiving weekend I spent my re-entry day dealing with two critical problems where I work. I started thinking that instead of "Cyber Monday" it should be called "Blue Monday."

The first issue was that one of our printers, an expensive laser photo-imaging device, was down. Indications were that one or more of its lasers were not working (it has red, green, and blue ones). There are also three computers driving this beast. The first prepares images to be printed, the second is dedicated to feeding them to the printer because it's a delicate operation that requires tight synchronization. Neither of those systems had any problems, but the one that sends the images lit up with a warning screen about the bad lasers.

A call to tech support for the printer reminded me to check the third computer, which is tucked away inside the machine and normally not used by the operator. Unlike the first two computers, which run HP Unix, this shy unit runs a command-line-only version of ... you'll never guess ... Windows 98! Which kind of shows how old the whole thing is. Anyway, this computer has a job to do in controlling the lasers, and it was simply powered off.

But why? It's supposed to come on when you start the machine. Turned out the little button battery that keeps the CMOS memory alive when it's powered down had finally run out of juice. (That's where all the BIOS settings are saved.) After all, it was at least 10 years old. Apparently when that computer failed to boot up properly the system just shut it down. Tech support coached me on how to put the BIOS settings in manually so we could get up and running, and we sent out for a replacement battery. For want of a $6 part the whole thing was dead. Problem solved.

In the middle of all this the second problem came up. One of our Mac users couldn't get on the network. I couldn't find any obvious reason. Then a Windows user came to report that he had the same problem -- in fact "the whole network" was down. Well, I knew that wasn't true because I'd just been on the network at my desk. And the Mac user confirmed that at least some of the other Macs were not having any problem. While I was looking into the network settings on the Windows machine it suddenly started working again. So, maybe a temporary glitch? But no, the other computers were still having problems.

We now had a select group of Windows PCs, Macs, and even one Unix machine exhibiting the connection problem, and scattered between our two buildings. It couldn't be a network switch, because most likely that would have affected all the computers connected to it, but I restarted the switches anyway. No help. We tried our wireless access point and could connect to it, but could not access the Internet, so it seemed to be having the same problem -- it couldn't connect to the network gateway to the Internet. It seemed like it had to be something on the server, but the server appeared to be working normally and to have Internet access itself. Time to call in our friendly IT support company which does all the heavy lifting on our server issues.

Meanwhile I noticed that all the machines having the problem had similarly misconfigured IP addresses. Our network uses 10.1.1.x addresses, and these all had 192.168.3.x addresses. I tried manually configuring one of them with a correct address. It still didn't work, but now we were thinking about DHCP.

[If you want to know, that stands for Dynamic Host Control Protocol, which is simply a procedure by which a server can control the addresses of the computers on its network. When each computer starts up it shouts down the hallway, "Hey, I'd like to join the network -- what address can I use?" Everyone else on the network ignores this request, but the server shouts back something like "10.1.1.203."]

The first thing the support tech told me was that the DHCP service was not running on the server. Aha! that made sense. Only those computers that had recently rebooted, or whose addresses had to be renewed, were having connection issues, because they couldn't get an address on the network. All those that had been left on over the weekend were still running normally. So, just as simple as starting the DHCP service up again, right?

Not really. Because we didn't know what had caused it to shut down. And we didn't know where those bogus IP addresses were coming from. Normally if the computer asks for an address and can't get one, then it simply has no address; it doesn't substitute a different one. The network engineer deduced that something else on the network -- either an unauthorized device or a piece of malware -- was acting as a DHCP server. If that was the case, then it would cause the Windows server to stop its own DHCP service to avoid conflicts. And it would explain where all those similar IP addresses were coming from.

We had not added any new equipment, so the only thing to do was try to find out which machine was the culprit. Time to play detective. The engineer began unplugging one system at a time from the patch panel in the server room. After each one he tried to connect to the network with his iPad. As soon as he was unable to get an address, he knew he had unplugged the offending device. The answer was port 18 on the patch panel. Using our sketchy documentation of our wiring plan we located the guilty party.

If your prejudices are like mine, you probably think that either someone had plugged in their own router somewhere, or else one of the Windows machines had gotten a virus. But surprise -- it was a Mac Pro workstation.

So now we knew where and what, but not how. Why would one of the Macs suddenly decide to start acting as a DHCP server? Consulted by phone, a Mac guru identified the problem by that "3" in the IP address, which is not commonly used. It's an address range used by the Internet connection sharing service on the Mac, by means of which one computer can share its network access with a group of other computers, and which works by acting as a DHCP server.

But why would this service suddenly be switched on? We questioned the users -- had they made any changes, had network problems that they tried to solve? No, but, now that we mentioned it, the only unusual thing about that Mac was that over the weekend it had been moved from one desk to another, so it was plugged into a different port on the wall. But why should that change anything?

Of course, it shouldn't. But the Mac Pro has two ethernet ports on the back which can be configured differently. Sure enough, the other port did NOT have Internet connection sharing enabled. All that had happened is that when the computer was moved the network cable had been switched to the other port, with all the resulting complications. Normally it would not have been a problem, and everything would have "just worked" as Macs are famous for. But somewhere in the past someone must have configured that other port for some long-forgotten reason, and it had emerged to bite us.

They say you're always supposed to learn from your mistakes, but that implies that you can figure out what your mistakes were. What we learned from this is that the littlest things -- like that bad CMOS battery -- can have far reaching implications. In an organization of any size, where the network must run smoothly, even a small glitch can bring everything to a standstill. In this case, we lost several hours of impaired production time while we tried to find something that should have been apparent as soon as it happened.

If an IT support person -- me, for example -- had moved the Mac instead of one of the users, then the problem still might have come up. After all, there was a 50/50 chance that I might plug into the "wrong" ethernet port, and even if I were careful about testing the connection the problem might not have been noticable on that computer because it was the one causing the problem. But at least I would have known that this was the last thing that had changed on the network, and I could have started looking there. I might have just disconnected it, and when that solved the problem we could have left it disconnected until we had a chance to get down to the source of the problem. Instead, since I was working in the dark, we had to take the long way around to the solution.

What else could we have done? Well, if time travel was an option, I would suggest going back to when that second ethernet port was configured to support some external device. Then we could document what was done, and why. We might even label the port as being dedicated to a specific purpose in the hopes this might prevent someone in the far future from trying to use it to connect to the network.

The moral, I guess, is that the future arrives sooner than we think, and the past -- in which all mistakes happen -- is right now.

In His Own Words

2011-11-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, war is hell. Take it from someone who knew ...

On some previous Veterans Days I've taken the opportunity to remember my father, who, among other things, fought and was wounded in the largest and deadliest war in history. This year I thought I'd let him speak for himself. The following piece from his posthumous collection of poetry contains everything he had to say on the subject of war.

Like many veterans of World War II he seldom spoke about what had happened to him. But I remember him reading this poem to my mother when he wrote it, probably ten years after the war had ended. It was as if everything he had bottled up inside spilled out.

In it you can see the cynicism about organized religion that let him to question his faith and to abandon the Church. (He had been born and raised a Catholic.) But there is also, I think, an undercurrent of an abiding faith in the power of the natural world to heal and restore us if we will only allow it.

Your Wars

Go on and fight your wars
Pseudo-Christians, cowards all,
Professing meek cheeks,
Afraid to sheath your swords.

I've seen every war since your God forbade them,
Astonished at your unstrained compromise,
And I've seen enough:
The distraught of men before the firing,
Of other men before our firing,
And I mourn these young men
Dying before their works are done.

One I hardly knew fell across my path,
Unwilling mutant, an extra mouth
Newly dug above his ear.
What words from that eloquent mouth!
But never mentioned little cakes or chasubles.
I still see his questioning eyes.

One sought cover beneath a tank
Which, seeing the fire it drew,
Backed without warning, its steel teeth
Chewing his brain to pulp on icy ground.
Farmers no doubt wondered
At that especially fertile spot.

One oblivious to the fighting
Sat clutching himself to himself,
Cupping the ragged remains of genitals
In bloody hands. Impassioned bullet
To engage in such sadistic intercourse.

A woman sprawled broken among the rubble,
Breast suckling the air, legs undecorous.
We forgave her impropriety,
In unknowing embrace with fornicating death.

And I've seen the children.
Have you seen them, never young?
Eyes wondering?
Legs wandering?
Grimy claws sifting garbage,
Scraping maggot off?
Don't worry, belly-bloated child,
There's plenty of food in heaven --
By the way, have you been baptized?
In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen. There. Now you can die.

What are your wars for?
I see only one good in them --
A speedier evolution to weed out the unfit --
The cowards yearning for death
Who fight and die for make-beliefs.
It's living requires courage -- living never tried.

So go on and fight your wars.
Your countries will go, and your rich kings,
Leaving only the unturmoiled world.
Marked only with natural boundaries
Her hair grows green and luxuriant,
Her tears wash over ancient festers, healing them,
Leaving only the brave, holding hard to nebulous dreams.

So go on and fight your wars,
Expunge yourselves, become vague specimens
In future museums: "Here is Acquisitive Man
From the Age of Veneers, offshoot of Homo Sapiens.
Note the small braincase and large grasping hands."

So go on and fight your wars,
Churchmen send them out on new crusades,
Pray of the Peaceful Prince luck in the kill,
Satraps continue doing foolish things in duty's name,
Drape the hallowed bunting on the deluded slob's eternal bed,
Safe old men, cheer them on,
tear in eye, drink in hand.

-- "Scott" Donachie, 1922-1973

On the Joys of Reading Long Books

2011-09-25T17:16:00.001-04:00

There was a time in my life when I found books of a certain size intimidating. Maybe it goes back to my attempt, at the age of twelve, to absorb my father's copy of War and Peace when the only adult literature I had read until then was science fiction. I remember getting to the end of chapter one and feeling like I'd just eaten way too much chocolate cake. I knew it was good stuff, on a level above anything I'd seen, but I also knew I wasn't ready for it.

By the time I reached high school I was able to plow my way through not only Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky, and not only Russians but Americans like Steinbeck and Faulkner -- even Absolom, Absolom with its pages-long sentences. In my college years Hermann Hesse came into vogue, so I consumed most of his works including the monumental Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game) which is supplemented at the end by a sort of appendix of poetry and three short stories purported to have been written by its main character, a wonderful example of a book that contains other books. I also developed my fondness for philosophical works by digesting William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and Aldous Huxley's The Perrenial Philosophy. Both of those are heavy wading, but they made an interesting pair since they shared the idea that all the world's religions have much in common, an idea that appealed to me as a Unitarian who was destined to become a Quaker.

Then, as happens to many of us, I became so caught up in the world and the need to make a living that I found less time for reading. I returned to my first love of science fiction for recreation, and gravitated toward short stories that were quicker to consume. I lost my taste for big thick books that revealed from their sheer bulk the amount of time and attention that would have to be give to them. It was so much easier to take two hours to absorb a movie or a magazine.

I suppose it has just been reaching a later stage of my life that has drawn me back to those substantial works I had avoided for so long. But the pleasure of discovery -- or rediscovery -- has been well worth the wait. Armed only with the willingness, I launched into such projects as reading the twenty volumes of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, and Neal Stephenson's trilogy of 700-pagers set in the Baroque period. I also got an ebook reader and have been using it to catch up on many of the classics that I had somehow managed to overlook, things like Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, and the other wonderful novels of Joseph Conrad which are not called Heart of Darkness.

Having acquired the taste, it is now one of the most satisfying feelings I can imagine to sit down and crack the covers on something that measures a couple of inches in thickness. I'm finally reading Shadow Country, Peter Matthieson's final version (900 pp.) of his legend about Mr. Watson, the backwoods killer who was shot down by his neighbors in the Florida Everglades.

And, just to keep things interesting, I've also started in on the three volumes of Shelby Foote's definitive account of the Civil War. Something wonderful happens when you realize the author will take as much time and space as it takes to give you the full picture. Thus we begin with two capsule biographies of Lincoln and Davis, the rival Presidents, and proceed at leisure up to the first conflict at Harper's Ferry.

The reader can sit back with a sigh, confident in the hundreds of pages remaining to unfold the whole tale, and comforted by the other two volumes still waiting on the shelf. When you're having this good a time, the best news you can hear are the words, "To be continued ..."

Last Thoughts on Mahler

2011-07-01T20:21:00.004-04:00

This is it, I promise ...

Just because Michael Tilson Thomas is blabbing to the whole world about Gustav Mahler on Public TV (see Keeping Score) there's no reason I can't add the rest of my thoughts as a kind of footnote. So here in no particular order are some further impressions that came out of my recent immersion in those nine symphonies.

Beginnings: Out of the silence, grandeur. Some of them emerge like pale shapes swimming up out of the depths of a dark ocean. Others begin in medias res, sort of like, "So as I was saying ..." or "Then the next thing that happened was ..." It feels like the composer was so familiar with his material that he could begin that way, fully confident of where he was going.

I'm reminded of something a friend said after listening to part of Wagner's Ring cycle in Germany: "It goes on forever, but then every once in a while there's this incredible music." (It's also been said that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds.")

While building familiarity with Mahler I sometimes felt that way, impatient to get to my favorite parts. But eventually I understood that these choice moments had been set up by the texture of everything that went before. The music is a continuum, an environment in which one wanders, stopping here and there to enjoy the expansive views. Clouds and fields of sound, oceans to swim, forests in which to wander. He's created an entire world, the way a novelist does.

Vocals? In a symphony? Yes, and not just material from his lieder, but soloists and whole choruses stray into the orchestra pit and demand to be heard. Melody is not enough, he seems to say. I must put a voice to the deep feelings here. It's another example of the great range of expression to be found, from the collosal augmented orchestra down to the intimate scale of chamber music. When is the last time you ran into an extended duet for violin and french horn in the middle of a symphonic work?

A lilting tune that becomes too much for itself, strains, develops discords, turns anguished. ... Wait, is that "Frere Jacques?" Yes, but in a minor key and reduced to only two parts while being scored for a hundred instruments.

All the time in the world, no rush to get anywhere. Endless brooding, currents and counter currents. And now it sounds so nostalgic, like "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places ..."

And again, there's comic relief in the form of Jewish folk dances, or circus-style marches that sound like they belong in a Fellini film.

Long endings. Really long. Endings that make you consult the minute hand of your watch. One time in particular I sensed the vast gathering of forces that signals a Coda, the grand finale ... except instead of the usual thirty or forty seconds it was fully eight minutes until we got there.

And now here we are.

Learning How to Listen

2011-06-17T23:18:00.000-04:00

One thing leads to another ...

Coming as I do from a home in which classical music was always prominent, with both of my parents playing the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg on the solid upright piano in the living room, it's not surprising that I have grown into an avid collector and appreciator of such music. What's got me stumped is how it could possibly have taken me so long to get around to one of the most monumental composers of the last century and a half.

Granted, it takes time for musical tastes to mature. It was not until my teens that I started making my own selections of what to listen to and forming my own collection of recordings. As I recall I began with Gershwin, having got there through jazz, then moved on to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, the Romantics being among the most accessible.

Then my interest in learning to play the recorder sent me on a musical odyssey through the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. There I crashed head first into Johann Sebastian Bach and fell down on my knees, awestruck -- a condition that continues to this day.

Once so afflicted, a person is probably doomed to move on to all the other gods in this pantheon of human achievement. Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Telemann, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Stravinsky, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bernstein ... all these and more came crowding around me, demanding to be heard. They all got their chance, and I was seldom disappointed. I even tried some things that are darn hard to like, such as the clinically atonal works of Schoenberg and Berg, which sort of feels like wandering in a surreal desert. And as a technology buff I collected examples of the new art of electronic music way back before modern synthesizers had been invented.

It wasn't until recently, while trying to round out my collection through eMusic, that I ran into a speed bump by the name of Dmitri Shostakovitch. I already owned the set of 24 preludes and fugues -- one in every possible key -- that the 20th century Russian had been the first to attempt since the time of good old Bach (who did it not once but twice). But, suddenly appalled that I knew nothing about his 15 symphonies, I set out to listen to them all.

I was puzzled to find how impenetrable they seemed. Words like ponderous, harsh, chaotic, directionless, and unmelodic came to mind. I remember thinking, "This sounds like something enormous is being hauled by a cast of thousands tugging on ropes into a giant public space -- like maybe Red Square in Moscow."

It took a few more months, but I finally found out what my problem was. I had skipped someone. Someone important. Someone whose work both anticipated and laid the groundwork for those who came after. Someone in whose work lay the key to understanding.

That someone was Gustav Mahler. My curiosity about him had been piqued by an upcoming performance of the New World Symphony with the redoubtable Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. I was pleased to find that all of his recent recordings of Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony were available at eMusic, so I grabbed them all and started to absorb them.

It's hard to describe what an unexpected pleasure this was. Imagine going through your whole life in ignorance of Beethoven, and then suddenly discovering what you'd been missing. I had no idea that at this stage of my life there were any more such pleasant surprises to be found, but here it was.

I loaded them all onto my phone and started listening to them one after the other as I made my way to and from work each day. They became like a single huge opus divided up into chapters and books, one continuous stream of invention. This is a good analogy, because Mahler's music is literary, a composition consisting of long sentences and paragraphs that take their time to fully explore each idea. And absorbing them all is like working your way through a multi-volume set of novels, such as Patric O'Brian's seafaring yarns or Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Moody doesn't say half say it. These things wallow in mood. And there are wonderful recurring devices such as the dying crescendo -- kind of like saying "TA-DAAaaaa-ohhhh wait a minute I didn't mean to sound so positive about it ..." There is no excitement that can't be moderated, no sadness that may not turn triumphant, no exaltation that does not turn frenetic and threaten to self-destruct.

You can't help thinking of film music, because several generations of movie composers from Bernard Herman to John Williams have sat at Mahler's knee, learning from the master how to push the emotional buttons of their audiences on demand. But if you follow the rest of 20th century music you will also hear shades of Prokofiev, Aaron Copeland, even Bernstein ... and Dimitri Shostakovitch.

Fortified by my months-long immersion in pools of Mahler I ventured into Shostakovitch again, and this time found him readily accessible. Mahler had shown me how to listen and left me wanting more. The saga continued, as it has for centuries, as the thread was picked up by a new voice. Lead on.

Mahler Under the Stars

2011-05-21T21:35:00.000-04:00

Remember drive-in movies? Like that ...

A couple of months back I reported on the debut concert of the New World Symphony in their new home on South Beach. Last weekend we got it into our heads to catch the final performance of the season, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which was given outdoors as a Wallcast.

From Mahler Under the Stars

The whole idea of the Wallcast is a signature feature of the Frank Ghery-designed facility. What it does is to turn the concert hall inside out, transforming what used to be a closed performance for a select audience into an open one for the public at large.

Of course there is a long history of public concerts going back long before bandshells and bandstands in parks, and certainly before outdoor rock concerts. Mozart, for example, composed one of his finest wind serenades for such an event. It was so popular with both performers and the public that the musicians played it over and over again -- even late at night in front of the composer's balcony as a way of saying thank you.

But projecting the event from inside the building onto its exterior as it happens is a new wrinkle. So is the construction of a public park from which to enjoy the concert, including a permanently installed high quality sound system. We decided this was something we had to see -- and hear.

Apparently close to a thousand other people had the same idea. By the time we arrived, about 15 minutes before concert time, the grass between the tubular stereo speaker systems was packed with people, many with blankets and lawn chairs. (My advice -- arrive well in advance to stake your claim.) We found some space where the Wall was only partially blocked by a palm tree and settled in.

A bit after 8:00 the 5-storey screen bloomed into imagery with the colors of the sunset sky still fading behind it. Applause greeted the gigantic spectacled face of Michael Tilson Thomas as he launched into a brief introduction to Mahler's opus, including his own playing of a few bars on the piano. These commentaries before each of the four movements were brief but enlightening, and served to further open up the music to a wider audience. (They also demonstrated that there was at least a short delay between interior live performance and the external video, because indoors the audience did not see or hear those introductions.)

And what can you say about Mahler? (Actually I have so much to say about him that it will have to keep for another time.) Hearing the spacious majesty of this century-old music as it spilled out beneath the stars seemed somehow perfectly appropriate. The Sixth is all about Fate, from the ominous opening march to the fall of the famous hammer blows in the finale -- yes, that's a hammer, a big one, landing on a big rectangle to create a concussion unlike anything else in the orchestra. WHAM!

So, a good time was had by all, including a pair of toddlers trying to dance as if it were a rock festival, and one of the most well-mannered dogs I've ever seen -- and in spite of a smattering of those whose cell phones or private conversations were considered too important to postpone. But hey, that's the great American outdoors. I only hope that they absorbed something of the music, if only unconsciously.

Wending our way home we marvelled at the human ability to perform as well as to absorb such a complex tapestry, but even more the ability to conceive of it in the first place and to be able to write it all down for the ages. Mahler's music is fraught with meaning and portent. Composing this in 1903-4, he seems to sense the approaching doomsday of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon that were only decades away.

Hearing it now, we can only hope there are not more such events heading our way, perhaps only a matter of years in our own future. Mahler originally put three hammer blows into this work, but later took one of them out as if he couldn't bear it. Maybe in this he was being merciful, or maybe it was an expression of hope. I'd like to think so. Maybe that last strike of the hammer is the one that hasn't happened ... yet.

[Mahler specified the sound of the Hammer -- "brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe)" -- but not how to produce it. Apparently lots of things have been tried, including just a large bass drum, but the prevalent solution seems to be a big wooden sledge hammer hitting a resonant wooden box. The one the New World used was, shall we say, very effective.]

Here's another review from the Miami Herald.

A Man in Space

2011-04-13T22:06:00.002-04:00

So what were YOU doing that year?

In April of 1961 I had just turned 14 and was entering a phase of historical and political global consciousness. I was caught up in the ideological struggle of the Cold War, and I was also a science fiction nerd who avidly followed developments in rocketry and space exploration.

Every day as soon as I got home from school I spread out on the floor the morning Herald that had been carefully re-folded by my grandmother, and read through all the stories that I found interesting, which were a lot of them. I prided myself on knowing the names of the Presidents, Premiers, and Prime Ministers of foreign countries, as well as being aware of the many fronts where the forces of Communism and Capitalism were facing off.

But on April 12th I didn't have to go any further than the front page, where the smiling image of Yuri Gagarin announced that those durned Russians had beat us again. Sputnik had been bad enough. Only four years earlier we'd all been amazed when the first demonstation of orbital flight had been acheived without warning, like a premonition of the kind of nuclear sneak attack that we lived in fear of.

After excitedly following the ironically named American effort, "Vanguard," I had a vested interest in its success. I felt personally shamed when "our" rocket was not only beaten to the punch but then blew itself up on the launch pad -- not once, but twice. Before Dr. Von Braun and his Army missile team from Alabama managed to put something up there (Explorer I), the Russians had launched a second satellite containing the first living organism to travel in space -- Laika, the dog -- in a 13-foot-long capsule that dwarfed anything the US would be capable of launching for years to come.

In the four years that followed, the Mercury program was put into high gear. America had astronauts in training, a batch of test pilots with "the right stuff" to fly the US into space. In 1961 the first sub-orbital test flights were to be made using the same Redstone rocket that had put up Explorer I. Meanwhile the Atlas ICBM was being tested as an orbital booster -- with a disconcerting record of its own explosive failures. And then ...

Gagarin. It was Sputnik all over again. Before Alan Sheppard could take his 15-minute peek into space, Gagarin's one-orbit flight was followed by Titov's of 17 orbits -- a full day in which he travelled over most of the entire planet.

It all sounds so quaint now, and hard to understand why we took it so seriously. What we were witnessing was the first baby steps to be taken on our inevitable journey as a species into a wider environment. Now, along with our Russian (no longer Soviet) friends, we can celebrate the daring and achievement of all those pioneers, not just the ones of our own nationality.

Oddly enough, if I could pluck my 14-year-old self out of that past and whisk him into my present, it would not be the state of space exploration that would amaze him. Given the rapid advancement from Sputnik to Cosmonaut, he would probably expect us to have not only a space station but permanent bases on the moon and maybe even Mars by now. He would be surprised at the way we lost interest in the moon after visiting it a few times, and how we have backed away from larger challenges. He would be suitably impressed by the space shuttle, but puzzled to learn how old the design is, and that it has yet to be replaced by something newer and sleeker.

He would be impressed too at the advances that have been made with computers, lasers, and astronomy. Video conferencing, cell phones, and 3D televisions would be science fiction dreams come true. Electric cars -- OK, but no flying ones yet? What would absolutely knock him out, though, is the demise of the Soviet Union.

That thoughtful and tentative youth -- the same one who was going to have to deal one way or another with the military draft and the Vietnam war only six years in his future -- expected that the USSR would be there throughout his lifetime, and that it would continue to threaten nuclear Armageddon perhaps for centuries to come. He would have thought that if a lasting peace agreement were ever to be reached, it would be an agreement with the Soviet government.

All of which goes to show that it is usually easier to predict technological progress than social revolution. Witness what happened in the American colonies, or what's going on right now throughout the Middle East. Sure, we're still moving into space. But what will really happen to us is bound to be far more interesting ... and unexpected.

Birthday Wish

2011-03-16T21:27:00.001-04:00

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me ...?"

According to this card in the year of my birth
the transistor was invented, making possible
a radio with no vaccuum tubes. Chuck Yeager flew
faster than sound in a rocket propelled airplane,
and the Dumont Television Network inauguerated
broadcast news from Washington, D.C.
If you had gone to the ball park all the players
except Jackie Robinson would have been white.

Before this year you could not clean your sink
with Ajax or mix a batch of orange juice
from a tiny frozen can because those things
did not yet exist. The Department of War became
the Department of Defense, anticipating
the Newspeak of George Orwell who had not yet
published 1984. Princess Elizabeth got married.

The Atomic Energy Commission was formed
in an attempt to keep the lid on Pandora's Box,
the Marshall Plan began to rebuild Europe
while Radio Free Europe broadcasted to the East
and President Truman asked Congress for funds
to fight what he called "the Cold War."

So it was all set in stone, the story
of my life, beginning with the boom
of babies they could never build
enough schools for, continuing through
the years of Conelrad and bomb tests,
clouds of strontium-90 settling over
Mid-West cow pastures and seeping
into the wholesomeness of our milk,
of air raid drills, hiding under our desks,
the Sunday afternoon sirens, the missle gap,
the arms race, the space race, the moon race,
The Korean War, the Berlin wall, Cuba,
and Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam --
the entire agony of Communist hysteria
that mutated into Peace and Love
through a purple haze of electric
guitar music, then collapsed into a stupor
of sated Capitalist moneygrubbing,
Internet boom and bust, as we squandered
what was supposed to be the "peace dividend"
awarded to us as the righteous victors
by mortgaging our homes and building
an army so intent on finding a new enemy
that it did at last exactly that.

Now here I am, supposedly old enough to
know better, studying the accumulation
of my retirement funds and estimating when
the final payment will be made on my house,
wondering, if that day ever comes, how much
longer I will have to live. All around me
the world spins in confusion, lurching
from one disaster to the next like a drunk
wondering when he'll finally hit his bottom --
from which point there is only UP to go,
from where Salvation can be found,
and where life, as with the coming
of grandchildren, may reveal, finally,
its rewards.

Feline Dreams

2011-02-15T22:47:00.002-05:00

A visit from an old friend ...

My cat who died last year came to me in a dream. Since he left he'd been looking for me everywhere and had finally found me. "Hi, Steve," he said in his small voice. He sounded a bit like our grandchildren.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear him speak. He'd always done his best to communicate, approximating multi-syllable words like "hungry." I picked him up and stroked his fur. It was all smoothed down, almost as if wet, because he'd been swimming through the dark beyond. His eyes were wild with what he'd seen, or what he'd been unable to see. I petted him and called him "my kitty" and "old fuzzyhead" the way I used to.

