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Extracts 5
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| Email extracts from the period November 2004 through February, 2005 |
| 11/2/04 I guess you must be busier than when you were officially working -- no picnics! Hope all is well, and your educational project is moving along. I thought of you as I was writing in my journal which I began on the momentous occasion of my 62nd birthday a few days ago. More than a few of the authors that have impressed me have kept a journal, and I thought I'd give it a try. Edwin Way Teale, perhaps following the lead of Henry David Thoreau, kept one all his life, and typed up his notes religiously. I have no plans to be assiduous, however. Too, I have always been impressed when an author has a really apt quote, fact, or story to sparkle up his writing, so I wonder how the taker of apt quotes finds them later in the possibly thousands of pages of journals? Perhaps I'll figure it out. Anyway, what follows is a paragraph from my journal where I was gnawing away regarding some recent reading in geology, from Annals of the Former World by John McPhee: [From journal] I had an idea for a useful time scale to add to the named periods and eras, that of simply dividing the whole span of earth’s time into a thousand parts, each of 4.5 million years, and dating forward from the beginning of the earth. This would have the advantage of placing events with decent chronological resolution that would be instantly comprehensible relative to the whole span. For example the K-T boundary and dinosaur extinction would be during 986 KE (kilo-epoch). News flash: Pangea Breaking Up! is a headline from 957 KE. Red Hill of future Pennsylvania with its early tetrapod land dwellers and first forests would date to 923 KE. The development of metazoan life forms would begin at around 867 KE (roughly), and life's beginning itself might be dated at (guessing here) 445 KE. This is being reported from the end of 1000 KE, an epoch that saw a lot of ice and the development of various beings of the genus homo, and of course, our illustrious extinctive selves. [End journal] Perhaps this is the cavil of a novice, but it is confusing to count backward in trying to understand a forward moving tale. And the period and era names, while wonderful and irreplaceable, force a constant translation of names and times that most non-experts have trouble with. I think it might be useful to have available a sequential, before-after time indicator when dealing with deep time. When you stop laughing, let me know what you think. ----- 11/06/04 The remaining pages of your 11-page letter yet reside on my desk, amid the sediment of sedentary days, but I haven't forgotten them -- having responded to around three pages of it, I am looking forward to more writing. Yes, at least temporarily I am doing quite a bit at the keyboard, especially in the journal, though I can see there is a lot of learning "how-to" in that. It is mostly a sort of haphazard log of the good ship self, but I want more than the wind, average knotage, and currents commentary. Images of a ship in moral seas, intellectual and cultural currents, speculative creakings of the sheets, strange astronomies, rheumatoid complaints from the crew... "O god, thy seas are so great and terrible, and my boat is so small!" Too bad God has lost his voice. Or perhaps He is sulking over his failure at moral suasion, and has decided to try experimenting with another planet. Good luck to it. As I was writing in journal, I wanted to extensively quote Teale. I succumbed to the quick fix of technology and scanned the paragraphs, which popped in not needing much editing, and thought I'd pass the quote onto you. You send articles you think I might find interesting, and this is the same sort of thing. Anyway, from Wandering Through Winter, here it is: [Begin quote] ============= Even the simplest of memories can bring to life again some pleasure of the past. Henry Thoreau tells us how, many a time, he lay awake at night thinking of the barking of a dog he heard long before, bathing his being once more in those waves of sound "as a frequenter of the opera might lie awake remembering the music he had heard." In that "immense, unfriendly wilderness of London," when Richard Jefferies lay dying of consumption, he turned for solace to memories of his windswept hours out-of-doors, recalling "the exceeding beauty of the earth, in the splendor of life." Beauty to remember formed the winter harvest of the days that followed White Sands. We traced a long, lazy loop up the Rio Grande from El Paso to Albuquerque, on to Santa Fe and back again to Tularosa. Far horizons gave way to other far horizons. Our road rose and fell. The thermometer went up when we went down and down when we went up. Always in the distance, like jagged strips of the desert floor tilted on their sides, pale-tan, arid mountains rose into the radiance of a sky that comprised a major portion of the scenery. "Elsewhere," Willa Gather noted of this widespread New Mexican land, "the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky." When I recall the beauty of those days, I remember first of all the blue snowbank. We had headed south from Santa Fe and had left the city thirty miles behind when we came to a small coulee. A scarf of snow lay melting at its edge. From end to end it was richly, vividly blue. As we drew near, all its coloring suddenly broke away, took wing and filled the air. Half a hundred mountain bluebirds, quenching their thirst with snow water, had carpeted the drift with the color of their plumage, one of the world's most entrancing shades of blue. Another time, soon after dawn, we stood beside a pool where mist curled up and froze into glittering needles of ice. In a continuous stream, the ice needles formed and drifted downward toward the ground, shining against the sunrise. They were the product of a moment when conditions were just right. Never before had we known this experience. It was as though we stood in the midst of a cirrus cloud forming in the stratosphere. [End quote] ============== I have a lifelong conflict between a love of adventure and an equally strong desire to stay at home. And it is true, I've had many a noetic adventure in a soft chair or in my bed. Yet I recognize that one of the chief, perhaps the chief, drivers of the good life is a lust for the greatest experiences, hence the finest memories. In my case, such things are not associated with competition at all, nor with a need to prove something to myself. These great moments come like a beneficence in the midst of other things. They seem to need a large preceding time of lesser things to set the stage. But, for me, this precedence is rarely provided by other people, their words or deeds, unless one counts the creations of great thinkers, experiencers, writers. Most of the commentary I read is like that mundanity preceding the finer moments, it is probably necessary, but it is only a kind of prelude. So much information, so little insight. Kindly old Mother Nature (frisson here) knows best. Anyway, such it is at the moment, P.S. I will send a "photo walk" email from Election Day. I did not comment on the results of that election, but I notice the Canadian immigration website got a lot of U.S. hits after the election... ----- 11/07/04 I think this is your best looking personal newsletter ever. Congratulations on it, and on surviving all your computer woes and coming out on top. Also, thanks for your nice and encouraging reply to the photo walk email. And, responding to it, yes the digital camera is perfect for that use of photography -- no waiting for photoprocessing (auto-mangling) machines, and one can work with the images to emphasize the intent of the photographer. The prices are coming down, have been doing so. Digital "snapshot" cameras are available for $100, and fairly good cameras are $300-$400 and up. The really good ones are still fairly expensive, but are not actually heart-stoppingly pricey as they were. Neither of us wants to spend much time on politics, but I note two things: a) if 50-100K people of Ohio had voted differently, we would have a different new President, and b) the number of hits at the Canadian immigration web site jumped dramatically the day after the election. As you say, the No Smoking issue is a touchy one for me. Anti-smokers in the early days said they didn't want to make life miserable for smokers, they just wanted consideration given to non-smokers' needs. I always supported that idea and have been considerate of non-smokers. But year by year smokers have been subjected to more and more restriction, as well as propaganda (some of which has been hysterical nonsense), and I have seen anti-smoking take on a true-believer's fervor -- the direct result of deliberate and costly manipulation of public opinion by experts, and the willingness of sheep-like people to buy into the propaganda. How bitter it is to the social engineers to see they cannot control people better. In the end, the worst of them want to resort to old-fashioned fascism -- the iron rule of power. Here I am not talking about the simple desire or need of some people to avoid tobacco smoke. That is a small matter and easily addressed with courtesy and good will. The semi-religious fervor that fabulous amounts of propaganda and government marketing, coupled with the almost laughable greed of governments for tobacco taxes and for the booty of spurious lawsuits, has made me lose some more respect for Homo Socialis. About the spurious lawsuits -- allow your imagination to apply the same reasoning and lawsuits (they lied to us, mislead us for profit, covered up evidence of harmfulness) to the legal, medical, construction, transportation, war materiel, and pharmaceutical industries. Government could fund itself forever on the results of that! Alas, I have a built-in sensor for evidences of bad faith, and you know, I think I am allergic to lawyers, fanatics, and spin-doctors of all kinds. (This Is A Non-Lawyer Establishment. Thank You For Not Lawyering.) It is bad enough they lie, cheat, and steal, but they do it with such puffed-up self-righteousness. Not only vile, but strutting! Enough of that, but it is good to vent once in awhile. Late fall (early winter?) is coming soon, weather reports are for the coming week in the 40F+ range days and 20F+ nights. Time for the longjohns. However, clearer days, so perhaps some good photo shooting weather... ----- 11/08/04 The scanner is definitely a good way to get a good image from either a previous image, or from a physical object. Objects, such as brooches, buttons, bas-relief, a hand calculator, etc. can show up well with good sense of depth (probably some of the images people selling things on Ebay use are scanned objects). I even scanned my own face one time as an experiment, however I looked like someone who was rather ill, or possibly beyond earthly help -- maybe I'll send it someone next Halloween. Too, with the scanner, it is possible to create quite a high resolution image, though of course it would be a large file size. We have a piece of black velvet that is a black hole for light, giving a very black background for scanned objects. Or sometimes we use a towel, or other cloth. I think we have some green felt that we have used. I certainly agree about the advantages of a flat-bed scanner. The other type is only good for scans of 8.5x11 inch paper, I think. It is fun, but frustrating, to try to get repeated background images to merge perfectly. I have had some success lately with a technique I've described before. Earlier on, I just hacked away at the task, using any tricks I could think of. Some images came out OK, and some went into the bit-bucket. I am trying to extend the time between major shopping trips mainly to save money as I seem to spend less that way, but I am bushed from the hauling of all that provender up the 24 steps and packing the fridge to the gills. Blessed are those with freezers. ----- 11/10/04 These are your first shots you've sent that used commentary. I hope you liked doing that, it adds so much to the images to have a word from the photographer. For the viewer it makes it even more like being there with the photographer. And, as I've said, it slows the modern brain that's like a cat on a hot tin roof. As always, the ducks tend to take center stage anywhere around the local park. I remember watching brother-in-law and his wife when they visited. I took them for a walk down the sidewalk paralleling the beach from Pacific Beach toward Ocean Beach. Streams of normal crazy Californians went by in various ways and dress. I tried to see it with their eyes. I remember when a wild-haired and tattooed beach dude went drifting by on a skateboard with a snake coiled around his neck. The visitors went a bit wide-eyed. Wouldn't see that in Kentucky. Again, your comment help so much because to a person who was not there, anyone's images lack emotional impact, but the comments can help give that, and continuity too. In short. it is the rare image that is worth 1000 well-chosen words. Your Eagle's Mere shots of the fourth set are fun, and show that you had fun too. And, as you say, oh to be rich. To be born with superb taste and a refined sensibility and yet be poor, how unfair and unreasonable. Why is the clock infamous? I liked the simple country lane shot, and the little pink house. I try to remind myself to take images of the surroundings, the context, of more "photogenic" scenes. The fall color shots work well to fix the time of year, as well as being beautiful in themselves. One would need to return many times to see and appreciate it all. I know a geologist that would like to do some writing of the relation of the geology of the