Brain Clouds: the Listening Post Blog

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2008-09-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Given the overall popularity of sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and the tools of online social networking in general--blogs, comment threads, social bookmarking, video, music and photo sharing platforms, citizen journalism, and on and on--it surprises me how little direct interaction there is between ncpr.org and its visitors. The two bright spots are our Photo of the Day feature, which has attracted since its inception more quality submissions than we can ever use, and the Community Calendar, where a substantial number of each day's events are contributed by visitors online.

Our general listener comment page has, on the other hand, attracted three comments in June, and one each in the months of July, August, and September. Brian Mann, in his new blog Ballot Box, has posted thoughtful and timely essays on North Country politics and the rural divide 19 times in the last ten days. He has received three comments total from the hundreds who have read the posts. Actually he has received five, including two abusive comments from the same writer trying to look like one person responding to another. Those didn't get posted. If the rude and nasty tenor of many political sites is keeping you away, we moderate comments--each is read before posting and will be rejected if it transgresses the bounds of civil public conversation.

We plan to go ahead with such features as the ability to comment on individual NCPR news stories, and to participate on NPR's soon-to-be-released social media platform. But it may be that our audience still does its networking the old-fashioned way: talking in the supermarket aisle and the ice cream stand queue and the at the pancake breakfast. Or perhaps it's just our laconic nature as rural folk. If you have anything to say about that, you can post a comment here.

And checking it twice

2008-09-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not an avid mass forwarder of email. I receive and send too much in my day job to enjoy doing more than the necessary off duty. But as a public library trustee I was interested to read a forwarded list of titles that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was supposed to have recommended for removal from the town library. The list purported to originate from the minutes of the library board. I was on the verge of forwarding it to my library director and fellow trustees, when I thought to check into its veracity. Good thing--it was bogus.

There are claims in the press that Palin had a conversation about policy regarding library books she considered inappropriate with the library director, and a claim that she subsequently tried to have the director removed, but no list has ever been unearthed, nor evidence that any particular titles were ever proposed. It is now unlikely that there ever will be a credible list, or that the other claims will ever be substantiated or disproven.

Because the entire conversation has now been overtaken by the question of who floated the bogus list and why. And why so many people were ready to accept it at face value, and whether it could be additional evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Bad info not only drives out good, it poisons the well of further discussion and investigation. It reduces all claims to equal veracity and converts what could have been a dialog into twin streams of disconnected invective.

This is one of the great dangers of the new media landscape. We get too much of our news from sources of untraceable provenance, from "redmeat14@yahoo.com." If there is a bright side to this tawdry episode, it is that it highlights the continuing value of professional and accountable media sources--despite what you might be reading about them in mass emails.

Politics and whiskey

2008-09-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

The sign above the bar used to read "Check your guns with the barkeep. No discussion of religion or the president." Small wonder--politics is intoxicating enough all by itself. Under the influence of a hot campaign, otherwise sensible people will say and do almost anything. Examples abound from both Denver and St. Paul, and the rhetorical binge will last until November. Speeches, ads, debates, press conferences, town meetings, photo ops, talking points, rallies, interviews, analysis, commentary, spin control, message management, opposition research, triangulation and segmentation. Yikes!

While I have had to forgo the consolations of whiskey in my life, I am unable to wean myself from politics. It sort of sneaks up on you, just like whiskey, and the sane person at the back of the brain looks on in horror as the tirade pours forth. I slip away from work to sample strong drink in the dim back booths of the blogosphere. I bolt my dinner, washed down with shots of cable news. Mornings lost in anger hangover, evenings lost in partisan email. The disease is progressive, and prone to quadrennial relapse. I would pray for recovery, but don't get me started on religion.

Where we breathe

2008-08-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

Weather report: improving

2008-08-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

I've been having a hard time with the weather. Not the weather outside--that's pretty sweet--but the weather online. Providing accurate and comprehensive weather data for an area this huge is a struggle both on air, and on the website. For years we have largely abandoned the field to the weather networks online, providing at ncpr.org only sketchy plug-ins with minimal forecast data, no alerts, no regional radar. As many of you have been at pains to point out over the years--pretty lame.