All I could think of was how I'd been mourning the recent loss of my other cat, the last one, and how I'd been feeling alone. "How could I think that when I'll always have you?" I asked him.

On waking I took him with me, a small warm presence who will always be at my side. Once I wrote this about him:

Feline Dreams

My cat has nightmares. This I know by how
he lifts his head from slumber, turns it side
to side while blinking, body still supine
as if still sleeping from the neck on down.

I know it by the way he issues forth
a plaintive call as if say where am I?
or to bring me to his side the way
a child beckons parents in the fearsome

dark. I know it, too, by how he likes
to be picked up, embraces me, and rests
his head upon my shoulder, softly purrs
as if to say it all was just a dream.

What could so strain a feline mind is likely
something I will never know. I wonder,
does he see his sister's death, the shining
chrome that knocked the life from out her head
the way a flame, when blown, departs the candle?

Or is it just some rival beast, a dog
perhaps, or nasty tom, who plagues his rest?
His brain, all cerebellum, no cerebrum,
lacks the convolution needed for
such pondering. He seeks alone the comfort
I provide, then lies content, far more
at peace than you or I will ever be.

Cadillac Lady

2011-02-10T20:24:00.004-05:00

Like two ships passing in broad daylight ...

I first spotted her when I began taking the train to work, which meant I had to walk the last few blocks to my office. I only noticed because she was parked in a big black Cadillac, shiny and new, with the engine running. So that first impression symbolized American wealth and extravagance, idling a big V8 engine just to keep the sole occupant of the car comfortable in the heat.

As time went on I realized I was seeing her almost every day, parked in the same spot. It was right in front of a big picture framing store, so she might have been a wealthy patron having some of her art collection framed. But not even a museum would have enough work to keep her there day after day, and always so early in the morning.

It didn't take long for my writer's instincts to kick in. Part detective, part fantasist, that side of me filled in a picture. It had to be her store, her business, that she was keeping an eye on. Maybe her husband used to run it, but he's dead now, and she's in her old age, hanging on to what she has left. Naturally that means making sure the employees are on the job and not stealing from her, that the manager gets there and opens up on time.

She also has an obsession with protecting her parking lot. She's in a neighborhood with scarce public parking and numerous restaurants and night spots. Some business owners might hire a guy to rent out spaces at night, but she puts chains across the driveways and posts WILL TOW signs. When the chains are broken or taken down, she has thicker ones installed, with padlocks. When someone runs into them she has them painted yellow. When the posts are knocked down, a crew is at work the next day installing new ones.

I know the parking lot because I cut through it to save a few steps. At least I used to, before she had additional chains put up to seal off the pedestrian-sized openings that not even a motorcycle could have squeezed through.

Were those chains directed at me? Has she been watching me through the glass of her tinted windows, through a glass darkly, seeing me as a threat? I could jump the chains easily, but I don't. She'd only put up taller ones, like an athletic competition raising the high jump bar till only one person could clear it.

Instead I respect her boundaries, the territory of her own space that she guards so jealously, hands clutching the motionless steering wheel, driving nowhere, eyes behind sunglasses, a cigarette held in her lipsticked mouth as she gives herself a light and fills the hermetically sealed car with a cloud of her own smoke.

When I took her picture this morning, she silently drove away.

Attention to the Details

2011-01-31T21:00:00.001-05:00

As Columbo used to say, "Oh -- just one more thing ..."

I just began writing articles for Suite101.com with a review of the opening night concert for the new home of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach. (You can read it here.) But one small thing I omitted is a wonderful example of the fantastic attention to detail that is evident in all aspects of this project.

You know that chime that tells people to put down their drinks in the lobby and get to their seats? The one that goes "bong ... bong ... bong ..." or maybe "bing bong ... bing bong ... ?"

Well that's not good enough for the New World Center! I was delighted to hear the chimes play an entire little tune. And even more delighted when I recognized it as one of the oldest known pieces of Western music: the "Seikilos epitaph" that was discovered engraved on a tombstone in Turkey, and which dates from over 2,000 years ago.

(If you're wondering how I happened to recognize such an old song, it's because I discovered it while researching the article I wrote about the discovery of some bone flutes from the Ice Age -- perhaps the oldest musical instruments ever found.)

So when you go to the New World Center, even in the act of being ushered to your seat you are being reminded of the wonderfully long and rich history that has delivered us to this new golden age. Here are the lyrics [translated] so you can sing along:

While you live, shine,
don't suffer anything at all;
life exists only a short while,
and time demands its toll.

So in other words, eat, drink and be merry!

"Art" In Very Public Places

2011-01-08T21:31:00.002-05:00

Recently I posted this photo to my facebook pages as an example of what can happen when committees respond to a government mandate to put "art" in public places. Pretty awful, huh?

This glorified hitching post stands about four feet tall at the corner of a medical arts (no pun intended) building in South Miami. Even as a phallic symbol it's pretty wimpy and disgusting. A dish of water at the base seems to allude to it being a fountain, but it more closely resembles some kind of monumental pet feeding station.

You only have to go a few blocks further east to find another such example. When this twenty-foot tall construction was first unveiled -- or perhaps a better word is "installed" -- it was instantly dubbed "The Giant French Fries," or, even better, "MacDonald's After The Blast."

We're told that its real name is "Patience," though there is no explanation of why. Oddly enough the name acquired additional meaning when the, um, sculpture was lost and we had to wait a long time to get it back.

How could we lose something so large, you ask? Simple. Just remove it temporarily (hold that thought) while the ground it was on got razed in preparation for building a low-income housing project. Unfortunately, the contractor involved pocketed most of the money he was supposed to get while going no further than scraping the dirt and putting a chain link fence around it. By the time he'd been prosecuted, the whole idea of putting low-income housing on the site had been abandoned. (Obviously it was way too expensive!)

The earth turned and revolved about the sun, the years passed, and those crumpled Golden Arches became no more than a fond memory. Are you still holding that thought? Then where would YOU put a ton of steel "temporarily?" Give up? So did everyone else who worked for the county.

One day an inspector doing an inventory of the county's art collection discovered the piece had been lost. Then it was miraculously found in a scrap yard, identified as "rusting pieces of metal." To make up for this embarrassment the county took down the fence around the weed-grown construction site, covered it with grass, and placed the prodigal artwork, now decked out with a new coat of yellow paint, on a concrete and gravel pad. This part cost us only $40,000 -- surely a bargain.

Oh, and the place is now called a park. "Patience Park," of course.

Renaissance Florence had the Medici and Leonardo, but we've got Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places and the Professional Advisory Committee to insure that 1.5% of the construction cost of our public buildings goes to acquire, well ... art. Enjoy!

In The Balance

2010-12-29T11:50:00.000-05:00

Time to dig up another time capsule ...

Recently NPR gave some air time to considering a quaint tech gadget that was all the rage ten years ago at the start of the new decade, century, and millennium. What was it? The PDA, of course. The Personal Digital Assistant that was going to replace all our Daytimers with their annual paper refills. (Remember those?) Now we've just upgraded our mobile phones instead, and we're starting to wonder just how many more things they may be able to do for us until they're implanted at birth.

But there was a more pressing issue back at the turn of the millenium -- namely, who was the President going to be? We weren't sure, we were still counting and recounting the votes. Meanwhile the ball dropped in Times Square and the national juggernaut rolled headlong into the future. This is what I was thinking about it at the time:

“Don’t follow leaders ...”
- Bob Dylan

“Where are the people going? I am their leader, and I must follow them.”
-Ghandi

“Freedom of choice is what you’ve got ... freedom from choice is what you want.”
- Devo

November 8, 2000. I don’t have a President today.

This is an unusual situation. I have always had a President, my whole life. It’s a fact I have always taken for granted, like having air to breathe. Now, suddenly, the situation is uncertain. However temporary it may be (and it surely it will have been resolved by the time you read this), the absence of a leader has made me see things in a different light. I feel as if the nation is running on autopilot. There’s still someone at the helm, but he’s packing his bags to leave and seems less interested than he did when he was first charging into the job with a sense of energy and excitement. This is the time when his successor should be getting ready to take over. He only has about two months to form a whole Executive Branch of bureaucrats from an assortment of friends and hangers-on and people-to-be-appointed-later. It’s barely enough time. But he can’t even get started (whoever he is) because he doesn’t know if he’s really going to be President yet. The election is still hanging in the balance.

This is an uncomfortable situation for us. As a people, we hate ties. We invented extra innings, playoffs and “sudden-death overtime” to eliminate stalemate from our sports. Probably the Founding Fathers thought they were doing the same thing when they invented the Electoral College, placing the decision in the hands of a smaller group of people who were expected to be intelligent and practical enough to come to a clear decision. And of course they thought of everything, as they always did, spelling out a series of steps to follow in case of a split decision, ending up (if I remember correctly) with the Speaker of the House stepping into the job in a worst-case scenario that would leave all other contenders out in the cold. But of course, they didn’t anticipate that our politics would come to be dominated by two massive and equally matched parties who would grow accustomed to thinking of 52% of the vote as a “clear mandate” from the electorate. They didn’t anticipate how often the vote might be this close.

As far as we can tell with our evidently inaccurate counting methods (more on that anon), one candidate is ahead nationally by fewer than 200,000 votes out of nearly 100 million, or about two-tenths of a percent. The other candidate is ahead in the last remaining state he needs to win the electoral ballot by fewer than 2,000 votes out of about 6 million, or only three one-hundredths of a percent. If the entire electorate were reduced to only ten thousand voters, this would represent a single one of them -- a wishy-washy individual who was unable to come to a firm decision -- having a change of mood, or perhaps sneezing at the moment of punching the ballot and inadvertantly making the wrong choice.

Think that could never happen? I heard something worse reported on National Public Radio, an example of someone who was deprived of her vote by a combination of confusion and a poorly trained polling-place worker. A young woman voting for the first time was confronted by the confusing ballot. Suspecting that she had made a mistake, she asked the (poorly trained) polling-place worker to tell her who she had voted for. When the worker confirmed she had voted for the wrong candidate, the young woman asked for a new ballot, as she was told she could do by instructions printed right on the ballot itself. But the (poorly trained) election official told her she could not change it once it was punched, took it from her, and put it in the ballot box! Not fair! Everyone knows that they’re supposed to hand it back to you and let you put it in the box with your own hand, or tear it up if you want to -- at least, everyone except this particular (poorly trained) polling-place worker.

Does an isolated incident like this make a difference? Maybe not, by itself. Maybe not, assuming that a number of such errors might tend to be made in different directions, cancelling each other out. But other things are coming to light as the recount proceeds. Twenty-nine thousand votes were nearly lost from a computer disk. Someone was accused of attempting to take a ballot box home with them. A courier showed up a day late with a package of ballots that he forgot to deliver on election day. No doubt as the process continues other such incidents will come to light, variously amusing and appalling. We will begin to ask ourselves how accurate it is possible to be in any undertaking of this size, with so many opportunites for human error, and with the result wavering at four decimal places. If the recount comes up different, will we do it again? If we do it again, will it give us the same result or a still different one?

I suspect we could get a different answer every time, which is why we won’t do it more than once. Such a level of uncertainty would threaten our confidence too much. We depend on ourselves to have opinions and express them. We rely on the idea that the best candidate will win out in a contest. We trust ourselves to support the best, and to make our decisions clearly. All this fuzziness, this gray area in between, is too disconcerting. It’s as if our mechanistic concept of a quantifiable vote has been replaced by a new quantum theory in which results, like those of the pre-election polls, are qualified by “plus or minus two percent.” Like the location of an electron, which can be predicted only statistically, our votes have become a trend or tendency rather than a firm quantity. Like the photon, sometimes wave and other times particle, some people managed to vote for an indeterminate candidate, or to vote for two candidates at the same time.

It’s easy to imagine how things will turn out. Even though the recount comes up with a new answer, it will still lean in the same direction. However obvious it is by then that the result is within the margin of error of our ability to count the votes, the losing candidate will say, What the heck, and bow to the decision of the people. Never mind that nationally he received more votes. Never mind that the winning candidate only has a 48% plurality, due to the effect of pesky upstart rival political parties. It may be wrong, but it’s the way the system works. And above all, we want to believe that the system works.

Meanwhile we proceed, full steam ahead, running on inertia and our innate lack of need for leadership. Blind, rudderless, a juggernaut, the ship of state sails on. While this situation persists, I for one am enjoying the ambiguity. It’s a sense of freedom I haven’t felt for a long time, and may never feel again. An anarchistic moment of hiatus in the political continuum. A time to explore new possibilities -- bigger chunks of the vote going to other parties, run-off elections, coalitions between minor parties to dominate major ones ... the possibilities are unlimited. Enjoy it while you can.

The "Other" Christmas Music

2010-12-11T08:00:00.007-05:00

Celebrating Bach's Magnificat ...

Looking back at previous entries I find that I've written twice about Handel's Messiah, appropriately enough at Christmas time. But how is it possible that I've found nothing to say about my favorite choral music for this or any other season? That distinction goes to J.S. Bach's Magnificat, a brief masterpiece that sails past the listener all too quickly, in contrast to Handel's monumental oratorio.

Maybe the soft spot I have for this work dates back to the way I first discovered it. I was about 15 years old and browsing through the dusty used record bins at a pawn shop with my music buddy. Suddenly there it was -- a rare, 10-inch LP just big enough to fit the approximately 30 minutes that it takes to perform the 12 short movements. I'd never heard of it, but it was by Bach and that was good enough for me. I didn't even particularly care for choral music, but hey, did I say this was by Bach? Not only that, but it cost no more than 50 cents. At that price I woudn't care if it had scratches on it. And it was by Bach!

Suffice to say, the piece has never failed to satisfy. From the first listening I felt I was hearing something like Bach's greatest hits. Each short aria and chorus was perfect and complete, each with its own "hook," as the pop song industry calls it -- that thing that gets it to lodge in your memory and beg to be repeated. I started out with particular favorites, but soon found that they had all grown on me until I had adopted each one and accepted the whole work as an old friend.

It begins with a bang, a big timpani-assisted BUM-bum! not unlike the opening notes of the second movement to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the one that used to open the NBC Nightly News. In the instrumental prelude that ensues, and the chorus after it, Bach manages to weave together an amazing number of contrapuntal melody lines. The feat is even more amazing because many of the voices -- flutes, oboes, violins, and trumpets -- are all playing in the same register, so their lines overlap.

One piece that caught my attention right away was the aria in which an alto voice is supported by a duo of flutes or recorders, which is kind of like adding sugar to the syrup. But since I was learning to play the recorder at the time it was wonderful to discover my instrument being put to such sublime uses.

Another highlight is the soprano aria "Quia respexit," which features a particularly delectable obbligato by the oboe that winds around the voice like a sinewy vine. And then there's the aria for three voices -- both sopranos and an alto -- in which all three twine around one another while the oboe sails long notes overhead like a halo of light.

Something happens in the mind when it is asked to follow three different melodic lines at once. Most of us have a hard time with just two -- apart from Bach, who could apparently handle four, five, and even six with his own two hands. But for ordinary mortals it seems there is just one tune, or two, or many. It's like watching a magician play the shell game. The result is that we get the delightful feeling that no matter how closely we listen there is always something new and unexpected emerging.

As I said, all the other movements are favorites as well. There's not a recitative in the whole thing, nothing but elegant melody from beginning to end. And speaking of the end, that's wonderful too. First comes the "Gloria," with voices rising and building before declaring "Patri" (father) and "Filio" (son), but then descending from on high like the symbolic dove to deliver "Spiritui Sancto" (the holy spirit). Then comes the finale in which the whole ensemble bursts into a reprise of the opening, while singing, "sicut erat in principio ..." As it was in the beginning, is now and always will be. Chills every time!

In my 30's I acquired a new and better recording, then later bought another version that included the "Christmas interpolations" -- four additional movements that were in the original version performed at Christmas Vespers in 1723, but which Bach later removed to make it appropriate for performance at any time of the year. Then I had to buy another copy when CD's came along, and just recently I downloaded yet another version from eMusic.

This latest acquisition is a unique performance by the Ricercar Consort from the Netherlands. They perform the work with a small instrumental ensemble like the one Bach would have employed, and with just one single voice for each part in the choruses as well as the arias. This minimalist approach delivers wonderful clarity, especially in the thickest of the choral passages. I can honestly say that after all the years of listening I heard new things in it that I had never heard before.

Many years passed between my original discovery of the recording and my first opportunity to hear a live performance of the Magnificat. And even then the circumstances were unusual. It was in 1992, just a few weeks after Hurricane Andrew had pasted South Florida like a wrecking ball. The Miami Bach Society had to decide whether to go ahead with their scheduled performance under such difficult conditions. They did it, and even imported a guest virtuoso on the trumpet clarino -- an instrument with a mouthpiece especially suited for the highest register -- to add a finishing touch.

I'm a big fan of our Bach Society, and I have to say they particularly shone on that evening. It was a wonderful and healing experience coming on the heels of natural disaster, and seemed to be greatly appreciated by all. The Magnificat shared the bill that night with abridged highlights from Handel's Messiah. That was all very well, but to my ear the scintillating perfection of Bach's inspired tapestry made Handel sound dull and heavy by comparison.

Maybe it's just me, but let's hear it for the magnificent Magnificat.

[See Wikipedia for the text and its history. It all started with two pregnant moms bumping into one another. Mary supposedly gave this eloquent recitation that was eventually set to music. Years later, all grown up, one of the kids encountered the other one while he was baptizing people in a river. No wonder they recognized each other -- they were cradle mates!]

Cloudier and Cloudier

2010-12-04T08:00:00.006-05:00

There's more than weather on the horizon ...

Here are some more examples of what I wrote about recently in Life in the Cloud -- and in a way, the fact that I forgot about them is the best evidence that we're already taking them for granted.

You've Got Mail

Yes, as AOL likes to tell us, we have mail, and most of it is spam. Over 80% of it, in fact, ranging from the annoying and disgusting to the viscious and destructive. In this environment it is unconscionable for any provider to give you an email address without some industrial strength spam filtering. Unfortunately some of the most commonly used services (that means YOU, Hotmail and Yahoo!) are less than stellar in this department.

What makes matters worse is that many of us are still stuck on using a local email client on our desktops. In this traditional model our computers suck down everything that comes through the pipe, then flag some of it as suspected spam. How well that works usually depends on how good a job we do of "training" the software, and even then we get lots of false positives along with things that make it to the inbox anyhow. Since some viruses and worms can spread this way even if you never act on them, the damage is not prevented.

When I started using Gmail my first concern was convenience plus a more pleasing user interface than what Bellsouth/AT&T provides for webmail (which is AWFUL). It was only after I used it for awhile that I began to notice something amazing: an almost total absence of spam! Though it's not highly publicized, Google is doing a better job at this valuable service than all but the best enterprise-class filtering systems. And they're mostly giving it away in the public interest. (Contrast this to the service used by the company I work for which costs about $33.00 per user each year.)

I still have a spam folder in Gmail, and I can look there to see if anything good has got caught in it. But that happened so seldom that I stopped checking long ago. I don't even have to empty the spam folder, because everything in it gets deleted automatically after 30 days. Spam? What spam?

You can use a local mail client with Gmail if you want to, but that's a step backward from the security of just looking at your mail while it lives on Google's servers. Of course, it still can't help you if you look in the spam folder and click on that Britney Spears link; but at least she has not automatically downloaded herself onto your hard drive first!

It's a classic example of a formerly desktop-based service being supplanted by a cloud-based one. It's safer, and offers the convenience of access to the same mail from any web browser on any Internet-capable device. This only makes sense, when you think about it. Email only exists online, and anything we have stored on our local machines is just a copy. Sometimes people express reservations about using a completely online service because it won't be available if they lose their internet connection. True, road warriors who are too far from a wifi connection may not be able to look for something in their mailbox. But now that you can check your mail anywhere from your phone, is that really a problem? And what good is email if you're not online?

In addition, Gmail gives me big file attachments -- up to 10 megabytes -- and storage space that keeps growing faster than I can use it up. For example, a few years ago it said on the bottom of my screen that I was using 200MB or 7% of my 3 gigabytes available. Now it says I'm using 600MB or 8% of my 7.5 gigabytes. At this rate I'll never have to delete an email for the rest of my life. (Though of course I usually delete those with huge attachments.) And when my computer crashes or gets stolen I won't lose anything.

Docs

In that previous installment I mentioned Dropbox, which is a great way to back up your critical files while also making them available wherever you are. (There's also Box.net and others that focus more on sharing files, including really big ones.) Google Docs is a different approach that encourages you not only to store your files online but also to create and edit them there, using software accessed exclusively through the web.

What's good about that? Well, suppose you're at the public library someday and you'd like to look at your budget spreadsheet. With Dropbox you could find the file or even download it, but without Excel or OpenOffice installed on the library computer you can't see what's in it, much less edit it. But upload it into Google Docs and all you need is the web browser -- even the one on your phone will do. Since your docs can be shared, you can also use it as a collaboration tool. Plus, with everyone using the same software on the website there are no version control problems. The light begins to dawn ...

Backups and Operating Systems

Dropbox is one way to back up your critical files, but it's not really designed for automated industrial scale backups. For that you can consider something like Crashplan, which offers moderately priced "unlimited" storage for personal use. But as our need for storage grows and our personal ability to manage and protect it remains limited, the whole model may be about to turn inside out.

A couple of years ago it was rumored that Google was about to launch a service called Gdrive which you would be able to use for all your storage needs. They seem to have backed off from the idea, perhaps because they didn't think the market was ready for it (or that they couldn't make money from it). But during the discussions online it leaked out that one promotional angle was that the online version of your data would be the "real" one while anything on your own computer would be just a local copy.

That may sound nuts at first glance, but when you consider that over time your computers will come and go but your data lives on (hopefully!) then it starts to make sense. Whatever is on your local drive now might only be needed for temporary computational performance reasons -- like editing a big spreadsheet or working with image files.

Gdrive may only have been postponed until it can be linked with Google's forthcoming Chrome operating system. Chrome is intended to move the OS online as well. Your computer will be able to install, load, and run completely from an online source, with the benefit of automated updates. Computer geeks may prefer to keep "rolling their own," but for the vast majority of cases where the computer primarily surfs the web and plays games, this will be all people need. And if that sounds limiting, consider that those online apps will keep growing in usefulness, and even online gaming will soon achieve locally-installed video performance levels.

The cloud is coming, and in the immortal words of the Borg, "resistance is futile."

Book Fair 2010

2010-11-24T08:00:00.009-05:00

It's great even when abbreviated ...

This was year 27 of the Miami Book Fair International, and year 50 of its host, Miami-Dade College. I've been attending ever since year one -- even the year when most events were canceled due to severe weather -- and I'm ashamed to say how close to its beginning I attended Miami-Dade College. (Hint: it was the first year of South Campus when we had to attend classes at my old high school because the classroom buildings weren't finished yet).

I could only make it for the final day of this year's fair, but I appreciated all the more the few events I could attend. I started out with some levity in the Mateo Theater, an intimate space with a semicircular stage only about a dozen feet across. T. Cooper presented his odd little work, The Beaufort Diaries, about a polar bear who goes Hollywood. This graphic novel has spawned a video and might grow up to be a feature someday, especially with the attention it's gotten from David Duchovny and Leo DiCapprio. Here's what he showed us, as projected from his MacBook.

Then Vicky Hendricks, Miami's femme fatale of noir, gave us part of a story that takes place in Key West. Let's just say the place is going to the dogs. But you already knew that. This is from her new collection titled, aptly enough, Florida Gothic Stories, a follow up to her appearance in the collection, Miami Noir.

Finally Preston Allen, my old compadre from the Butterfly Lightning reading series (the website is gone but you can still view it at the Internet archive), read from his latest novel, Jesus Boy, about the steamy relations between bible thumper Elwin Parker and a lady old enough to know better. The book has a serious message that goes down more smoothly with its chuckle-provoking coat of sugar.

Fortified by this trio, I felt ready to face Writing On The Edge, an anthology of articles by fiction writers who were invited to witness the work of Doctors Without Borders. Tom Craig interviewed two of these writers, Damon Galgut from South Africa and Hari Kunzru from Great Britain. All the while they were accompanied by a running slide show of images collected from around the world, wherever the good doctors are involved in providing relief.

As the presentation progressed I began to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem. As it happened, the evening before I had attended a fundraiser for an organization called ProNica that assists the poor in Nicaragua. Coming from that narrow focus on a single locale in a single country, it was devastating to see the same scenes repeated in nation after nation. Just to give you an idea, here's a partial list that I jotted down from the captions in the slide show:

Armenia ... Assam ... Burundi ... Cambodia ... Chad ... Congo ... Morocco ... Palestine ... Sierra Leon ... Somalia ... Sudan ... Ukraine ... Uganda ... and as you can see from the gaps in the alphabet there are many more. One of the panelists quoted Harold Pinter, who said simply, "Most people in the world live in hell." What can be done? Well, if you're a doctor you can sign up for a six to nine month stint in hell, and wake up every day knowing that you will save one or more lives. If you're not a doctor, you can send them some money. It's not much, but it's a start.

After this it was comforting to get a longer view of history. Biographer Stacy Schiff's latest project is Cleopatra:A Life -- though, as she said, considering that her subject lived from 69 to 30 BCE, she wasn't sure if it was biography or paleontology. It's one thing when you can read all of Ben Franklin's letters or interview everyone who knew Richard Feynman, but quite another thing when 2,000 years have passed and the person of interest is a feature of ancient history. Schiff reminded us that over the intervening years the language, culture, religion, and calendar have all changed. Even the topography of Egypt is not what it was -- it's flatter -- and the Nile itself has moved over two miles from where it used to flow.

Given this, she appears to have done wonderful work by going back to the available sources -- what the Romans of the day had to say about Cleo -- and cutting through centuries of myth and romanticism. One notable correction is that the notorious queen was not known for her beauty but for her charisma. Hey, Marc Antony, you're going to love her -- she's got a great personality! She also had an unerring knack for who to get pregnant with, and when. Not a bad way to play the game when you're in the business of hereditary rule.

After grabbing a crepe in the food court I wrapped up my day with a duo of poets (Jim Brock, where were you?). Geoffrey Philp read to us from Dub Wise in his mellifluous Jamaican voice, and Nina Romano from her latest collection titled Cooking Lessons. Don't let this title fool you, though. This is far from an episode on the Food Channel, and Nina evokes far more of life than the satisfaction of appetites. I was particularly taken with the poem about an encounter with a deer in its death throes on a high and dark mountain road. I still have the chills to prove I was listening.

Until next year ...

Times are hard ... anyone want to buy a paper?

Another Modest Proposal

2010-11-21T09:00:00.004-05:00

My very own solution to the health care dilemma ...

One of the most bizarre spectacles I've ever seen in American politics was in the runup to our recent midterm election when crowds of protesters could be seen waving signs demanding "Repeal Healthcare!"

Huh? You mean you don't want any healthcare? No, of course that's not really what they meant. It's just that in our quest for soundbite brevity two words are better than three. What they really meant to say was "Repeal Healthcare Reform."

What? You mean you want healthcare to stay the way it is now? Unaffordable for many, unobtainable for some, easily lost for millions more? You mean insurance companies should continue to drop people as soon as they get sick? You mean people should continue to be required to bankrupt themselves before they can get any public assistance for medical issues?