area to the events of the battles. In another set you zero in on the smaller, more poignant aspects of the battlefield. I'm glad to have seen these shots. "Pennsylvania - 534 bodies" -- such things remain with one when grander sights have faded. And the fence image reminded me how appreciative I am they are restoring the look of the land at the time of the battle. And the last set of Forksville was a kick. "Calm down. Your (sp) in Forksvile. I like it. The covered bridge is a gem. So many of these covered bridges are lost forever. The artist Eric Sloane whose museum my lady and I visited was, among other things, a painter of covered bridges. They were fast disappearing at the time he painted, and many more have passed away since. See them while you can. Well, this was a real effort on your part, an accomplishment, and you must have learned a good deal while you did it. One of the benefits of working on such a project was to enjoy your journey again. And, having done it, you can pass along parts of it, or the whole thing, to others and share your adventure at no extra charge. Off to dive back into John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, a four-volume work. I'm well into the third volume. It is a non-fiction romp through the geology of North America, as seen along I-80, and through the eyes of professional geologists. A lot of the information is sort of stupefying, the long ages, the titanic changes. California, by the way, will eventually split off from the rest of the continent and head off on its own course. Seems appropriate, doesn't it? --- All that's great to hear -- you may be proselytizing an interest in photos at your place of work. And yes, that huge panorama could be a BIG book of photos. Again, it is good to hear your office mates enjoyed the images and comments, and went with you (and to a much lesser extent me) in the effort to ferret out the images. I really believe in the value of recording one's adventures for others to see, and to look at later oneself to relive it all. It is well worth the time and effort we put into it. The current fad (or has it passed already?) of making scrapbooks is suggestive that people sense they should pay attention as the good times go by, but they don't know how to pause in the midst. Here is what I have been working at today. I made a pastel drawing of one of my ducks images and, rather than scan it, I photographed it, and played around with the resulting image. I think this sort of thing has possibilities. She suggested I think about printing digital versions of drawings / paintings, and maybe market these sometime, rather than the original works. Might be a good idea as the costs would be less as far as matting and framing are concerned, and, being generally smaller would be less hassle. Worth mulling over... ----- 11/11/04 You have seen the image that I drew from on the Larch website -- the photopage for 8/03. About a month ago I did the first pastel that was transferred to digital form. This was a quick sketch I liked well enough to play around with it in digital form. How did I think to do this? Well, I have been interested in drawing and painting for years, but long stretches of time go by where I do nothing at all. But it comes back. One of my observations about art compared to photography is that in art one starts with a blank canvas and adds to it (nothing there but what one deliberately adds), but in photography one can easily take an image of "everything" thus the fight is backward to a simpler, more powerful vision of whatever it is (one deletes the extraneous by various means, such as cropping, tonal control, depth of field, etc.). There are times when I have wanted to skip the effort to get a particular photo and just draw what I want. I haven't done that very much, but the desire is there. I have done many experiments with digitizing drawings. For example, I might do a drawing and want several copies to use as the basis of painting experiments, so I have made digital versions of the drawing to use as the basis of a series of paintings. Another reason might be a desire to change the color of the drawing, say from black to sepia, or red. Or maybe I have been sketching for practice where there is a board (I often use black board for drawing practice and sketching) that is filled with little drawings, most of them no good, but maybe one image that I like. So I can "clip" that out by working digitally. Probably the best reason I do this is it is fun, it is "messing about with images" and I feel at home doing that. ----- 11/14/04 Thanks for the call. It is a good idea to talk once in a while to reset one's verbal sense of the other person, though for sustained and high-quality discourse writing is probably the most effective means. Conversation is unsurpassed for spontaneity and serendipity. One may cover a lot of ground in a conversation, but in writing there is the possibility of greater depth. And, not least important, writing encourages better expression and profounder thought, so at least one hopes. "At the end of the day" (arrgh!), both means of dialogue are Good Things. My lady and I have watched the Shakelton movie recently (Kenneth Branaugh) -- very interesting Antarctic exploration history, and followed it up this evening with a two-hour documentary on Antarctica itself. Strange what a magnet forbidding lands have been for brave, and often foolish men. Interesting that during Eisenhower's time, there was established as the result of the International Geophysical Year, a treaty that exempted Antarctica from the territoriality of nations with all the conflict that would have had. A nice bit of good news back in the Cold War days. I will be trying to upgrade the Larch web site in the days to come. I have deleted two photo pages in preparation to adding new ones. As I said, the photo walk is now up there. The Larch website url is http://users.adelphia.net/~larch/, in case the link has faded from your machine. Read a report today of a tremor in the Treasury bonds sales, and in the falling value of the dollar, etc. It seems that not only do we have to believe in Tinkerbell, but so do the Japanese and the Chinese. I believe we have been at war with these two nations fairly recently (one more explicitly than the other), and now our economic future is dependent on them. How thick does a person have to be to avoid being uneasy? The retired person's observer eyrie is the place to be about now, mayhap. Interesting times. ----- 11/27/04 How did I put myself in the painting? One can select a part of one image and overlay that onto another image. Another way to do the same kind of thing is with a feature called cloning. I have a warm spot for the simplest of my three graphics programs because of ease of use. I can have two images open, select the clone tool, shift-click on picture A and start "cloning" into Picture B. As I move the mouse cursor over picture B, a part of picture A is magically drawn. And I can control a given transparency. So the short answer is, play around with a more sophisticated image manipulation tool and see what you come up with. So, as you can see, the sky is the limit with digital images. (Let your conscience be your guide). Also, no one program is good at everything, it is better to have several for different purposes and moods. ----- 11/28/04 I may have the same Kodak thing you have (Kodak EasyShare) -- as you say, not too useful, except to promote Kodak. But I found a couple of unique features in it good for something. They are called Coloring Book and Cartoon. Coloring Book turns an image into a black-and-white drawing, and Cartoon does approximately what it says. This kind of thing does not work at all on some images. And while these are cute bits of trickery, the uses are limited. But once in a while, even cheap tricks are useful. The main point here is that this Kodak program is the only one I have ever seen that does these specific transformations, so if once in a while I want to do this, I drag out the Kodak program and ignore it the rest of the time. --- I'm glad we are back in communication. I need all the intelligent input I can get. I had not considered your computer situation might have been a bit chaotic as you rearranged your life and tools to fit your new lifestyle. As to the geologic time business, it came about as I have been reading in several books about geology, geophysics, deep time, etc. I realized I was struggling a bit with the time issue, and several of the geologists in McPhee's four-volume work strongly emphasized two things: the necessity of grasping deep time, and that of "seeing into" the earth with its layers of rocky history. So I began thinking about what might help me with deep time and, in my journal (started it on my birthday), I wrote the bit about it that I sent you. Since then I have added to the idea and refined it a bit. The key idea is to have the proportional relationship of all dates be clear. To compare 540 million BCE and 260 BCE is to invite confusion, but the translated dates 892 E compared to 948 E is clearer as they are 89.2% and 94.8 % of the whole respectively. Every date would reinforce the idea of the whole time span of years. I have appended both writings to the end of this email. As noted, I am reading, along with many other books, SciAms, and web stuff, and John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. I think you would enjoy curling up with this tome (it contains 4 volumes under one cover). To summarize, it is the epic journey of a well-informed contemporary mind into the world of geology. The "theme" is Interstate 80 and the geology it traverses across America. McPhee worked with several geologists, who emerge as real people with personal perspectives and differing backgrounds and biases. Each has expertise in various areas of the country along Interstate 80 with its geologically-influenced paths and its lovely roadcuts. The larger theme is the current state of geophysical understanding. I like it because it assumes a modern person wants to know about such things -- an idea that has had some hard knocks. It is good to counter the modern barbarianism of shrinking understanding, expanding ignorance, and the drugged solipsism of the happy consumer. However, I admit my head is swimming with my somewhat improved understanding of things geological. I find myself wishing there were a conceptual map with well-defined "terra incognita" marks strewn about that would help make it clearer what is known and what is partially known and what is flatly unknown (I always want the unknown to be as defined as possible). Plate movement is clearer to me, but the lack of a clear mechanism for its cause is frustrating. (I keep thinking geologists need to kidnap some animation genius and force the creation of a good, updateable, animated movie or computer software display program of the development of the Earth. What a great teaching tool that would be! ) It is not so hard to imagine this or that event, but it is very hard to maintain a 4.5 billion year sequence in the mind, especially with all the vague parts. Besides plate movement, the importance of hot spots or plumes is coming clearer as well. One speculation I had as I read was that metazoan life, so tardy in appearing, may have had to wait for the emergence of shallow seas, and maybe protected shallow seas, to develop. It is easy to imagine single-celled life happily floating toward the surface of deep water forever, but multi-celled beings may have needed the stability of a well-lit surface of rock in shallow seas. If this speculation has any validity, then it makes me wonder if plate movement and hot spots were weaker, lesser, in former times. Has the Earth been heating up over time? My guess is, it has. And with increased energy flow came increased surface change. Another notion I had was partially corroborated later as I read: that the swelling and subsidence of crust in the oceans is a cause, or the cause, of rising and falling sea levels. I have wondered about that for a while. I now have enough of a whiff of deep time to see why geologists may be subject to a dizzying split in time sense, a schizophrenia, between deep time and human time. (To spouse: "I promise we'll buy a new heater when the glaciers reach Buffalo.") Another new perception is the sheer violence of some geological changes. Continents ripping apart and bashing together. Splitting seams ten thousand miles long oozing hot rock and strange chemicals. Chunks of landscape being moved miles sideways. Island arcs heaped onto continental edges. Plumes mysteriously hot enough to burn through miles of crust or continent. Bulges of magma invading country rock. Pipes spewing rock at Mach 2. Mile thick drifts of ash. Rock metamorphosed many miles deep hoisted and dumped on newer lands. Masses of ice many hundreds of miles wide and one to two miles thick flowing out and back over and over bulldozing land and life alike. Beds sinking exactly as fast as sea deposits rain down (handy). Mud flows gushing into and filling valleys. Mountain ranges buried under volcanic outpour. Seas expanding and contracting over and over. Oceans closed down for good, others created. Whew. Your chosen field is ferocious! However there are lots of intermissions to recuperate in. “What every home buyer/builder should know about geology.” I have put together a list of topics that I plan on covering (5 nights, 2-hrs per night) should the course be given the green light, but I thought you might have some ideas to add to the mix. I think that something as practical and applied as this approach to geology might spark some interest. If you get a chance and have some thoughts, I would appreciate your input, and perhaps we can chat about them. I can give some thoughts off the top of my