Having become enamored of Google Gadgets, last week I tried to put together something better. I tuned up a forecast scroller for each of the regions pages that gave current conditions and twenty-four hours of forecast for a specific location or set of locations. Except that its notion of current conditions runs hours out of date. I found a beautiful zoomable regional map with animated precipitation radar, except that it wouldn't work for the 8% of our visitors using the Safari browser--showing the western US to newer versions, and crashing the older browsers altogether. No way to win geekly glory.

So we bit the bullet and installed the shareware package HamWeather, which gives about as much information as anyone can absorb. It's still in shakedown phase--current conditions are still too out of date, there are styling conflicts that make the display a little buggy, etc. But I'm psyched, and even better, have some control over how it works. Once all is in order, you will be able to set the page to your own preferred location for return visits. Oxbow is, after all, the rightful center of the universe. And at 2 pm, it's mostly sunny there and 78 degrees, relative humidity 34%, 0% chance of rain, winds SSW at 7 mph. Check out the new page; the weather is improving.

Leechcraft

2008-08-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

There is something hideously fascinating about war news. The last week has given us a new one to follow--new geography to learn, "Ossetiya," new experts to hear from, and new smoke-shrouded, rubble-strewn streets to sorrow over. As long as there have been historians, they have attempted to explain why wars start, why they end--but they can't have gotten it right, else war would long ago have been done away with.

It's my theory that we don't have a theory. What if war is a disease that societies catch, and we are living in the era before germ theory? It could be evil spirits, we'd say, or unbalanced humors, or invisible miasmas that waft from battlefield to battlefield. When I listen to the pundits talk about war, what they tell me sounds like medieval pharmacopeia. Judging from the results, it's equally efficacious. Bleeding, as I recall, was one of the favored therapies.

New connections

2008-08-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the clock just sits there, slowly grinding gravel into sand, and sometimes everything seems to happen at once. We're heading into one of the latter times now. Stuff from the back burner, things we have been chipping away at month by month, all come to a head. A lot of the action is being driven by new projects and initiatives from our network partner, NPR.

The big news of the last few days was NPR's acquisition of Public Interactive, the platform host of many public radio websites, and a service provider to many more, NCPR among them. The merger may save us some change in the long run, but it will help most in facilitating our use of content from public radio programs that originate with PI's former parent, Public Radio International, and with other media services PI has under contract. It will beef up NPR's digital shop and will help PI stations play more effectively on the national stage.

NPR is making a big investment in social networking for the public radio community and is set to roll out a platform on which stations can foster their own communities within NPR.org. Look for lots more on this in late September.

NPR has also jump-started stations into the arcanely-labeled field of mobilecasting, making a mix of station and network features available via cell phones and other mobile devices. NCPR expects to join them by November. For those of you who wish your cell phones had a cord and a dial, there will be a regular phone number you can call from any type of phone to get the latest NCPR and NPR news and features. This will make NCPR available for the first time in remoter parts of the region that don't have broadband internet, or cell service, or even radio reception.

Speaking of mergers, I have saved the best for last. NCPR station manager Ellen Rocco is tying the knot this weekend with Adirondack potter Bill Noble. We wish them all the best.

The world looks back

2008-07-31T07:40:00.000-07:00

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

2008-07-24T12:23:00.000-07:00

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.

Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Just in time

2008-07-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

A child's garden

2008-07-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

These days my gardening efforts are pretty much reduced to weeding the perennials that survived another winter and the predation of the deer. Life in Millennium 3 seems to leave less and less time for playing in the mud. But I'm finding that each year of neglect brings my yard more closely into line with what I remember from my childhood. The hardy survivors seem to be those favored by earlier generations of North Country gardeners. The honeysuckle and mock orange will probably outlive me. Day lilies and bearded iris grow where they've always grown, and have even spread to the old compost pile where I dumped the spade-damaged thinnings. Exotics and annuals have long gone extinct, but the lily of the valley and the myrtle undergird the thick old lilacs each season. The peony transplanted from my grandfather's house sprawls each spring in aromatic disarray.