Well, to be fair, I don't believe that's really what they want either. Mostly what they object to is the idea that they might be required by law to buy health insurance. It doesn't matter that we are already required by law to buy car insurance and required by banks to buy home insurance, and that our employers are required to purchase workers compensation insurance even though medical insurance is optional.

And it doesn't matter that a poll showed that 39% of the voters agreed with the statement, "The government should keep its hands off of Medicare." (True story!) It doesn't even matter that if those voters squinted carefully at their paycheck stubs they would see that they are paying the government for Medicare.

No, all they want is choice. And let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume this is not just a case of deep pocketed lobbyists managing to influence the electorate to vote against its own interests. No, these people are simply independent. They want to be able to buy insurance if they feel like it, and take their chances if they don't. Or, as many people below a certain income level do already, they might simply continue to report to the nearest emergency room whenever they get sick, relying on the public mandate that assures them of getting healthcare delivered in the most expensive way possible, and letting the rest of us pay for them.

My modest proposal is simply to add a provision allowing people to opt out of healthcare altogether. Don't want to buy coverage? Don't want to be taxed for it either? Fine. Just sign a release and you're on your own. But you don't get to change your mind when you get sick. And don't worry -- there won't be any government "death panels" advising euthenasia. That would be an unnecessary expense. There's already a place for you to go away and die. It's called "the street," and has been successfully tested nationwide for many years.

With this provision in place to remove any objections, the rest of us can proceed to join the other nations of the developed world in enjoying the benefits of assured, reliable medical treatment throughout our lives. The emergency rooms will be empty except for, um, emergencies, hospitals will not be overburdened with treating those who can't pay, and doctors will have time to talk to us again.

Here, I'll make it easy for you. Just clip this out and mail it in:

I, the undersigned, wish to exercise my freedom of choice to opt out of the hateful government mandated socialist Obamacare plan. I promise to purchase my medications __online / __ in Canada / __ in Mexico / __ at Walmart (choose one) or to do without them. I will find my own doctor and make my own arrangements to pay, thank you very much. In the choice between death and taxes my mind is made up.

I further waive my right to coverage under any current medical plan for preexisting conditions prior to the signing of this agreement. I'm mad as hell and I'm not taking it any more.

Signature: _____________________________
Effective Date: _____________

The Day After Veterans Day

2010-11-13T23:48:00.000-05:00

It used to be called Armistice Day, and celebrated peace ...

I wanted to post something about my dad again for Veterans Day but didn't get the chance. Now it occurs to me there's something symbolic about celebrating a bit late.

Have a look at this dashing young army officer. Dad posed in front of the League of Nations building in Geneva, Switzerland, where he got to go on leave immediately after the end of World War II. Seems the picture of youthful health doesn't he? But the photo lies. This vacation was purchased at the expense of putting his body in harm's way and having it punctured by a bullet. Not to mention the rest of the horrors he had managed to live through.

His wound was treated, and it healed. The pain went away except that it ached in certain kinds of weather. But there was scar tissue in one of his lungs that made him susceptible to chest colds. Ten years after the war he spent two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia in the middle of a Miami summer. He recovered, but would come down with bronchitis every winter like clockwork. One of the things I knew him by as a child was his cough, so familiar to me that I can still hear it.

He got in the habit of treating himself with penicillin pills that a friend who worked at the VA hospital got for him. It's possible that by doing this he created his very own drug resistant strain of pneumonia. The disease hit him again at the age of 52, and this time it failed to respond to treatment. So you could say that he died from his wound 30 years after it had been inflicted.

This national holiday was originally called Armistice Day to commemorate the end of the First World War, "the war to end all wars." It was to celebrate a peace which was supposed to be kept by the newly formed League of Nations. Sad to say, the League failed largely because the United States did not join. So there we have my father visiting its mortal remains in Geneva, the tomb of a dream of world peace, with the blood and ashes of another war fresh upon him.

In his too short life he saw other wars from the home front -- Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and a list of other "military interventions" too small to be dignified by being named. Armistice Day has become Veterans Day, and increasingly celebrates not just the sacrifices of soldiers, but the so-called glory of their achievements. The day comes wrapped in flags as well as wreaths and flowers. Misty-eyed we are supposed to march to the drum into the future, endlessly supplying new bodies eager for the grave.

But as our new crop of wounded veterans grows, we should attend to the hurt, and keep that foremost in our minds. We know now that pretty much everyone returns wounded from war, and that the effects last a lifetime. Brain damage, suicides, addictions, and homelessness are as much a result of military service as death in battle, and often harder for families to deal with.

When will there really be a war to end them all? Probably not unless there is a war that puts an end to everything, which was always the threat in the Cold War. But there could be a peace to end all war. And if that should ever happen we will really have an Armistice to commemorate.

Vive Jeanne D'Arc!

2010-10-23T13:14:00.001-04:00

Perhaps the greatest heroine in history ...

If you think you're familiar with the story of Joan of Arc, you might want to revisit the history of this remarkable woman. You could read George Bernard Shaw's play, Saint Joan, or do as I did and download a copy of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by none other than Mark Twain.

This may seem an odd subject for the author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and most of us have never heard of it. But besides being his last novel Twain considered it his finest:

"I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none."

Critics have never agreed with him, and even Mr. Clemens himself must have recognized that it was a departure from the bulk of his work since he first published it under a different pseudonym. Even so, it's an eminently readable tale told with his familiar gusto and killing insight into the depths of human nature. Often his lack of reverence for royalty recalls the "Duck" (duke) floating down the Mississippi on that immortal raft.

The book purports to be a translation of a French manuscript by Joan's page and secretary -- and childhood friend -- as he writes his memoirs late in life. This gives him a narrative vantage point from which to describe her history from country youth to unlikely soldier and liberator of her country, and finally to martyrdom.

Twain was accused of being "infatuated" with the subject of this history, and it's true that through his narrator he allows himself to gush with emotion over her. But in the context of fictional memoir this doesn't seem out of place, but rather in character: an emotional old man recalling a tragedy from his youth.

Through the amazement and enthusiasm of the narrator we are led to an understanding of the magnitude of what Joan accomplished. How is it possible that an illiterant country bumpkin, a slip of a girl just seventeen who had never been outside her own village, was able to inspire the confidence of her king and countrymen and to route occupying armies that had been entrenched for decades?

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the book is to make the story believable as it expands from the dreams and visions of a young girl to sweeping military engagements. Step by step, time and again, young Joan's implacable confidence in her "Voices" and faith in the strength of her Creator overcome all obstacles, however improbable it may seem. And whenever we might be threatened to doubt what happened, we are reminded of the meticulous historical record of the facts.

Much of that record, of course, is due to the trials (it took six of them!) that were arranged by the English to convict Joan of heresy. That she was burned at the stake is an historical fact as iconic as any that has ever been recorded. But in many ways what she accomplished in the course of the trials was her most impressive victory.

She was forced to endure endless questioning by as many as 62 judges arrayed before her, while allowed no legal counsel of her own, and living in chains and darkness during the rest of her days. In spite of this, her testimony is a sustained example of speaking truth to power that exceeds the confrontation of Jesus with Pontius Pilate. Day after day, week after week, month after month, she never admitted to any wrongdoing, never repudiated her faith and belief, avoided every legal trap devised by the opposition, dared to call them on every count of deviousness and blatant disregard of their own laws as they tried to convict her by her own admission.

For example, she was asked if she knew she was in God's grace. Answering Yes would have admitted heresy, because Church doctrine stated that no one could know if they were in a state of grace. Answering No would have admitted that she was guilty of her crimes, since she was not in a state of grace. It was the original Catch 22! Joan's reply?

"If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me."

What makes the story truly tragic is that she was ultimately punished for all the same qualities that made her remarkable, and that her devotion to the simple truth prevented her from making any compromises that might have saved her life. It is a life that was immortalized by being ended so soon. Joan was just nineteen when she was publically incinerated. That was almost 600 years ago, but the flame still burns.

[You can see a contemporary artist's take on Joan

at Geddes Levenson's "Officially An Artist."]

Blood and Oil

2010-09-30T20:00:00.003-04:00

Beware of judging a book by its movie ...

It's always dangerous to see a movie before reading the book it's based on, but in the case of There Will Be Blood I did it anyway, compelled by my admiration for Daniel Day Lewis and the critical acclaim the film had garnered. This is not to say I'm sorry, but it's a case where the film turns out to bear little resemblance to the tale told by the novel.

The dark, brooding portrait of a monomaniacal "oil man" in Paul Thomas Anderson's cinematic fantasy is a study in cold calculation. Lewis's restrained anger, which is destined to burst forth into violence, contrasts dramatically with the raving Evangelical foil of a self-declared preacher. The story comes to be a wrestling match between good and evil. The oil man's obsession with the dark fluid under the earth makes him satanic -- particularly so when lit by the flames of his burning well. The character is deepened by his adoption of the orphaned son of one of the oil field workers. This gives him a human side that would have been lacking otherwise, and makes him more complex.

The movie piqued my curiosity about what Upton Sinclair might have had in mind when he published Oil! back in 1926. Unlike some of his other works such as The Jungle and Metropolis, which are available from public domain sources like Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, OIL! was only available in traditional print form, so I ordered one from Amazon and plunged in.

How to catalog all the differences? To begin with, the "adopted" son of the film turns out to be a plot device to eliminate a whole range of characters. In the book, the "oil man" is known as Dad from the beginning, with the story told from the POV of his natural son and heir. Rather than the solitary loner of the film, Dad is replete with an estranged wife, a daughter, a sister, and mother, all of whom relocate with the father and son to be close to the latest oil field.

Early on Dad delivers a sales speech to a group of hopeful property owners on whose land he hopes to drill. The speech is repeated nearly word for word in the film, and sets the tone for the methodical nature of this entrepeneur. He's a man who can level with you while stealing the ground from under your feet, and not think any the worse of himself in the process. Once this quotation is over, however, the plots diverge immensely.

The chief victim in the wholesale character eliminations of the film is Paul, the brother of Eli, the preacher. Both are portrayed by the same actor in the film, and they never appear together, so we are led to believe they are a case of split personality which adds to the maniacal character of the "healer" as he strays predictably from the straight and narrow path. But in the novel Paul becomes one of the principle characters, the very embodiment of the workers struggling for justice.

What? Workers? Justice? Right. You'd never guess it from the film, but Sinclair created his Capitalist anti-hero in order to advocate his destruction. The genius of this is the way he gets you to like and admire him first. He's portrayed as the model self-made man, parlaying his gut feelings and street sense into a growing fortune while enriching his country by developing its natural resources. He's seen through the halo of his son's admiration, and in the beginning he's even a boss who treats his employees with decency and respect.

This sympathetic treatment continues throughout the story. Even as Dad is called upon to participate in ever more dastardly deeds to protect his growing empire, it is continually shown that even he is a victim of the system forced to comply with the demands of big business even when it goes against his grain as a compassionate human being.

The son goes by the nickname of "Bunny," though he is also "Jim Junior," sharing his father's name. As he grows up, the story continually broadens in reflection of his widening horizons. Early on he forms an attachment to Paul, Eli's secular brother, who impresses him as someone of complete honesty and lack of interest in money.

Paul goes to work for Dad, but soon takes the side of the oil workers as they organize themselves into a union. Then when World War I breaks out he joins the army, only to end up as part of a contingent of US soldiers guarding the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia.

Where? The book is an education on this chapter of our history, which has been largely swept under the rug. During the civil war that raged after the Russian revolution, the US and its allies actively took the side of the Whites against the Reds, aiding and abetting anyone who wanted to fight them, occupying territory, and supplying arms and troops. This foreign counterinsurgency effort continued long after the armistice that ended the war in Europe. (Any wonder why the Soviet Union was so paranoid about the West?)

Paul returns from this duty thoroughly radicalized, having seen the lengths to which the established powers would go in order to curtail the threat that their own workers might rebel in the same way. From then on he takes up the cause of American workers in this global struggle for rights and dignity, with Bunny following eagerly in his wake.

The scope of the story has gone from the personal to the community -- with Dad greasing the wheels of local politics to get roads built where he wants them -- then to the state and the nation -- as Dad, now a member of a powerful association, plays kingmaker in the Presidential election -- and finally to the global scale of worldwide economic oppression of the masses.

Through all this Bunny is the pivot point, his sympathies for Paul and the workers always at odds with his loyalty to his father and his own inherited wealth and position. As we know, it is not possible to serve two masters, at least not for long. The tension between the two builds as the characters continue to become ever more symbolic of the struggle they are acting out.

The conclusion will be familiar to any student of recent history. Because when faced with the choice between comfort and freedom, which one do we always choose? Yet still we are left with hope, because Bunny -- Jim Junior, his father's son -- was born with a conscience, and the will to exercise it.

Yes, there will be blood, plenty of it, and there's still oil in it.

Life in the Cloud

2010-09-23T21:00:00.002-04:00

There is no Cloud, only a silver lining ...

Long ago someone predicted that when computers acheived true commodity status we would no longer speak of "using a computer" any more than we speak of "using an electric motor" while vacuuming the floor.

This is nearly true now, as we use our cell phones, televisions, microwave ovens, and even cars, oblivious to the fact that they all contain microprocessors running operating systems and software. Instead we just call, watch, cook, and drive -- all of these activities enhanced or made possible by the ubiquitous chips within.

A similar development is about to happen to "The Cloud," that overused and constantly hyped buzzword that could easily be dismissed as just the latest in a long series of so-called paradigm shifts or "revolutions" flogged to the public consciousness. Nevertheless, The Cloud is about to achieve commodity status, and the less you hear about it the more certain it is that you'll be using it and relying upon it.

Here are a few cases in point:

Music

CD's may have been the death of LP records, but it took MP3's and the Internet to transform the music industry and its distribution system. The physical package has been replaced by a digital format, no different from anything else that can be turned into packets and sent round the world. But people still buy and collect music. Why? What does it mean to "own" a copy of something so insubstantial?

What we're really buying is a license to listen to it any number of times. But to protect that right we have to carefully store our copies and back them up to protect against loss, because the only way to legally acquire another copy is to buy it again.

But this model is based on the ownership of physical artifacts, and it has nothing to do with listening. How many times can I listen to a favorite song? Dozens, certainly. Hundreds, probably. But thousands? Would have to be a really good tune! And in my own case, with the equivalent of hundreds of CD's and many thousands of tracks (I refuse to call them songs, because most of them aren't), it would take me months of listening 24 hours a day just to hear everything I have just once.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a license to listen to anything that has ever been recorded, whatever I might choose at the moment? If the price was low enough -- and there's no reason for it to be expensive -- I would happily pay a monthly fee, or even by the hour, for the priviledge. This way I wouldn't have to acquire my own copies and worry about their preservation. And I wouldn't have to limit myself to a single set of performances of the Beethoven Symphonies, when others might be equally interesting. This service should also keep track of my favorite composers and performers so I could easily find them again, and find new things for me as they became available.

Remember what Jean Luc Picard could do on the Starship Enterprise? He could request some music ... make it guitar music ... no, not Spanish, classical ... Bach, perhaps ... by Julian Bream ... something slower ... and whatever his whim, the ubiquitous ship's computer would provide. There are nascent services like Rhapsody and Last.fm that are attempting something like this with pop music. It has a long way to go, but don't be surprised if it happens, and seemingly overnight.

Movies

You might think the exact same thing was going to happen to movies -- and certainly the MPAA is afraid that's true. But films are fundamentally different from music in two ways. First, they're much bigger, so storing your own copies presents more of a challenge. But second, and more importantly, there is a much more limited number of times they will be watched. Sure, you might sit through another rerun of Casablanca or Citizen Kane no matter how many times you've seen them before. But let's face it, most films wear thin even the second time around, and most of us will quickly move on from been-there-done-that to something new, even if it's not as good.

The result is that there is more of an impetus to changing the distribution model for movies than there is for music -- meaning that music stores might outlast video rental stores. Within the year there will be multiple choices for internet-based movies and TV from big names like Google and Apple as well as traditional cable and communications companies.

Netflix is pushing to eliminate mailing DVD's back and forth to you. They would rather get you to grab what you want online, even if they have to give much of it away for nothing. The whole idea of seeing what's on the shelf at Blockbuster already seems so quaint that the firm has filed for bankruptcy protection -- despite its own efforts to move online, the firm is bogged down by the weight of its bricks-and-mortar stores.

On the consumer side, permanent storage of the media has been replaced by streaming, which means you don't have to spend hours downloading a DVD but instead can watch it while the data pours in. Temporary storage is available in the form of Tivo-style recorders that let you pause or backup or even play over what you're watching, while recognizing (and incidentally enforcing) the idea that you won't want to see it more than a few times.

The shift to streaming is happening so fast that for many people the upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray will be skipped over -- the first time a physical format has been trumped by a purely digital one before it achieved wide adoption. Even the idea of consulting a schedule to find out when your favorite show is "on" will soon be a thing of the past. TV by appointment is over.

Once we get used to this with visual content, we'll look again at our music collections and wonder why not to do the same thing with them.

Computers

Which brings us back to computers, where we started out. If you live with one or more of these beasts, and most of us do, you have undoubtedly had your share of upgrades, crashes, lost files, and maddening tech support phone calls. Of these, the most insidious is that it is so easy to lose everything we thought we had carefully saved. All those photo albums ... emails ... financial information ... passwords to websites ... music collections (see above) ... cute videos of the kids at Christmas ... all up in smoke, either literally or figuratively, due to the failure of some cheap part on a motherboard, a dead hard drive, a dreaded virus attack, or a catastrophic software failure.

For years I've protected myself against these disasters (and many of us don't even try) by making periodic backup copies to some form of removable disk, or uploading them to a secure place on a server that I had access to.

But recently I began keeping some of my most useful files on Dropbox,* a service that gives you 2 gigabytes of free storage space online, with more available for a low cost. Google offers such space, too, through their Google Docs service -- and for an even lower price. But what makes Dropbox worthwhile is that it gives you a special folder that will automatically replicate everything you put there into your folder on their website. Not only that, but it will also replicate your files onto any other computers that you set up to use with the service. It even keeps the copies in sync and allows recovery of deleted files.

The convenience is eye-opening. What a pleasure to know the files I saved at home are available automatically at my office the next time I log in. The more I've used it, the less reason I see not to put ALL my files there -- at least the ones that don't take up too much space. It would be expensive to back up my vast music library, but not a problem at all to keep all my word documents, spreadsheets, and things I need for working with websites. Once you get used to the idea, you wonder why computers shouldn't just work this way, period.

The answer is, they soon will. Computers (if they're still called that), just like phones and tablets, will become nothing more than platforms to access software, data, and services that will be housed exclusively online. Any local copies you save will be just backups for the real thing. Just as with movies and music, what matters is access, not ownership or physical location.

Right now to save all my files with Dropbox might cost me from $8 to $30 per month (for 50 or 100 gigabytes). That's not cheap, but comparable to what I pay for Internet access. Google will sell you a full terabyte for $20 a month, showing that prices can go much lower. Now imagine that the service is bundled with your Internet package by your provider, just as you get a "free" email account along with it. And naturally your provider will take care of those tedious backups for you. Life is good!

The cloud is upon us, and as soon as it disappears you'll know we're living in it.

*[Like to try Dropbox and get some free extra storage space? Contact me for an invitation.]

Who Am I?

2010-09-12T20:40:00.003-04:00

For that matter, who are any of us?

Here's something from the past ... a journal that my mother kept for 28 days back in 1975, and which I discovered recently among her papers.

This is also a demo of Scribd.com, which bills itself as a "YouTube for documents." You can upload your material for publication in a variety of forms (I like PDF), make it public or private, set your copyright terms, even sell it if you want to. Scribd provides an easy set of tools for viewing, and you can choose to allow or disallow downloading and printing. There are even multiple ways to view called book, scroll, or slide. You can determine what the default view will be, but users can change it to suit their preference.

To distribute what you've done you can send a link like this one which will take the user to a full page view, or you can embed it in a web page or blog as I've done below. People can also find your publications by searching either on Scribd or the Internet. How cool is that?

My only complaint is that they don't offer enough categories under which to publish. For example, there is no heading for memoir, which seems like a big oversight. However, you can also add tags of your own choosing to make up for that. And presumably other categories will emerge according to demand.

And now ... ladies and gentlemen ... introducing my mom ...
Who Am I? - A Spiritual Journal by Evelyn Donachie

Letting Go

2010-08-30T19:43:00.002-04:00

When the weight of the past turns out not to be so heavy ...

One of the few things I wanted to collect from my sister's house after her death was a stone sculpture that had been sitting in the yard for over 30 years. A seated Buddha, it represented an ambition of peace and calm that my mother, who commissioned it, had always aspired to but never achieved.

The artist is also long gone. My friend Richard Sevigny gave it up to heart failure in the back of an emergency vehicle while he was preparing to move from what turned out to be his last home. He was just a few years into his 50's, but had lived hard and with scant regard to his health for most of his life.

He left behind a significant body of work including many drawings and paintings, and a number of other sculptures in wood, marble, and feather rock, but this was his only piece in limestone. The Buddha measured only about 20" tall but weighed a lot. I could still remember grunting as I lifted it out of my car to deliver it into my mom's yard when I was a lot younger and stronger than I am now. I was not looking forward to wrestling with it again, but it was important enough to me that I felt I had to try.

The more I thought about it, the heavier it got. I looked for my back support belt so I could protect my troublesome L4 and L5 vertebrae. I wondered if I should take some long boards so I could try to roll it up into the car if I couldn't lift it. In the end I imagined I wouldn't be able to budge it at all, that it would rest embedded in the earth as if permanently attached.

Then when I got there ... it was gone.

Not just gone as in recently stolen, but long gone. I found where it used to be, but there was not even an impression in the undergrowth to mark the spot. There was nothing to do but let it go. Just like that, the imagined weight was lifted. The only trace of it was a few photographs, as light as feathers.

In its place I brought back a whole trunk full of stuff that weighed just a few pounds: Two paintings by my grandmother, one by my sister, one by my ex-wife, a stack of family photo albums, and a metal file box full of documents.

Among these treasures were the manuscript to my dad's poetry book with his hand-written edits, a lock of my sister's hair from the age of 4, a US flag saved by my great-grandfather from the day he became a citizen, and a long manuscript in my mom's hand (she belonged to the age of beautiful penmanship) dated 1975 and titled "Who Am I?" in which she set down all her thoughts about life, identity, and religion.

Quite a trove. You never know what you'll find when you let go of the weight, real or imagined, of the past.

Where They Lived And Died

2010-08-19T20:50:00.003-04:00

When you don't know what you want to say, write a poem ...

I've come from the emptied shell of her house,
the one that protrudes from its yard
like a rotting tooth. It was possible once,
when it was full of her possessions,
the accumulated trash of a lifetime,
to believe that something yet pure
lay beneath. But bare, with its puddled
floor and mottled walls, its windows of
fractured glass, it's clear at last
that nothing was ever there.

The town is vacant at 5PM and
every third doorway is up for rent.
All Antiques Half Off (except #112)
but there's a choice of pub and 2 bars,
Tattoos are OPEN and the VFW is having a
Corn Hole Contest and Pancake Breakfast!
-- why must these things hurt so?

The whole place persists like a headache
that just won't go away. At lakeside
I smoke a cigar like Grandpa and wait
for the end of the day. The water is flat.
Gravity has pulled it taut as a sheet
on a final bed. Birds cross the overcast,
a flock of notes come loose from their staff
to wander tuneless on the air.
At one end the sky has been rubbed
by a last scrap of rainbow ... promising?
... promising? while at the other
the sun settles into murk, and dims,
yet will not die.

Future Past

2010-08-03T20:00:00.031-04:00

Cookie, shmookie -- there's nothing like old music to evoke old memories ...

Remember Monty Python's "Summarize Proust" sketch? It was a quiz show in which contestants were given 30 seconds to summarize Marcel Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. It went something like this:

"Go!"
"Well, um um, there's this man, um, and he's sitting -- he's sitting in a garden -- Oh! and there's a cookie! Yes yes, the cookie's very important, because, um um --"
BZZT!
"Time's up!"

But seriously ... The flavor of a cookie might have worked for Proust, bringing back the entire flavor of his childhood. But for me there's nothing better than hearing a piece of music I haven't heard for a long time. Recently I unearthed another lost recording that dates back (I'm amazed to say) almost 50 years. If you have any idea of my taste in music, you'll be surprised to hear that this treasured work is a collection of pop orchestrations by Les Baxter, one of those composer/arrangers who used to fill offices and department stores with "easy listening" Muzak.

I always thought that expression was perfect -- "easy" because it was so undemanding on listeners that you could hear it almost without noticing. To Baxter's credit, he was among the most capable practitioners of this style. At his best he approached the interesting orchestral textures of Ferde Grofé in The Grand Canyon Suite, and you could certainly stack him up against Leroy Anderson, whose work gets performed by serious orchestras.

So what's so special about Space Escapade? Well, to begin with, I was young and my musical sophistication had yet to develop. At the time the records in our household ranged from classical to Broadway musicals, but there was no jazz, no folk, and certainly no rock and roll. (Yes, kids, before it was Rock there was a roll at the end of it.) I think the only recordings I owned myself were Alvin and the Chipmunks (the originals) and maybe a Bob Newhart comedy album.

But I was enchanted with science fiction and Outer Space. And my dad had this wild friend who drove a Thunderbird sports car and threw parties. I'm pretty sure Space Escapade was a present from him, because my parents would never have bought such a thing. At any rate I always associated it with a free life style. Probably this was due to the cover, which represented some futuristic singles whooping it up with purple beverages and a misty floor. Things in the future would be more open and free, it implied. Girls would come in colors, like shirts, and there would be more than one of them available per male. (Hey, I never said it was politically correct.) Small wonder that it captured my juvenile fancy.

Looking for more info on Les Baxter I came across the website SpaceAgePop.com, the author of which has identified an entire genre of related music dating from the 1940's through the 1970's. One interesting thing to note is that apparently the "Space Age" is long since over -- it ended with the conclusion of the Space Race with the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the Apollo moon program. But for a few glorious decades the future seemed to hold unlimited promise. It was going to be a Technicolor future, with Americans riding in rockets to the accompaniment of sugary sweet violins ... a Jetsons future in which the nuclear family would consist of mom and dad, two kids, a dog and a robot.

Alas, that future is over too. It ended in the quicksand of Vietnam, the debacle of Watergate, two space shuttle disasters, financial collapse, terrorism, pollution, and the advent of global warming. We have to work quite a bit harder now to imagine a brighter future, and even then it is one that has lost its innocence.

But Space Age Pop is still here to remind us of the future that used to be. It even includes multiple sub-genres such as Exotica, Jet Set Pop, Incredibly Strange Music, and my personal favorite: Bachelor Pad Pop. Actually I learned later that my dad's wild friend was gay, so we really should add an additional genre called Gay Bachelor Pad Pop.

You can listen to samples of Space Escapade and the rest of Baxter's prolific output at Amazon. What's that? You say it sounds dippy? Of course it's dippy! That's the whole point! You just have to strap on your jet pack and go along for the ride. Even the album cover description is camp beyond words:

"Even today, in an era of science and satellites, the mystery of the universe has lost none of its magical appeal. We can close our eyes and dream of the future, wondering whether a starlit planet might soon replace a tropical island, the Riviera, or a distant mountain lodge as the ideal spot for a romantic holiday. Or, with the aid of the music in this album, we can drift into the future's lovemist with Les Baxter and make a spaceliner escapade by earthlight, tongue safely fastened in cheek."

