Convenience, Coffee & How We Use Our Time

My New Year’s Resolution – the one about time-management – is slowly taking hold. (Thank you, I know, it’s a tough one.) After washing today’s lunch dishes in record time (only one thing broken) I jumped onto the pc, leaving the wife to play zookeeper with the boys since that is her job. Then I started plowing through a dozen critical, mindless tasks: checking my e-mail for that inevitable offer of employment (if they want me bad enough then yes, they will contact me on a Saturday); promoting the Staten Island Film Festival on facebook (if Broccoli can get 16,000 fans, this shouldn’t be that hard); and shamelessly throwing my work at the latest ‘Look at what a great writer I am!’ website, among other things.

My powers of concentration, or maybe denial, are strong enough to get all this done even as the boys are shoving plastic train tracks in each others’ ear canals. When the bigger one sticks his thumbs in his little brother’s eye sockets, however, it’s time for me to take a break from my assault on the world and give my wife a break from the world’s assault on her.

She came back an hour later, the blood vessels in her forehead having receded. I told her to relax for a while longer, setting the stage for my permissioned escape to Dunkin Donuts.

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Featured Find: Lake Vostok!

Russian scientists have acheived what's being called the moon landing of our generation:

MOSCOW — In the coldest spot on the earth’s coldest continent, Russian scientists have reached a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario after spending a decade drilling through more than two miles of solid ice, the scientists said Wednesday.

A statement by the chief of the Vostok Research Station, A. M. Yelagin, released by the director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, said the drill made contact with the lake water at a depth of 12,366 feet. As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100 to 130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination. Next Antarctic season, the scientists will return to take samples of the water.

The first hint of contact with the lake was on Saturday, but it was not until Sunday that pressure sensors showed that the drill had fully entered the lake. Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the miles-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent, and the first one to have a drill bit break through to liquid water from the ice that has kept it sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years.

National Novel Writing Month

I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I'm way behind, and participating to begin with was stupid considering how busy and uncompensated I am, but I figure it's time to try being sloppy. Anyways, here's a randomly-and-hastily-assembled excerpt from the 5,000 or so totally unpolished and vomitous words I have so far:

It was always thought that time travel would be a quantitative thing; whether or not scientists thought of it that way, certainly the culture did. I guess in retrospect, it became clear around the early 2000s that time travel would take on a qualitatively different character than dude gets in machine and goes somewhere, and it was obvious even before that if you were one of those rare people who sits around all day thinking about the future of personal electronic devices or fab labs or harvesting trillion-dollar asteroids.  

I remember my own childhood when a family friend who worked for the air force came by to talk physics: we would spend hours discussing the potential pitfalls of travel through time or at the speed of light – radicals in space hitting the ship hull at super-high effective speeds and gradually poking little holes in the hulls until one day all of a sudden you’re very far from home with a very serious air leak, whether time travel would involve actually going back (or forward) and screwing up things or creating alternate realities, and would these alternate realities by super-focused, i.e. holding everything but properties relevant to some particular goal as constant. Anyways, we’d have these conversations, imagining these wildly different possibilities for future technologies that none of the science fiction writers or Time journalists had been anywhere near.

Well it turns out that out of the ashes of the first genomic revolution back just after the human genome was decoded came the phoenix of realizing that all of that genetic noise as it was called then – or the stuff that they didn’t really understand – was actually a very, very detailed record of the past for that particular individual’s genome; and it was this, combined with increasingly larger processing power and the new emergent engineering that started coming out of Stanford around 2030 or so, plus the entrepreneurial vigor of the Bay Area’s young residents, plus the new propensity for the public to voluntarily upload all sorts of intimate personal details onto the Internet, plus neuroscience shit, plus some other stuff which I’m probably leaving out and advanced mathematical techniques, and social forces pushing towards cooperation – am I getting too preachy?