Dutchman's Pipe shaded many a North Country porch

The elms of my childhood are long gone, supplanted by maples that struggle now with their own blights. Much else that once shaped the North Country yard is also gone rare. As a once-voracious grazer of my neighbors' bounty, I can tell you that style has changed from "eating apples" to flowering crab apple in most places, and that the ubiquitous twin patches, one for rhubarb and one for raspberries, are now a rarity in town. And in the age before air conditioning, a vine-shaded front porch was the summer living room. Now only the Potsdam Food Co-op seems to sport the huge-leaved vine (I forget its name) that once broke the summer sun all over town. And I miss other old-fashioned favorites—few plant gladioli and more, or the simple miniature cabbage roses--modest, but hardy.

But then there was also that rash affection for japonica, or "bamboo"—three and four generations later, we still pay the toll on our knees, digging out the roots that extend without end—who knows—all the way through the earth to their Pacific island home. Long after we're all gone, japonica can fight it out with the cockroaches.

The thirty-threes of sixty-eight

2008-07-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

Radio Bob wandered in this morning with his latest $5 CD treasure, a compendium of Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly--tasty. The music of 1968 was special for a lot of reasons, but most special because I was then 15 years old--an age when musical passion runs an inch wide but a mile deep, when there are only 3 or 4 decent bands in the world and the rest of everything is chopped liver, when you can listen to the same cut 15 times in a row, just because that screaming guitar lick is so freaking amazing.

My early adopter friend David stopped me on the street in the summer of '68 to pass along a brand new copy of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly's side-long rock extravaganza. I was about to hustle it home to fire it up on my crunchy portable, the one with the tone arm weighted down with a penny to grind the needle over the skips. David said, "No man--you gotta do this with headphones." I trekked up to the college library's listening booth and jacked in. And the world changed, or so it seemed.

But the world changes, and then it keeps on changing. Iron Butterfly just doesn't sound the same. I listen to '60s music still, but different music, and with a different ear. Less naïve perhaps, but also less engaged, less willing to be transported. I have the benefit of experience, and the deficit.

Dark matters

2008-06-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to lose the car keys, or to forget where you left that true crime paperback with the lurid cover; they'll turn up eventually. But astrophysicists appear to have mislaid approximately 80% of the universe. Actually, it's probably always been missing, but it took them this long to notice. The problem it appears, is that things move too fast--things in orbit, that is--stars orbiting within galaxies, galaxies orbiting about one another. Given the puny amount of mass we can observe, they should be flying off in all directions. We would need five times as much "stuff" to explain what we see in the telescope. Quite the three-pipe problem.

Left: a map of the missing "stuff"

With Jesuitical aplomb as regards matters of uncertainty, physicists declare the missing rest of the universe to be "dark matter," invisible, and thus far undetectable. As an explanation, it reminds me of the cartoon where a blackboard is covered by an endless and intricate equation, totally indecipherable except for the phrase in parentheses in the middle: "then something magic happens."

No doubt we will someday discover that the loss can be accounted for by totaling up mateless socks, lost airline luggage, daylight savings time, balls in the rough, inventory shrinkage, evaporation, lost homework assignments, bets laid down on inside straights, and the countless other little dark matters that remain beyond our ken. Until then, we take the invisible on faith.

Barbed reply

2008-06-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

If the internet is--as Sen. Ted Stevens maintains--a bunch of tubes, it could sure use a dose of Liquid Plumber. The most persistent rap against the web has been that it's almost impossible to tell whether you are getting good information or not. In a time of reputation management, viral marketing, buzz doctors and spin control--not to mention the assortment of more pedestrian rumormongers, outright liars, and smear artists--who can you believe? Then there are the soreheads, the crackpots, the professionally paranoid, and the wearers of tinfoil hats. It boggles the mind (if the mind is not already boggled).

I assumed that somewhere in the jungle of social networking tools that is burying traditional media like a collapsed barn under grapevine, there would be a service that allowed the surfing community to tag specious content as crap. Something like :
428 readers reported (link to offending content) to SepticTank.org.
Tags: bogus (412), twaddle (15), how do i log in? (1)
Veracity score: 00.23%
But there's no such thing. I should know because I checked it out… on the internet.