The Deltas and Epsilons Among Us

2010-07-28T21:00:00.001-04:00

"How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"

-The Tempest

Each day when I disembark at the Brickell Ave metro station I encounter one or more unusual men making their way to work. I group them together for several reasons. For one thing, they obviously know one another and are often traveling together in groups of two or three. They get off at the same stop each day and presumably go to the same destination, so I assume they work together. And then there are the other things they have in common ...

They tend to be large-bottomed, dumpy figures with a tendency to waddle when they walk. They favor pants with elastic waistbands instead of belts. They wear t-shirts with company sponsor logos or event announcements. Their speech is slurred. They have the unselfconsciousness of children. They speak in short sentences, shorter words. Like Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. In fact, they are Benjy.

My fascination with them is not that of a journalist. If it were, I would be concerned to find out where they worked, what sort of "program" was helping them find their place in the world, how it was funded, what their medical maladies were, and what their prospects were. I'd want to know what percentage of the population they represent, and whether their segment is growing, and if so how fast.

Instead, I prefer to wonder what their lives are like, and if in some odd wordless way we are all like them. I can certainly relate to their air of worn out innocence, that of children who have grown old without growing up, who in fact will never grow up. Don't I still sense that kid within me, the same one I used to be and still am? How different am I because I've learned all my skills and can express myself in big paragraphs?

Then, too, I find myself thinking of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which people are purposefully bred into graded subspecies to fit them to different niches in society -- from the Alphas and Betas who run everything, through the Gammas who can do skilled labor, down to the Deltas and Epsilons who are suited only for menial tasks like assembly lines and cleaning.

This book used to be science fiction. Now it often seems ever closer to reality. A high-school teacher I know was shocked to find that his students could not see any problem with this dystopian vision, especially its use of the wonder drug called Soma to make everyone placid and cooperative if not downright happy. Now the prospect of memory and learning enhancement chemicals, and computer augmented intelligence, makes it possible we will create a caste of hyperintelligent beings among ourselves, while the mass of third-world humanity is left behind to shift for itself.

Meanwhile, the Deltas and Epsilons are already here, swabbing our floors and emptying the trash. We ask nothing more of them but to keep quiet and out of the way, maybe to watch a little TV, and remain content.

Synesthesia City

2010-07-18T14:43:00.006-04:00

"A neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway." (Wikipedia)

I can remember "seeing" music for the first time when I was only about seven years old. My parents were listening to a symphony on the radio one Sunday afternoon and I was just dreaming away the time when I became caught up in the sound as waves from the string section alternately broke over the rocks of the percussion with competing waves from the brass and winds. I picked up a knife and fork and began weaving them through the air in imitation of what I perceived the music doing.

Some people say they see colors in music, while others feel only emotion. For me it has always been structures and shapes, three dimensional forms that erupt and soar and collide. Even years later, after I had learned to hear the notes and keys, to understand the formalism of music and to appreciate all its subtlety of tone, I'm still able to hear the shape of it. Perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to showing what I see is the version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as it was visualized in the original film of Fantasia. Those great rolling waves of abstract form, both surreal and tangible, struck me as being just about right.

The experience came to me again the other night while listening to -- and watching -- a recital by pianist Awadagin Pratt. I'd seen him once before and had been impressed enough to leave the performance with two of his CD's clutched in my hands. (We picked up another one this night.) As my wife noted, "He's a Big guy!" Large enough to play on the line in the NFL, Pratt uses his powerful frame to cause the piano to thunder. But of course it's not only a matter of pounding. He can evoke the tinkle of chiming glass in the topmost register, and soar from end to end of the keyboard with perfect grace and control.

This ambitious program began with Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann and concluded with Chopin and Liszt. The long suffering Bösendorfer at his command showed it was equal to the task, and Pratt seemed as full of energy at the conclusion as he was in the beginning. Along the way tens of thousands of notes must have been struck, and all to good effect. The Liszt sonata in particular produced the above mentioned effect of synesthesia most powerfully -- I found it best to close my eyes, the better to see the towering shapes that seemed to emerge from the strings, totter and collapse in pieces, only to rise again, wrenching and twisting at the dual demands of composer and performer.

Mr. Pratt is also an educator, who instructed us in the history of the Schumann variations on a theme of Beethoven. This was a work that never achieved a final definitive form in the composer's lifetime, though different versions of it were published. Pratt took it on himself to arrange the variations in a novel sequence, starting with those most free formed and farthest from the theme, and progressing through those more similar to it, then ending with a statement of the theme itself. He let us listen for it ourselves so we could experience what he called an "aha moment" somewhere in the middle. I'll spoil it for you: the theme is from the second movement of the Seventh Symphony, the funeral march, though there was nothing funereal about what Schumann did with it. It has to be one of the most virtuosic pieces he ever wrote, easily rivaling the calisthenics of Franz Liszt.

And speaking of Liszt, my favorite quote attributed to him is his reply to Georges Sand when she told him he played the piano better than anyone had ever played it. "But," he said, "I want to play it as well as it can be played." Which is something else again. Supposedly late in his life he began revising some of his more difficult compositions, fearing that after his death his music would be forgotten if no one else could play it. He needn't have worried so much. Just turn Awadagin Pratt loose on it and tell him it's impossible to perform.

You can see him in action through his website which has a video from his performance at the White House last year. He's playing what the New York Times called "his herculean transcription" of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. This is the same piece he played for us the other night (though without the addition of "Hail to the Chief" at the end) and demonstrates what Bach might have done if the concert grand piano had been invented in his lifetime.

Like to experience synesthesia yourself? Have a look at this ...

The link to the White House video is no longer on his website, but here it is straight from YouTube --

Phone Envy

2010-07-13T20:55:00.004-04:00

I'm a victim of inconspicuous consumption ...

If a future historian ever reads this blog the way we read the diary of Samuel Pepys, trying to find out what life was like in the past, one thing that will no doubt prove amusing is the way I can rhapsodize about technologies that will soon become quaint.

This has happened to me before. Way back when I was in college I learned to program on an IBM 360 mainframe computer that ate punch cards, recorded its memories on reels of magnetic tape, and spat out reams of text on multipart green-bar paper. The room-sized beast had a face full of glittering lights and no video screen. It had less computing power than what is contained now in my watch.

Later I worked for a company that used just such a machine to process payroll records. Years afterward I wrote about my experiences there ... the room full of chattering keypunch machines like a nest of machine guns, the "bursting and decollating" room where printed reports were torn apart, the dumpster full of used data cards that were disposed of each night. One comment about this in a writing workshop was, "this might as well be Bartleby, the Scrivener." Just as Melville's quirky clerk, with his job (scrivening?) of copying documents in longhand, has vanished like a covered wagon heading West, so too this "modern" technology quickly passed into history almost while we watched. The next time I saw an IBM 360 it was behind glass in the Computer History Museum in Boston. The curators had recreated a programmer's office, circa 1965, including a scribbled note that said, "Bob - I can get you an hour on the machine between 3 and 4 AM tomorrow."

With all that in mind, let me tell you about my new phone (an HTC Aria running Android). One of the nice things about arriving late to a party like the smart phone revolution is the delightful experience of the "how long has this been going on?" feeling. Of course I've been reading about the developments all along, watching coworkers check their email on their phones, even listen to music and browse the Internet. And my own last two phones have at least had cameras built in and a way to send pictures out into the world. And yes, I even experienced some envy for the first iPhone adopters and their endless fascination with flipping through screens with their bare fingertips.

No more phone envy. My new phone has "apps" (more quaintly known as "applications," a usage of the word that comes from the idea of applying computer power to some task). It doesn't matter to me that the iPhone currently has more of them; there are already more than I can bother to find out about. This number is effectively in the "jillions." And unlike the painful, laborious, and sometimes catastrophic experience of installing software on a desktop computer, apps are designed to plug in like popping a Chiclet in your mouth. I was soon playing with a bubble level, a compass, and a map. The phone knows which way is up, which way is north, and where it is located - which gives it a leg up on many humans.

Naturally it has a camera, both photo and video, now standard equipment on any self respecting phone, as well as the ability to play music, and even a built in FM radio to tie me into NPR. (Hey, Apple - when will you let people play with the deactivated radios in YOUR phones? Oh, never mind - I realize that will not happen until there's a way to make them pay for it.)

But the thing that really brought me up short was pushing the little icon that said "Voice Dialing." A window opened up that said "Listening ..." like the ship computer on Star Trek used to say. I assumed I would have to record the sound of my voice saying a name and then train the phone to identify this with an entry in my address book. But when I said my wife's name a moment later her phone number appeared on screen ready to dial. The phone understood me!

Like I said. The "how long has this been going on" feeling. Last time I paid any attention to voice recognition software it was an expensive application that demanded a desktop computer with plenty of horsepower and didn't work very well even then. Apparently now a phone has all the horsepower needed for this, and it works pretty well. I guess I should have caught on from all the recent conversations I've had with phone answering robots when I call the phone company.

So, for you in the future, to whom Implanted Direct Cerebral Communication (or IDCC) is commonplace, and to whom the very idea of a "phone" is so arcane that it requires explanation, just remember where you came from. And remember too, that even your wonderful toys will someday become laughable.

A Modest Proposal

2010-06-20T20:55:00.003-04:00

Oil spill? Wattaya say we just go with it?

So it's been a couple of months now, and so far all attempts to seal the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico have failed to do anything but slow it down a bit. I've got a better idea. Let's use this as an opportunity to establish one of the world's largest petroleum holding tanks right in our own back yard.

First off, forget trying to plug the leak. What's the point? With thousands of other oil platforms out there something else is bound to happen to another one someday and we'll be right back where we started. Instead, let's pop the cork on the rest of them and REALLY start filling the Gulf with oil. After a while there should be so much of it that the water will be displaced completely, leaving us with a thousand mile wide lake of crude to draw on.

Of course we'll have to prevent it from escaping into the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, so that's why we'll need the good old Army Corps of Engineers to build a sea wall from the Florida Keys to the tip of the Yucatan peninsula. We'll let the water out but keep the oil in -- don't ask, let's just let them figure out a way. I think oil floats, right?

Speaking of the Yucatan, we'll need to address finding a way to keep Mexico from sucking up some of our oil. After all, we drilled the holes and built the big sea wall, so we should have exclusive rights to the oil even though about a thousand miles of the Mexican coastline will be helping to contain it. Well, all right, maybe we'll let them share. There has to be some role for diplomacy in all this.

Finally we'll have to address the danger of fire. That's why I propose to invest in the installation of a line of NO SMOKING signs about every 100 feet around the whole circumference of what will now be called the Gulf Oil Lake. Of course we'll need to have guards patrolling the edges also and making sure that people obey the signs. This is very important, because you can just imagine what the environmentalists would say if the whole thing turns into a giant torch.

Admittedly, that is a worst case scenario, but we should be prepared for this too. That's why NASA will be called in to capture an asteroid of the right size and place it into Earth orbit. Then if the oil lake ever catches fire, they will land the asteroid in the middle of it, and the tremendous rush of air will snuff the flames out.

I realize this sounds a bit scary, but remember it's only a worst case scenario. If everything is designed and built properly, and everyone is careful, what could possibly go wrong?

A New Old Fave

2010-06-19T08:00:00.024-04:00

That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

- Twelfth Night

Proving that it's never too late to discover classical works for the first time, I can say that I have a new favorite piece of chamber music following my introduction to Schubert's cello quintet in C major at a recent performance at the University of Miami.

No, silly, of course it's not five cellos, but a string quartet (in this case Miami's own Amernet) augmented by an extra guest cellist (in the person of Gary Hoffman). What this makes possible is the creation and evolution of some achingly beautiful dual melodies handed back and forth between the pair of cellos and the pair of violins, or in some cases violin and viola.

What I mean by dual melody is that the theme is written in harmony, with an upper and lower voice singing in unison or winding around one another in counterpoint, but impossible to separate. Neither voice can be said to represent the melody on its own; it exists for two voices or not at all -- something like the monumental double fugue built into the last movement of Beethoven's ninth.

Another facet of this inspired composition is the ineffability of the theme. Hearing it for the first time, I seemed to have known it all my life. But the day after the performance I was unable to reconstruct it in my mind. I had to hunt down a recording to end that maddening sensation of having a forgotten song on the tip of my tongue. (And let me say that the CD with the Cleveland Quartet and guest Yo-Yo Ma is at least as good as the live performance I heard.)

The slow second movement is a study in stasis, with measured accents in pizzicato like the ticking of a clock to punctuate a melodic progression that seems in no rush whatsoever to get anywhere. I found myself recalling the old song by the Talking Heads that says, "Heaven ... heaven is a place ... a place where nothing ... nothing ever happens ..." This movement is certainly ethereal enough to qualify for the afterlife. Then the piece achieves rebirth in the gutsy scherzo that follows.

Also fascinating is the way Schubert hearkens back to the first movement's theme in the fourth. It nearly sounds like it will be a recapitulation note for note, but instead he gives it a different twist. In fact, it turns out to be a wholly different melody that somehow alludes to the original one. While the tune in the beginning is full of yearning and becoming, the one at the end seems to be a fond memory, a summation while bowing out in conclusion.

We feel works like this are "deep" in proportion to what we bring to them and how they seem to reflect our experience of life. Perhaps my own attraction to this one is partly due to my own maturity and the ability to look back across a lifetime toward the distant events of childhood and adolescence.

But don't let age or experience get in your way of the rich enjoyment to be found in Schubert's works for chamber ensemble. The cello quintet doesn't stand alone; it's part of a large body of string quartets, piano trios and quartets, and at least one octet including a few wind instruments.

Another sea to dive into and swim around in. Come on in, the water's great.

How I Spent the 17th Century

2010-06-12T23:23:00.001-04:00

-- and the early years of the 18th, too ...

When I first spotted the first volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle at the book store my initial reaction was "Oh no!" (in the immortal words of Mr. Bill). It was so huge, at 900 pages, and so interesting to me, and so soon to be followed by two sequels of similar length, that all I could see was the huge investment of time I was sure to make in absorbing the whole opus. (The original three volumes were later printed in eight smaller installments, so it's not accurate to call it a trilogy.)

I put it off as long as I could, but this year I bought all three volumes in trade paperback format and wallowed my way through one of the most rewarding reading experiences I can remember. It's not the longest series I've got under my belt -- that distinction goes to the 20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian's epic about the Napoleonic Wars. But Stephenson's efforts are certainly to be classed with O'Brian's as mileposts in historical fiction.

Like O'Brian's work, Stephenson's is global in scope, with historical allusions going back to medieval alchemy and forward to contemporary science, cryptography, computers, and multinational corporate greed. The characters range from the noble in birth to the slave, from the greatest scientific minds of the day (Newton and Leibniz) to the self-centered idiots who generally people the rest of the world.

The principle characters are Daniel Waterhouse, a college roommate of Isaac Newton's who goes on to play a pivotal role in the machinations of the plot; Jack Shaftoe, a mercenary soldier and erstwhile street urchin who becomes a "vagabond king" legendary all over Europe; and one Eliza, a woman who was taken as a slave and escapes from a Turkish harem to become Duchess of the (mythical) island of Qwghlm and a femme fatale of international finance and intrigue.

If those names sound familiar then you must have read Stephenson's earlier work, Cryptonomicon, to which the Baroque Cycle forms an enormous prequel. In that novel, two generations of the 20th century descendants of Waterhouse, Shaftoe, and Eliza fight their way through World War II into the age of the Internet and global finance.

In all, the four volumes constitute a fascinating meditation on the nature of money, the influences of science and mathematics on the real world, and the origins and direction of technology. At the same time, the story is pure adventure, filled with sword fights, desperate battles and escapes from imprisonment, lust and romance, and the old tale of rags to riches -- and rags again -- that never fails to disappoint the reader.

Of course any good novel must come with a villain, and due to its size the Baroque Cycle has room for a number of them, all of whom come to wonderfully satisfying bad ends. But I won't spoil things by naming them or describing their fates. For that you'll just have to buckle up and go along for the ride.

What makes a piece like this work is, in a word, texture. Stephenson has achieved a nearly perfect synthesis of modern narrative with the best features of careful classical description. No detail is so minor that it can't become the subject of historical analysis, or etymology, or lengthy depiction, or all three, until the picture becomes almost like a memory of having had the experience. Repetition plays a role also -- I lost count, for example, of the number of allusions, all of them disgusting, to the Fleet Ditch (later to become Fleet Street) that sliced Baroque London with a reeking open sewer.

But the earthy horrors of the day are counterbalanced by the lofty flights of the first stirrings of modern science, the birth of the Age of Reason. You can argue that it's an age whose time has yet to come, but its aspirations are as timely now as they were 300 years ago. After setting down the last volume, I almost felt as if I'd been reading for that long, or that I could remember what it was like to be there ... how I myself had lived, centuries in the past.

Marbles

2010-06-05T08:00:00.004-04:00

I've still got mine ... what about you?

It's true. I'm one of the few people I know who still has all his marbles. The ones from my childhood, I mean. Somehow in spite of losing track of all my toys and everything else I used to own, the marbles have always come along with me. Maybe because they were relatively compact and could just live quietly in a jar or a dish on a shelf, content with just a passing glance from time to time.

It occurs to me there may be younger people out there who passed their entire boyhood or girlhood without ever owning any marbles or playing with them. I can only say I'm sorry. They will never know the crazy glee of marble season, when suddenly everyone was bringing bags of them to school and using every spare moment to scratch rings in the nearest patch of dirt and test their skills. The marble bags of the winners grew fat, and the losers made their way back to the toy store to buy more. As with any good gambling game even losers occasionally made gains, which was enough to keep them coming back.

But I also had an aesthetic relationship with my marbles. I could spend an hour gazing into them, holding them up to the light, looking through them, admiring their colors and patterns, pretending they were planets, getting to know them, memorizing them like the faces of old friends. There were aggies and puries and cat's eyes ... some like the colors of fruit stirred into milk, some like real stone, others like glowing stained glass windows, still others like flowers frozen in ice. There were new ones, pristine in clarity, and old ones battered like gladiators with the scars of many collisions in the dusty ring.

I picked my favorites and set them aside, reluctant to risk losing them at play. I had my game marbles and my keepers. It may have been selfish, but it was better than the way the kid next door kept all his black marbles in a segregated bag where they carried on a "separate but equal" existence. In those days of unbridled bigotry he called them his "nigger marbles" and would put them in the ring when he was losing, out of spite to the winner. Where are you now, Eugene? Lost years later in Vietnam, I'll bet.

So that's what I start thinking about whenever I pick my way through the marble jar. Oh -- and who is one of the few other people I know who still has their marbles? Happens to be my wife. We made this discovery in the process of merging our households, so now there are two jars on the shelf, looking very much alike.

At some point we made a ritual exchange of a single marble, just as royal offspring used to be wedded off to one another to cement the relations between two countries. The marble I contributed to her jar is lost like a drop in the ocean, but I can still pick out familiar faces in my own jar, little planets that orbited in the imaginary spaces of my 9-year-old mind ...

Incredible Shrinking Music

2010-05-29T08:00:00.007-04:00

If it gets any more compact it might just disappear ...

Back when the millennium rolled over from 1 to 2 I was still using a computer with a mere 10 gigabyte hard drive. But newer drives were becoming available with 60 or 80 gigabytes, and 100 was soon to follow. At this point I turned my eyes to my music collection -- a set of shelves holding a few hundred CD's -- and began to wonder ...

Wouldn't it be great if I could copy all those disks to a big hard drive someday? Then I could organize them into folders by composer and album title, even into larger categories like Classical, Jazz, Rock, and Folk, and I'd be able to find what I wanted to hear with a few mouse clicks instead of tilting my head sideways to read the tiny print on the edges of the disk boxes. Instead of loading my 5-disk CD changer I'd be able to have a list of music that would play all day, or all weekend if I wanted to.

Then I did the math. Allowing about 600 megabytes for each CD (because many of them were not the full capacity of 700 megs or 80 minutes) and multiplying by the approximate number of disks on my shelves I got the discouraging result of nearly 400 gigabytes. (I have a LOT of music.) To contain my whole collection I would need an array of at least five 100 meg hard drives. At the going rate of about $200 each, plus a rack of RAID hardware to organize them all, it would have cost over $1400, even with no room to grow.

But of course all I had to do was wait a few years. Three things happened that made my dream system not only doable but easy and cheap.

First was advances in sound compression technology. The huge WAV files on all those CD's were like the pig-sized BMP images that take up so much space because they make no attempt to optimize the way they store their contents. MP3 compression was one answer, of course, and I came to consider it good enough for at least some forms of music (e.g. rock) where the subtlest shades of tone might not be critical. But I wasn't satisfied with that for my classical collection. Having shelled out all those bucks for the best possible sound I wasn't about to run it through a meat grinder before listening to it.

Fortunately FLAC came along -- a "lossless" form of audio compression that can shrink a WAV file to about half its size and then blow it up again with every bit intact. If this format had been used on CD's you could have bought the complete Brandenburg Concertos on a single disk, or all the Beethoven Symphonies and overtures on a 4 disk set instead of 7 or 8. Flac has the further advantage of being open source and free to use. This instantly reduced the amount of storage I would need down to a more manageable 200 gigabytes.

By this time hard drives had grown to 500 gigabytes (the original size of my estimate), with 750 and 1000 -- a full terabyte -- soon to come. Not willing to wait any longer, but still cost conscious, I grabbed a 320 gig drive on sale for $89. Quite a bit better than $1400!

The last ingredient that pulled all the pieces together was software that automated the process of converting the CD's to flac files, and adding them to a searchable database complete with categories that I could edit as I chose. There are many programs to organize music collections, but my favorite is the open source Amarok. Originally for Linux only, and now also available for Mac and Windows, Amarok works well and makes it trivially easy to find, manage, and play your music.

It was a short step from there to acquiring new music in pure digital form. I do this legally through eMusic, a subscription service that lets you budget how fast you want to grow your collection by choosing from a variety of monthly plans and payment options. Depending on your selection you can get your downloads for as little as 43 cents per track, with most full albums (if that word still has any meaning) only a bit above $5.

eMusic convinced me that with a high enough sample rate MP3's were satisfactory even for classical music with its subtle nuances. This launched me into a new acquisitive phase. I started buying more music than I had done at any time since the advent of CD's caused me to replace my LP collection. (Music publishers please take note.) And of course the MP3 albums were even more compact than all those flacs I had pulled off my CD's, so I was able to pack an amazing amount of additional music onto my 320 gig drive and still have space left over.

Digital Peril

What about disaster recovery, you may well ask? With so many hours of effort invested in this project, not to mention the financial investment in new music, what would I do if the hard drive failed?

In the case of the CD's I still had the optical disks for backup. At the beginning I started burning at least the best of the new MP3's to disk for protection, but this seemed to defeat the purpose. It now began to appear as a liability to have to store all the disks. In the end I decided that once I outgrew the old hard drive I would copy all the files to a newer and bigger one, then put the old drive in a drawer as a backup copy. At least that would give me a fallback position so only the files that I added to the new drive would be lost if it failed. (Notice, by the way, that my shelves full of disks had been reduced to a package about 4x6 inches in size.)

I planned to move next to a 500 gig drive, but what happened is that my computer died instead of the hard drive. I ended up moving to a new machine with a full terabyte instead -- a system I would have drooled over ten years ago, but which is now pretty standard. I partitioned the drive into two 500 gig halves, donated one half for my wife and grandchildren to live in under Windows, and moved into my own Linux partition on the other half. After restoring all my files from the old drives, including all the music, I still had almost 200 gigs left over. Room to grow.

The old music drive is tucked into that drawer to give me some peace of mind. Next will be to set up another 1 or 2 terabyte drive in an external enclosure to serve as backup. The thing to keep in mind is that the growth of storage space and the dropping of its prices have not slowed down yet. That old 10 gig drive cost me $160 back in 1998, or around $16 per gigabyte. Now you can buy a terabyte drive for around $90, or about 9 cents per gigabyte. In five years we should be up to 8 or 10 terabyte drives with a cost per gigabyte of about a penny. After that we'll have to start watching the terabyte prices fall until we're up in the petabytes.

The same drive that holds all those music files also contains a few "virtual machines" -- files that contain a simulated computer complete with its own simulated hard drive. They can be opened in their own windows (using VirtualBox), copied, and moved to other hard drives as easily as you move a photo from one folder to another. Each of my virtual machines has more power and storage space than my whole computer back in 2000. The new computer swallows them whole and has space for them to swim around in.

Long ago I got used to the idea that everything I had ever written, if suitably compressed, would fit on a single floppy disk. Now it seems I can look forward to a time when all the files I've ever worked with -- all the images, software, music, etc -- can be saved and copied just as trivially. But by then we may no longer be storing anything ourselves ...

[Coming soon: Life in the clouds.]

Draw Me!

2010-05-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

I may not know what I like, but I know art when I see it ...

One of my favorite scenes in the film I, Robot is when the robot, "Sonny," tries to tell the investigating officer about his recurring dream. A picture being worth a thousand words (even to a robot), he proceeds to make a drawing to convey the scene. However he draws it like a robot might, in a series of rapid horizontal scan lines like the ones on a TV tube (remember them?) or an old dot-matrix printer. The result is uncanny -- an artistic rendering generated by a machine.

Like most science fiction this robotic trick has been quickly surpassed by reality, as you can see in this news item about Aikon, a machine that not only can draw, but does so by looking at real objects and imitating the same techniques of seeing and modeling that might be used by a human artist. I suspect that Stephen Hawking, who is himself assisted to communicate by a computer speech synthesizer, welcomes being a subject for such an experiment, as you can see in this example.

Back in the early years of computers (the 1950's) many people felt that in spite of their wizardly ability to perform mathematical calculations, there were other types of thinking that a computer would never be able to do. Alan Turing, whose work in mathematics and logic laid the groundwork for the development of the first computers, disagreed. He could find no difference in principle between what was happening in his mechanical "children" and what takes place in a human brain. Turing was one of the first to predict that computers would not only reach but surpass the abilities of those who invented them.

Oddly, in retrospect, the game of chess was sometimes sited as the kind of thing humans would always be able to do better than machines. As we know now, the opposite is true. Only the top grand masters of the game stand a chance against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, and most of us can't defeat a toy that sells at Radio Shack. Chess is trivial to computer analysis, and the amazing thing is that we can do as well as we do while lacking the ability to see as many moves ahead as our automated opponents.

So I for one am not the least surprised to see a portrait of Hawking that could be easily mistaken for the work of a human artist. If you play with Photoshop, or one of its alternatives like the open source GIMP, you may be familiar with the filters that can be applied to a photographic image to make it resemble an oil painting -- even to resemble a particular school of art like Impressionism or Pointillism. What Aikon does is far beyond that, actually reproducing at least some of the creative process to compose original work.

What's that? You say Aikon doesn't feel anything? That what it produces doesn't mean anything, either to itself or those who view it? That to be art it has to convey something about human experience?

Maybe you should have another look at the work of Piet Mondrian, compare it to the Hawking portrait, and ask which of them looks like it was done by a human being.

Or maybe you think that feeling and expression are the kinds of things machines will never be able to do?

The Uncertainty Principle

2010-05-17T22:03:00.004-04:00

How can we see it when we're in the middle of it?

Once we were told that a "giant sucking sound" coming from south of the border would represent our jobs leaving the country under NAFTA. Turns out it is really BP, everyone's current favorite oil conglomerate, trying to slurp up some of its product before it disburses itself all over the Gulf of Mexico.

As I posted on Facebook, shouldn't someone be saying I TOLD YOU SO?!?