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Cool Story, Wyss

This is pretty cool:

BOSTON -- The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that it has been awarded a $12.3 million, four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a treatment for sepsis, a commonly fatal bloodstream infection. Sepsis is a major cause of injury and death among combat-injured soldiers in the field, as well as patients in hospital intensive care units.

The proposed treatment would involve a miniaturized, dialysis-like device that could rapidly clear the blood of a wide range of pathogens, much as a living human spleen does, without removing normal blood cells, proteins, fluids, or electrolytes. This novel "Spleen-on-a-Chip" would be portable, self-contained, and easily inserted into the peripheral blood vessels of a septic patient or soldier.

The award is part of DARPA's Dialysis Like Therapeutics program, which seeks to develop ways to dramatically decrease the morbidity and mortality of sepsis, thereby saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the United States each year. Worldwide, more than 18 million cases of sepsis are reported every year, with more than six million resulting in death.

A Friend Indeed

What a wonderful thing it is when you feel that things couldn’t seem worse a soul (or more) comes from out of nowhere and at the last minute and miraculously snatches you from the jaws of perceived doom.  Many will never know this salvation.  Plenty call this sensation “God”; but I’d like to focus on the flesh and give adoration to a human man and his spirit.

   

Today more than ever we are so acutely aware of all the tragedies that are enveloping the world - war, famine, poverty, personal loss - and the list is longer than I care to write about here.  We are force fed with a language of fear through the media because that’s what sells and we are always seduced by what is wrong.  But tragedy has always been with us, and it won’t be going away as long as we’re around (a human condition).  Maybe it’s me.  We see the bad in the world through the camera and computer eye, and many of us withdraw and just carry on surrendering to the "I can’t make a difference” feeling and even feeling like we might be in as bad a position as the other folks we feel bad for.

   

I’m carrying on about this because a recent interaction and external experience got me thinking about the microscopic aspects of pitching in. We are bombarded with trouble these days it seems en masse by the light-lit screens that are in our faces most of the time.  But I think the things underneath are what I would like to bring attention to and try and beat down the doom and gloom that can be so easy to fall into these days.  Our great country (and world for that matter) is in dire need of a positive jolt of who we really are.  Humans are such a wonderful creature when they care about their brothers and sisters: a truly unstoppable force of good.  But so many of us give in to the ethic of helplessness bequeathed by the all-seeing eye of modernity because that’s what comes easy.

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Modern Visionaries Part II - Buckminster Fuller

"For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.  Only ten years ago the "more with less" technology reached the point where this could be done.  All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful." - Buckminster Fuller, 1980.

This Buckminster Fuller stamp is itself an achievement in design.

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was born on July 12th, 1895 and died on July 1st, 1983.  Fuller was an American engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. “Bucky” was the author of more than thirty books; he was responsible for creating and popularizing futuristic terms like “synergetics", “Spaceship Earth", and “ephemeralization” - terms many of us have heard and even used without knowing where they came from.  

Fuller attended Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts and after that began studying at Harvard University.  He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." Fuller later described himself during this period as a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.  

Buckminster Fuller went on to become one of the twentieth century's most futuristic, controversial, and creative thinkers.  Fuller is best known for inventing the geodesic dome, but Fuller had many other inventions - such as an air-streamed, three-wheeled car - and many influential ideas on how to benefit humankind.  Buckminster Fuller was truly a modern visionary.   

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Formalisms and Formalities

[I'd like to use this post to introduce a new feature on this website: Apture.  You may notice that there are no links at all in this post.  That is because Apture allows easy lookup of words and phrases: simply highlight any word or phrase on this page and move the cursor over to "learn more".  A pop-up window from Wikipedia or Google or some other source should appear...]

The Japanese are often stereotyped as being excessively formal.  This stereotype I think is true for the Japanese (although necessarily oversimplified and commonly misused); but America is full of formalism too.  Our formalism is qualitatively different than that of the Japanese, but in my experience formalism has a quantitatively equal role in each country.  In Japan, formalism is often associated with the most mature expressions of traditional arts: kata in karate; shodo; even the infamous Japanese bureaucracy has its roots in the formal rigors codified in Confucianism.  Formalism lies at the received base of the culture (especially with Shinto), and this is difficult for the American in Japan to grasp.