head, and would also enjoy talking about them. First thought: if you were to develop a rip-snortin' talk on the new geology (after emergence of plate tectonics in the mid-sixties), it could be a lot of fun. I am thinking of something that appeals to the sense of the awesome and dramatic that most people would respond to. This would be an informal, theatrical, and free-wheeling exposition of our planet's history, ending with question-and-answer period. This is a talk you could modify and give to a variety of audiences, such as clubs, schools, and other organizations with different purposes you have in mind. At the end of such a talk, you could announce the prospective course, maybe called "The Thoughtful Person's Guide to Geologically Correct Home-Building", or some such thing. Describe the course and ask people to sign up if they would like more information about it. Then, based on the number of people signing up, you could approach the Jersey Shore folks and say, here are X people who are interested in the adult education course. Of course I don't know how "am interested" would translate to "will attend", but it is a lot better than a shot in the dark, and I have no doubt your talk would excite interest. As to the course itself, the first of the five days should be attention-grabbing and dramatic. It shouldn't be too hard to find several dozen "how not to" scenarios based on real events. These examples could range from "Joe Blow tried to start a town near Freebish, PA, and the town did grow right up to the time it was transported downstream at an average speed of 11 mph by the formerly picturesque little river that ran through it." Or "Ed and Nancy Dreamer had a lovely little home on land that happened to be sited on well-soaked volcanic muddy outflow. A small earthquake caused their land to liquefy with the following results." "The Benny Vista family of Whoa, CA built on the side of a cliff at great expense because of the wonderful view. The view was the result of certain geological events in the fairly recent past that caused the Vista's dwelling site to become less than stable under conditions of saturating rainfall. Gravity did the rest." And so on, with nothing but true stories of what happens when people ignore the physical world and listen instead to real estate agents. All the stories would carry real information about the actions of geological forces over time, so people would be entertained and informed simultaneously. If you know of examples of fraught buildings and communities in PA, I suggest you hint about that, with the promise to reveal them on the last day of the course if there is time and the other topics have been covered. This is a carrot. Day Two might well be an overview of cities, towns, villages and how geology has guided or affected the locations where people could make a living, including rivers, roads, and transport of goods generally. Why people live where they do (what do people need from the land), and why don't they live over there anymore (mines, poor croplands, etc). Day Three: What are the specific geological forces and influences that affect your home (and community)? -- a survey of the issues to be considered when choosing a home site. Day Four and Day Five: Here I suspect you have already done a lot of thinking. The challenge is to make this practical for ordinary people. Discussion of what they should be responsible for. What building materials and building design are appropriate to what local geology and weather (how can you avoid discussing weather?). Issues of radon, dampness, cracking, earth creep, avalanche, etc. Wind conditions related to the shape of local landforms. Issues of fire-resistant roofing? Acid rain. Where to get the necessary information? When should they consult an expert to resolve concerns, or to correct what the architect dreams up? Read geological maps? Water table information, reliability of water supply. How to verify one is flood safe. Dangerous world, there are no guarantees, but they can reduce their vulnerability. Don't rely on complacent people to make the right choices for one's family, etc. Don't forget the carrot. That's it for the nonce, good to hear from you, appendix below, [Begin deep time quotes] ================ A chronological construct: a comprehensible way of handling deep time for geology because it uses a range of 1 to 1000 so all numbers are seen as proportional to the whole, e.g. 900/1000 or ninety percent. Anyway, what follows is a paragraph from my journal where I was gnawing away regarding some recent reading in geology, from Annals of the Former World by John McPhee: First writing 10/31/04: I had an idea for a useful time scale to add to the named periods and eras, that of simply dividing the whole span of earth’s time into a thousand parts, each of 4.5 million years, and dating forward from the beginning of the earth. This would have the advantage of placing events with decent chronological resolution that would be instantly comprehensible relative to the whole span. For example the K-T boundary and dinosaur extinction would be during 986 KE (kilo-epoch). News flash: Pangea Breaking Up! is a headline from 957 KE. Red Hill of future Pennsylvania with its early tetrapod land dwellers and first forests would date to 923 KE. The development of metazoan life forms would begin at around 867 KE (roughly), and life's beginning itself might be dated at (guessing here) 445 KE. This is being reported from the end of 1000 KE, an epoch that saw a lot of ice and the development of various beings of the genus homo, and of course, our illustrious extinctive selves. Perhaps this is the cavil of a novice, but it is confusing to count backward in trying to understand a forward moving tale. And the period and era names, while wonderful and irreplaceable, force a constant translation of names and times that most non-experts have trouble with. I think it might be useful to have available a sequential, before-after time indicator when dealing with deep time. When you stop laughing, let me know what you think. Second writing 11/26/04: Spent some time recently thinking about the geologic time scale I noted in this journal. Maybe it is simpler to chart the geologists’ deep time to have a 5 billion year sequence that thus begins a half billion years before the accepted time of the establishment of the Earth. Then there could be 1000 epochs of 5 million years each (the whole period would be a kilo-epoch), 1000 milli-epochs of 5 thousand years each, and of course 1000 micro epochs of 5 years each. That seems tidy, and because the purpose of the scale is to simplify the grasp of deep time, this arbitrary scale would work OK. No matter how sharp or fuzzy a specific chunk of time may be, it would be possible to say clearly when the time was, and it would have a number that would fit into a comprehensible sequence. If, for example an object or event was thought to be 50 K years after the beginning of epoch 998 (10 million years ago), then its number would be 998.01. If it lasted 20K years, the range would be from 998.010 to 998.014. Earth’s origin would be dated to Epoch 100 (100 E) or 500 Million years. If the seas were established in a billion years, that would be at 300 E. If life developed in 500 million years from that time, it would be at 400 E. If the first seas that were shallow (and possibly land) evolved in another two billion years, that would be 600 E. Here we must jump nearly one and a half billion years to maybe 880 E for metazoan life to evolve. Four-legged life crawls onto land at 940 E (roughly, this needs correcting). Dinosaurs died out at 987 E (except for birds). Our genus homo occurs in 999 E. . Some paleontologists date our species to around 999.940 to 999.950 E. Completely modern man dates to within a range 999.990 to 999.994 E. Civilization dates from 999.998 E. [End Deep Time quotes]=============== --- Cats are expert at snoozing. We have much to learn from them... ----- 11/29/04 I am vegetating a bit, noodling in a journal, messing with images, reading much, thinking thoughts (like "I thought they already had reached bottom")... It must be an adaptation of the spirit to the coming winter season. Here is a Photographer-In-A-Painting where I have sidled into a painting by Robert Bateman, Canadian wildlife artist. (I may invade all kinds of things, and I think I rather like being in paintings). When I do write a longer letter to you, there could a lot of length indeed, as I now have many pages of journal entries to call upon. Quoting oneself seems to grow on one. You have been warned. Yet who knows, good taste may prevail... ----- 12/03/04 To quote our friend who quoted someone else: "Peculiar travel instructions are dancing lessons from God". So you are eventually on your way to a northern elsewhere, you having absorbed your limit of things City-ish or the City having absorbed its limit of things you-ish, or both. Yes, do send some details eventually as they must be good ones. I trust retirement will at least be a considered option at this point, the sooner to write the adventures of a city manager in a consuming ethos, or something like that. You have my sympathy if you need it, but if you are harboring a secret joy, then sympathy is unnecessary. At some point, there comes a time to consider that large economy size time: eternity, and what gestures one wishes to make in advance of that. Many thanks for the Dylan book, it is much appreciated and I'm sure I'll be reading it very soon. Thinking now about it, what I know about it and Dylan, I remember My Principle, that most problems among humans come about from a mis-match of expectations. Of course the expectations of some people is straight from Devonian world where the only requirements of others are they succumb without fuss and taste good. But in the ordinary world of people with more or less good intentions (okay, I'm assuming a lot here), then failures of cooperation are very often due to differing assumptions as to what is going on, what success is, who picks up the lunch check, and who gets to decide who gets to do what, and like that. When the evolving scene varies too much from what the participant expects, there are bestow-als of blame, hurt feelings, and desires to cover one's personal tush, etc. Ahem, oh yes, Dylan. So he thought he was a professional clown / singer of songs / voice of the people, but others decided he was a demigod, a messiah, a mysterious omniscient poet who not only told people what they would think if they hadn't fried their brains on whatever drugs, but who was a cultural prophet leading by means of coded verses and Byzantine riddles of meaning to the promised land of well, we don't know, but it will be so cool. If Dylan is sincere (and I recognize that part of what makes him interesting is I don't ever feel I know when he is sincere), then he felt pursued and nearly destroyed by all this suffocating crowd projection. Maybe all he wanted is to live comfortably and be thought of as part of the pantheon of Presley, Stones, et al. Merely remaining alive was one of his best moves, given the times. I wonder about Bristol and Steinbeck, did Bristol feel a bit burned when Steinbeck bailed out on their project? Also, I can't see why Steinbeck would have been adverse to authoring a small non-fiction book with photos to have hit the shelves after Grapes of Wrath the movie came out. At least Bristol could have written one called "On the Trail of Grapes of Wrath with John Steinbeck" and packed it with his photos. I do remember in the letters of Steinbeck something about working with a photographer and some implication of not being all that happy with him, don't remember who or the circumstances, except the photographer gleefully shot images of Steinbeck undressed due to the heat. Later Steinbeck worked successfully with photographer Robert Capa. Anyway...just curious. The Salinas vs. libraries article conjured up lots of thoughts, the chief one being the real message of the Salinas council to the voters seems to be: we are incompetent fiscal managers, so to compensate for that please pony up a whole bunch more money or we, being philistines, will ax the library system. I felt neatly torn in half between a desire to ax the council en masse and bluntly telling them to get noised if they thought more $ would be forthcoming, so do your worst, you bozos. How often have we seen this scenario where incompetents pretend to be in sad need of informing the people that all their taxes had been a pittance, and in consequence the "leaders of the people" would be forced against their will by fiscal conscience to withdraw services until such time as the people would come to their miserly senses? Jeez! One wearies of soap operas in high places. Another thought is one I've tried to interest others in with little success -- that there is a prion-like malverting of local economies by larger ones. The tendency is for smaller, weaker economies to be forced to function at a higher pace and cost than would be their normal pattern. Whatever natural integrity an economy might have is thus weakened, forcing the little guys to play unsuccessfully like the big boys. This is more obvious in the rust belt or fading resources areas (land less productive, mines playing out, etc), but applies everywhere. If Salinas is run by not particularly brilliant leaders, then it is easy to imagine them committing too heavily in staffs and pension plans, more buildings, new projects or whatever sexy thing you can imagine, then panicking when the revenue projection (this is Tinkerbelle squared) fails to be met. Such people seem never to be forced to explain why they overcommitted the community. (Oh, I forgot, the excuse is the people demanded the extra commitment. [Sorry Jack, that's why we have representative