A catastrophic leak of some kind was pretty easy to predict. In fact, with thousands of wells and platforms and enormous ships plying their lanes through hurricane country, it seems inevitable that sooner or later something would go awry. The actual event -- a specatular explosion and fire followed by an ocean floor leak like a severed artery -- is more sensational than any doomsday scenario likely to have been scripted by advocates for the environment, but the end result will be much the same: untold miles of coastline and thousands of acres of delicate fisheries glurped up with millions of gallons of crude, with an expensive cleanup to follow for years.

As with all historical events, while we're in the middle of it we still don't know how long it will go on, how bad it will get, what the long term effects will be, how many years and billions of dollars it will take to recover. Some predictions show the plume of oil eventually wrapping around much of Florida, with unprecedented effects. If that happens, then just as with Hurricane Katrina it will be another disaster that we share with the people of Louisiana.

Back during the Vietnam War some of my friends encouraged me to stay in college until it was over, using my student status as protection from the military draft. One of the reasons I didn't take their advice was that I couldn't see any end in sight. In the midst of that history unfolding, all I could see was that the war was escalating each year as the number of troops grew, the bombing campaign increased, and the daily body counts kept mounting. Who knew what would happen? The Soviet Union was already supplying the North with weapons; maybe they would get more actively involved. Or maybe the Chinese would suddenly come into the conflict as they had in Korea only fifteen years earlier.

No one knew how bad it could get or when it would end. Maybe we were just in the early stages of World War III and hadn't figured it out yet. Maybe if we didn't stop the war it would mean the end of everything. In the face of uncertainty I decided, as did many others, to confront the draft, resist the military juggernaut, and add my own drop to the bucket of pacifism in opposing the war. My actions were small in themselves, but collectively we did bring the war to an end, even though it took years.

Maybe we're at that point now. If we don't draw this line in the sand and say that the destruction of our environment is too high a price to pay for oil, and that controling the sources of oil is not an acceptable reason for fighting wars, then who can say where it will end?

Bit by Bit

2010-04-26T20:00:00.004-04:00

The floppy is dead. Long live the bit!

Let me date myself right off the bat by saying that the first computer I personally owned had a single 5" floppy disk drive, and of course NO hard drive. Not only that, but the drive was single sided and low density, meaning that its capacity was 80 kilobytes, or about 8 percent of a single megabyte. If you wonder how we were able to do anything useful with something so small, you're right, it was a challenge.

My first attempt to increase capacity was to add an 8" floppy disk which held twice as much. Now we're talking a disk the size of a sheet of letter size paper, and the term "floppy" was highly descriptive. But the 8" ones were already obsolete when I got mine. The 5" size doubled in capacity by writing on both sides, then doubled again by writing in "double density." Now we had reached a whopping 320 kbytes, but of course it didn't end there. The 5" format topped out at 1.2 megabytes before being replaced by the smaller and more durably packaged 3" which immediately jumped from 720k to 1.4 megabytes.

This was a plateau that held up for a remarkably long time. The familiar 3" disk first appeared in Apple's original Mac and the Atari in the early 1980's. In spite of attempts at further technical refinements -- including such things as etching positioning rings into the magnetic platter, and adding optical positioning marks -- the floppy seemed to be big enough for carrying small files, and not likely to reach anything like the capacity it would need to handle really big ones.

Keep in mind that at the time pretty much all software was being distributed on floppy disks. As software grew in complexity and features (often known as "bloat") the number of disks required began to get ridiculous. Windows 3.1 came on about half a dozen of them, but the first version of Windows 95 needed a set of sixteen. Soon we were all maintaining shoeboxes full of disk sets, many of them rubber banded together, with no relief in sight.

Relief did come, of course, in the form of optical media, but these didn't take off as quickly as they might have because the computers of the day were barely adequate to take advantage of them. I recall reading an article in a computer magazine about how to successfully burn a CD. You needed plenty of RAM -- at least 4 to 8 megabytes -- and enough hard drive space to contain a master copy of what was going to be on the CD. Allowing space for your operating system and other software, that meant you needed a whopping 1 gigabyte hard drive at a time when most new PC's came with something in the 100 megabyte range. And don't even think of running another program while the disk burned, or you were sure to turn it into a "coaster" (only useful for resting a beverage on).

Of course it was only a matter of time. Now with terrabyte hard drives, multi-core processors, and multi-gigabytes of RAM we expect our PC's to burn CD's and even DVD's while simultaneously browsing the Internet and playing music. The age of coastering your CD are pretty much passed. Software continues to grow, but we're still in the range where even a lavish production like Adobe Creative Suite can fit on a small set of DVD's including the instructional video. And now high speed internet connections and plentiful space for online storage are threatening to obsolete even optical media. Why bother to keep a disk at all when you can just grab a newer version of whatever it is from an online source whenever you want it?

There's an interesting footnote here about Iomega and the Zip drive -- a technology that could have replaced the floppy for at least a period of time, and nearly did. By using Bernoulli's principle of air flow to "fly" the drive head closer to the magnetic surface of the disk, Iomega succeeded in producing a perfectly useful 100 megabyte disk that was not much larger than the venerably floppy. But they shot themselves in the foot by continually introducing new formats that were not backward compatible. Combined with their failure to license the technology to other manufacturers, the Zip disk remained a niche product until it, too, was rendered obsolete.

By what? The lowly flash memory chip of course. For who would continue to carry around a portable Zip drive and its assorted disks when you could wear a few gigabytes on your key chain? And so it goes. Now after a run of almost 30 years, Sony -- the last major manufacturer to still sell them -- has announced they will discontinue 3" floppy disks. So the floppy is dead at last. But those bits just keep coming.

[Just because they're no longer mass marketed doesn't mean they are not still used and produced. One company, for example - Athana (http://www.athana.com) - will still sell you any size or format of floppy you might need to keep your ancient mainframe or dedicated wordprocessing machine fed. But how much longer will they be readable now that the hardware is obsolete?

It doesn't take long for this to happen. Once a customer brought me a whole shoebox full of 5" floppies to see if I could read and restore them. This is what they had been relying on for backup for years. Not a single one was readable.]

Another Reason to Like Kerouac

2010-04-02T17:25:00.000-04:00

The ultimate dharma bum talks to God ...

Found in Jack Kerouac's journals from 1947, the year I was born, no further comment required (fom Harper's magazine):

And what do I owe You, God, for my gifts:
I owe you perspiration and suffering and
all the dark nights of my life:
God I owe you godliness and diligence,
God I owe you this blackest loneliness,
and terrified dreams--
but humbleness, God, I have none and
I owe it You: for I would have You
reach down a hand to me, to help me
up to You--Oh I am not humble.
Give me this last gift, God, and I will
be humble, I will owe You humbleness,
but only give me the gift.
Spit in my soul, God, for asking and
always asking, and for not giving and
owing what I have given, and give,
and shall give: God make me give.
Old Job there of the three thousand five
hundred years a-mouldering in his grave,
Old Job there is your servant, God:
forgive me for my youth, then, forgive
me for it, God, oh make me a giver.

The Passing of a Cat

2010-03-21T20:24:00.003-04:00

How much our pets have to teach us ...

I've lost one of the best companions I will ever have. Albert was a cat who I raised from a kitten, and who stuck with me for seventeen years.

Originally he was part a matched set. He had a sister who we named Victoria (get it?) and who was, if possible, of an even sweeter disposition than Albert, as placid and affectionate as he was. They were "litter mates" as the vet called them, siblings who were inseparable. They ate and had adventures together, washed each other, fell asleep in each other's arms.

One of the more amazing things they did was when we left them for a couple of weeks with the rest of their brothers and sisters and parents at the house of their former owners. When our vacation trip was over we went to pick them up. Seeing us, Victoria and Albert walked calmly, all by themselves, into the waiting carrier to be driven back home. It was a startling example of their intelligence, to understand that we had come for them and to know where they belonged. And, too, that they had adopted us as we had adopted them.

Alas, Victoria was hit by a car when she was barely a year or two in age (already a young adult by feline standards). We buried her, sentimentally though illegally, in a leafy corner of the back yard. Albert had to learn to be on his own. His reaction was to grow closer to his human companions.

Thinking he could use some company of his own kind, we later adopted two new kittens. Annie and Maggie had been discovered in a dumpster behind the vet's office and given a new chance at life. At first Albert wanted nothing to do with them -- meaning that he would climb up on tall pieces of furniture to get away from them. In time, however, he not only got used to them but adopted them as his own.

For example, I learned from a documentary about cat behavior how domestic cats in the wild teach their offspring how to hunt. They do this by first introducing them to dead prey, such as mice. Then they give them living ones to play with. Even though the live ones get away sometimes, still the kittens learn to chase and catch them, and eventually how to kill and eat them.

Now, keep in mind that Albert was not the parent of our two new kittens. Nevertheless this unrelated male brought them a gift one day: a pair of dead baby birds, just their size, one for each to play with. Apparently he had decided it was up to him to teach them what they had to know when they grew up.

So there's one lesson he taught me -- that much of what we consider "human" is not limited to our own species, but rather shared widely with other animals. How was his parenting different from mine? Only in that he taught kittens how to be cats, while I'm teaching my grandchildren how to be human.

A number of times Albert proved the saying about cats having nine lives. He suffered multiple infections and abscesses resulting from confrontations with other cats. Once he started limping, and would actually gasp in pain when he jumped up into my lap. An x-ray revealed that his hip joint was literally in fragments. We never found out how it happened, but gladly paid for an operation to fix the problem. With cats they don't do a replacement as they do for people, but it is possible to remove the bone fragments and arrange the muscles to form what the vet called a "false joint." Amazingly he made a full recovery and showed no signs of discomfort or loss of agility. After that I started calling him "my thousand dollar cat."

So there's another lesson, the same one we learn with family and friends: when love and health are at stake, dollar amounts look smaller than they usually do.

Another time I almost gave Albert up for lost when I discovered him lying as if dead behind the washing machine. I rushed him to the vet, who made a lucky guess that he'd ingested rat poison and started him immediately on a heavy dose of coagulants. (Some rat poison works by producing internal bleeding.) This reminded me that I had found two dead mice or rats on the doorstep in the preceding days, tokens Albert must have left to show me he was on the job. Unfortunately the vermin must have been poisoned. It was touch and go for several days, and once even the vet almost gave up on him, but Albert pulled through.

One of his biggest adventures came when my back yard neighbor was trying to catch a nasty tom that was beating up all the cats in the neighborhood. Unfortunately he caught Albert by mistake. In the gray light of early dawn he didn't recognize him, and drove him fifteen miles away to release him in a mangrove swamp at the edge of Key Biscayne. He considered this humane because it was a place where people fed other abandoned cats.

Fortunately I went around looking for Albert later that morning and found the neighbor and his trap still in the front yard. When I asked if he'd seen Albert he went all to pieces and kept repeating, "I've done a terrible thing." I was afraid he'd killed him or turned him in to the pound, but as soon as we figured out what had happened he immediately drove me to where he'd let him go so we could try to find him.

Here's why it's important for your cats to have names, and to be trained to come when they're called (usually food is a good incentive). The mangrove swamp was as big as a couple of suburban blocks, but all I had to do was to walk up the inland side calling Albert's name, and in a minute or two I heard an answering meow. Moments later he emerged from the woods with very big eyes, but none the worse for wear.

The lesson this time was the value of loyalty -- meaning my loyalty to him. It was important for me to know that he was important to me, and how much.

Sadly, the final lesson he had to teach was mortality. Like aging humans, he began to slow down and to lose his appetite. He responded once to a treatment of antibiotics and appetite stimulants, and bounced back for a vigorous few months. But his weight loss continued, and we learned from an x-ray that he had developed cancer in a large part of one lung. His decline was rapid after that.

It's true that I will always remember his last moments as he dropped off to a final sleep in my lap at the vet's office. But more than that I will remember his last days of enjoying life in the outdoors through some of the most perfect, sun filled, cool days of the Miami winter. I see him leaving his food dish and walking to the edge of the patio stones where he was accustomed to wash up after eating. And I see how he sat there with his eyes half closed, the sun on his face, gazing out across the patch of lawn where he had spent nearly his entire life, and where in the corner his sister lay buried.

No human gentleman could have met his end with any more grace and peace, nor shown with more clarity the truth that in the end it is not death that we see, but life.

Hey - What's On Your Book?

2010-03-17T20:26:00.000-04:00

I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours ...

A while back Apple Computer used to run some ads asking the question, "What do you have on your MacBook?" The results, posted by various celebrities, always seemed to include something like a draft of their novel/memoir/screenplay along with iMovies of the kids, their latest GarageBand album, complete financial history, etc., ad infinitum.

It occurs to me we could start asking people what they have on their eBook readers, whether they be Amazonian, Sonian, or Barnes & Noblean. I, for one, would be proud to show off the veritable library (well, at least one bookcase thereof) that I have on mine.

This corresponds to the shelf in my physical library of books-I-need-to-read-right-now. I usually delete the ones I've read, keeping copies of some on my desktop computer, so everything on the reader is either in progress or yet to be read. One of the wonderful things about these devices is how easy it is to read multiple books at the same time without being limited by how many you are willing to carry around with you. And it always remembers your place in each one.

This is my in-progress list:

Democracy in America - de Toqueville
Last of the Mohecans - Cooper
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Stories from L'Morte d'Arthur
Short Stories by Henry James

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

And here's the wealth of others just waiting their turn:

On the Origin of Species - Darwin
Hard Times - Dickens
The Mutineers - Charles Hawes
3 Victorian novels by Charles John Cutliffe Wright Hyne (see my review about him)
The Water Babies - Kingsley
Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe
The Longest Journey - E.M. Forster
The Octopus - Frank Norris
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Nietsche
All Things Considered - G.K. Chesterton
Celt and Saxon - George Meredith
3 Western novels by Zane Gray
A Modern Utopia - H.G. Wells
4 novels by J. Fenimore Cooper, other than Last of the Mohecans
The American Scene and The Bostonians - Henry James
3 novels by Joseph Conrad (and none of them is Heart of Darkness)
Essays - Emerson
Plain Tales From the Hills - Kipling
2 novels by Olaf Stapledon
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane
The Virginians - Wm. Thackeray
The Voyage Out and Night and Day - Virginia Woolf
The Magician - Somerset Maugham
Leaves of Grass - Whitman
The Sonnets - Shakespeare
Boswell's Life of Johnson
Can Such Things Be? - Ambrose Bierce
Chrome Yellow - Aldous Huxley
Journal of the Plague Year - Defoe

If this doesn't whet your appetite, then you are not a reader of good books. Just two final comments:

(1) The amount of money I paid for these fine examples of literature is zero, zilch, nada. They are freely available online through Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks. You may have noticed that they all date from the period now comfortably in the public domain.

(2) It's true that I'm probably adding to the list faster than I'm deleting the ones I've read, but hey, I'm making progress. And there's plenty of room left in my reader, so bring them on!

(How about you? What's on your book?)

Music and Transience

2010-03-09T20:00:00.000-05:00

When you just can't get that tune out of your head ...

With all the furor over music piracy in recent years, it never ceases to amaze me that most of the music in question is of the most transient kind. The popular song is certainly one of the most enduring forms of music, with roots going back farther than we have written history. But start looking at what remains, and it's clear that most of the individual examples have the lifespans of houseflies.

Take rap, for example. They say the roots of this genre date back to the 1970's. You could place it even earlier if you link an instance like Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with its semi-spoken lyrics delivered over a driving beat. But, Dylan aside, out of the hundreds and thousands of compositions since, how many are classics, still remembered and hummed (or chanted) by fans decades later? How many will there be in another few decades?

Or look at the earlier styles of the 20th century. This is still living memory for many of us, but styles changed with almost violent rapidity during those 100 years. In 1900 people were still turning out for oompah-band concerts in the park, with tunes like "The Girl on the Flying Trapeze" and "I Dream of Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair." Twenty years later we'd moved on to jazz and the Charleston, another ten and it was Swing, Big Bands, then post-war Pop, Rock, and all the Rock variations. Makes you dizzy, Miss Lizzy.

When you try to see farther back the details are soon lost in mist at the horizon. We have some choice examples of Civil War tunes, ditties like "Just Before the Battle, Mother, I Am Dreaming Most of You." And of course we still know "Yankee Doodle," which the redcoats sang to taunt the soldiers of the Continental Army in our Revolutionary War. But before that?

Well, let's see. We have some Christmas carols still in use after a few centuries. "What Child Is This" even uses the tune of the ancient "Greensleeves" that might go back over a thousand years. And we know some of Thomas Morley's compositions from the Elizabethan period because they were immortalized by being included in Shakespeare's plays, but we don't even know how many others have been lost.

Last year I reminisced about the music of Lennon and McCartney, but in spite of their hits that are still being performed today it's clear that many of the lesser works are already falling by the wayside. The chaff falls away, and the precious grains are few and far between.

What a different landscape it is in the world of classical music, and how glad I am to be living in that world. It's a place where you can wander for a lifetime, constantly discovering new composers and new performances of their work, even if there was never another new piece composed.

We can start in the Middle Ages with the quaint strains of recorder and crumhorn consorts, with lute music, madrigals, and the timelessness of Gregorian chants. (And what an odd best-seller that was when the album Chant was released in 1994!)

As if cruising down a river, we can progress through the glories of the Italian Renaissance with brass choirs and contrapuntal organ music, passing the monumental works of J.S. Bach along the shore, the scintillating diversions of Mozart, the heroic struggles of Beethoven, the soaring emotion of the Romantic period, the wrenching turbulence of Mahler, the startling iconoclasm of the atonal 20th century and its many conflicting ideas of what music could and should be.

The grand procession is ongoing, with an explosion of electronics and computer enhancements creating a growing arena of possibilities. Gaining full appreciation of it requires, and deserves, a lifetime of attention. You'll excuse me if I couldn't care less who wrote, or has the rights to collect royalties on each copy of [insert song of the week here].

1984, 1985, and Beyond

2010-02-27T07:56:00.006-05:00

Long live Big Brother! But what happens after he dies?

[Continued from last week.]

George Orwell may have imagined the world of Big Brother, but György Dalos actually lived in it. The Hungarian poet was educated in Moscow. In 1968, while the Cultural Revolution was going on in China, he was accused of "Maoist activities." Imprisoned and tortured just like the fictional Winston Smith, he was eventually released but booted out of the Communist Party and kept under police surveillance. I don't know when he first read the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he must have thought, "This is about ME!"

Dalos is only four years older than I am, so roughly a contemporary. But while I was reading the book and watching the movie, he was growing up under the exact kind of despotic totalitarianism Orwell had depicted. Later, while making a living as a translator and poet, he ventured to write a sequel titled, appropriately enough, 1985 (Pantheon, 1984). This slim volume is a wonderful gloss on history, with resonances reaching back to Orwell's novel and the then-recent Cultural Revolution, and forward to the events that we now know were soon to follow: the unraveling of the Soviet Union and the other States of the Eastern Bloc.

The book pretends to be a compilation of memoirs and official reports of the years following the death of Big Brother and the collapse of Oceania. It begins with the official account of BB's death, in itself a wonderful satire of colorless reportage by committee. The leader is admitted to the hospital for "a temporary indisposition." During treatment first one limb, then another is "temporarily removed." Then one lung is "temporarily removed." His condition goes from Critical to Improved, then to Critical and Unchanged, then Unchanged and Critical. Finally he perishes "as the result of a temporary indisposition." So the condition of the leader becomes symbolic of that of the State, kept alive only through the most extreme measures.

If that's not enough to cheer you up, Oceania then suffers a crippling military defeat which causes it to sue for peace with its rival Eurasia. The collapse of its government soon follows, after an interim struggle for power in which the late BB's wife leads one faction, much the way the wife of Chairman Mao became part of the Gang of Four. By now it is apparent that the author has mimicked the way Orwell reversed the roles of foreign and domestic politics. His description of the corruption and demise of Oceania (the West) is clearly about the immanent fall of the USSR.

One fact that brings this home is the way it is revealed that Eurasia is vastly superior in technology. Their foreign delegation declines the limousines that meet them at the airport and instead levitate their way to the hotel with the aid of some kind of devices in their clothing. Later a multifunction ballpoint pen is found to also serve as a radio. (Commonplace now, this was futuristic in 1980.) By comparison, remember how hard it was for Winston Smith to find razor blades, not to mention food, in Oceania.

This reminded me of a revealing article that was published in the 1980's in a US computer magazine. The author had been to Moscow and had managed to get hold of a Soviet personal computer. At the time this beast was so rare it had seldom been seen in the wild. Not only did it not work very well, but disassembling it revealed a spaghetti mess of hand-wiring inside, evidence of abundant errors and problems with the printed circuit boards. The device was selling for the equivalent of $10,000 if you could even get one. Meanwhile in the US, Apple was designing the first Mac.

Analysis of the Soviet microchips revealed they had been directly copied from Western designs. Engineers had actually opened up the chips, used a photographic enlarger to blow up the circuitry, cleaned it up, and shrunk it back down again for production. They had not even bothered to remove the manufacturer's logo and code numbers. However, due to some distortions introduced by the copying process, they could not be reduced to as small a size as the originals. This led to a gag boast that "Soviet microchips are the largest in the world!"

The really interesting bit was that at the same time China had begun to mass produce very serviceable and inexpensive clones of the IBM PC. In the three-way race for technological supremacy the Chinese were catching up, while Russia was falling farther behind. The writing was on the wall (pun intended) for all to see.

Just as interesting as the politics are the personal stories in 1985. Winston Smith and his lover Julia both emerge as revolutionary figures, and even form a bizarre partnership with O'Brien, the same officer of the Ministry of Truth who had overseen Winston's torture. The Chestnut Tree Cafe, frequented by those recently released from brainwashing, becomes the center of revolutionary discussions and partisan debates.

Sadly, Dalos did not dare to imagine the groundswell of popular support that was to buoy Lech Walesa into office in Poland, or that would support Boris Yeltsin against a possible counter-revolution in Russia. But no doubt that was due to his experience of the abortive uprising in his native Hungary in 1956, when they had failed to get the support of the West and were crushed by Soviet tanks.

What's left of Oceania -- now stripped down to the bare essentials of the British Isles -- ends up as a struggling socialist state of which Julia is a prominent minister but from which Winston has been ousted as overly radical. One imagines this was both the hope and the worst fear of the author, that change might come that was not much change at all. Indeed, things have not gone swimmingly in Hungary since the regime change, and conditions in the wake of the global financial meltdown are now critical, as Dalos reported in his recent article, "A Peaceless Democracy."

Needless to say, 1985 could not be published in Hungary back when it was written. It appeared first in German and French translation in 1982, and in English in -- when else? -- 1984. What a year.

Orwell's novel was of course forbidden throughout the Soviet empire, but I know how at least one copy made its way in. I once met a man who had been with US Army Intelligence in Germany during the 1960's. He used to cross into East Berlin sometimes, and once smuggled a German translation of the novel across the border for a friend.

"Weren't you afraid of being caught?" I asked him. He replied no, because he knew the border guards were mostly green kids conscripted from the farms. All he had to do was to place some West German skin magazines on top of the book in his bag. These, of course, they immediately confiscated. What about the book? "I'm practicing my German," my friend told them. "Oh, that's all right then," they said, their eyes bulging with visions of naked breasts. And so the empire falls.

Back When 1984 Was the Future

2010-02-21T19:47:00.002-05:00

"Who controls the present controls the past ... who controls the past controls the future ..."

- George Orwell, 1984

One night back in about 1956 when I was only nine years old, my father roused me from my sleep and invited me to stay up late with him to watch a movie on TV. It was the original film version of 1984, starring Edmund O'Brien as Winston Smith, and Dad knew I wouldn't want to miss it because I was so fond of science fiction. (This is how I got to see things like Destination Moon and The Man From Planet X on our fuzzy gray 17" screen.)

A tale of life under a brutal dictatorship which includes brainwashing and torture might not be the sort of entertainment most parents would inflict on their children. But my dad, who almost certainly had read the book and knew what it was about, trusted me not only to withstand it but to understand it as well. He was introducing me to one of the core myths of our age.

In those days of Cold War hysteria the producers of the film felt obliged to present it as a cautionary tale about what life might be like if the Communists were to take over, just to insure that they couldn't be accused of questioning the authority of our own government. After all, Big Brother ruled over not just England but the rest of "Oceania," which included North and South America. The story implied not only that the USSR might absorb all of continental Europe into "Eurasia," but that the US and its allies would be transformed into a regime just as ugly by the demands of decades of prolonged conflict.

My dad, having recently fought a war against Germany, was more concerned about Fascism taking over -- perhaps in the person of a demagogue like Joseph McCarthy, who was currently raking people over the coals, destroying careers, and driving people to suicide in the halls of Congress. So Dad was attuned to the intentions of author George Orwell, who had clearly imagined the tripartite "balance of terror" that would hold sway over most of the rest of the 20th century.

Orwell's dark vision, in which civilization descends inevitably into a state of permanent war and the enslavement of populations, has haunted us ever since. But for much of my early life 1984 was in the distant future. To a child, 30 years from now might as well be forever, in another lifetime.

As we lived through the real history of those years, events played out both better and worse than Orwell dreamed. On the home front we seemed to still have democracy and freedom, at least in our personal lives. Life was good, food and entertainment were plentiful. Orwell seemed to have got the idea of the "telescreen" completely wrong. Instead of it watching us, we watched it. Instead of citizens having their privacy invaded, the government seemed to be under a public microscope more so than ever before. Television got Kennedy elected, brought the Vietnam War into the living room, called the Nixon administration to justice, and changed history.

But at the same time we lived increasingly under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Orwell failed to include nuclear weaponry in his arsenal, but even in this he may have been accurate. In his view it was never the intention of the superpowers to destroy one another; instead, the rulers of each one used the continual threat of destruction as a tool to maintain power and control over their own populations. And so, even though the bombs never fell on us, they were always hanging over our heads and keeping us in line. With slogans like Better Dead Than Red and My Country, Right or Wrong, the rabid right could defend almost any actions in the name of curbing the spread of Communism.

Still, the closer we came to the fateful year, the more 1984 seemed to be a vision of some other reality than our own, an alternate "what if" universe in which things had worked out differently. It was like a story about how things would be if Germany had gotten the Bomb or the South had won the Civil War.

In 1982, all grown up now, I started making plans to have a 1984 party to commemorate the difference between the prediction and the reality. We would celebrate Ronald Reagan as Big Brother, discuss the politics of Emmanuel Goldstein (the fictional false enemy of the State), and drink Victory Gin.

I was dismayed when some of my friends told me they would come in costume as Alphas, Betas, or Gammas, revealing that they had confused 1984 with Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's variation of a dark future in which humans were "decanted" instead of born and were genetically altered into graded subspecies suitable to their roles in society. On reflection I decided this meant it was time to put the fear of 1984 to rest. People seemed to have forgotten to be afraid, which was the surest sign it had not come to pass. It seemed fitting that it was now Huxley's future that haunted us, because it seemed more like where we were headed, and because, well, it was still in the future.

A new version of 1984 was filmed -- in London and in 1984 -- with John Hurt as Winston Smith. It was very well done, but went largely unnoticed by the public. However, in the same notable year a sequel was published by a citizen of our Eurasian adversary ...

[Next time: 1985 and beyond.]

Back 2 Space

2010-02-04T22:00:00.002-05:00

Let's see what the tea leaves have to say ...

Since back before the turn of the century (I know, that used to mean about a hundred years ago, but now it's only ten) I've been dabbling with predicting the future, so it's about time for a reality check. How am I doing, anyway?

Well, last January I dared to speculate on what the first year of the Obama administration might look like, and I can now claim to have been correct about two of the most wild leaps of fancy. First, on the financial front, I said: "By year's end financial experts will begin noting with some surprise that the stock markets have actually had a pretty good year. All those who waited too long to get out will suddenly realize they have waited too long to get back in."