American formalism on the other hand is a modern invention, unrefined, and even wild: Taylorism and scientific management; organizational theory and Edward Bernays; the elaborate dance sequences associated with modern finance and commercial banking security protocols; outsourcing and automated customer services; the grand and complex American healthcare system; and finally (corporate) job applications.  This kind of formalism is as American as apple pie.

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The Disconnect of Staying Connected

<This guest post is contributed by Mariana Ashley who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana dot ashley031 at gmail dot com.>

Eyes down and only half-listening to what was supposed to be a two-sided conversation, my roommate's fingers clacked away on her Blackberry as she responded to e-mails, sent in a fresh tweet, and blasted her boyfriend with the fifth "I love you more!" text since we sat down. I pondered why I even bothered to go out for coffee with a person who seemed less interested in interacting with someone who was actually there and more interested in interacting with those who weren't.

Chances are I am not the first to marvel at this wonder - how it seems the more that people are connected by technology, the less they are connected to actual people. A friend once told me a story about a group of customers in her restaurant who spent their entire meal talking to one another through their Nintendo DS devices. None of them uttered an actual word to one another, aside from the occasional yelp of victory or distress from whatever game they were playing. How is it that we can be more social than ever through social media and still be completely shut out from human interaction?

The allure of connectedness through technology is obvious. With a click of a button, you can send out a missive to everyone in your phone book. You can have lengthy or short discussions with someone without having to suffer through the awkward pauses that tend to fill the holes of face-to-face conversations. You don't even have to comb your hair or put on make-up or change out of your sweaty gym clothes to talk to someone through texting, Facebook, or e-mail. All in all, technology makes it easier than ever to communicate, which may be the most dangerously seductive aspect of it.

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Computers are Tools for Humans

Watson competes on Jeopardy.I'd like to introduce a new theme that I will explore over the coming weeks: personificationism.  This first post will relate to personificationism in discussions of artifical intelligence; future posts will discuss notions of personificationism in theology, ecology, economics, and astrobiology.  

This idea grows from the Shinto wedding I attended two weekends ago.  I divided my discussion of the wedding into three posts: the first part was a brief analysis of Shinto; the second was a description of the procedural details of the traditional wedding ceremony; and the third discussed the very different procedure of the reception.  

As a rule, I try to avoid constructing meta-narratives of my own arguments as this can only limit what I hope is a broad and personally diverse set of interpretations, but the general theme of the first part is the nature and history of the received practices that we call Shinto.  The second part follows from this by describing a ritual that readers of this magazine should find utterly foreign and inexplicable but with which Japanese are intimately familiar (increasingly less so, but, as Kevin pointed out in the comments to the part one, Shinto being the wide base of Japanese culture explains a lot of what the outside observer might find uncanny about Japan).  The third part compares this foreign and inexplicable ritual to a more familiar one.  

When read in this light, the overall effect of the series should be to make the reader deeply self-conscious of elements of his own culture that he takes as true and objective properties of the world: these "true and objective" properties may seem just as uncanny to a Japanese person as a Shinto wedding would to a Westerner.

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Book Reviews Aren't Dying; They've Just Moved Online.

<This guest post was contributed by Kitty Holman, who specializes in writing about nursing colleges.  Questions and comments can be sent to kitty dot holman20 at gmail dot com.>

In recent years, much has been said of newspapers's budget cuts and subscription troubles, but no one industry has had as much to worry about regarding the unhealthy state of print journalism today than the book publishing industry. In the past decade, we have seen a remarkable drop in our newspapers's literature coverage: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major print venues have cut books sections. (The Wall Street Journal's recent launching of a book review section - which has been well-received - is an exception to that trend; we'll have to wait and see how well this section does in the coming years.)