government.] Grrr.) Well, that from me explains why it is you and not I in government. Homicidal tendencies are probably a drawback in your line of work. A recent thought: if it is, as Krutch commented, the feeling that is the important thing in everyday life, not the facts, then the thing to do is support the feeling regardless of the facts, and not wait on the facts to support the feeling. Well, this longish short note is enough to reestablish our electronic lines of communication in your status non quo, so off it goes. I, humbly modeling retirement for the thoughtful set, remain, mine truly, P.S. Still have not forgotten your other letters, though time seems to be modifying their context something fierce. ---- 12/04/04 Good newsletter! The background works very well and is nicely in season. Your newsletters are better than the general letters to all family & friends that most people send out (if they still do), that used to be mimeographed. The color and the photos make it more enjoyable for most people, I think, and gives you an opportunity to be creative with the facts of your own existence, so it is not a "chore" you do, but fun you have and that makes a difference in the tone of the communication. The scanner is handy, isn't it? It is capable of quite high resolution and sharpness, as your image of the autumn leaves shows. I also liked the comparison of the trees in spring and fall -- that is something few take the trouble to do, though they probably say to themselves they will do it someday. And I have thought more than once that many people are less impressed with good images than they should be, because they assure themselves that of course if they had been in front of that scene they too would have lifted their camera and clicked the shutter. They do not stop to realize they only see the impressiveness of scene because someone else made it his or her business to be there and it was that someone else who saw the possibilities in the scene. The good photographer does the work, and the viewer's ego co-opts the image as if it were the viewer's own. Human nature strikes again. O well, "forgive them father" for they have not a clue... The business of a blind lady knitting with the help of Braille cards is a good image for the holiday season, or any season. Carefully making colorful patterns she can never see, bless her and us every one. Must admit I skimmed over your health news, as I am allergic to things medical -- I break out in hypochondria and pre-hostage-syndromeitis. Yet all seems if not perfectly well with you then moving apace in that direction. Your reaction to the Pilgrim movie, and information about it were a nice touch of history, good images to illustrate too. The second image of the ship in stormy waters does indeed remind me of "thy ocean so great, my ship so small" and the hair-raising maritime experiences of former days. I have been reading Letters from an American Farmer by Crevecoeur who sailed back to France around 1780. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland, spent months in England, and finally got back home to attend family business. Travel was not so casual an affair in those days. By the way, the author was somewhat an early naturalist in the more modern sense in that he wrote with sympathy for living creatures long before Thoreau showed the way for later naturalists. His writings fell into obscurity for a long time, and he is still not well known. I liked the humor, my favorite being "AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD" (wonderful image). I recently read the book Eats Shoots and Leaves that I imagine you have heard about, it being very popular. It is quite humorous, with more than a little owed to British comedy shows for the style of humor. The subject is, of all things for a popular book, punctuation. I recommend the book, a good one for the library to supply. Am slowly building up a journal, and I am amazed to announce I have made entries for every day of the last five weeks. The goal is to include notes jotted down throughout the day, in addition to ones I write in the morning as I laze and read. It would not be hard, at times, to write many pages of notions of mine and many quotes from writers I am reading. Yet, as I have realized from the beginning, few are born knowing how to keep a journal, it is not so obvious how best to encapsulate one's days. In the past, that has been one of the side benefits of letter writing, that in explaining one's life to others, one does so for oneself too. But the journal has the potential to deepen the understanding of the voyage of the good ship Self in its faring through changeable seas, not unlike the Pilgrims' journey. Hope I am not overmasted. ----- 12/06/04 I like the general drift of this, though I am not so happy with the static tile quality of it, though for some purposes this "repeating rectangles" might not be so bad. The original image is of an old barn. Your use of larger images is effective in getting away from the "over-tiled" quality. The reason I keep coming back to this is to see if one can take advantage of tiling, but without being rectangled to distraction in the process. It is hard to get away from the simple fact that some images do not blend well at the edges, so a texture is called upon to add some unity. I suppose I may have to break down someday and try to work out the formal elements of doing backgrounds, but that sounds a bit like work :^) and experimenting is way more fun. In general, the backgrounds seem to want to be less graphic and more atmospheric in nature. ----- 12/11/04 My that was quite a session of conversation last night. This morning I was a mere filamentous husk of my normal self, floating palely in the random zephyrs of my abode. However, a good breakfast of pancakes, sausage, and egg restored me to my usual Apollonian state. ( I referred once to myself as an Apollonian being to a fellow worker and she asked what kind, Macintosh, Granny Smith, or what?) As to atrophization, you could probably do that for years and still be ahead of nearly all around you in a wide circle. This morning before rising and being up and doing, I made some notes for my journal regarding last night's conversation. I'll send on any updated journal comments if any seem worthwhile. I did realize there was more to know about your projected web site and its contents than we covered. I remember you made a point about PowerPoint being only good for outlines and that is basically true. The other thing it does is help focus the attention of the audience while each item in the outline is covered and to some degree filled in. It is specifically designed to aid in giving presentations and is not the best tool to use if one wants to go deeper than that. What is the best tool? I don't know. I'm not sure there is a really good one, but that so much depends on exactly what one wishes to do. The web is excellent for so many things -- I suppose a web site itself, or a major section of it, could do a much more challenging representation of knowledge than the production style forced on one by a specific program. Also, I have seen many sites that have forums for the asking of questions, and the exchange of views generally. Pdf files can exactly reproduce detailed charts, illustrations, and whole chapters and books if need be. Sound is available. PowerPoint or other presentation programs can have their "pages" online. And on and on. In the end it is the limitation of the reader more than the limitation of the medium that is the crucial issue. I will have more to say as I learn more your intentions for your web site. By the way, if you have time (ha ha), you might look at Wikipedia and its geological content. you may already be familiar with it, so I won't go into much detail. Basically it is an online encyclopedia that is written by "the people", rather than by an author or committee. It has grown very fast and is now a useful set of tools. The great thing about it is it can be edited and corrected by someone who knows more than a previous contributor. If you become interested, you could create new topics or modify previous ones. Also there are projects connected with Wikipedia to develop text books on a wide range of topics... The link is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ----- 12/12/04 The last few days have been active ones, at least time-gobbling ones. Perhaps it is the heightened metabolism of the holiday season. And you have been busy as well -- two more newsletters since I last wrote. You are obviously taking pleasure in being the editor of your own doings and thoughts. And you are at ease with integrating images into the text. (I recently read a book from the late fifties where the black and white images were placed in the book according to the publisher's needs, not the author's, so there were often several dozen pages intervening between the photo and the related text. This reminded me of how it used to be with illustrations, and what an improvement has come about.) The journal miraculously continues, though after this email, I am resolved to catch up with it. I have filled one side of all the pages in a pocket notebook, and have reversed the book to begin filling the rest of it. Most notes are taken in the morning reverie / reading session which is only ended by a need to break my fast. The real trick is to take notes during the activities of the day. To do that means rearranging my entire brain and a lifetime of habit. Still, a few times I have succeeded and will keep trying. You mention less reading due to pain medication. That is the worst part of so many medications -- they rob one of that edge of self that is needed to hack through the fuzz of everyday life. Intellectually we know each second is precious, but there is a ho-hum factor in there that blands things down. Perhaps it is one of our many protective devices, but it is usually "over the top" in application. You asked about geese flying together and their organization. By coincidence I have just read of a person out with an Indian guide who happened to observe a very distant goose overhead who was repeatedly circling in a rift of the clouds. He asked the guide what the bird was doing and the Indian said it was a leader goose, waiting for the rest of the flock to arrive. Sure enough, after a considerable wait, the man saw through the tatters of cloud in the windy sky a flock of geese approach the leader goose, and arrive at the particular dot of sky the leader was waiting in. After milling around a bit, the leader headed off to the south with the others in the classical V-shape behind. How the flock located the leader, or how the leader knew precisely where to intersect their path, was not known. It is that kind of thing which adds piquancy to observation of the natural world -- science, by a long long ways, does not know all. There is always room for one's personal observation as far as new knowledge is concerned. I like your "power" stationery. I may be in fact fondest of the embossed background for simple elegance and readability. The pigeon head you mentioned was fun to do, though I found myself wishing I had spent more time on the drawing. I do like the "enameled" technique and may well do more with it. I have been doing some drawing exercises and, as is typical, other things have taken me away from it. It is like doing musical exercises for musicians; it helps later when I want to do original work. Well, I'll squeeze it in when I can. The cat in the shot, the lord of a home in the town of Mifflinburg that hosts Christkindl, weighs over 20 pounds. Petting this cat calls for really wide sweeps of the hand. He is sometimes willing to lie on a capacious lap to be petted, if the lappee doesn't mind reduced blood flow to the legs. ----- 12/13/04 Your recent letter was delivered to me as I lay abed philosophizing (actually lazing, reverie-ing, reading) and seemed to drip a couple drops of blood on the sheets, but with the application of the cool waters of a distant compassion all was well. Insensitive humor to one side, I thought I could sense that you are hurting and am sorry the segue to happier climes was not timed better to your wishes. I still look forward to hearing such details as you wish to convey. The mood of this email is rambly, some idle thoughts of the moment. I'll do a more focused email soon, better responding to your communications. I just finished a phone call with a friend in San Diego and his recent experiences were rather inspiring to hear. He is a long-time singer in his church's choral group, and he is particularly involved with that during the Christmas season. He was in a production of Handel's Messiah and someone else's Oratorio. Hearing him, the music director at a small college (Point Loma Nazarene College, I think is the name) approached him to do a part in a new opera they were working on. So, he ended up doing over 100 hours of rehearsal and voice lessons to do a fairly major role in their production. The opera was to be of a selection from three operas done by three different composers based on the writings of Caron de Beaumarchais : Rossini's Barber of Seville, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and a third much more recent work. He also was the "official photographer" of the production, which came off very well in the four performances. He is about 67 or 68 years old, and is full of enthusiasm for snagging a part in a new production of "My Fair Lady". Whew, I got a bit tired just hearing all this -- my metabolism is from the other end of the spectrum. He also raised an interesting question that had arisen in his mind as he worked through the long pre-production process, as he came to realize that each performer must know the whole opera in detail, must memorize