20 years later

Twenty years is a long time. Two decades is two generations of wolves, deer and bear, and five generations of squirrel, and usually one whole generations of humans. My last twenty years has been eventful. 

I haven't written in a while, and this blog is dusty and the corners have thick spiderwebs. I'm going to take a stab at memoir, though, and this venue is as good as any other. So here are some of my regrets and regretful lessons.

Is that you in there?

Yes yes many months have passed since I posted. In my absence, a lot of stuff happened. I was mostly writing for a couple of smaller audiences. I now have some time for more general efforts. 

Today its the most recent flare up of "the AI problem." I've met it with a lot of skepticism, approaching Clint Eastwood-yelling-at-empty-chairs levels of irritation, for a number of reasons:

Above Average

Its been more than two years since I've done any writing, except for a couple of minor pieces that probably should have had more thought put into them.  My skills are rusty.  If I'd taken two years off running and come back to it, there's an entire shelf of books I could use for advice on appropriate workouts and pacing to get me back to where I was.  This being writing, though, something I've been doing for longer than running (sadly enough) I'll just jump right back in, do back-to-backs, and hopefully not sprain myself.

Its all just journal entries anyway.  No one reads this, despite it being public, and that's one of the benefits of being incommunicado for two years.  You may as well be dead.  At least the old skin is gone, and a few parts that, like a lizard under attack drops its tail, really weren't necessary to begin with.

Edge of Chaos

I stopped writing.  It seemed after Trump was elected for a little while there that writing would be essential.  A wave of protest and fear swept the country; women marched in unprecedented numbers all over the US, outraged that a man who admitted to a habit of sexual assault on national television could be elected President.  The outrage was sharpened no less by the fact that ~60% of white women would vote for the man.  How could such a morally odious, socially- and intellectually-disgusting man get into such a position, and why would women with so much to lose at best blindly follow partisan branding and fall in line behind someone who was at best incompetent in his malignancy, and more likely determined to end all the institutions and conventions they depended on?     

No pain, no gain

Its pretty much a basic rule of online life not to read the comments.  Whether its trolls who somehow find time to comment on millions of hours YouTube videos or determined efforts by Russian and American military and corporate social media specialists to influence foreign and domestic populations, its very likely that if you look at the comments on pretty much any post you'll just into a fight.

What makes comments so particularly infuriating is that there are just so many people who are wrong, and they all show up with carefully-crafted talking points.  I say this without irony, because of course the people on the other side of the argument - the ones who you disagree with - believe you're showing up with predetermined and carefully crafted talking points.

Some thoughts on hyperbole

Perhaps you've been deep in a cave for the last week or so, but just in case: A man with the lowest personal approval rating of probably any candidate for president of the US won election last Tuesday.  His approval rating was even lower than his opponent, who won the popular vote but wasn't able to carry enough state-by-state votes to win the thing outright.  It may be that she can still win the election, as the Electoral College is the final arbiter.  And, as many who voted for Hillary Clinton are aware, the Electoral College was invented to ensure the Presidency doesn't fall into the hands of the unfit.

The water's fine

Editor's Note: I wrote this back in March...


What defines a "tribe?"  In the old days it was defined anthropologically, as

a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.
"indigenous Indian tribes"  

At about the same time people in my neighborhood started going to Burning Man, when it was still just a group of artists and their families and friends getting together over the Labor Day weekend on a beach in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco to burn up some of the stuff they couldn't sell or didn't want to, the definition of "tribe" changed to something more like "affinity group."  One's "tribe" came to connote the people you wanted to hang out with, as opposed to say the ethnic group you might accidentally find yourself part of by birth.  San Francisco divided into tribes, as many of the people in Generation X made there way out from their homelands and migrated to different parts of their continents.  It was voluntary tribalhood, of course; the slacker image aside, very few of the people in Generation X chose their companions carelessly.  The definition of your local family or affinity group might have been as simple as "no needle drugs" but you'd surprised how meaningful and exclusive a club like that might be at various points in the '90s.

Perdido

When I was still a young man Beck released the song "Loser."  In 1993 the Reagan era was in collapse, Generation X was still a viable concept, Clinton was President and it appeared that a life of low-wage unfulfilling work loomed ahead of all of us who weren't Boomers.  I was in graduate school, living with a bunch of other graduate students in a newly gentrifying neighborhood in San Francisco, the students and white kids slowly moving into apartments recently vacated by African-American families.  (Not all of those families were economic refugees; our landlord was African American, and that was true for about half the places I lived in San Francisco).