Within weeks of this pronouncement the Dow began a plunge of over 1,000 points, and even the most optimistic investors would have been justified in having serious qualms about the rest of the year. Nevertheless, by December 31 the market had not only recovered the loss but ended around 30% higher than at the start of the year. Not bad!

What's that? You'd like to get in on a return of 30%? Sorry, too late. They tell us that the last time the market did that well two years in a row was at the beginning of FDR's first term. But remember, that was coming off the crash of '29 and it was a Depression, while what we had in '08 was merely a [subliminal: worst in our history since the Great Depression] "Recession."

The other limb I went out on was to predict a major shift in the role of NASA, with spacecraft development and operations being farmed out to private corporations. This new policy has just been announced, as reported in Astronomy magazine, following another one of the Obama administration's exhaustive reviews in which they actually tried to find out what was the best thing to do.

Return with us now to those thrilling early years of the airplane, where the likes of Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, and Howard Hughes blazed new trails. Now it's time for the airlines to become spacelines, and for free enterprise to figure out how to finance our move into the wider solar system and beyond. Don't be surprised when the Chinese get to the moon and start mining operations, or some private venture decides to move mineral-rich asteroids into Earth orbit where they can be chopped up and refined into raw materials. We have passed the era of Columbus and Magellan. Now it's time for the East India Company to reap the rewards, and for the colonists to create the societies and interplanetary nations of the future.

Stay tuned for further developments.

[And check out this slide show to get an idea of how many players are already getting into this game: http://news.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-390897-1.html?tag=content;col1]

Giving Feedback

2010-01-26T21:56:00.003-05:00

Well, they asked, so I gave it to them ...

Some years ago I got on a Republican mailing list. It happened like this: The first time John McCain ran for President he was facing off in the primaries against G. W. Bush. Remember? This was the primary eventually won by Dubya, leading to the stolen election of 1999 -- not that we're bitter about it or anything. At any rate, convinced that McCain would be a superior choice if we HAD to end up with a Republican in the White House, my former wife bit the bullet and registered as a Republican so she could cast her vote for him in the primary, fully intending to then vote for the Democratic candidate, WHOEVER it turned out to be, in the general election.

The Republicans got wind of the fact that lots of people were having the same idea, and accused the Democrats of deliberately and maliciously trying to poison their chances by seeing to it that the GOP would run a loser as their candidate. (How's that sound as a way to welcome new registrants to your party?) I insist, however, that our intentions were pure, and we were only expressing our Constitutional preference for the lesser of two evils -- I mean, for our choice of who should serve as our leader for the next four years.

In fact, I would argue that the country would be better served by allowing everyone to vote in all primary races regardless of their party affiliation. This would seem to insure that lesser or fringe candidates would garner more votes and be able to keep their campaigns alive longer, thus continuing to present diverse points of view and keeping the field open closer to the actual election. We might even find independents or third party candidates winning some State and Federal seats, which could break the perpetual stalemate in the legislature.

Anyway, that's how I ended up on this Red State mailing list, and why I was selected to receive a "2010 Congressional District Census" (and appeal for funds) from said Republican Party. Rather than send it to the landfill, I decided to fill it out to let them know how I think they're doing. But, like all multiple choice tests, it left me feeling the need to express things more fully, to "attach extra pages if necessary," which they did not invite me to do. Here then are a few explanations and amplifications:

"Do you identify yourself as a:" Well, I'm glad there was an "other" box with a place to fill in the party of my choice. I didn't know that the recognized parties were called Conservative Republican, Moderate Republican, Liberal Republican, and Independent-voter-who-leans-Republican. Thanks for providing a line long enough to contain the word Democrat, even if it might not have been big enough for something like Socialist Workers.

"From what media source do you regularly receive your political views?" First let me say that my views are my own, I don't receive them from anyone else. I am, however, interested to hear other points of view. I found it very interesting that while NBC/CBS/ABC were lumped together there were separate check boxes for both CNN/MSNBC and Fox (subliminal: dummy shill for the radical right ventriloquist). I had always harbored paranoid suspicions about this, but it is good to have them confirmed. The omission of PBS altogether speaks volumes. Just please note that when I say "Radio" I am not alluding to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Oliver North. Instad I'm thinking NPR and the BBC. And what more delightful way is there of reviewing the week's events than Wait--Wait--Don't Tell Me! on Saturday mornings?

When you ask "How much does it concern you that the Democrats have total control of the federal government?" I am really non-plussed. Does it seem that anyone has any control up there? I am concerned that they don't know what to do with power when they have it and continue to wander around in a daze, but at least they are not deliberately breaking everything and canceling the Constitution like some other parties we could mention.

You will note that I put check marks in the Democrat column for nearly all categories under "which political party do you feel is best able to handle the following issues?" The single exception is "protecting traditional values." That's because I don't know what those are, and wonder, if they are so traditional, why they need to be protected. Also, I note that the Republicans are not protecting our tradition of Constitutional freedom, except the ability to carry guns, and I wonder what's up with that. So on this subject I selected "No Opinion," even though that is not really correct because as you see I have lots of them.

Finally the one that really stumped me: "Do you believe the Republican Party should continue to embrace social issues?" This is like the question, Have you stopped beating your wife yet? If I say Yes it implies that I agree the Republicans are "embracing social issues," and that I approve of what they are doing and want them to keep it up. If I say No it still implies that I think they are "embracing social issues" but that I think they should cut it out. If I say Undecided (the third and final option) it still implies that I think they are "embracing social issues" but I'm so wishy washy that I don't know if I like what they're doing or not.

However, I noticed the follow up question that could only be filled out if I answered Yes, so I changed my choice from Undecided to Yes so that I could register opposition to the following:

school prayer
a ban on burning the flag
a ban on human cloning
a ban on all abortions
prohibition of same-sex marriage

I went along with "faith based initiatives" because they're not all bad. Concerning the others I'd like to point out that there is no rash of flag burnings at present, so I don't know what all the fuss is about, and that human cloning is still in the science fiction stage, so we may as well ban Unauthorized Commerce With Alien Civilizations while we're at it. At least this list clarifies what was meant by "embracing social issues." Silly me to think of things like health care, education, drug treatment programs, feeding the hungry, and finding homes for the homeless.

So there you have it. Tomorrow it will be winging its way to Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee. I feel a lot better for having taken the trouble.

The Fall of the Sparrow

2010-01-19T22:00:00.003-05:00

Considering why each life matters ...

This past First Day, otherwise known as Sunday, our Miami Friends meeting was graced by the father and brother of Christa Brelsford, the American woman from Anchorage who was one of the survivors pulled from the wreckage of the earthquake in Haiti.

The meeting was a deep and emotional one. Among other messages, Taylor Brelsford, Christa's father, declared the miracle that it was for him and his son to be able to worship with us, and that compared to the life of his daughter the loss of a leg was "nothing." This echoed Christa's own sentiments as expressed in the CBS news story and video, and I'm sure we can all agree. When we are confronted with the difference between life and death, often so tenuous, it becomes very clear what is the important, essential thing. Beside it, all other concerns pale to insignificance. And faced with the loss of so many lives, we naturally celebrate each one that can be preserved.

Christa's brother, Julian, who was volunteering with her in a literacy program for adults and children, also expressed his heartfelt joy at life, even in the face of grief, and led us in the spontaneous singing of a hymn. This is a rare occurrence in meetings like ours, and when it happens it feels very powerful -- much less like reading from a book, and more like the expression of birdsong that greets the morning sun.

Julian, who was fortunate to receive only minor injuries himself, is mindful of the many in Haiti who perished or who are not getting the medical attention they need. He intends to return, and hopes for an outpouring of assistance from around the world, which seems to be materializing.

During the meeting I found my own thoughts wandering back to a small incident of the previous week. It may sound funny in the face so many human casualties, but I kept remembering how on my way to work one morning I had noticed some of the small lizards that abound here, temporarily immobilized by the cold weather, lying on the sidewalk. Positioned like that on the concrete, they were ready to be warmed back to life by the action of the sun. I stepped carefully around them and wished them well, only to find at least one of them flattened when I returned at the end of the day. Whether it was done with intentional cruelty or simple carelessness, some passer-by had simply snuffed the life from the tiny insignificant creature.

Aren't our own lives like that? We spend our time planning and building, then the earth moves beneath us and everything comes toppling down.

It is said that God notes the fall of the sparrow -- meaning each and every one of them. Even those of us who may not believe in a personal or personified Deity can still conceive of the idea that each life, no matter how small, is worthy of note, and that in some way each is accounted for in the great ledger book of existence.

If I could notice and feel a pang of regret over the demise of a creature so small, then how much more must each of those human victims of calamity matter to that Spirit of which we are all a part? If such a small life is worthy of notice, then surely, as tens of thousands of nameless men, women, and children are interred in mass graves, so must the life of each one be noted with sorrow in its end. And equally so, we should note the lives of those who are still with us, rejoice with them, and give them the care and respect that each one deserves by the simply virtue of being alive.

You can learn more about the work of Haiti Partners through their website at http://www.haitipartners.org/ where you can also make donations for earthquake relief and longer term community building in Haiti.

Roll Over Beethoven

2010-01-06T21:00:00.001-05:00

Pardon me, boy -- is this the philharmonic station?

One of the things that should endear Ludwig van Beethoven to all of us who live in this latter day egalitarian culture was his insistence upon being treated as an equal by his "betters," meaning the nobility. Even though he may not have granted that courtesy to others, and even though he was decidedly upwardly mobile himself, still he chafed at the tradition of patronage that decreed musicians had to arrive through the servants' entrance, even if they were the greatest composers of their day.

I like the story that the "van" in his name, a pretension to noble birth, was added by Beethoven himself. It is also said that when his brother added the sobriquet "Land-owner" to his card, Lugwig countered by having some of his own printed with "Brain-owner." If invited to a party as a guest who was expected to perform, he refused; but if not expected, he would perform, like it or not.

I was thinking about him today, as I do almost every weekday, because when I disembark at the Brickell Metrorail station I am invariably greeted with the strains of the first movement to the Fifth Symphony. Due to the efforts of local Beethoven enthusiasts, including the local homeowners association and at least one County Commissioner, this recording has been playing between the security and train announcements for several years now. You might think that it would get tiresome after all that time, or that the endless repetition -- never a full performance, or any of the other three movements -- would have turned the immortal symphony into mindless Muzak by now. But so far it has never failed to strike me as new and vigorous every time.

Surely this is a testament to what an enduring composition this piece is. In a recent biography, Beethoven: The Universal Composer, author Edmund Morris relates a story about being on the campus of Harvard University in the middle of winter. It was the first day the sun showed itself after a week or more of blizzardly darkness. As the snow lit up, someone opened a dormitory window and placed speakers on the sill to blare out the triumphant final movement of -- what else? -- Beethoven's Fifth. Supposedly everyone who was close enough to hear it stopped in their tracks and listened as the music gave perfect expression to their joy at the return of the light.

So I often still find myself with an additional spring in my step as I leave the station, and find myself humming the other movements as I walk to my office -- the lyrically swinging second, the waltzing scherzo that imitates the opening theme of the first movement, and then the victorious fanfare of the finale that emerges from the misty end of the scherzo like a sun cutting through morning fog.

There's another irony about the playing of the Fifth at the metro station, though. At the same time they were memorializing Beethoven, the Brickell Homeowners Association, fancying themselves loftier than the rabble who must ride the bus, engaged in a successful lobbying campaign to nix the rental of some space at their train station to Greyhound. Now the poor slobs who drift into town that way must remain content to disembark among some warehouses near the airport from which it is a long hike to anywhere.

Poor Ludwig, who insisted in his Ninth symphony that "all men will be brothers" and that "this kiss is for all the world," must be rolling over in his grave.

After the Flood

2009-12-12T08:00:00.002-05:00

Google takes a bite out of Florida ...

So there I was, just fiddling around in my Google Analytics reports to see where my latest hits were coming from. Suddenly I did a doubletake, because there was something funny about the familiar South Florida coastline.

Apparently Google has flashed forward in time and redrawn the map to reflect rising sea levels. That's the only reason I can think of to explain why Marjorie Stoneman Douglas's "River of Grass," AKA the Everglades, is now a river of water with the cities of Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Palm Beach clinging to a narrow isthmus sticking out into the Gulf Stream.

Well, this should silence the skeptics once and for all. No global warming? How about no snows on Kilamanjaro? How about an ocean instead of an ice sheet at the north pole? These things are normal? Maybe when their favorite golf course submerges they'll catch on. Or when Sara Palin can't find any polar bears to shoot near her balmy beachfront property in Alaska.

Hm, on second glance it's even worse than I thought, because the island city of Miami Beach doesn't appear on the map at all. Guess we'll have to knock down all the buildings once the lower floors are flooded out. Maybe it will make a nice artificial reef.

Got a better explanation? Let me know, because I need to find out if I have to sell my house ... quick!

Handel's Gift

2009-12-06T22:00:00.004-05:00

The music that keeps on giving ...

Miami used to be a provincial town when I was growing up here, with precious little in the way of big city cultural events. Times have changed since we've become a multicultural hub of the Americas, though, and sometimes we get performances here that are better than anything we have have a right to expect.

So it was on Friday evening when James Judd, former conductor of the Florida Philharmonic, returned to conduct a splendid ensemble and chorus in a world class rendition of the complete Messiah at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

Only five years old, the Boca Raton Symphonia played with grace and clear intonation, as well as a good deal of oomph when it was called for, including a thunderous timpani and clarion clear trumpet (more on that later). The Master Chorale of South Florida, in existence for seven years, draws its talent from all three of our local counties. Under Artistic Director Joshua Habermann, they exhibit a mature and refined sound with many textures and a large dynamic range.

And then there were the guest vocal soloists. These kids can sing. And I have to call them kids, because the eldest of them were only 22 -- a very cultured mezzo-soprano, J'nai Bridges, and a striking tenor, Joshua Stuart. But then there was soprano Sarah Shafer, only 20, already with the resume of a 30-something, whose bio mentions that, by the way, she has also appeared as a piano soloist with two regional orchestras. I wonder what she does with all her spare time? And bass Thomas Shivone, with a stronger voice than any 19 year old has any right to possess, who began studying voice at the age of 13. So let's see ... six years, and for how many of them has his voice changed?

With such a cast, Maestro Judd could be counted on to wring every last drop of emotional content from Handel's enduring oratorio -- the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving. A couple of years ago I wrote about listening to a recording of this work, especially the chorus For Unto Us A Child Is Born. But good live performances always beat even the best recordings. There is a texture in the air, a complex of physical vibrations, that is far more subtle and expressive than what comes out of a pair of speakers -- even my very nice set by Bose. And of course seeing the performers, and getting the full resonance of the acoustic space in which they work, add even more.

One thing I noticed about this rendition of "Unto Us" was the way the words were first sung gently, as if to a babe in a cradle (or manger), and then with progressive gusto and emphasis. Naturally, the Halleluiah chorus was equally splendid and jubilant, and audiences can always be excused if they feel the performance could end right there. But Handel had more to say, to complete the story, and the rewards are there for keeping your seat.

"The Trumpet Shall Sound," for example, in which the first trumpet -- in this case, Jeff Kaye -- gets to show what he can do. They had him deliver this solo from the lectern where the lay reader stands during a mass, while the aforementioned bass vocalist, front and center, had to keep up with him and project over him. Talking of textures, you could practically see the brass notes in the air; if they'd been any closer you might have been able to reach up and grab them as they went by, each one perfect and buffed to a high sheen.

The work ends with "Worthy Is The Lamb That Was Slain," and one of the most rousing Amens ever rendered outside of a gospel meeting. I asked my wife on the way home, "How did he get them to hold that last note so long?" She replied that of course they were professionals.

Of course. Don't try this at home, kids. These were professional drivers on a closed course. Just say Amen.

Giving Darwin Away

2009-11-25T23:17:00.003-05:00

One of the most important books you never read ...

Talk about strange bedfellows: the Christian Science Monitor reports on the project of an evangelical minister to distribute thousands of copies of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species on college campuses around the country, just in time for the 150th anniversary of the book's first publication.

True, there is some fine print. The minister has put out his own edition, which includes an introduction of his own that refutes the book and admonishes readers to "read the Bible daily and obey what you read." Even so, I think it's a swell idea because it means that some percentage of college students will actually read the whole book who might never have done so otherwise. And I have enough faith in Our Youth to trust them to sort it out for themselves. I've met some of them and would stack their wits up against those of any other generation, be it X, Y or Z, that you would care to name.

But you don't have to wait for someone to walk up and foist one upon you -- why not pick up a copy? Many editions are available, including free digital ones for your ebook reader (visit feedbooks.com). I have a nice little pocket sized hardbound with gilt edged pages put out by Barnes & Noble's Collector's Library, which sells for only $5.95.

With all the furor that continues to surround Darwin's work, you might think that by now everyone must have read it since they have such strong opinions on his ideas. Of course, the opposite is the case. Many of the strongest opinions, both pro and con, are voiced by people who have only heard about those ideas at second hand. And depending on what the source of their information is, they may be seriously misinformed. The book itself languishes unread.

Indeed, most of the fuss is about the origins of human beings, and so complaints should be directed not against Origin, but Darwin's later work, The Descent of Man. But it is true that he was only following to its logical conclusion the theory of evolution by natural selection which he had laid out in the first book. And by then it was obvious to anyone who had understood what he was saying that human beings were part and parcel of the same natural order, and must have arisen from earlier forms of life just as all other species had done.

Curiously, the work had a warmer public reception when it debuted, at least in some circles, than it has now. Boiled down to the misleading summary, "survival of the fittest," it was seen to explain the superiority of European civilization, and to lend the weight of historic inevitability to the colonization and subjugation of the rest of the world. "Man," as humans were known in those simpler and less politically correct times, had emerged on top of the heap of Nature, and white men were destined to be on top of the heap of other races.

Of course this is as much a misinterpretation of Darwin's work as it is to believe it is an affront to God or a justification of atheism. Darwin may have been a bit on the fence as to the role a Creator may have played in all this, but his intention was simply to explore the nature of things as they are, and to learn from that how they may have been in the past. He sought an answer to the question not of who created us, but how it happened. It was an audacious project, especially given that so little was known at the time about the mechanism of heredity. DNA was more than a century in the future, and not even genes had been hypothesized yet.

In his meticulous, almost plodding way, Darwin worked his way from observations of domestic breeding of livestock, to differences between isolated populations of animals, and ended up with the first really plausible explanation for the variety and progressive changes that can be seen everywhere in the world surrounding us.

Maybe the word "plodding" is unkind, but Darwin's carefulness bordered on the compulsive. He labored over Origin for twenty years, during which time Mr. Wallace came up with basically the same idea and almost beat him into print, in which case it would now be known as Wallace's Theory of Evolution. Thanks to the fairness of peer review, it was agreed that the two gentlemen would both present their papers at the same time. Neither of them made much of a stir at first, but once the dust settled Darwin was credited with precedence and by far the most thorough working out of the idea.

After all that, it's amazing to see the author apologizing in his introduction for what he evidently considered to be a sort of first draft or summary of his ideas! "This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. ... No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this."

If the 500 pages that follow are to be considered sketchy, what might his full treatment have amounted to? Something on the scale of the Britannica, I suppose. Anyway, I commend them to your careful attention. After all this time and all that has been learned since, this book still stands as one of the principle landmarks in the history of human consciousness, the time when we first turned to look back from where we came and discerned the first inklings of the tracks we left behind us in the sand.

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

- Charles Darwin, Introduction to The Origin of Species

Another Veterans Day

2009-11-13T07:00:00.005-05:00

More memories of a vanished former soldier ...

As I've said before, my thoughts on Veterans Day often turn to my father, who served in World War II. What I'm remembering this year is how little he ever spoke about the war. Like many vets from that era, when he came home he seemed determined to close the door on the ugly past. His intention was to protect his family from the horrors he had seen by keeping them to himself, and his hopes were for a peaceful future where his son would never have to go to war.

I can only imagine the distress he must have felt when the Cold War with the Soviet Union immediately emerged from the ashes of the hot one fought with Germany and Japan. He'd only been home for a few years and had just started a family when the Korean War broke out. For several years he lived with the idea that he might be called back into active service if things got bad enough -- and they seemed to be getting pretty bad.

Then the rest transpired … the H-bomb surpassed the A-bomb by a factor of a thousand … the Goldbergs were executed for nuclear espionage … Joe McCarthy got everyone looking for Communists … Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles shortened the early warning of nuclear war from hours to minutes … Civil Defense put air-raid sirens everywhere and tested them each Sunday, religiously … bomb testing put radioactive fallout into the air and the milk consumed by a generation of children, even in mothers’ milk … American and Russian tanks faced off in Berlin … the Wall went up … and the whole thing nearly blew up around us when the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba, just a few hundred miles from our Miami home, and we found ourselves surrounded by an army preparing to invade the island.

Through it all my Dad never wavered from his conviction that war was a bad idea and had to be put to an end. Each new crisis in current events only stregthened his belief in the senselessness of armed conflict, the idiocy of politicians who relied upon it, the crime that it was to send young men out to kill and be killed. The prospect of nuclear holocost made the whole picture abundantly clear – the history of warfare led inevitable to the final cataclysm that would destroy all of humankind.

The final insult to him was to find yet another war, the one in Vietnam, emerging just in time to lay claim to the life of his only son. So you will understand why he supported me when I claimed exemption from the draft as a conscientious objector. For me, I felt I was only following what he had taught me. When I was a child playing with toy soldiers he had said, “If you want to make them look realistic you should have them all lying in a puddle of blood.” I had heard him reading an anti-war poem to my mother in which he described seeing a tank back up over the head of a soldier who was hiding behind it, crushing it like an egg. And I remembered how the poem ended, with its bitter admonition:

Drape the hallowed bunting on the poor deluded slob’s eternal bed …

Safe old men, cheer them on, tear in eye, drink in hand.

So Dad wrote me a letter to present to the draft board, along with the ones from my school principal and a minister. He came with me on the day of my hearing, and had to cool his heels in the waiting room until I was done. The board declined to see him or listen to him, and I’m sorry, because when we left he told me through clenched teeth, “I was ready to give them such a piece of my mind.”

I would love to have seen that.

Taking the Plunge

2009-10-27T20:33:00.004-04:00

A pause that refreshes ...

For some time now my friend Laura Cerwinske has been conducting classes in what she calls Radical Writing. Simply put, it's a technique for using writing to dig into what's up with yourself and to clear up the log jams that most of us experience as getting in our way as we try to navigate down the tumultuous river of life. (Lookout, matey -- thar be rapids up ahead!)

In a former incarnation, these classes were titled "Writing as a Healing Art," which is another good way to describe what happens in them. But lets face it, Radical Writing has more panache. It also captures something about the way you are supposed to launch into your assignments. This is not "creative" writing, or memoir, or even journal writing, though it may have elements of them all. More than anything it is "automatic" writing -- an attempt to let the words flow as uninterrupted as possible from as deep a source as possible, close to the unconscious itself.

This weekend I participated in a two-hour workshop with Laura, my wife, and several other acquaintances and strangers (no, they weren't so strange, only people we hadn't met yet). I thought I might share what came up for me as a way to give an example, so here goes ...

Our first task was to state why we were there:

"My intention for coming here today is to pass the time as pleasantly as possible while delving into some of the scarier parts of my internal nature and sharing them with a combination of intimate friends and complete strangers - an experience no doubt to be be fraught with qualms but which I am quite prepared to plunge into as if taking a dive off the high board - which I did once as a teenager."

At this point Laura pounces on everyone's hot spots and assigns a different task to each one. Mine was to revisit that plunge that I only took ONCE and never again.

"What it was like to look down at the water, so far so far below, and come to the brink and be afraid and do it anyway, the bang of the impact, glad I did but not ever going back for more - so what is the plunge now? not the old ones, the starting of a business, the selling of it, marriage and divorce and marriage again, the change of career - too late? too high? and the plunges yet to be - yet another career, more creations, more disasters, vortexing whirlpooling closer to the last disaster of all that awaits somewhere down the line - to plunge into life as if into death, to commit all, hold nothing back, to be all in the game, to be alive-dead, to be dead-alive, without any hope or dread."

And then a follow up: What if disaster does NOT lurk as a result of my plunge?

"In spite of my fear of rejection I submit my novel and the publisher despite some misgivings agrees to publish it and Oprah loves it as do her millions of viewers and the movie version collects Oscars for the director and cast and I start turning out sequels at the rate of one every 2 or 3 years while the royalties add up and my biggest concern is how to distribute all the money among various charities because my own needs and those of all my family are long since satisfied and I can go to my final rest knowing I have lived the life I was meant to live and given it everything I have and learned all there was to learn and done as much as I possibly could and have no regrets and no apologies to make and know that this is just about the most perfect way for things to be."

Now finally, as a sort of combination graduation exercise and final exam: What I'm feeling now:

"I'm able to breathe - a relaxed feeling in the chest and solar plexus - goes along with a feeling of standing straighter with my feet solidly on the ground, legs extended without slouching or stooping my shoulders, goes along with seeming to see more clearly and attentively - but breathing above all, drinking in the air like cool water, cleansing and life giving, healing, maybe blessing as in holy water, maybe flowing as in streams, cold mountain ones that melt from the glaciers or deep blue ones that melt from the polar ice, a feeling of melting, of thawing, as at the end of a freeze, a relaxing, a seeping into moist earth from which things can grow - and what might sprout, I wonder, what green shoots of dormant things might emerge - everything that has been buried and lost - everything of life that has been dormant and in hiding - out into the clear air - into the lungs and out again - merging with the vapors of the world by inhaling them, waking up from a dream."

Pretty cool, no? And don't worry that I've spilled the beans. If you should take the class (which you can also do online in the comfort of your own room) I guarantee your results will be completely different -- as mine would be if I did it again right now. Hmmm...

"My intention for being here tonight is ..."

Going Electric

2009-10-16T08:00:00.004-04:00

It's all about the green ...

If you're a homeowner you can take advantage of a proven technology that will save you money, time, and trouble while at the same time lowering your energy consumption, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and improving the air quality. You might even prevent yourself from going deaf. Interested?

No, you don't have to park your SUV and invest 30K in a hybrid car. All you have to do is dump your humble gas guzzling lawnmower and replace it with an electric one. I did it myself about 3 years ago and I'm here to tell you it works.

The way it happened is, my old lawnmower was giving me problems. I had just spent about $120 having it refitted with a new blade, spark plug, air filter, and oil change. It worked for about a month before it became impossible to start. Then I noticed the metal housing of the whole thing was beginning to rust through and was almost ready to fall apart. So I went shopping for a replacement.

Not finding anything that didn't seem overpriced, I returned from the store with only an electric weed-whacker, which was another tool I needed. I thought I could at least do some trimming while I figured out what to do about the mower. The new machine was light weight and fun to use. I quickly cleaned up all my edges, then paused and considered how much grass was left in the remainder of the front lawn. Hmm ...

Twenty minutes later I had mowed the entire front yard with the weed whacker. My back was a little sore but I'd hardly broken a sweat. That was enough for me. If I could do it with a weed whacker, then a scaled up version with 4 wheels had to be that much easier. For less than $200 -- that's almost $100 less than the price of a Kindle Reader -- I came back with an 18" Black and Decker Lawn Hog electric mulching mower that made short work of the back lawn, and has served me faithfully now for 3 South Florida lawn mowing seasons.