lines, blocking positions, manner, dress, etc. and must essentially be aware of the actions and words of each of the other performers every moment of the performance. How can the human mind not only do all that, but do it for thirty, forty, or fifty other operas with only a short interval of preparation to refresh the memory? I said I had wondered the same for stage actors of some companies who do different plays of Shakespeare or other authors on a subsequent series of days. Or for that matter, how does a person learn maybe 50 thousand words of two or more languages and never mix them up. This ability to place many mental objects in a portmanteau and carry them around intact is truly amazing when you stop to think about it. Joke from old book: Businessman: Are you having luck with the hogs this year? Farmer: Shucks, we never play for money. All for the moment, hope the divorce proceedings with your city are smooth, ----- 12/14/04 I was working my way through a reply to your links email, when I recalled the part of our conversation dealing with the origins of life. Out of that came some extensive scribbling in my notebook. The result was more a little essay than a note, so I treat it that way. Here it is, the first draft of some notions on the subject in which I attempt to draw together in a compact form many of the ideas on the topic that are swirling around in me and in many others. [Begin document] THOUGHTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE Most of our planet is not alive, most of its mass is as sterile as the moon, the sun, the other planets and comets and asteroids. The vacuums of space with their sprinklings of atoms and ions, its wispy photons, are devoid of life. We humans, who care for ourselves, see and feel the starkness of the deterministic reality all around us like the coldly beautiful crystal-driftings of an endless winter. Why should our empathies be strained to encompass all other living forms? It is because we have much in common with them, are family with them, for they are with us in a vast alien landscape that, for all its intricacies and beauties, is blank and dead as if it were at the beginning of time. Yet, having said this and thinking it true, I find my empathies sweeping onward. There are three ideas man has about the origin of life: divinely created, drifting in from space, and spontaneous generation. Of divinely created, I think little. Gods are the ultimate begging of the question of origins: where did they come from, and how did they get to be all-this and all-that? Life wafting in from space? This is not impossible, but again it is a way of begging the question of origin. The how of life is simply removed to an unknown environment. "Spontaneous generation" alone remains a viable field of speculation and scientific enquiry. However, I don’t like the phrase itself. There is a connotation of suddenness to it. And there is still the smell of the dungheap hovering over the phrase. Early thinkers imagined, "simpler" living forms, such as maggots, to burst into being out of mere warmth and muck. The human mind routinely stuns itself with its assumptions and the misleading shapes of the consequent questions. We say, "life from non-life". We say, "greater results cannot be generated by lesser causes". We say, "what is the purpose?". Yes , we are skilled in making categories and dichotomies, but poor in grasping the dynamic, the evolving, the gray area between thesis and antithesis. However, biased toward a foolish rigor of assumption though we are, new understandings have eventually come. From an old dichotomy of static / chaotic, we have achieved the notion of static / dynamic / chaotic. (Is this a trichotomy?) In time the term dynamic came to include the idea of movement, as that of a running horse, and of cycles, as of the zodiac and the seasons. Later, the idea of evolution was added. The intellectual possibilities in the swelling concept of dynamism were becoming very interesting. Though not always explicit, the idea of continuity was very much a part of the developing concept of dynamism. At this point, it was possible to imagine a continuous change, a changing continuity. But what is it that is continuous and changing? From our conceptual kit, we drew words such as being or entity, terms that fit more comfortably in the static zone of our assumptions. It was easier to conceive of an equine entity running, than of an equine entity morphing through evolutionary time. As we learn now to add the idea of a dynamic unity – a changing thing that is continuous and has integrity – to our intellectual kit, we are better able to apprehend such systems in the world. We now use the terms self-organizing, self-sustaining, self-actualizing. We speculate on continuities in states of matter neither chaotic nor crystalline. At last we begin to have the conceptual tools to perceive a blur between non-life and life. What had seemed to be an absolute distinction is no longer so. We are now engaged in resolving that blur, seeing into it. The fog of inadequate conceptualization is clearing. Bemused, a person may now contemplate the following: All matter and energy have characteristics. As matter and energy interact, the interplay of these characteristics tends to modify the previous states of matter and energy. These modifications contribute to further modifications. When conditions are neither statically cold nor chaotically hot, persistent patterns of matter circulating and trapping energy – dynamic integrities – form, which last for varying lengths of time. The longer these integrities last, the more selective evolution may occur. The more successful an integrity is in maintaining itself internally, the longer it lasts, and the more evolution acts upon it. The internal state is affected by what is beyond the boundary of the integrity – the external state. Integrities that can adjust to, or modify, the external state have evolutionary advantages. What we call life is the result of the above processes after a lot of evolution, and with many of the intermediate steps erased. A natural tendency of integrities is to increase the level of integrity over time. Eventually this is perceivable as consciousness itself. It seems fairly clear that both life and, more elusively, consciousness are evolved from the natural world, and are based upon it. To call this materialism seems not perfectly accurate because apprehension of these truths is not possible without applying non-material understandings: dynamics, evolution, integrity, self-organization, emergence, etc., not to mention the dimensions of time and space which are not material. What is clear to a lively intuition is the joyous idea that life is Earth itself – respiring, vibrating, paddling, walking, running, and flapping. –December, 14, 2004 [End of document] For me, at any rate, our conversation has already born fruit. ----- 12/15/04 Back to substantive comments... Can anything be more exciting than contemplating the evidence from the development of metazoan life after all those hundreds of millions of years of single-celled life? Not that I am denigrating single-celled life -- life is life, and as Krutch says in imagining trees speaking to the sky: "We are alive," say the trees, "and you, O sky, are not. Without your light we would perish; unless the sun comes in time to shed its rays less obliquely upon us, we shall never awake from the sleep which now envelops us. But what you have the power to give, you yourself are without, you can have no share in. You represent the regular, the remorseless, the thing which endures so long that you are, as we count things, eternal. But we are part of the Great Rebellion against your exclusive rule." [This was where I broke off to write the little essay I sent.] It would amuse me if dinosaurs turned out to be birds instead of vice versa. Interesting, looking at this dinosaur, I am reminded of On Growth and Form by D'arcy Thompson. The larger back legs of the dinosaur are matched by a shrinking of the fore legs, as if there were a transfer of size from one to the other. Finally, I got to the scotese site with its animations of plate movement. Wonderful stuff. These animations are immensely useful for anyone wanting to learn the sequences of plate change, but also to actually understand the change, even develop insights into the source of the change. I developed an interest in using models in learning when I ran a little program that does gravity simulation for different masses of interacting bodies. I watched for many hours, and eventually developed a "feeling" for gravitational interaction I had not had before. To a friend who was denigrating the use of models based on the reasoning they simply reproduce the ignorance of the maker, I said that experience is worth a lot, it can help do things that reason alone cannot do. I asked him to imagine a good virtual model of something he knows well, and where he could spend hours involved in it. If there were subtle errors, he would become familiar with them, and he could direct the modeler to improve the interactions. If he were not the type who is never wrong, and whose ego is too challenged in rethinking an unreasonable conclusion, I think he might have agreed with me :^D Heaven's sake, no room even for a McDonalds in North America! Doesn't is seem surprising that continents of substantial size were so late in forming? This representation is so much improved over even quite recent views of the state of land masses at this time. Geology is being revolutionized in our lifetime. I have not forgotten your question: how does one effectively convey a sense of the rapid movement of India as it moved toward Asia? My guess at its speed was off: it is 15 centimeters per year. This is 6 inches, or 12000 inches (1000 feet) since the time of Christ, and about a mile since the beginnings of civilization, a 100 miles in a million years, a 1000 miles in ten million years. I guess my conclusion about your question is that as long as a student uses personal markers of time, then most geological changes will seem very slow. But if the teacher makes a point of installing a geological clock in the students (which would take time and emphasis to do), then it is possible to convey the sense of "fast" and "slow". The sense of deep time comes to most geology students slowly and indirectly, I suppose. It depends directly on a grasping of continuities of sequences. It is one of the "jewels" in the crown of geology, one of the rewards. It can't be done quickly, though the chronology I suggested to you is my best current offering to assist this goal. Using it (1000 units of time in 5 billion years, 5 million years per unit), India moved 5000 miles in 10 ticks of the timer -- 50 million years, which is 1/100th of the whole period of 5 billion years. I'm sure I am a novice compared with someone in the field for thirty years, but every once in a while, I do feel a little cramped in a mere 5 billion years. And the supposed age of the universe itself is only 14 billion or so. The rotation of our galaxy takes 250 million years, so if the galaxy is, say, 10 billion years old, then it has only rotated 40 times, making it early middle age in galactic years. Bottom line on the chronology question: those interested in conveying the reality of the earth's history to students should use the best tools that our age offers. As far as possible, let students experience geological processes through interactive, high-quality models. The military has used simulators for years to accelerate learning, especially where mistakes need to be made without massive destruction. In the long run, we need to be able to descend to any depth in the earth, to race through the millennia, to follow strata wherever they go, to slow down and increase the resolution for fine detail, to watch crystals form, to observe the subtleties of heat effects at different depths, watch mountains grow and waste away, trace the development of life in its geological contexts, watch rifts form and plates drift apart, chart the changing levels of the seas, watch the island arcs as they are swept up by wandering land masses, ponder the astonishing effects of lava flows and volcanic ashes as they fill basins and bury mountains. Remember the old line, "Why should the devil have all the good tunes?" Why should a meretricious modern culture hog all the great tools of generating experiences? --- ...a note of a moment's mood from you, Indeed, the viruses and the other nasty little packages out there ready to infect computers need to be defended against. Currently I use a free anti-virus, the XP firewall, and caution generally to protect my computer. So far, so good, but the bad types seem to be at work day and night, like conspirators of evil, to mess us up. If the medical profession ever gets into the antivirus business, the price will rise sharply, and the quality will fall. Computers will croak, but no liability will ever touch the failed protectors. Many of the little med programs will cause side effects, such as wrong math, or memory breakdown, or shrinkage of functionality. Fun and games programs will be disallowed. Lawyers will be added to the mix, and more misery will follow. Let's hope they stick to their multi-gazillion dollar turf and leave the computers alone. ----- 12/16/04 It continues... Quote ================= Oddly Enough - Reuters Steinbeck's Birthplace to Close Its Libraries 42 minutes ago Oddly Enough - Reuters SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The central California town of Salinas, birthplace of Nobel prize-winning author John Steinbeck who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath," will close its three libraries next year as a cost-cutting move. The Salinas city council voted 6-1 late on