Housekeeping

My posts have been non-existent for the last few months because I've suddenly got things to do.  My job involves some combination of sitting around thinking about what the future looks like and relating that to senior management in pithy and catchy ways, and driving the execution of that vision by persuading engineers to do things and sometimes just telling people what to do.  For the first half of this year I spent a lot of time thinking about the future.  For the last half its been execution.

But I wanted to talk, for a minute or two, about the future.

Out here in the sticks

Fermi sees record flare from a black hole in a distant galaxy | Astronomy.com

I've been reading a lot of ecology lately, because its hunting season again and after six months of spiteful sulking over my lack of success last year my hunter's heart has lifted with optimism.  Surely last year you learned something useful, it whispers to me, and you won't be left wondering whether you're blind or maybe all the prey animals have just gone on vacation.

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing

A moment, if you will, for a philosophical reflection.

Once a month or so I do a talk for a local amateur astronomy club about what's available up in the night sky in the coming month.  I offered to do the talk a few months ago, just a few months after I joined the club, which was just a month or so after I bought a telescope and for the first time in maybe 25 years looked up at the sky with more than drunken longing.  (Astronomy is honestly my first love; I got into Philosophy and math because of the larger considerations explained below, but in all fairness I just married Philosophy of Math, intellectually.  Astronomy is the one I'll always love.)  The talk is designed to be useful and interesting for kids and adults alike, so we use simple flashy pictures and don't go too much into the science; the point of the talk is more slideshow empiricism than it is deep astronomical science.  I want the kids and the adults just starting to go outside into their backyards on a new-moon Wednesday night and take a look around with some binoculars.  That will provoke questions, but it helps to have some names on things.  In much the same way that people are able to understand the health of their neighborhoods if they can name the trees and shrubs and vegetables growing there as well as the middle schools and coffee chains and the name of the people with the purple fence down the street, people will feel more comfortable looking up if they have some sense of what they're looking at.  So to encourage that, we need to show them around a little, so they get a sense of the texture of the night sky and what's visible, and what's just out of visibility.

Frankenstein, version 1078.78, build 22

Medium has an excellent piece up ostensibly on the cozy relationship between the national security state and Google.  Its really much more about the foundation of American innovation since roughly the end of the first Bush administration, when the old cold warriors looked around at the wreckage of the world and, despite their eventual determination to burn their prophets, decided they needed to get the Internet into everything so they could control the world they'd won.

Grooming

I've been trying to understand my feelings for the Cosby revelations, the accusations from many women of various ages (is it now more than 20?) that Bill Cosby assaulted them, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes after drugging them, over the course of decades.  Cosby has had a shady reputation as a philanderer for years - but then what famous male entertainer hasn't? - and when the initial charges from Andrea Constand surfaced in 2002 everyone remembered a weird extortion attempt against him in 1997 that seemed at the time to be unhinged.  The very same emotional resistance to the notion of Cosby the philanderer helped push Autumn Jackson into Crazytown; the thoroughly tragic death of Cosby's son in 2001 in a botched robbery, and his cranky-old-man lecture tour where he somehow found the nerve to tell black kids that they needed to be better than white kids, all that made it just much easier for those of us who were male and of a certain age to hope for the best so we could continue to fondly remember the man who taught a generation of young men comic timing and the art of the anecdote.

180 degrees of victimhood, part I

Way way back in 2010 Tom Junod wrote a fascinating piece for Esquire about Barack Obama's political style.  The gist of the piece was that Obama, as a firm believer in the parenting movement called Positive Discipline, was applying the rules he and his wife used to raise their daughters, to the government of the United States. 

Post-Racial America. Except for the Scots-Irish.

What is pretty clear now, is that after the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, the lynchings, beatings, shootings and bombings, the civil rights movement and all the laws passed by legislatures of both parties in all fifty states, and all the advantages and opportunities they've been given, that some White Americans are just genetically incapable of being fair to Black people.

Despite the fact that its both the law and its the right thing to do, some White Americans are just basically violent racists. They just can't be trusted not to shoot Black people for no good reason, or abuse the law and take advantage of it to harm Black people.

And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to be cops. I mean, we hold cops to a much higher standard than gangs, but lately it seems like every week some white racist is shooting a black teenager just because the kid is acting like a teenager.

Maybe its the Scottish heritage. I'm part Scots myself and proud of it. But those people are pretty intolerant. Its a shame they can't be trusted, but they certainly don't seem to be able to treat Black people fairly.

No Country For Old Men

I was struck this morning by the image of the putative leader of the Old White Guy faction in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, telling his followers that it was time to turn this country around.