Trust me, there is nothing wrong with this idea. Let's take the usual objections one at a time:

The extension cords are a hassle*. Not really. I have two 50-foot cords that I plug together, and two exterior outlets to choose from. All you need is enough wire to reach the farthest corner of your lot. Uncoiling them and wrapping them up again at the beginning and end of the job takes about 2 minutes and is less work than yanking a rope trying to get a gas engine going when it's not in the mood.
You get tangled up in the cords. Not if you give it any thought. The only concession I had to make was the time honored pattern of mowing from the outside of a square to the center. Of course if you insist on that you will get tangled up. The thing to do instead is to start from where the cord plugs in and work your way back and forth away from it so the cord just unfurls as you go.
Electric motors aren't powerful enough. Baloney. I don't know how a 12 amp motor converts to horsepower, but I know that my gas mower used to stall if I plowed it into a clump of tall weeds. The electric has never done that. It slows but does not stall and has cut down everything I have asked it to.
An electric mower won't last. We'll see. Three years and counting. My gas mower gave up after less than 10. One thing I do know is that I will never spend time and money on oil changes, tuneups, or trips to the gas station to fill my 2-gallon can.
Your electric bill will go up. Can't say I've noticed anything there. If you think about it, buying 2 gallons of gas every few months is not a noticeable expense either, so why should electricity be any different? I trust the electric company to use its fuel more efficiently than the noisy, polluting engines that they slap on mowers.

And then there are the pluses of going electric:

Maintenance-free, or very nearly. I suppose I may need a new blade someday.
Quieter - more like a vaccuum cleaner than a mower.
Light weight - again, more like a vaccuum cleaner. Even gas mowers that drive themselves are beasts to wrestle around corners, or to lift into the back of your car when you take them to the repair shop.
No fumes - remember you're not the only one who has to breath that exhaust.
Safety - my gas mower caught on fire once when dry grass clippings were ignited by the hot engine. Remember, it has a gas tank on it, too. Whoops! Another time I splashed gasoline into my eyes when the filler hose came out of the gas tank while I was pouring. Those things are dangerous!

There are some amusing estimates of how many miles per gallon a gas lawnmower gets. This one, for example, concludes: "If you mow for 1 hour and your mower uses say 1/2 gallon ... then in 2 hours you would have walked 8 miles and used 1 gallon. So your MPG is 8 gallons to the mile!" In my case my yard is much too small to walk 8 miles in. I would say maybe 1 to 2 miles max, especially because I walk so slowly while pushing a mower. That gives me between 32 and 64 gallons per mile -- yikes! [Note: this math is backwards, see comments below.]

But mpg is not everything. This article delves into the pollution caused by gas lawnmowers and their noisy brethren -- leaf blowers, chain saws, and trimmers. They say that every week 54 million of us mow our lawns, so you have to multiply what you do by a very large number. 20 million small engines are sold each year, which is another measure of the scale of the problem, as well as how many old ones must be disposed of each year. Altogether they contribute a whopping 10% of our annual production of hydrocarbons.

Convinced? Please, give it a try the next time your mower causes you grief. I promise you won't be sorry, and you'll feel good about yourself, too.

[*You can also get electric mowers that run on rechargeable batteries, but I don't recommend it. They are more expensive, much heavier, lower powered, and have higher maintenance costs because of replacing the battery. Engineers tell me AC motors that run on wall current are always more powerful and longer lasting than DC motors that run on batteries. Let's let them do the math and take their word for it.]

Atoms of Empire

2009-10-09T21:05:00.000-04:00

Judging a book not by its cover but by the author's name ...

While browsing on one of my favorite sources for online books, Feedbooks.com, I stumbled across an obscure work called Atoms of Empire. The title caught my eye first, but what really hooked me was the name of the author: Charles John Cutliffe Wright Hyne. How's that for a mouthful? And what an epitome of Victorian respectability it captures in its ringing tones. That settled it. I had to see what Mr. C.J.C.W. Hyne had written.

The concept behind the title is that each individual is an indivisible atomic unit of the society as a whole. Specifically, in whatever far flung reaches of the globe they might find themselves, the intrepid subjects of the Crown were each a representative microcosm of the British Empire. Keep in mind that the work dates from the late 1890's when Victoria was still "Queen of England and Empress of India."

What follows in this collection of short fiction is a marvelous variety of period pieces ranging from droll plots hinging on matrimony to Indiana Jones-style adventures that stretch credulity to the breaking point.

In the opening story a priggish newcomer to an African colony decides to march into the jungle to impose law and order on the cannibal king, armed only with an umbrella. Having made himself universally unpopular, no one sees fit to prevent him from sallying forth to meet his fate.

Elsewhere various adventurers find themselves in the wilds of American swamps, falling victim to brazen train robberies, and fighting a cholera epidemic aboard ship. Then, on the fantastical side, we find out what lurks in an unexplored cave in the heart of the British Isles, and interview a mummy on the floor of an Egyptologist's study. Often the denouement of the story involves an encounter between two of the characters back home in Piccadilly or in the snug confines of their gentlemen's club.

What's enjoyable about these yarns is not just their dry wit but their unselfconscious belief in the triumph of pluck and daring-do. It's like watching old Hollywood movies where the writers, directors, and actors had absolutely no qualms about good triumphing over evil and America vanquishing fascism.

But more than just escape fiction, these stories have acquired a layer of historical interest for what they reveal about the attitudes of their intended readers. Racism, for example, is portrayed in a matter of fact way that has long since (thankfully) ceased being politically correct. Still, there is something refreshing about the use of the word "nigger" by someone who intended no insult by it. Now we are stuck with using the infantile phrase, "the N-word." That's progress for you.

There is precious little biographical information to be found about Hyne online, but in his day (1866-1944) he was a prolific popular novelist who cranked out a whopping 46 volumes during his career. There are a few others available on Feedbooks, including The Lost Continent, and still others thanks to the efforts of Google Books (check on Barnes and Noble), including the likes of Kate Meredith, Financier.

So if Atoms whets your appetite there is plenty to feast upon.

Enough Crime Fiction Already

2009-09-26T08:00:00.003-04:00

How many ways are there to end up dead?

Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy a good detective story as much as anyone. And the genre's prolific practitioners, from Edgar Allan Poe to Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and many more, have left us some wonderful works. But it seems to me we may have exhausted the possibilities of inventing new and ever more bizarre ways for people to be murdered. I don't doubt we can keep it up, but I question whether the exercise is worthwhile. It may even be destructive.

This doesn't tarnish my admiration for the likes of Chandler. For example, one of the many times that his hero, Phillip Marlowe, wakes up after being knocked unconscious, what does he see? A beautiful woman of course. And what does he say when describing her? "A glass of beer stood tall and amber at her side."

Is that great writing, or what? It's a line that sings, a piece of iambic poetry that jumps off the page while bringing the woman into focus. She's elegant because she sips her beer from a tall glass. At the other end of the literary scale, Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled Mike Hammer would have said, "she had a beer next to her." Not the same thing at all.

But that's Chandler for you. He had a way of giving you the whole person or place with just a pair of details. So he calls forth an entire room by focussing on the single yellow rose in a vase atop the grand piano. Or the life of a gin-soaked old woman by noticing the dead fly trapped behind her window screen. It's a kind of writing with images that must even survive translation.

Unfortunately few of those who followed after have equaled Chandler in poetry or matched his chivalric sense of bringing order to the chaos of the unlawful. The public demand for more has called forth an endless stream of imitators, many of whom must qualify only as lesser talents. But if they can't write they can still dream up endless new variations on the demented criminal mind, with loads of ingenious ways for them to torture and kill their victims.

I confess I fell into this trap myself some years ago. Combining my fondness for Marlowe with an interest in Miami history, I invented a detective of my own named Jonathan Spare who came down here from New York in the 1930's on a manhunt and stayed. My original idea was to do something different with the genre. There was to be no murder, only a haunting kind of search in which the watcher found himself being watched.

But when I arrived at the end of the novel I was dismayed to find that three people were dead, and my hero had killed two of them himself. What happened? Two things, I think.

First, the genre makes demands of its own. When I was about two-thirds of the way through and trying to figure out how it should end, I realized my hero had to confront the evil he had uncovered. If he didn't, it just wouldn't be a story. And confronting it seemed to require doing battle with it, and since good must triumph the evil ones had to perish. Well, they had it coming, after all. And my hero had to be transformed by all this.

The second thing is that I fear the contemplation of these evil deeds must have an effect on the author. We have to imagine what we write to the point of living it. Whatever our characters are up to we have to be there with them and see it through their eyes. One wonders how Jim Thompson, for example, was able to live with himself after spending so much time closeted in the dark and cramped minds of his demonic, obsessive characters.

It reminds me of a story by Jorge Luis Borges where a wealthy man gives a big party. In his basement he has a museum of weapons that he has collected, and one of his prize pieces is the actual knife that was used in a notorious murder. Later, two inebriated guests go down to look at it and end up having an argument. You guessed it: one of them dies. The knife has struck again.

So too with the "mystery" novel. Nowadays there is less mystery in it, but ever more graphic and depraved violence. The audience demands it. The publishers demand it. The movies demand it. The characters and plot demand it. What's a poor writer to do?

In spite of all this, it is not impossible to transcend these demands and to create something truly marvelous. Look what Graham Greene did in The Third Man, where a man searching for his missing and presumed dead friend finds him very much alive, but having caused the deaths of untold numbers of innocent people by blackmarketing worthless medicines. Or his earlier Brighton Rock, in which an average woman rises to heroic stature as she makes it her business to bring a couple of thugs to justice.

More recently Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man accomplished something like what I had in mind -- his hero, only a part-time detective, seems to end up hunting for himself in a wonderfully detailed and dreamlike archetypal fantasy.

I had an epiphany about all this one year at the Miami Book Fair when I attended a session called "Crime, Real and Imagined." The panel included two crime novelists, one of them a woman new to the field, the other a former NYPD officer. With them was Arthur Jay Harris, a reporter for the Sun Sentinel, who had just published Until Proven Innocent, an account of a real Broward County murder and the police detective who showed that the prime suspect was innocent of the crime.

What struck me about this presentation was the contrast between the ways murder was represented. In the fictional accounts the violence was exciting, and the tension leading up to it was titillating, almost sexual in intensity. The factual book began with the first visit to the crime scene, an ordinary house drenched in blood, and the understandable horror that comes over anyone who has to see such things.

I realized that only the real-life (or real-death) account elicited the normal reaction of disgust and revulsion that most of us have when we actually encounter violent acts. The fictional stories were just playing with the idea. There was no reality behind them, so they had to make up for that with senseless excesses.

That was the day I gave up on my fictional hero. Somewhere in his alternate reality he is free now to go his own way, to choose another profession, one that will not call upon him to become as evil as those he has to pursue. He won't have to go through all those other things I had planned for him in sequels. No hunting for fascists during World War II, no encounters with KKK racists, no agent provocateurs during the McCarthy communist witch hunts.

Maybe he'll sell real estate. That used to be a good business in Miami. He can buy a house himself, settle down, maybe get married and have a kid. He can have a life. And the rest of us can get on with ours.

Voice of the Oracle

2009-09-19T08:00:00.006-04:00

Daring to listen to those who are ignored ...

On the first day I passed her at the bus bench in front of the South Miami City Hall: a small, middle-aged woman just beginning to turn elderly, with the usual collection of shopping and garbage bags filled with all her worldly possessions. The sort of person we have all become accustomed to turning away from and ignoring lest they accost us for money.

But she was impossible to ignore, because she was in the middle of a tirade against the world. As I came closer she turned a withering gaze at me, lips curled in a snarl as her teeth bit out these words:

"I never broke the law, and that's more than I can say for you, Jack!"

I acknowledged her with a nod as I went on by, meaning only that I had heard her words and accepted them. She was probably right about never breaking the law. Except that now, having been forced into her current circumstances by who knows what convolutions of fate, economic violence, and lack of social concern, her condition itself has been declared illegal. We live in a country where one is not assured of a home but not allowed to be without one, the ultimate of all Catch-22 paradoxes.

Kurt Vonnegut described it this way in one of his novels (paraphrasing): The way it works is, gravity causes everyone to have to stick to the planet, but some people own all the places there are to stick to, so everyone else has to pay them for the privilege.

So I believed her that she was innocent, and when I reflected on it I knew she was right about me as well. Oh yes, it is true that I have broken the law. No matter now that the infractions were minor, or that I never got caught, or that I'm sorry and would not do it again, or that enough years have passed for the statute of limitations to have expired several times over. Time doesn't change the fact.

On the second day I passed her in the same spot on the same bench, but totally transformed. Now meek as a kitten she came up to me and with sorrowful eyes said simply, "Do you have anything to spare so I could get something to eat?"

"I have something," I said, and gave her most of the change from my left pocket (preserving my dollar coins for the morning commute in the other one because, hey -- I have to look out for myself too).

Guilty? No, not really. I gave, and having given moved on. My drop in the bucket would take her as far as it could, and someone else would have to take over from there. That's how we do it, such as it is. And she's right about one more thing: we owe it to her.

On the third day she was gone.

Creating from the Silence

2009-09-12T11:10:00.006-04:00

You can't make this stuff up ...

The idea that human acts of creation are divinely inspired is an ancient one. We only have to consider that the Classical Greeks had a staff of nine muses to preside over the various arts – and this must have been a formulation of a belief that was already ancient two thousand years ago.

Today we tend to admire the creative powers of the artist rather than to consider the source of what he or she creates. Yet where the creative impulse springs from, the source of inspiration, remains mysterious. To attribute it to such modern generalities as “the unconscious” is only to apply a new term for the muse. My suggestion is that we consider it to come from the same source as messages in Quaker meetings, and to think of it as "creating from the silence." For me, as a part-time writer and poet, this not only serves to improve my understanding of the process but to nurture and cultivate it as well.

Interestingly, the dictionary has a lot more to say about “inspiration” than it does about “creation.” The latter is simply the making, the craft of the art; the former speaks to its source. To inspire is "to have an animating effect upon; to cause, guide, communicate or motivate as by divine or supernatural influence.” [Webster's New World.] Specifically in theology, it means “a divine influence upon human beings, as that resulting in the writing of the Scriptures.” If we believe in continuing revelation, then this process must have been at work in other writings as well -- pehaps even most of them.

People who may have no interest in spiritual works may find a comparable resource in all forms of artistic expression, just as most of us find satisfaction in admiring a beautiful sunset or an astounding mountain range. Before composing his famous Choral Symphony using Schiller's “Ode to Joy,” Beethoven penned an earlier work, the Choral Fantasy, in which the “divine spark of the gods” was substituted by “the gifts of high art.” Clearly for Beethoven inspiration came from the realm of the divine, and art was a bridge leading us back to the source.

There is one other connotation of inspiration: “to arouse or produce a thought or feeling; to affect with a specified feeling or thought.” What's of interest here is that, having been so affected, the artist proceeds to arrange words or paint or musical notes in such a way as to affect others the same way. There is certainly an analogy to be drawn with the giving of a message in meeting. I would suggest the message is more fully received in the act of sharing it with others, just as music is better when performed than if it were only heard in the mind of the composer. A similar creative impulse is at work in both cases, and they both improve with communication.

In using poetry as an illustration of this idea, I like to use a piece by Billy Collins, our former Poet Laureate, titled “Introduction to Poetry,” from his collection The Apple That Astonished Paris. (Go ahead and read it, then please come back.)

Besides being wonderfully funny, this poem manages to give several examples of how poetry works its magic – by drawing comparisons between things that do not normally seem to resemble each other – while contrasting it with the kind of plodding, rational analysis that not only misses the point, but extinguishes the life of the poem.

[There is certainly “art” made in this way, and one of the kinder things said about it is that it is “uninspired.” We only have to consider the torrent of popular novels and soap operas and situation comedies, not to mention the forgettable Broadway musicals, that occupy our time without nourishing our spirits.]

What do a mouse and a light switch have to do with poetry? How is reading a poem like water skiing? These are not the first ideas that would occur to most of us, yet even on a first reading his wonderful analogies stimulate us into a deeper understanding of what poetry is, why we like it, and how to listen to it better. But where did Collins come up with these ideas? How did he decide that this was the best way to say what he wanted to say about poetry? Certainly it was not an entirely rational process done with compass and protractor on a sheet of graph paper. Rather, the images and substance of the poem must have emerged from a place of quiet contemplation, and they may have leapt instantly into being, regardless of how long he later refined them into their final form.

Someone said (I have not been able to locate the source) “When I know what I want to say, I write an essay; when I don't know what I want to say, I write a poem.” In other words, the poetic process is a search for meaning, not a report on one. This process cannot be rushed, and resists direction. Robert Frost said, “Asking a poet to write a poem on a certain subject is like asking a woman, eight months pregnant, to give birth to a red-headed girl.”

Another saying goes, “The problem with being a poet is figuring out what to do with the other 23 hours in the day.” Those hours may be filled with many things, including a search for the quiet place where creation can happen. This may not be the usual hour of sitting in silence in a Friends meeting, just as not all artists are Quakers. Rather, it may be only a momentary sinking into reflection, even in the midst of activity.

Here's another example from my own work:

Star Gazer

Looking at the night sky through glasses
I begin to be bothered by the rim around my vision
so take them off -- there, so much better,
my eyes not so bad after all, a bit fuzzy maybe

but still there’s a rim around my vision:
the sockets of my eyes, the ridge of brow,
both sides of my nose displaced to left and right
in binocular transparent apparition,

so take off my face and it’s better yet,
but still that dark behind where I can’t see
so remove the back of my skull, and
while I’m at it, the eyes.

There. Perfect.

I don't know how many times before I had noticed that I could see parts of my own face -- like the sides of my nose and the sockets of my eyes -- as if I were peering out from the mouth of a cave. Probably the first time was when I was a child, dozens of years before the poem happened. But somehow, in the midst of this particular evening, it suddenly meant something, it “spoke” to me. The ideas that the face could be removed, and that vision is somehow enhanced by the lack of eyes, simply occurred to me, and seemed to express a desire to witness and encompass the whole universe with nothing in the way. And, too, that looking out and looking in are much the same. I didn't go to the beach with anything to say. I didn't go there looking for a poem, but I came back with one.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings saw dew drops on morning leaves. Countless times, people must have noticed that things looked “funny” under the drops, before someone in the Netherlands realized that things were being magnified, and discovered the microscope.

It must be that all of us are receiving messages and inspirations on a regular basis, though we may be too busy most of the time to notice, or to do anything about it. All we can do is nurture the process, by quieting down and paying attention. Then maybe we can learn to do what feels like taking dictation, and to speak and share those “gifts of high art” as they emerge from the silence.

Bird Brains

2009-08-29T11:09:00.002-04:00

New respect for small minds ...

Long ago a particular bird impressed the heck out of me. I was sitting by a pond in a local park (Fuchs Park, to be precise) when this small winged creature hopped down to the water's edge to feed.

My friends who are bird fanciers will have to forgive me for not knowing its species. It was shiny and black or dark brown, that's the best I can do. The main thing is, it was not a water bird, one of those long-legged varieties that wade around looking for critters to scoop up in their long pointed or shovel-shaped beaks. No, this was a normal tree-dwelling type of bird, with a short beak built for pecking. I would have expected it to be searching the lawn for insects and worms.

Instead it amazed me by peering into the water, then quickly darting its head under and emerging with an aquatic snail. Placing it down on a rock, it held the shell with one foot while extracting the escargot with its beak. This bird was a gourmet! I marveled over its ingenuity. How had it learned to do this? When did the first of its kind learn that there was food in the water? Was the behavior taught, invented, or instinctual?

Recently far more advanced examples of avian intelligence have been documented. This BBC news item shows a rook smart enough to drop pebbles into a glass tube in order to raise the water level so it could reach the snack inside. (The story is told in one of Aesop's fables, which we now see may have been based on fact instead of fantasy.) I thought this problem-solving ability was impressive when I saw a chimpanzee do it, but a bird? How is it possible to pack so much intelligence into a brain the size of a pea?

Maybe we need to rethink the whole idea of how unique our intellectual capabilities are. True, Aristotle took the bird's accomplishment a step further when, noticing how his body displaced the bath water, he came up with the concept of mass and how to measure it. And building on such insights, look how far we've come.

But seeing these examples of the innate intelligence of some of the smallest creatures, we need to admit to a greater and more widespread intelligence at large in the world, the same one from which we, like the birds, have been born.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8181233.stm

Magic Words

2009-08-18T20:56:00.007-04:00

When language itself becomes a tool ...

The human belief in magical powers has probably included the power of words dating back to the earliest beginnings of language. It's widely present in mythology and fable, and continues with us today in contemporary myths like the Dungeons and Dragons game and the Harry Potter saga. Who wouldn't like to be able to say "shazam" or "abracadabra" and have things happen?

Language may not have been our first tool, but it quickly became the most powerful of them through its ability to encode knowledge and pass it along to others, even across generations. Each time we enhanced it, the power of language increased dramatically. We invented writing to supplement our power to remember, then printing to increase the availability of written documents, and lately what we might call "indexing" -- the addition of powerful search algorithms to make information radically more accessible.

Information that used to be arcane because it was buried in a single library somewhere is increasingly widespread and publicly available. My first experience of this was back in the early years of the Internet. I was running a digital printing business at the time and wanted information about scanning images -- recommendations for color depth, dots per inch, and how to scale them.

It was one of the first things I ever used a search engine for, and even though there was no Google yet (I was probably using Yahoo or AltaVista) within five minutes I was reading a masters thesis on the subject which had been made available by a distant university. The document answered all my questions and then some, complete with illustrations, charts, and graphs. I was truly impressed.

Such incidents are now so commonplace that we not only expect them but take them for granted. Why shouldn't things be this way? Of course, all we should have to do is know what question to ask, and the answers will be available -- all 2,417,673 of them.

Behind the scenes of this modern miracle is the global network of computers and software that are doing the job for us. And the real secret of their power is the use of language to communicate with them -- both for programming and for getting comprehensible output from them.

This came home to me again recently as I was honing my skills as a website designer. Mostly this involved facility with various computer languages -- HTML/XHTML for page content, CSS for page styles, and both Javascript and PHP for working with special effects, databases, forms, and "dynamic" pages created on the fly in response to user input.

The most satisfying part of this job is that the words you write actually DO something. They are the abracadabras of the computer age. And even though computers are notoriously intolerant of tiny typos like incorrect capitalization or missing semicolons, they are absolutely obedient to correct syntax. (And really, wouldn't it be better if we humans could be relied upon to require clear instructions and then to do exactly what we have agreed to do?)

In the spirit of the new age, this mastery of the machine is not limited to those who can do the programming. Anyone who wants it can access the same search engines. Anyone who wants one can have an email account. The computers are standing by to do our bidding.

So next time you send a message to a bunch of your friends, just say, "Shazam!" and see what happens.

We Shall Overcome

2009-08-03T06:00:00.004-04:00

"When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean."

- Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.

So Pete Seeger is 90. This achievement was celebrated in a big star-studded bash at Madison Square Garden recently, honoring a lifetime of service to the causes of public good. Seems as if he's been an old man for my whole life. The year I turned 15 and discovered folk music Pete was already 43, older than my parents, and that seemed plenty old at the time. Now I'm a grandpa myself and he's still old enough to be looked up to.

My first years in college coincided with Pete's short-lived TV show called "Rainbow Quest." Of his many guests I especially remember the delightful Malvina Reynolds who gave us "Little Boxes" (made of ticky-tacky), and guitar wizard Leo Kottke, who demonstrated how beat up his instrument was by knocking his cigarette ashes into the hole in its scarred top.

By that time Pete was already a veteran of the Depression era, the struggles for unionization, racial equality and nuclear disarmament, and the blacklisting of the McCarthy period. Always a survivor, he somehow managed to emerge from it all unscathed and undaunted -- in the words of Bruce Springsteen, he "outlasted the bastards."

One thing that struck me in Seeger's recent interviews was that he didn't care for the fuss being made over him because, "I don't like big things." How to reconcile that with a lifetime of involvement with big social issues? I found an answer in the footage of him wandering through the crowd at an outdoor concert, his face lighting up with delighted attention to anyone who wanted to speak with him. This has been his magic, to take the personal relationship to the scale of a mass movement, recognizing that all meaningful human contact is always one-to-one. His songs speak to us individually, but appeal to what is universal in us, challenging us to do the same in our relations with one another.

The highest measure of success for song writers is not how many albums they sell but how many other people perform their songs. By now Pete's list of indelible tunes has imprinted itself on our collective consciousness to a degree that insures they will be with us for a long while. And each time the words are taken up by a new voice, the sentiments they embody spring into action once more, reaching new ears and new minds, addressing the age old problems in yet another incarnation.

Take "If I Had a Hammer," for example, which Seeger wrote along with Lee Hays of The Weavers. In the early Sixties, while Seeger himself was still banned from television, the tune was taken to a mass audience by Peter, Paul and Mary, who delivered it into millions of living rooms "live" on the Smothers Brothers show -- and nailed it, I might add. Thus the lyrics spoke on behalf of the one who was not allowed to speak. A message of empowerment spread across the land, encouraging anyone who would listen to pick up that hammer, ring that bell, and take up the chorus of social change.

And who else would have thought that you could clean up a river by building a boat and writing a song? Only Pete could have brought to bear the implacable confidence that if we would only stop filling it with refuse the waters of the Hudson would soon run clear once more. And what a parable that is for the many perils and evils that we still have to overcome.

Did I say "overcome?" Of course that brings us to the most famous song that Pete did not write, the gospel tune which he published back in 1949 and helped to foster into what became the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. This song has a long history with many participants, but Pete's biggest contribution, aside from the verses he added, was his revision of a single word from will to shall. He claims this was simply because "it sang better," and that feels like it is so. But I would argue that it served another function as well.

Grammatically, when using the first person we are supposed to use shall normally, and will to indicate a higher degree of intention or determination. The fact that this is opposite to the usage for the second or third person has helped to make it so confusing that shall is falling out of use altogether, especially in the common language of the folk who are theoretically responsible for folk songs. The result, I think, is that in common speech shall, whenever it is used, indicates emphasis, grammatically correct or not. In America, especially, we have the words of Abraham Lincoln lurking in the backs of our minds, promising that this government of the people "shall not perish from the earth," and that is a use of the intentional that has left its impression on us.

[A similar phenomenon happened among Quakers, whose use of "thee" and "thou" dates back to when these commonly used terms were simply the familiar forms of "you." They made a point of using them because they did not want to confer undue respect toward any individual by the use of the formal "you." Well, the language has changed since then. Thee and thou have disappeared from English altogether, with the notable exception of addressing God in scriptures or formal prayers. Thus the formerly familiar terms have come to indicate a respect, not to say awe, for the Deity. Any Quakers who persist in the old usage are considered quaint. And though they could argue that they are only showing proper respect for "that of God in everyone," that was not the original intention. In reality, most contemporary Quakers have adopted the current usage of "you" along with everyone else, because plain speech was the goal of this exercise.]

So my argument is that in current usage Seeger's substitution of the word shall gave an added emphasis of intention, just as it would if addressing a crowd in the third person. In any case the singing of the tune certainly enhanced the intentions of a generation of activists for peace and social justice, and even took root in soil as far afield as Czechoslovakia in the peaceful revolution of 1989.

Since Pete came of age with the arrival of Marshall McCluhan's "global village," it is not unusual that this wandering troubadour has reached far more people than he would have been able to do in the past, no matter how much travelling he might have done. Many who have been touched by his spirit have only done so through a recording or an image on TV. I've only seen him once in person at a concert he gave with Arlo Guthrie in Miami Beach some years ago. But that one close encounter was enough to last a lifetime.