Tuesday to end funding of the libraries due to an $8 million city budget shortfall. The library doors, including the main John Steinbeck branch, will close during the first half of 2005. "Unfortunately part of the $8 million solution is the $3 million library program," Salinas City Manager David Mora said in an interview on Wednesday. "But in addition to the libraries we are not hiring police officers, we are closing recreation centers, we are making further reductions in maintenance services." He blamed a continuing economic recession, voter rejection last month of a local half-cent sales tax increase and other factors for the city's economic woes. The library closures mark the latest chapter in the city's sometimes rocky relationship with literature. Steinbeck, whose works also included "Of Mice and Men" and "East of Eden," was born and grew up in Salinas but was often criticized there during his lifetime. "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad," he wrote in 1938. In recent years Salinas, population 155,000, has embraced Steinbeck and opened a museum in his honor, but the library closures have again generated negative publicity for the town. The three Salinas libraries are mostly open only in the afternoons five days a week following earlier cutbacks. "In essence, for lack of a better word, we are going to mothball the facilities," Mora said, adding he hoped they would reopen. End quote ================== And, oddly enough, instead of being in an "Ain't This Crappy?" section of Yahoo News, it is in "Oddly Enough". And perhaps the council and Mr. Mora will be mothballed eventually. Those recessions are hell, ain't they? Especially since, though there are mandated emergency plans for rare disasters, there are none for common and predictable economic variations. Thinking of changing his species membership, and shaking his old gray locks, ----- 12/19/04 I have emphasized in the past that there are many free graphics programs and usually, no matter what the program, it has some trick the other programs can't do as easily, or as well. I'll let you know what I find among my programs. Meanwhile, download and install as many of the free programs as you wish, check them out spend some time with each one -- long enough to get a feel for it. You can always uninstall completely useless programs. Let me know how it goes. ----- 12/20/04 Thanks for the thoughtful reply, the dialogue is humming along! This is a quick note to acknowledge your email and I'll re-read your comments and respond to them, and add some things no doubt. However I'll respond to your query regarding the chronology idea: "However, when I went further (page 4 of 11/28 addressing “Second writing (11/26)),” I hit a road block and the clouds rolled in: You refer to Earth’s origin as “Epoch 100 (100 E) or 500 Million years.” I seem to be missing an order of magnitude for that number. I sometimes refer to that number as 5,000 million years (or 4,500 my). Where have I gone wrong? Perhaps the next time we get together, you need to lead me by the hand through all of this! [Note: the time term epoch is very specifically defined to refer to the sub-categories of the periods in the Tertiary and Quaternary of the Cenozoic (I prefer Paleogene & Neogene, but these are not synonymous with the previous two subdivisions). Paleoeocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene are all epochs.] " The change I made in the second writing was to arbitrarily use the date of 5 billion years ago rather than the accepted date of earth's origin of 4.5 billion years. Written out, the new point of reference (done for convenience, 5 being easier than 4.5) is 5,000,000,000 years ago. So, one thousandth of that is 5,000,000 or five million. This five million year period is taken to be a basic unit (not sure what is best to call it, I used "epoch", but I have no preference for a term. I'll use the word "period" here.) Thus, there are one thousand periods of 5 million years duration in the entire 5 billion year sequence of years. If the Earth "began" 500 million years after the starting point used in this proposal, then it is 100 units of 5 million years each. In other words, the first period is period 1 or 1P and after 99P more, the Earth is said to have formed to the point it could be called a planet at 100P. The two arguments for the value of this idea is 1) a forward movement in numbers to correspond to the forward movement of time itself, and 2) a geological dating system that by its own nature places the period of its event relative to the whole span of time that is being considered. To say event A happened in 100P, event B happened in 275P, event C happened in 530P, and event D happened in 805P is to give an immediate sense of the relative times of these occurrences. The first is ten percent of the whole period, the second is 27.5 percent, the third is 50.3 percent, and the last is 80.5 percent of the same whole time expanse of 1000 periods. My assumption is we humans are good at this kind of relative and proportional thinking. We would not be challenged to use a hydrogen atom as a basic unit of atomic diameters, and we could easily grasp a carbon at 4 (times a hydrogen diameter), or iron at 6, lead at 13, and so on. (These numbers are just guesses, I did not bother to stop to research this, but I did look into it once and the relative sizes were approximately from ping pong ball size up to a basketball relatively.) Another example is the specific gravity measurement, where water is the base unit. I thought about using 10 billion years as the starting point, again for convenience. That would take the beginning back to the formation of the sun, and the units would be a handy 10 million years each. But I thought this would be pushing things maybe too far for most people, and maybe most uses. Using that scale, Earth would form at 550P (leaving a large hole in the story!) and the KT boundary would be in period 993. In the end, I thought the best useful beginning might be an arbitrary point at 5 billion years ago, as above. Any difficulty you may have with this idea is probably because you are a geologist, and used to thinking more backward in time than forward. ----- 12/21/04 I got your electronic card and I thank you for it. I am thinking of doing something Christmas-sy myself, and if I do I'll send it along. We are pleasantly vegetating here, reading, watching movies, concocting edibles. Today I made some banana nut bread that, though I violated both the letter and the spirit of the recipe, was good enough we ate much of it and skipped supper. That in turn later caused me to have a gigantic dessert to keep B. and S. together. One does what one must. Happy Christmas, ----- 12/22/04 However you two spend your Christmas -- have a great time! Hope all your young 'uns are flourishing. Here, we are vegetating, reading, talking, watching a few movies, a thoroughly pleasant period. My lady has 16 days off from the Twilight zone of work, so she is mellow as a cream-filled cat. Our birds continue their insane, but sweet, ways. I continue to demonstrate the nuances of retirement, getting a lot of reading done that I neglected for too many years (while I did less important, but superficially interesting, things). Am in communication with a recently retired professor of geology, which is stimulating for us both. With my recent read of the huge Annals of the Former world by John McPhee, I have lots of things geological to speculate on. And I do enjoy arguing (affably) with experts. --- Yep, I did finally do it. It is all learning as I go, and where many people send canned cards they get from some web site, at least this is personal. Yet, having said that, there is a commercial site that is much better than any other we have seen -- the Jackie Lawson site in Great Britain. It is basically one illustrator’s animated work, and she, bless her, is making a living at it. I'll ask my lady, who subscribes, to send you a card to show you what high quality it is, and how charming. Meanwhile, here are the four images of my card, warts and all. --- Well, will we get a deep smash of lovely snow for Christmas? Here is the Christmas card made of four of my images that I said I might do (better to say might, handy out if one foogles the situation). Hope you can see all the images OK. ----- 12/24/04 Good to hear from you. The Merritt Island thing sounds like a good adventure and you probably could use one. If a change is good as a vacation, then this should be a heck of a vacation. We are well. My lady continues in the Twilight Zone of Penn State (, Inc). I am ecstatic to be retired, and am slowly catching up on books I should have read years ago. The photography goes on, and I am keeping a journal for the first time in my life. The journal is a log of the good ship self, as it meanders among the ports of interest, with extra stops for the outré wherever that is found. I had a look a while back at the sandcasting website and liked what the company does -- I'm sure there is a market for that kind of work, though I surmise (without knowing squat about it) that having as many ins as possible at the right times among the moneyed folk would help enormously. I can imaging large commissions for the main theme / decoration of a new building, or a complex of them, and for private homes with the good addresses. Also, Florida, with itself stuck so phallicly into la mer, would probably be receptive to this kind of decorative art. Good luck on the evolution of your trilogy -- about terrorism via tankers, wasn't it? Certainly the ports open to ocean traffic are real Achilles heels. By now, your research has probably given you a good idea what the effective security is at such places. A bit of deception on the part of terrorists as to the nature of the ship, its provenance, its ownership, etc, could be enough to cause authorities to go blind and assume too much. Another thought connected with the whole terrorism deal is: what is its nature? The U.S. has been making enemies by the bush-el of late. The current image of the unlettered fanatic in some Syrian or Sudanese or wherever camp preparing to do or die against the "great Satan", may already be passé. Attacks in the future could take forms we have never thought of. What they have already done has changed our history, our institutions, our national personality... Airlines are dying, package mail is way more expensive, and Congress seems to have lost some IQ points. We are increasingly fragile, I think. The Tinkerbelle economy is based more on belief than real strength. Our industry is down to 16% of the economy. China and Japan buy our bonds, so we can pay them the imbalance of trade. We have to buy key military components from people who are not necessarily our friends. We are taking the lead in "combating terrorism" because our economy is our main interest, beating out religion, politics, and anything else by a good margin. (Not that there aren't some strange religious quirks in all this.) Israel lurks in the background like something from a medieval play. By far, we are weakest in diplomatic relations and in the economy. Both could be attacked. We could end up flailing this way, then that, raging like a friendless old bull stuck in a mudhole surrounded by lions and hyenas. Be that as it may, much as I would like to have seen Bush go back to Texas, I am not convinced that much that has come to pass would not have happened anyway, though the overtones may have been different. America has been the world's whipping boy for a lot of years -- I'm sure a failure of the manioc or coconut crops have been blamed on us in third world lands. Also, we have absorbed like body blows, many social changes that made for an anxious nation of the alienated who can only worship consuming -- it is the only thing left we agree on to make any kind of culture at all. We get our culture from the gigantic enter- and info- tainment industry. We may not have been all that sane on November 10, 2001, certainly not after. And, a personal doubt is in the nature of management generally -- American managers in general have no understanding of the old values and skills, and they do not care about anything but themselves and their advancements. These are the people whose exemplars strip companies, lay off the workers, and send the jobs to Malaysia or wherever. Near us, the town of Lock Haven has seen about 60 companies die in the last 40 years, and there is virtually no manufacturing left there. The management class, including the House and Senate, see little problem with this, and there isn't one, unless one cares about the health of the country. And when Bush made sure there were no government contract penalties for going offshore to avoid taxes, that made sense to the managers. Enough of that, it's Christmas and god bless us every one. I hope your Merritt Island move works out well, it sure sounds good. --- I could not resist the desire to make a four-image Christmas card (of sorts) , though it be by email. It turned out to be fun, and I learned a few things, mostly about manipulating text. Usually I tell people to stay warm at this season, but in the case of San Diegans, I'll just say, "stay comfortable". Had any Julian pie lately? ----- 12/26/04 Yes, we had a hunkered down and pleasant Christmas Day. We had a moderate feast of pork ribs, mashed potatoes, rather good salad, and a real English plum pudding with brandy hard sauce. Then later we sat with the birds in a dimmed living room and watched the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol (they called it just Scrooge). All very nice. As to the bird's expression on the Larch site -- which bird? There are several birds, or lots, if you include the ducks. Do you mean the bull House Sparrow shot taken just as he noticed