Nevertheless, where newspapers's books coverage has suddenly faltered, there is a new opportunity for other forms of media to take its place, namely the quickly rising in-depth literary coverage and discussion common to online magazines.
 
John Palattella, literary editor of The Nation, disagrees.  In his essay "The Death and Life of the Book Review," Palatella explains the history of journalism and how the many forms of media and coverage have shifted over time with and against readership and audience trends.  From an economic perspective, Palatella argues against the commonly held belief that books and literary coverage in print newspapers is dying because such coverage doesn’t "turn a profit." Instead, he suggests that "cultural forces" - such as what he calls "the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers" - have harmed book coverage, while other, less intellectual sections remain despite losing money.
 
Palatella hypothesizes that the rise of the Internet and other forms of new media has greatly affected how we consume text, words, language, and other kinds of information.  He suggests that free content has made internet browsers more inclined to bounce around the web.  He also points at our reliance on search engines and hyperlinks as characteristics that hurt forms like book reviews which encourage in-depth and patient critical thinking.

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They Were Never Planning on Televising the Revolution

art by Jack Jerz. Click on photo for link.Fake Steve Jobs and blogosphere hater Dan Lyons speculates that the latest FCC net neutrality ruling ushers in the age of consolidation for the Internet:

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control—and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

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The nonSTARTer

From Flckr Creative Commons by MuklukA treaty that is a priority of the President, advocated for by the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the Missile Defense Agency, the Secretary of State, every Democrat in the Senate, the President of Russia, every member of NATO, U.K. leaders past and present, major Israeli lobbies, Republican Cabinet Secretaries Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, Lawrence S. Eagleburger and Colin Powell and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would seem to be a slam dunk. Yet, in a testament to U.S. policy’s powerful status quo bias, the new nuclear disarmament START treaty is widely considered to be a long-shot for passage because of the objections of one Senator, John Kyl, the Republican whip.

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Obama's Perpetual Mulligan

If there's anything the recent ridiculous Nation/Mark Ames/Yasha Levine incident has revealed other than absurd tribalism or that Mark Ames is the Gwar of journalism, it's that liberals have been giving the Obama Administration a pass on civil liberties violations in favor of pointing out how conservatives did the same thing when Bush was President.  From a Harvard Law Bulletin Jeri Zeder review of Charles and Gregory Fried's new book, "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror":

The book explores three issues presented by Bush administration policies, primarily from ethical but also from historical and legal perspectives: torture; eavesdropping, surveillance and the right to privacy; and executive prerogative.

f course I think the work the Fried's are doing is great in principle, and I haven't read the book, but this passage in the review ignores the fact that, while the Obama Administration has closed Gitmo and opted for Stalinist show trials instead of secret dungeon torture, the Administration has escalated da warz and the intrusiveness of our security state.  There has also been the unprecedented step taken of ordering an American Citizen to be assassinated.  I mean, holy shit, we're talking like these issues of Executive power are all in the past and the real question now is how do we clean up the mess and deal with the fallout.

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The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice "compassion" meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

"We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts," says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that - more than any other moral framework - virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world's major religions and cultures.

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The Grass Is Always Greener

I've written in defense of Facebook before, and Alexis Madrigal does it better than me:

...The real struggle is with ourselves to use Facebook well … You get to determine your level of investment in the digital world around you. You get to choose the people you listen and talk to. You have control over your data. You get to define who you are, no matter what your Facebook profile says. All that is not lost unless we choose to lose it.

I think this is obvious, and if you don't get it, may nature select against your genes.  The one concern I do have with Facebook is that it is so much better than anything else at allowing users to use their own local knowledge to coordinate and manage information that it will soon come to monopolize much of the activity on the Internet (just like Microsoft with the operating system market in the 1990s) - future blogging will be solely on Facebook, email will be taken over by Facebook (perhaps as soon as tomorrow), games developed will be all for Facebook platforms a la Farmville; essentially, we could be seeing the genesis of something far more of a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word than Microsoft ever was

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