Community self-policing works pretty well on individual sites like Wikipedia, but we lack a scheme that will apply to the whole ball of bits. Long before the days of cyberspace my friend Allen proposed the following, which can be taken as a model. Repeal all traffic laws and give every driver a dart gun. Each time a driver jumps the light, cuts someone off, straddles both lanes, or drives while shaving, a vigilant motorist fires a barbed dart with a red flag into the body of the offending vehicle. Collect enough flags and police wave the idiot over and ask him to step out. Then a big electromagnet lifts his car into the maw of a portable crusher. Harsh perhaps, but then Allen is a bit of a sorehead himself.

Topical relief

2008-06-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

I hear occasionally from a web-usability guru who was kind enough to advise me during the NCPR website redesign. He dropped me a note this morning to say how much he liked the results, but he cautioned me on the dangers of fragmenting the news into too many topics--citing the mess of Yahoo's old topic-driven navigation system. I had already been thinking about this as a result of going to a major news site yesterday, and finding that of all the things going on in the world, their top story featured a guy who had been walking around with a two-and-a-half inch nail driven into his skull by a nail gun.

Here we see the freakish x-ray, and here is the guy himself, seemingly unharmed. He says the weirdest thing is that the surgeon chose a claw hammer as the best instrument to do the extraction. Owww! Not having had enough, I then Googled "nail in skull" and found that this is not only an irresistible topic of discussion, it happens way more often than one would think. There was the guy who drove the four-inch nail up his nose into the brain, then there was the guy who wandered into a Portland hospital, complaining of headache. The cause--twelve nails shot into his head in a failed suicide attempt. And the guy from South Dakota with the three-inch nail near the brain stem, and on and on.

An hour later, I closed my gore-spattered web browser and realized that I never did find out what was happening in the world. But on that one topic, I had it nailed.

Bobby plus 40

2008-06-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

When a talking head these days cites the "post 9/11" world and how dangerous it is, it might be worthwhile to consider the halcyon days of 1968. That year the Soviet Union had 20,000 nuclear weapons targeted on hair trigger at the US, and we were targeted right back. They had just crushed Czechoslovakia's bid for liberal autonomy in the heart of Europe with tanks and machine guns. China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, killing and imprisoning millions. The War in Vietnam was at its peak, with a weekly US body count in the hundreds. At home, protests drew more than a million demonstrators into the streets. Martin Luther King was gunned down and cities burned across the country. Bobby Kennedy was gunned down on the brink of winning nomination for the presidency, and his party's convention in Chicago brought a new term to the American lexicon: police riot.

In the North Country that year, the last sound one heard before dropping off to sleep was the distant rumble of B-52s from Plattsburgh and Griffiths Air Bases, carrying their nuclear payloads around in circles, waiting for the "Go" code. Like many in my age group, I shifted my allegiance (grudgingly at first) from Eugene McCarthy to Bobby Kennedy. But by June I was ready to believe. How long would we have to live under the shadow of violence and fear? Then came the gunshots, and an answer of sorts.

The feeling of insecurity is a relative thing, and fear is an optional response. How we behave given the dangers we face is the measure of character.

Perfect swish

2008-05-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

One of the ways you can tell I am a geek is that I watch science programs on TV. This week I was glued to the screen watching to see if NASA's Phoenix lander would beat the odds and reach the polar Martian surface in one piece, then phone home. Nice trick--sort of like throwing a perfect swish from mid-court in Montana through a basket located in the Canton High School gym. It takes a certain cast of mind. A few years ago I took the Boeing factory tour and was impressed by the fanatic level of organization. The tool cart area was marked out on the assembly floor with precise grid lines, and each rectangular cart was aligned in the center of its grid area, square to the lines. The tools on each cart were likewise perfectly aligned with the sides of the cart. All down the third of a mile long production line, there was not one thing out of place.

Amoeba greets Phoenix lander.