the big eye of the camera on him? If so, then I think his expression shows the same emotion you or I would have had in his position. --- I am roaming through your letters and intending to catch up a bit on them, but who knows where this email will wander -- certainly not me. One thought has returned to me several times thinking about the situation you are in is what a great interlude it can be. From a total focus, time-devouring lifestyle to one where there are a plethora of options is a shock, but can be a pleasurable time. First, relaxing is possible, assuming your nervous system remembers how. If finances are not an overwhelming issue (and I never had reason to think it was your driving force), then one can coast and recreate a while. Maybe travel a bit, see Yellowstone or Yosemite, take the inland waterway tour to Alaska, whatever place you have reveried on. Projects you have put off could be done. Catch up on correspondence with friends, artists, musicians, ... There is the good old Future to consider, thought experiments of "if I were to do this..." or "what would happen if..." Besides the option of tackling another city in transition (doing it again), I remember you were part of a private business at one time (consulting?), so maybe that could be a transitional state toward a full retirement. Or writing, even a reportorial type of writing possibly, or a "confessions of a professional", or whatever moves you, lie out there as possibilities. Obviously, you know all that, but maybe seeing in print from someone else would be useful. One thing I'm pretty sure of is the energy-scattering effect of others when a person is facing choices, especially ones where there are anxieties and uncertainties involved. A friend who is a recently retired geology professor has had his own projects derailed because he allowed others to urge their projects on him. The habits of forty years, and the recognition that was a part of his professional life, lead him away from his own preferences, and toward his past way of being. That is a tender trap, a siren song that takes focus away from your own motivations and possibilities. If you start something you enjoy, but find yourself called away by the preemptive needs of others -- watch out! It will be harder to get back to what you started, and you'll find yourself vaguely figuring what you wanted was not meant to be. Many people have thus dropped the adventure of their lives, and found themselves merely muddling through. (..2 PM Staff meeting; 3 PM Dictate three letters; 3:30 PM Outline proposal; 4 PM Have massive heart attack, die; 4:01 PM Not sure...) Heard from a San Diego friend that the city is embroiled in a pension mess of Olympian proportions. In his descriptions of politics there, he had to remind me he was not making anything up -- it's that bizarre. ----- 12/29/04 Very pleased to get your email, as well as your Christmas card/letter that came in the day after I sent my last missive your way. I had intended to you write anyway as that last one was a "partial". Besides the usual scattering of attention the end-of-year holidays always bring, I have been singularly unfocused of late, this resulting in not getting projects done, small and humble though they be, that I have wanted to accomplish. Wandering in the detritus of oneself is always a strange medley of emotions. We Americans look back rarely, the past is to us a sort of vestigial tail of time, a reminder of things once useful, or even vital, but now shriveled and of doubtful relevance. I have consciously tried to retrain myself in the importance of the past. And not just the history of us all, but the private history of myself. I find myself regretting I did not have more adventures than I did have, and I've had more than many I have met. There is a tendency to be like Bilbo Baggins who did not care for adventures -- they are inconvenient and make one late for breakfast. As you say, a major movie at least, though not Dean (too dead) or Schwartzenegger (starring in a big role at the moment), maybe Kenneth Branaugh, he's good. He would lend a Shakespearean quality to this urban travesty, er tragedy. I see that your tendency is to be reasonable, understanding, and forgiving of the weaknesses of others. I'll have to try that sometime. My instinct is utter annihilation and laying waste to the surrounding landscape (more like Jehovah), but perhaps that is passé. Still, there is something to be said for old time religion, especially the sacrificing of oxen and just donating the smoke to the god, leaving the rest for a good feast. If I read you right, you are unsure yourself just what the details were of what went wrong. If so, that is typical of separations in the wonderful world of work. More than once I have suspected it is like a pack of wolves who sniff each other constantly. The day comes when someone begins to lack the right fragrance, or the rest of the pack is generating a new smell, and the someone didn't notice. If the wolves thought they acted rationally, then they would come up with reasons, usually couched in such language as: "certain concerns have been raised" or "people have expressed a discomfort with some issues connected with your procedures" or [fill in bullshit language here]. This is not to say your own instincts as to the cause or causes is wrong, but the fog of this sort of thing is thick, and the reasons often beneath one's threshold of belief. When one is hurt, the mind returns endlessly to find something firm to understand. No one wants to suffer for totally irrational reasons, unless it is from an Act of God (meaningless, oddly enough), and even then we try to make sense of it. Thanks for this comment. I do try to be relevant at least, and worry sometimes that my particular, if not peculiar, point of view works out OK at the other end. I have never thought of myself as a people-person (odious term), and while I praise empathy as among the highest qualities of humanity (perhaps the creator of it), it is fair to say I do not wear this on my sleeve because those who do are nearly always a kind of solipsist in disguise. My style is indirect, but real nevertheless. I have not seen much of the S B Press as I turn down online newspapers that want me to register. You sent the "Good job, and thanks" column and I read it. It shows a sympathy and understanding of your situation that is quite remarkable. And it implies a bozohood of the council without saying a word about it. Something like that helps a great deal -- usually one writhes in the outer darkness alone and no way to fix it. True about San Francisco, the golden city shining above the fog as I remember seeing it one day when I lived there. That whole area is exceptional, though growing crowded. And if I am fated again to live in a city, I hope it is that one. Relaxation is probably essential now, not an appendage, and it will help you stay uncommitted until you are ready. Thought: a "So long, and thanks for all the fish" letter from you to the good (hypothetical word) people of your ex-city. Interesting to imagine your lawyer's gimlet eye roving over such a document looking for landmines, but finding none due to your gift for indirection and implication, of course. Seriously, the people might like to know what is going on and what the future is likely to bring. That such a letter might bring pressure on the council to do the right thing would just be frosting on the cake. This would be revenge with a pastry brush rather than a flamethrower, just a fireside chat with a person who may know the city better than any other human -- a Farewell Address from "one grown old in the service to my country such that I need glasses to read from this paper" as Washington said to his rebellious officers. The notion may strike you as a non-starter, but I can imagine you and your lady having a lot of fun with it... For myself, I continue the journal, and am finding an absurd pleasure in it. To be sure there is a lot of drivel there, comments about movies, personal problems du jour, assertions of a desire to do this or that better, etc. but some of it is not so bad and it would be lost otherwise. Here are some October/November quotes from it: [Begin journal quotes] ...So one obvious good of a habit of journal-keeping is the recording of what has been important in the acts of living. If a ship is worthy of a log because of its value and its human-entwined destiny, then a person is surely as worthy. By noting thoughts, actions, interests, observations, speculations as they happen, there is a chance for a journalist to know himself better, to catch himself objectively in the act of living. This knowledge of the self can only grow, and it must affect the life as it is being lived. We say we humans are some punkins because we are self-aware, but the self-awareness of most people is not sufficient to protect them from being co-opted by happenstance, let alone by those who deliberately manipulate others for whatever gain of power or income. There is a lot of drowsy inattention going on in this vaunted awareness. ...Mantle forces of both compression and stretching must have played a part. I try to keep in mind the picture given the day I went with a geologist to Red Hill where I saw red rock (still have a sample) that has real charcoal in it from the first forest fires of the first forests. This at the time the first animals were crawling on land. Time, time. All those millions of years and slow change, or rather, often abrupt small changes with gaps of no action repeated to form large accumulations of change. ...He and I stood in the doorway after he put out bird feed and the birds did come quickly. The male and female cardinals were spectacular, and there were Tufted Titmouse, a White-Throated Sparrow, and Nuthatch. He especially likes the hummingbirds. I told him there was just one eastern hummingbird, the Ruby-Throated. I think he was surprised at this. [End journal quotes] And like that, some factual, some speculative, some just noodling around with a notion of the moment. The biggest problem is learning to note things during the action, so to speak. Thus far it is nearly all from morning, with a few notes from afternoon idlings. Another lapse is I transcribe several days at a time from a pocket notebook and do not often edit as I go, as I should. By the way, the first journal quote above mentions ships' logs and I have often wondered why if it is good enough for ships to have a record of being, not only why not people, but why not companies, departments, cities like your ex-one? I suppose the answer is that we are all too busy, too battered by the collision of the future on the past (i.e. the present) to waste time describing it. Poor response by poor attendants of whatever it is. Is everything a sort of damage control? Too busy bailing out the bilge to say what the sky is doing? I do not think it is too much to say we Americans throw out the past like so much garbage to fester on Time's midden heap for a minimum of twenty years. If some literary archeologist is then willing to transmute this into gold of sufficiently high assay, it is readmitted into the august presence of the public mind which is a species of enervated butterfly. Ahem. Good to clear out one's pipes on a regular basis, I think. As you say, folk tales everywhere. I was reading recently in a library copy of Paul Bunyan by a writer named Stevens. It was interesting enough in the introduction that I asked my lady, who has a flair for online ordering, to order me a used copy of the book. I'll get and read it soon. The point here was his description of working men around a red-hot camp stove exchanging stories of Paul and Babe and all the amazing gang. I tried to imagine the modern office worker lounging around the cafeteria coffee machine telling tall tales of heroic managers, fiscal officers, office assistants, et al. Even my fevered cortex was deeply challenged to do this, though I have seen office gods for sale, such as Caffeina the Focused and the like. Stevens was writing in the mid-Twenties and I found it interesting he used the word "democratic" like a curse. For him it was a monstrous leveler and crusher-out of all that was creative and idiosyncratic. Though democracy may be, as Churchill said, a terrible system except it is better than all others, it does have a leveling effect, or better said, a layering effect. Society is made of sheets, like two dimensional levels of people -- little depth either in the high or low. Goofy as they are, it is the artist, the writer, the philosopher (small 'P') that have vertical connections. Long may they wend their odd ways. This letter has been enjoyable to write, I hope it is the same to read. And, heh heh, I suspect the journal is quite accepting in what may be allowed to form a part of it. For the present, I am what I yam and that's all I yam, ----- 12/30/04 Thanks for letting us know. That bacterium must be vicious to cause so much damage so fast that there were no obvious symptoms. Glad they finally operated. He must have felt like his former Dracula persona indeed. Our good wishes for them. Have a safe trip, take care of yourself. ----- 12/31/04 There may well be other good digital camera sites, but the one I used a lot was http://www.dpreview.com/ You're welcome to the calendar, glad you enjoy the pictures. The image of the two golden kids having their millionth picture taken was added when I realized I would never have a better place to use it -- I would never put such a thing on the net. And, each year, I make a little one-pager for my lady in Excel that can be scaled down when printing for a really small year's calendar. It is bare bones, no images. She has a small version pasted next to her keyboard. If you use Excel and want such a calendar, let me