He promises a 180 degree shift: that's what his campaign was about; that's what his party's message was; that's what his comrade's messages were; that's what's wanted by the evil billionaires who poured money into their coffers and their supporters.

And so I'm reminded of the comic's routine, popular during the 80s among comedians who'd grown up on Bill Cosby and then pushed away from him - people like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor - of the dad who threatens to turn the car around and go home because the kids are misbehaving.  And then antics ensue, because the punchline was some variation of "dad just wanted to go home and drink beer on the couch in front of the football game and only took us out because we pestered him."  Now, its funny because its true.  At least it was funny the first dozen or so times I heard it.

Time Has Come Today

I've done six posts this year and its already October.  Quite a feat.

I've been involved in work-related things, none of which panned out.  So I'm passing on from one employer to another, once again hoping that meaningful work is just around the corner.  I'm still just intellectual migrant labor, but this new gig will hopefully require less handholding and soft cooing and babysitting, and more actual intellectual work.  And as a result, more posts.

Update: My editor informs me the actual count is nine (9) posts this year, counting this one.  Somewhat less of a feat, roughly 50% less, but still almost one a month.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Part II

Consider, if you will, the implications of the following two stories:

Why India's Mars mission is so cheap - and thrilling

First U.S. Stealth Jet Attack on Syria Cost More Than Indian Mission to Mars

 

I'm a big fan of Obama's "Don't do stupid stuff" foreign policy.  Its the same principle you find in medicine - "First, do no harm" - and it applies to pretty much any attempt to develop solutions to problems.  When it comes to relationships with other countries and regions, you really ought to avoid doing something stupid.

Apostrophic

Quick and nearly meaningless observation that may be of some use to some of you.

Bars in small towns or super-suburban neighborhoods usually have an apostrophe in their name, a possessive to indicate that the owner has a cool, hip name and has seen a lot of the world and will sell you a kicky multi-colored cocktail and maybe you can dance.  So you get bars named "Hollywood's" or "O'Reilly's" or "Chance's."

Bars in actual cool hip places don't use the apostrophe.  The possessive isn't there.  The bar is named after a state of being and not a person.  The most famous of these is Cheers, which was actually a TV show: but note its not named Cheer's, as in There's a guy named Cheer and this is his bar, but Cheers, just the toast you give when you're drinking. 

A long time ago I used to frequent a bar in San Francisco in what's now probably called the "upper-to-mid-Market" neighborhood (or Umm) called The Lucky 13.  Great bar.  I practically lived in another bar called The Armadillo, which effectively killed my hopes of being a great graduate student.  No possessive on either, and that is, I'm now convinced, what made them great bars to drink in. 

Because here's an easy test to see whether you'll like a bar.  The test requires some time, so its not going to resolved right away.  But go into the bar's neighborhood, and listen to people talk about it.  If they use the possessive, as in "Are we going to Lucky 13's?" or "How about Armadillo's for a beer?" then they're the kind of people who drink their Bud lite with a lime and there will be a lot of popped collars in the clique. The blondes will not be dirty; the tattoos will be pretty butterflies.  Those people should go the nearest O'Reilly's or Bing's and commence to mixing.  That may be what you prefer. 

But if people put the definite article in front of the bars name - and no one ever said "The Lucky 13's", because that's just obviously dumb - then the bar shows promise.  If they shorten and use The, as in The Dillo, then they're talking about a place to go because its cool and not because the owner is some kind of goofy loser who accommodates the wealthy riff-raff.  Those are definitely stops.

One exception to this rule is the bar Rudy's, at the tale end of University Avenue in Palo Alto right next to the train station.  Rudy's is dark, malevolent and existential, a red-hued entrance to the Hell under those innocuous Venetian-style villas housing shadowy government-funded institutes on the Stanford campus, where they pass out heroin on the first day and lock you into the basement until they've sucked your soul into an intelligent dissident surveillance system.  Rudy's is just pretending to be the kind of place frat boys go to drink, in the way the funhouse entrance is often painted to look like a clown's mouth.

Otherwise, I think the theory holds. 

Deja Vu vs. Reality

In the morning I like to watch the local NBC affiliate while I read the NYTimes.  My daughter will often ask me questions about what's on the news, such as "why is everyone so happy this Bowe guy got out of prison?  His parents should be ashamed of him!"  It helps to be there to gently clear up her misconceptions.

But I've had this nagging thought for weeks now: How much of what I'm reading in the Times or seeing on TV is caused by conservatives flailing around demanding their irrational prejudices be enforced as the law of the land and universally respected as truth?  On any given day it seems like 80% or more.  Even the weather isn't immune.

Perhaps its time for a media diet.