I shared this techno-utopian vision with my biologist friend David in a little New York taqueria. He said, "That's the difference between technology and life. Living things are always right on the edge of falling apart. Biology is like a Marx Brothers movie." I asked him why we couldn't build a simple single-celled creature from scratch, once we had the entire genome decoded. "Information is not the same as knowledge;" he said, "only a cell knows how to make another cell." I guess it's like the difference between having the script to A Night at the Opera and living inside Groucho's head. It comforts me to think that out there in some underground "clean room," greater geeks than I are grinding their teeth in frustration at the genius of the amoeba.

Audio archaeology

2008-05-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

Nosing around

2008-05-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

"Friend me" not

2008-05-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Until telepathy

2008-05-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month has come and gone again, and while I rarely take time out to talk like a pirate on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have taken time in the last month to give a few poetry readings and to attend a few readings, to buy and to sell a few books of poetry--and to read them--as opposed to stacking them on my nightstand. It's a curious business, much out of fashion, an eccentricity in myself that I rarely examine.

So it was with great interest that I listened to Jeffrey Brown's interview with poet Robert Hass on last night's PBS News Hour. His collection Time and Materials won this year's poetry Pulitzer--yes, there actually is one. The great lit major bull session questions--Why poetry? What is it good for?--are things he has examined in some depth. There is a line in his poem "The Problem of Describing Trees:"

There are limits to saying, in language, what the tree did.

This prompted Brown to question: "Why the need to describe trees?" Hass parried with a quote from environmentalist Ed Wilson: "Every species lives within its own sensory world." We can't say what the tree actually did; we can only say what we saw. The exercise is not to describe the tree, but to record "our memory of the gift of life," to say "here is what it was like for me to be alive." Or to quote another poet, Brett Duffany, "Until telepathy, poetry."

Two cent lunch

2008-04-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

Achieving liftoff

2008-04-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was it--the day Spring became a reality instead of a theoretical possibility. Everyone has their own gauge. For some it's the first robin, but as far as I'm concerned, the early bird gets frostbite. For some it's the first snowdrops--but they get ahead of themselves, too. I look for the first sunny day in the 60s, and the first blue heron. Yesterday--double whammy.

If the heron has come back, you know it wasn't some flighty decision--they can, after all, barely fly. They seem to be a "proof of concept" design on the part of nature, rather than an actual production model. Watching them lumber up from the shallows is like watching a grainy newsreel of Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk. They graze the water with each downbeat, like a seaplane powered by oars. Both the principles of lift and the grace of God appear to be necessary to accomplish launch.

Just so my spirits. The blue body of winter is almost too massive for my wingspan to support. But give me sufficient open water, a little solar power assist, and up I go--eventually.

Where did the future go?

2008-04-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

from An Introduction to Information Science

2008-03-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

To fathom the workings of the material universe, theoretical physicists have developed elaborate structures of strings, quarks, forces and dimensions, spreading out from a generative big bang, maybe 15 billion years ago. Researchers in cybernetics are beginning to postulate similar structures to explain the development of the dataverse or cyberspace, which exploded into being about 441 quadrillion nanoseconds ago, around 1994.

Left: Radio Bob deploys bogon detection apparatus.

Instead of particles possessed of mass, cyberspace is thought to be composed of particles of information. And instead of charge, they have polar qualities of validity and bogosity. The irreducible units of information are known as the bogon and the cluon. The presence of bogons can be felt most strongly in the vicinity of intense bogon emission sources, such as political figures and sales executives. The development of the worldwide web was accompanied by a huge outflux of bogons, as evidenced by early websites such as "The Hamster Dance," and by the formation of the dot.com bubble. Cluons propogate at a slower rate, trailing the wavefront of the "bogon bang" by as much as two years. The spreadsheets of venture capitalists became a rich source of cluons that helped to stabilize the rapidly deflating, but still superheated mass. While the interplay of cluons and bogons explain much of the observable dataverse, researchers are still seeking evidence for a supermassive neutral information particle, tentatively dubbed the "npron."

As in the physical universe, particles are not uniformly distributed in cyberspace. For example, there is a peak in the field strength of the local bogon flux each year, shortly after the vernal equinox. For an excellent exegesis of recent research, see the Wikipedia entry on quantum bogodynamics.