And you know, Miami audiences are not known for their willingness to sing along. But we sang that night, because Pete asked us to, and because he made us feel like singing.

Tales of Space and Time

2009-07-28T21:00:00.003-04:00

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." - Niels Bohr

H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, Things to Come, and a number of other imaginative novels, also left us a body of shorter works. Some of these are available in a collection called Tales of Space and Time which you can download from Feedbooks.

The first piece in this collection, "The Crystal Egg," was dramatized in a 2001 British TV series titled, "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells" (available from Netflix). It begins in that staple of English fiction, the old curiosity shop, where the proprietor experiments with the peculiar visionary properties of an item on his shelves. Wells' original version is a good yarn, but I confess I like the twist given to it by the TV writers. (In making a series of it, they cast H.G. himself as the protagonist investigating such things as time travel and mysterious teleportations.)

In "The Star," Wells abandons any pretense of telling a story and simply gives us a compelling account of what it might be like for our solar system to suffer a near encounter with a large, bright, hot, and gravitationally powerful interloper. The material could have been delivered as an essay, but by presenting it as a historical account by an omniscient observer, and by weaving in many glimpses from the point of view of common people, the vision becomes much more powerful.

Wells next visits the distant past and the not so distant future. His tale of the primitive man who invented the first ax foreshadows later works such as The Clan of the Cave Bear and William Golding's The Inheritors, while also harking back to Kipling's The Jungle Book with its talking animals. Even though the science behind it is no longer up to date, Wells' vision of it still rings true, as if he was able to imagine his way back to those earlier times. Oh -- and of course the inventor of the ax lived in primordial England.

The future seems to have caused Wells more trouble, for even though he only ventured ahead by 200 years many of his ideas are still hopelessly antiquated. Single young women, for example, still have chaperons, and hypnotism is the state of the art in mental health care. Women still wear fancy hats attached with hat-pins, and marketers are selling "digestive pills." His vaguely depicted flying machines have huge "sails" on them, with people hanging below in "swinging seats." (And you thought you were afraid to fly in a plane!) He accurately extrapolated the movement of the population into the big cities, but failed to see that the same mobility could result in the sprawl of suburbia.

Despite all this, Wells gets one thing right in an uncanny way. His hero and heroine are star-crossed lovers from different classes (and don't tell me that's an anacronism) who develop an antipathy for the status quo that is eerily reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960's. They leave the city to try living in an abandoned town in the country (back to the land!), and when that doesn't work out they end up doing manual labor in the underbelly of society where everyone wears "blue canvas" clothing (jeans?). They even have their own ideas about child rearing that sets them at odds with the system of public "creches" where the infants of the future are raised. This foreshadows the darker vision of Huxley's Brave New World, in which the hero also left society to try living in the wilds of South America where it was still possible to be free.

As I've mentioned before (here and here), those who would foretell the future are taking a big risk, and science fiction writers are among the most daring of the lot. As Paul Valery said, "... the future is not what it used to be." Things are changing so rapidly that yesterday's future resembles yesterday more than today, and much more than tomorrow. Just consider some past images of the future on display at Paleofuture.com ("a look into the future that never was").

But we have to give the venerable Wells his due. Like Jule Verne, Jonathan Swift, and others who went before, by boldly imagining what had never been imagined he helped to create the space of possibility in which the future, come what may, is still unfolding.

Long Live Big Brother!

2009-07-19T19:03:00.005-04:00

1984 becomes the first unbook, but probably won't be the last ...

What a coincidence -- no sooner was the digital ink dry on my recent blog about the 25th anniversary of 1984 than Orwell's notorious novel made news again by disappearing from Amazon's Kindle readers everywhere. This must mean it's time to reflect once more about the issue of copyright and rights management in the digital era.

Apparently Amazon was notified by the legitimate copyright owners that their digital editions of 1984 and also Animal Farm had been obtained from an illegitimate third party source, so they were obliged to stop distributing them. What makes the story bizarre, and should put consumers on alert, is that Amazon went way beyond what was required of them and decided to use their "Whispernet" back door into all Kindles everywhere to recall (i.e., delete) all the copies that had been downloaded previously.

Customers received refunds, but were not even told that their books were now vanished as if they had never been. They had become "unbooks."

Now, as everyone should remember, Winston Smith, the diligent worker bee of Orwell's imaginary world, toiled away at his desk in the Ministry of Truth carefully excising past references to news that had been revised and people who had been done away with: "unpersons." He did this by pasting brown paper over their pictures in old newspapers, and by redacting the text until it resembled a passage of testimony on the Iran-Contra affair. The operative government slogan was: Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.

But just when we thought we were safe because things have worked out differently, along comes this new digital technique capable of instantly removing all references to any digital content. The battle is not lost yet, because regardless of Amazon's deletions there are still lots of hard copies of Orwell out in the world, and perhaps some legitimate digital copies as well -- maybe even a fugitive one living on a Kindle somewhere, saved only because it is in some remote area of the planet where Whispernet cannot reach. But the example shows what is possible and should give us cause for concern.

With the immanent demise of the print editions of all newspapers, we will soon get used to the idea that our sole source for information is the digital archives of the Internet. And alas, the memory of online sources is brief and subject to loss and revision. Under a regime with the will to do so (let's pick China as an example), the nerve-nexuses of the Internet can be constricted, spying software can be installed on your computer by law, and what you can and cannot access can become very much a matter of centralized control.

And never mind deleting books or articles -- how about just revising them, perhaps while they are still being read? Remember that election last year where our editor lambasted the other party's candidate? Well, as you can see, you are mistaken, because he was clearly backing the winner from the start. Remember the famous photo of the young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square? Well, your memory must be playing tricks on you, because you can search all day and you will never again find a copy of that photo.

Our defense against this potential tyranny is still vigilance, as always. The battle of information flow between the top-down central authority model and the bottom-up grass roots model gives hope that there is at least an alternative. But we also need to start choosing our battles while we can still win them. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is still a winnable debate.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has stripped us of some basic rights that we used to take for granted when we bought a book or record. We need to make up our minds to resist. We can do it economically, by boycotting publishers and distributors who engage in practices we don't approve of, or politically, by demanding legislative change, or in courts, where organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up on our behalf. (Check out their take on this issue here.)

One commentator on the irony of this fate befalling 1984 observed that it might have been even more ironic if it had happened to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, about a society that had burned all its books. But there is probably small chance of that happening as long as the publishers need to have something to sell us. Rights management is really about having a way to sell us the same thing multiple times, the way we are expected to pay every time we watch a movie.

I'm much more concerned about the possibility that the next time I read it there will be something funny about the ending of 1984. Winston Smith, bright and shiny after graduating from the rehab program in the basement of Minitrue, joins the Anti-Sex league with his pal Julia. They move into a plush new apartment suitable for Inner Party members and live happily ever after. Winston can't imagine what ever got into him to question things the way he did. But that's all in the past now, where it can be safely ... revised.

Death of a Pioneer

2009-07-12T08:00:00.005-04:00

Gosh, Grandpa -- what was it like before the Internet?

Way back at the dawn of time, around 1982, I stared at a dark screen with some green text on it and listened to the squawking of the first modem I ever used as it dialed up a connection to a distant host.

I had attached this beast with a fat 25-pin cable, installed a terminal program that came on a 5-inch floppy disk, and followed the instructions for configuring my serial port using settings like "COM1" and "8,N,E," which meant 8 data bits, No stop bit, Even parity. Without this, PC-DOS would have been unable to get the modem to do anything, or the terminal program would have spewed gibberish across my screen.

Breathless seconds passed. Then I was greeted by a "CONNECTED" message and a prompt for my user name and password. I was in! But what was I into, you may ask. Not the Internet, which, under the name of ARPANET, was still in its infancy and had not been allowed out of the nursery of the DOD and a collection of universities and defense contractors. And not the World Wide Web*, which had not been invented yet. No, it was none other than Compuserve, that grand-daddy of online life. And if you want to click that link you'd better do it soon, because this pioneer of cyberspace is about to become history, the victim of the same fast-paced rat-race of innovation that it helped to bring into being.

About all I ever did with Compuserve was to read the news, and that was mostly for the novelty of it. At a speed of 300 baud I could actually read the text faster than it scrolled onto my screen. In modern parlance, by the time I had downloaded it I was already through with it and on to the next story. Sure, it was clunky, but the idea that I could get the news as fast as the Associated Press could send it out was a real novelty and clearly a sign of things to come. This was still the era of the daily newspaper and the weekly news magazine, which we now see are becoming obsolete because they can never report anything but old news, which by definition is not "new."

Compuserve offered email if I wanted it, but I didn't know anyone else who had an email account so I never sent any. And why would anyone want to correspond with someone they didn't know? I had heard about "bulletin board" services but could not see the purpose of one. That was a light bulb that took some time to turn on.

I didn't use Compuserve very often or for very long. At the rate of $6 per hour it didn't take much to rack up a substantial bill. If you wanted higher speed you could pay for the premium 1200 baud service -- 4 times faster. But that cost $12 per hour and required a modem that cost hundreds of dollars extra, so for most of us it was not a realistic option. Later modem speeds increased rapidly from 1200 baud to 2400 ... 4800 ... 9600 ... 14k ... 28k ... finally maxing out at 56k just before DSL technology made them obsolete. (Apologies to those who still rely on them out of choice or lack thereof.)

And of course the rest is history. Within 10 years Sir Tim Berners-Lee had come up with the paradigm of hypertext and server addressing that made web pages and the World Wide Web a reality. I can still remember reviews of some early web sites that complimented them on their use of images to present a nice appearance. Wouldn't Web 2.0 with full video and sound have blown our minds back then? Another 10 years was long enough for the whole dot-com boom and bust to happen. Whoosh.

Lost in the shuffle was poor old Compuserve. Bought out by AOL--which became part of Time-Warner and itself struggles to survive in the face of losing its dialup access revenue--Compuserve ended up in a dwindling niche as just another web portal looking for customers. And now AOL has decided to pull the plug on it.

But like every good ending, it is really only the end of the beginning.

* Note: Though they are now used synonymously, the Internet and the World Wide Web (all those www's) are actually different things. The Internet is the infrastructure that allows servers, client computers, and networks to interconnect around the world, while the WWW is the system of domain names, hypertext documents (web pages) and email that flows across it. We could (and did) have an Internet without the Web as we know it, but the Web could not exist without something to run on.

Musical Roots

2009-07-07T21:33:00.001-04:00

Unearthing the song hits of the Ice Age ...

One of my all time favorite Star Trek episodes from the Next Generation period is the one in which they encounter an alien space probe that temporarily kidnaps the mind of Captain Picard. In the course of 24 hours he finds himself living an entire lifetime as a member of the alien species that created the probe as its legacy. Their sun is swelling, their planet drying out and burning up, becoming an uninhabitable desert. It is all they can do to create the technology to launch a first probe into space, signalling that they existed. As one of the aliens, Picard marries, raises a family, and lives out his natural life as their world grows steadily hotter and more dead. He even finds time to learn a musical instrument--a small flute like a penny whistle--and to play a favorite tune on it.

Awakening back on the Enterprise, Picard learns that the lifetime he experienced was the message that the doomed alien race had packed into its probe -- the essence of one life out of its billions, designed to be planted in the first receptive mind that came along, a way of saying "this is what our lives were like" long after those lives had ended.

Also packed into the probe was a small flute which Picard puts to his lips, and from which a familiar poignant tune emerges as the Enterprise sails off into the depths of space. Its frail notes are all that remains of the vanished world.

Back in reality, we learn that our own world's oldest musical instruments have been pieced together from bits of ivory and bone found in a cave in Germany. As the legacy of our vanished ancestors, this certainly compares to Picard's discovery.

Dated to between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, these flutes, or at least replicas of them, can actually be played, emitting into the modern air tones that have not been heard since humans hunted mammoths in a glaciated Europe. Fascinatingly, they approximate the same pentatonic scale still used tens of thousands of years later in the Orient, and which can be played using only two fingers of each hand.

What melodies they played and how they were used remains a mystery. We can only speculate that the music may have resembled that of the indigenous peoples of Africa, Australia, or the Americas, and that singing and dancing may have been done to it. How wonderful it is to see those instinctual activities still alive and thriving in human societies today, and to realize how fundamental they are to our humanity.

The discovery shows that music goes back at least as far as language, and may even have preceded it. A recent PBS documentary titled "The Music Instinct" mentions the idea that Neanderthals (who preceded the flute-making modern humans) may have sung to communicate, even though they never developed a true language. I imagine this being comparable to the way we modulate our grunts to say "uh-huh" (yes) or "uh-uh" (no) -- or even "uh-oh" (whoops) or "mm-MM-mm" (I don't know).

Taking this a bit further, some naturalists look at the "musical" activities of creatures like whales and birds to show that the modulation of sound has a history that likely goes back for many millions of years. Used to attract mates, to warn of danger, or just to stay in touch with other members of a flock or family group, the making of sounds has long held a big survival value, which is how such capabilities evolve.

And when it comes to dance, you have probably already seen the video of the dancing cockatoo that has been making the rounds online and on TV. (If not, just look for it on YouTube. I'm not going to post the one millionth link to the thing.) This bird, like others who have been similarly tested, clearly enjoys bobbing and stepping to a rhythmic beat -- even if it has been created by a different species (us) using technical apparatus.

Which brings us to music as technology...

If language made us human, it also enabled us to improve our tool making ability, and ultimately led to the highly sophisticated machinery of modern life. Among those tools were our earliest musical instruments. And just as language existed for a long time before being written, music existed as a purely oral tradition until relatively recent times. The music of India, for example, is still taught that way even though it is highly evolved, with a rich history that spans many centuries.

It is uncertain how far back musical notation goes, but it appears to be more recent than the written word. Some of the earliest examples appear as markings above the words of a song, much as contemporary guitar chords are sometimes shown between the lines of folk music. (See the photo of a Delphic hymn carved in stone from Greece.) Experts have managed to decipher the notes and durations and to reproduce a few poignant scraps of ancient melody -- all that remains of the musical legacy of vanished civilizations.

Our modern notation evolved along with our scales, tonal system, and theories of harmony. It would be hard to see how things could have developed this far without the ability to write it down and pass it along. Just try to imagine getting an orchestra to play Beethoven with words alone.

But our musical technology has gone far beyond that, leading to the creation of new instruments, and to the recording and reproduction of the sounds we make. Now musicians can learn from not only the written notes left behind by those who have gone before, but by listening to all the nuances of their performances. It amounts to a new kind of oral -- or aural -- tradition laid on top of the traditions of the past.

So how far back does our musical heritage go? According to Brian Green, author of The Elegant Universe, if the String Theory of physics is correct, then the most basic particles that compose the universe can all be thought of as vibrating in a cosmic harmony. Perhaps "in the beginning was the Word," but right after that was Music.

For more info:

Watching the Watchers

2009-06-22T22:29:00.005-04:00

25 years after 1984, Orwell's ghost still haunts us ...

Way back in 1947, with the scars of World War II surrounding him, George Orwell spent one of the final years of his life laboriously retyping the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the archetypal dystopian fantasy of a world gone wrong. This book was prophetic of so much that it no longer matters if its future is now in our past.

It might have been possible for others to imagine the looming Cold War, but how uncanny was Orwell's vision of a three-way balance of terror maintained between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia? One of the telling moments is during a Hate Week speech when the orator is interrupted by the delivery of a small piece of note paper, after which his speech continues as before, but with the names of friend and foe reversed. Just plug in the names of America, Russia, and China, then contemplate how Richard Nixon's peace overtures to Chairman Mao may have tilted the balance of power to put more pressure on the Soviet Union.

Or consider how the wacky linguistics of Newspeak, an attempt to make it impossible to formulate a critical thought against the government, was magnificently surpassed by the Nixon White House with its "inoperative statements" (lies) and deleted expletives. Or the Bush White House with its "extraordinary rendition" (kidnapping) and "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture). At least now both of them are unpersons, which has to be doubleplusgood.

Also fascinating is the role played by the media, especially television, in the nightmare world of 1984. At first glance it would seem as if Orwell got it wrong, because Big Brother used video strictly for propaganda and surveillance--the video screen was two-way and the government used it to keep a watchful eye on the citizenry. In reality, Joe McCarthy was able to use TV in the 1950's to further his Communist witch hunt, but we all know the real propaganda was commercial advertisements that sold us the American Dream of consumerism.

Long before 1984, television as an entertainment medium had grown to a scale that dwarfed the ability of governments to put out press releases. And in America at least, with its tradition of a free press, the media seemed to be doing a much better job of keeping an eye on government excesses. Thus Nixon was brought down first by a newspaper, then by televised hearings. And without the TV coverage, would the public really have cared enough to force the President's abdication?

But the implications of long-range and widespread viewing are still playing out. Over the last ten years online video has put the power to broadcast into the hands of anyone with a cell phone or cheap digital camera, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter have provided the means for rapid dissemination of anything that sparks an interest. This past week in Iran these potent new tools were used by an aroused population to bypass the censorship of its government and organize a demonstration just one note shy of open rebellion.

So, does this mean Orwell had it backwards, and that the watchful eyes of the public will be enough to keep our governments in line? As much as I'd like to think so, there are other possibilities to beware of. First of all, social networks are two-edged swords. You can certainly use them for protests and social change, but just by signing up and identifying our friends we have created a perfect database that could be abused in order to shut that protest down. It is far too easy to imagine a national emergency that provoked enough fear that the government could demand access to such information in order to round up "conspirators" and all their associates.

Consider how the Iranians turned those networks into weapons to attack government websites. Any doubt how our own government might react to an attack like that? Under the Patriot Act, which still holds sway over the Land of the Free, all you have to do is raise the specter of terrorism and any defensive measure becomes permissible.

And if you think we are not being watched, think again. Miniaturization and falling costs are making it possible to put cameras anywhere and record anything. Cameras are capturing the license numbers of cars committing traffic violations. Banks, airports, stores, warehouses, workplaces, even public streets are under constant surveillance in the name of public safety. Soon the military will be employing miniature robots the size of flying insects with the ability to see and hear, to literally be a "fly on the wall."

It remains to be seen which way the balance will tip, and if our watching the watchers as they watch us will be enough to keep them under control.

Several film versions of Orwell's 1984 have been made -- most recently in the famous year itself, in the real London, or at least part of it that was scuzzy enough to stand in for the one in the book. John Hurt played Winston Smith, with a benignly malevolent Richard Burton as his government tormentor. Interesting casting. You could easily imagine them with the roles reversed, the way Burton and Peter O'Toole were known to switch parts when they were playing Becket on Broadway. Music was nominally by the Eurythmics, but someone forgot to tell anyone to use their work in the film (except the closing credits), so if you want to hear it you need to get their album of the same name.

My favorite, though, is the 1956 version starring Edmond O'Brien. (It's not on Netflix, but you can buy it from Amazon and other vendors.) The stark noir character of the black-and-white, along with the fevered background of Cold War nuclear hysteria, makes you feel you are really there in that alternate reality. Long Live Big Brother!

So, Is God a Particle or a Wave?

2009-06-13T23:06:00.001-04:00

If the universe is the answer, what is the question?

Photons are tricky little things. You can show that they are particles by catching one, and you can show that they are waves because they have the ability to pass through two slots at the same time. Even weirder, they only do it if we're not watching. (What?) Two of them can even become "entangled" so that across vast distances a change in one of them will be instantly mirrored by the other.

All the other basic constituents of matter and energy are equally strange and unique. But perhaps the weirdest one is the one we haven't found yet. Right now the news is full of reports on the new particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider and how it may be able to discover the ultimate missing link in the form of the mystical (and perhaps imaginary) Higgs boson, which has garnered the unfortunate nickname of "the God particle." Its original namesake, Peter Higgs, is supposedly an atheist who hates the nickname. But even Leon Lederman, who dubbed it that in his book title (The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?), had no intention of ascribing divinity to the particle. He only meant that it would possibly complete our understanding of the universe.

According to what is now called "The Standard Model," the Higgs boson is the only remaining fundamental particle which has not been seen -- by which we mean, caught in the act of nano-second transformation following a spectacular crash of two larger particles. The Higgs was proposed to complete the array of known fundamental particles, because without it there is no way to explain why anything in the universe has mass -- which, if you consider any large object, is obviously a key component of existence. Much as scientists earlier filled in the missing spots in the periodic table of the elements, they are now filling in the gaps in a similar table of subatomic components of those atoms.

The Standard Model really needs this missing particle, because even if it exists the theory still has to jump through hoops to explain things like the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, and the expansion and shape of the universe. If the Higgs boson cannot be found, or if it can be proved NOT to exist, then the Standard Model may be done for, and it will be up to one of the newer competing theories to explain why things are the way they are.

All of which is by way of explanation that the God Particle is not supposed to be God, or even a particle of God, any more or less than the rest of the swarm of particles that form the physical universe. So those who are up in arms about it can just settle down, and Dan Brown can desist from having his Vatican-obsessed characters ascribe nefarious implications to it. All the discovery will do, assuming it happens, is to give us a better handle on reality, which is what science is all about.

The wonderful thing about the universe is the way it continues to exist regardless of how good a handle we may or may not have on it. Objects from atoms to galaxies have a remarkable quality of persistence. They go about their business with delightful disregard for the way we think they ought to behave. You might conclude that it doesn't matter what we think about it. But then why do those pesky photons seem to know when we're watching and change their behavior accordingly?

We have been blessed (or cursed) with this need to know, and an amazing ability to figure things out which has already surpassed the expectations of anyone who lived up till about a century ago. Think we'll never get to the bottom of the Cosmic Riddle? Consider what Charles Darwin had to say, presciently, about the mystery of our own origins:

It has often and confidently been asserted that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

From The Descent of Man

An Anthem for Anathem

2009-06-07T08:00:00.002-04:00

In the age of digital books, this one deserves a hard copy ...

As a long time fan of novelist Neal Stephenson and a new fan of the Long Now Foundation, when I heard that the latest novel of the former was inspired by the 10,000 Year Clock project of the latter, I hurried to order a copy. And while it might seem that science fiction -- or speculative fiction, to use a newer term -- would be perfect to read in digital form, something compelled me to acquire Anathem not only printed on paper but hard bound as well.

Of course, this would not suit the denizens of the novel itself. To the "avout" who live in the hermetic society of the "math," mechanically printed books are too transient to be considered of value. All of their books are copied by hand onto leaves grown in orchards of "page trees," genetically engineered to produce a ready made paper with great longevity. Unstated is the corollary that only books considered important enough to warrant the effort will be copied by hand, which effectively culls the libraries of chaff and leaves only those works of enduring value.

[A similar idea appears in Robert Graves' utopian novel, Watch the North Wind Rise, in which poems are written in chalk and only when they have survived long enough are finally engraved in gold to be kept for all time. Not sure if this is a writer's dream or nightmare.]

Anathem is one of those books that comes with a glossary for the various unfamiliar terms of its internal language, though many of them become apparent from their usage. The most important concepts are also introduced by extracts from the Dictionary that appear as chapter preambles. Some of the words are English, but with modified meanings. A "math," for example, is a place where a certain mental discipline is followed. Other terms have been invented to fit the needs of the narrative. "Avout" is used the way we use "devout" when we say "one of the devout," except that the avout scrupulously avoid the concept of divinity in their pursuit of pure logic and knowledge. Thus the prefix "a-" to mean without belief. Those who do believe in God are called "deolaters" (not idolaters, which would imply false gods) and are found only in the world outside the maths.

One thing that becomes plain late in the story and which you might as well know at the beginning (because Stephenson tells us in his foreward), is that the planet called Arbre is not Earth. Letting go of this at the outset helps to explain how Arbre can have such a long history without any of it sounding familiar -- though there are, intentionally, many parallels to human history, especially the history of religion, philosophy, and science.

Beyond that, the less you know going in, the more you will enjoy the unfolding of this tale as it grows in scale and complexity. At first a sense of timelessness is created as we are introduced to a social order that thinks in terms of centuries and millenia, isolated by physical walls and social conventions from the surrounding civilization. But soon one of the characters expresses a wish that someday something would ... happen. And of course it does, as it must in any good novel. In a very satisfying way, something momentous works its way up from the depths until it bursts to the surface like a whale, shattering the quiet lives of the contemplatives and threatening global survival.

Should we compare it to Moby Dick? Probably not, but the quest for the explanation and resolution is as compelling as Ahab's obsession. And Anathem is a rare thing in contemporary literature of any kind: a novel of ideas. Though it owes something to Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose in its depiction of a monastic life, it also invites comparison to The Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann or The Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse. Where else would we find the characters (and the author) indulging in lengthy Socratic dialogs about logic and a priori truth? This is not your father's sci fi.

There is such a wealth of this type of material that several sections have been stripped out (perhaps at the suggestion of an editor) and appear in the back of the book as "Calcas," or logical exercises. The cuts were made judiciously, because while they are interesting reading by themselves they are not as relevant to the plot as the ones that remain in the body of the novel.

But by all means, don't let this imposing array of features deter you from reading. Anathem is a ripping good yarn that even manages to encompass a love story. And it is one of the most richly depicted worlds in all of literature. Dive in and feast.

God on the Brain

2009-06-01T07:30:00.003-04:00

So who created whom?

Recently several scientific articles have been published that describe how a belief in God and the idea of Creation may be "wired" into our brains, and that these beliefs may have evolved in us because they were beneficial to our survival.

Oddly enough, the first conclusion that comes to mind is that this means God is just a figment of our imaginations. But this is just another example of how our minds work. Belief in something is no proof it is false any more than it proves it is true; it is simply belief. Our beliefs may be based on observation, logical deduction, and reasoning, or they may be based on faith, superstition, or whatever innate sense we have of right and wrong. Belief can even be purely pragmatic, leading us to believe whatever seems to work at the moment, even if it is contradictory. Thus I might be an ardent supporter of the right to privacy, but still be in favor of wiretapping when it makes me feel safer. (It doesn't, by the way.)

As to the survival value of religious systems, you could certainly argue both ways. It might be the case that believing in something larger than ourselves can induce us to sacrifice our individual survival for that of the whole species. On the other hand, look how quickly Christianity evolved from a doctrine of love and charity to the bloodbath of the Crusades and the horrors of the Inquisition. Wouldn't we have done better to avoid those chapters of our history? Of course, some would argue that is what happens when we turn religious faith into religious organizations or institutions, which behave more the way states and politicians behave than like the figures such as Jesus and Buddha who inspired them.

And when it comes to personal sacrifice, consider the case of the house cat I saw on the news who repeatedly entered a burning house to pull out her kittens one by one. The poor feline had her ears burned, her eyes blistered shut, and the fur singed from her face, yet she saved their lives. It would seem that we could achieve as much for our collective survival just by emulating this cat, tapping into this same deeply seated instinct in our own animal brains, without having to resort to a belief in anything supernatural.

I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more of an outcry against this new research by the proponents of Intelligent Design. You might expect it to start another round in the battle of the Jesus-fish emblems seen on the backs of cars. You know the ones. The first fish contains the letters "Jesus." The second fish, with legs, contains "Darwin." The third fish is a pair of them -- a smaller Darwin fish being eaten by a larger one labeled "TRUTH." And now we seem to have the potential for an Evolution fish big enough to swallow a God fish.

But I think a better parable would be the one about Li Po, the ancient Chinese poet who, on waking up, could not decide if he had been dreaming he was a butterfly, of if he were now a butterfly dreaming he was Li Po. If God did not exist, would we create one? If God created us, would we believe it? If we didn't believe it would it still be true? If we were God, and forgot how we had created ourselves, could we find out?