know. The way I designed it, you can create calendars for any year, so it is good forever, though I suspect that forever ain't what it used to be. This camera that you "have", do you actually have it, or is it a "have in mind"? ----- 01/01/05 This is not a simple question and I had to research it a bit on Wikipedia to get the best information as below. Basically it has to do with the method used to establish URLs on the Internet, as you will see in the quoted material below that defines the ".net" (typically ISPs) and ".com" (commercial sites) terms. In practice, the terms are not rigidly applied, that is, anyone can claim to be a ".net" or ".com" and register their sites that way. This is not a good thing, but does show the swirls of chaos that surround what is basically a rational technical construct. [Begin quoted material ] .net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used on the Internet's Domain Name System. The .net gTLD is currently operated by VeriSign. .net was one of the original top-level domains (despite not being mentioned in RFC 920), created in January 1985. It was initially intended for use by network oriented entities such as Internet service providers. Nowadays, anyone can register a .net domain. .com is a generic top-level domain used on the Internet's Domain Name System. It was one of the original top-level domains, established in January 1985. It is currently operated by VeriSign. It is consistently pronounced as a word, dot-com, and has entered the common language this way; in contrast, though some of the other TLDs are also sometimes pronounced as words, they're also frequently spelled out instead, something that is never done with .com. Although .com domains have always been intended for commercial use, they are currently available for anyone to register. In the 1990s, .com became the most common top-level domain for websites, especially commercial ones, and gave its name to dot-com companies. The introduction of .biz, which is restricted to businesses, has had little impact on the popularity of .com. Often, noncommercial sites such as those of nonprofit organizations, governments, and so on will use .com addresses, which some find to be contrary to the domain's original purpose. A .org, .gov, or other more specific TLD might be more appropriate for such sites. Other common top-level domains .gov: Government related. .edu: Education related. .org: Organization. .mil: Military related. [End quoted material ] Wikipedia continues to develop and is a good source of information. I suggest you bookmark it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page It is developed and corrected by users and is the "people's encyclopedia". For fun you might look up accounting or other fiscal stuff to see what the current level of understanding is, and you could even correct information or contribute new articles to the encyclopedia or one of the other projects if you wish to. --- My blushes, as Holmes said. Yes, the Wikipedia site is one to use both for day to day information on words and phrases, but with its strong hyperlink structure, it leads off to ever wider implications and connections. That it is not the product of a government or business, indeed not of any one entity, is proof that "open source" is a viable alternate way of producing excellence. In the past, one had to accept a dependence on some sort of authority for the acquisition and sharing of knowledge and invention. You had thus a choice only of playing the game or getting out. The game always had as much to do with the furtherance of the authority-organization as it did with the noble purposes of knowledge and the advancement of the culture. Now, even if in a humble way, there is something one can participate in that has no reason to be but its aspirations shared by the independent participants. The hierarchy is simply the natural one of who contributes "furstest with the mostest". Cream rises. It is interesting to think how shy governments are in invading areas of endeavor that might be used by some private company or other entity to generate money. And this is true even in areas where there is a strong argument that the effort would serve the larger public interest. An example is in mapping. Would it not serve the interests of the society as a whole to have free or very low cost maps of every type and description? But someone worries this would step on the toes of some private companies, so this does not happen, except a few limited map types. Another example is health information -- why not have a national database of health information, including mortality causes by region, that is available to everyone? The answer is that it would take power away from the health industry and give it to the people. I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples of government inaction where a buck is to be made, or hypothetically might be made, by some private group. If you can restrict the flow of information, you give some group a chance to make money selling an artificially scarce commodity. Of course, I'm not advocating that governments get into areas not appropriate to it. But where free knowledge can generate more informed citizens, and that in turn can create business opportunities, it seems a shame that governments act with such timidity. I notice they react quickly enough to industry demands. The real war regarding business will come if the vague longings of people, typified by the anti-globalization movement, are able to generate an effective and broad-based way of creating wealth. This would be a dagger at the heart of IBM, Microsoft, and the rest. They would get really mean then. Armies of lawyers would clash. Titanic lawsuits, gigantic threats, dire warnings would flow from this. (Microsoft is quite busy trying to kill the Linux operating system because it is a real threat.) The end of the world would be predicted. At the center of the fear would be all those millions of dollars snagged by upper-level managers which seems to be the main goal of modern business -- not filling a need, not serving the customers. So, question: Is the corporate business model the best one for a world undergoing all the stresses that exist due to high population and the wrenching of cultures into the needs of a high-tech world? I don't think so because by nature businesses act in their own interests. They ebb and flow with the somewhat brutish needs of money which is itself a sort of dumb virus that grows only where it is welcome, and if people are destroyed in the process, too bad. I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples of government inaction where a buck is to be made, or hypothetically might be made, by some private group. Again: if you can restrict the flow of information, you give some group a chance to make money selling an artificially scarce commodity. I found when I looked into it, that copyright information (is this book in public domain or not?) is not available on the web. Only those living near Washington D.C. can access that info. So you pay someone to research it for you. Guess what that does to Joe Blow who wants to know. It's "Pay, Joe, pretend you are one of the big boys." Do you have time to noodle around with this and send the results hitherward? Interesting to think about the strengths of the business model -- clarity, simplicity -- and the broad way the free market can act to nullify excesses, and curb greed. Yet in the global environment there is undeniably an effort to circumvent the "invisible hand" and grow like a demigod, such as fire that can, if without restraint, simply destroy. I think I had some other sort of idea about responding to your note, but the above is what came out... All this from one who has voted conservatively more often than not. Strange, eh? ----- 01/03/05 I have yet to do an adequate response, excepting the time-scale issue, to your last email before your Christmas trip. The holiday season seems to defocus people, including me. This note is to send you a good link on the Sumatra quake. I, like millions of others, have visited many sites on the web to learn as much as possible. I burrowed into bulletins and other actions of the NOAA tsunami warning station at Hilo, Hawaii and was not impressed with their sequence of behaviors, but they thought they had done a good job. I have gone to university seismic centers to find what I couldn't find in the so-called news sources. I have read messages from reporters at the scene from the BBC (always an impressive source of news). I have read the moving messages from ordinary people in some of the affected areas. Perhaps you have done these things too, or maybe you left it for later after your vacation was done. There are always disasters of course, but this was a really big one. Many will not see the end of difficulty for a generation or more. Anyway the Wikipedia page regarding the quake is the best overview and links I have seen. ----- 01/04/05 Thanks for the good news! This seems to be a strange bacteria indeed. Some basic web info is at the bottom of this message. The text says the ulcer is likely to come back if the H. pylori is not eliminated completely. One thing you learn in life is how fast something can reach out and grab you, like it did to Jim Henson with bacterial pneumonia. And number two son sounds nearly as shy of doctors as I am, but there are times they earn their pay. The Sumatra quake / tsunami is certainly the big news these days. The web has lots of information about it. The NOAA's tsunami center's response was not impressive, the excuses lame. Also our government was slow in having a decent response to relief efforts. So many people dead, lost, injured, homeless -- a generation is too little time to heal this problem. Tell him there was a report of elephants and other animals not found among the dead -- they had headed to higher ground apparently. Also a report of a group of elephants whose job was to give rides to tourists. They started a strange trumpeting that sounded like crying just after the quake, and an hour later they headed up a hill, breaking chains if necessary to do it, and saved those on their backs. They also picked up some tourists with their trunks and set them on their backs, saving them too. When they reached the top of the hill, the elephants stopped. They and the people with them watched the tsunami come in over the lower lands below. Anyway, as he is healing, perhaps you can find a time to drive around the countryside and see beautiful California before you head back home. Say hello to the Californians from us. My lady is back at work. Managers discussed a response to the Indian Ocean disaster, so she and another staff person waited until the lame ideas had emanated from management, then suggested some things that would cost Penn State money. An awkward silence prevailed then, and the staff meeting dwindled to a close. ----- 01/05/05 Passing this on: In your former city, high tides washed away tons of sand deposited last year as part of a $2 million beach-preservation project. Most of the 80,000 cubic yards of sand used to curb erosion has been swept away, leaving a jagged wall of sand and dirt and forcing officials to close part of the coastline as a safety precaution. California has been battered over the past week by severe storms that caused widespread street flooding. More storms are expected later in the week. --- As you have fallen off the radar, I thought I'd better send an explicit query regarding things chez you. Our Christmas card was returned from your address -- "Unable to forward". My graphic Christmas card to your email did not bounce, so maybe the address is good. Of course for the time being you can reach us at our same addresses, but we can't seem to reach you. Silence lacks a certain something, j'en sait quoi, oh, a sort of articulate quality, I guess. Even if you would rather not do "dialogue-type" letters, a note back and forth once in a while would probably not mangle your groove too badly. I am still in touch with our city manager friend and I know he'd like to hear from you. He has ceased being the city manager in the city you know of due to some political seismology, but is still in that city. My guess is a lot has changed in your life, and it probably is focused on family, which is fine, dandy, normal, and like that there. Hope, though, you are finding time to burrow into the personal stuff, music, messing about with notions, generally enjoying the days of retirement whose chief characteristic is that no one is controlling your efforts but you, as of course it would have been all along had the world been spiffier. As to moi, I have amazingly enough finally established a journal -- about seventy pages have been transcribed from a pocket notebook in the last couple of months. Much dreck of course, but some stuff not wholly vile has emerged. Quotes from authors I like are in there too. I can now include my own book in those stacked near my reading couch (alias bed). ----- 01/07/05 I decided it would be interesting to use this same well-worn message to continue the discussion. I'll use blue for my comments this time. Alas I am not the fellow to cheer you up regarding the future of education, though we both know there are still good people out there. The short answer is to teach only people who have already proven their capability of learning. I was told in San Diego by a person of a friend who gave up teaching advanced music classes, saying "These are not people!" of her students. She continued teaching though, but only highly motivated and talented students. This does not bode well at all for the ideal of a broad democratic education, and an informed citizenry of thoughtful individuals, to put it mildly. Skipping the polemics, I would say that for power-people, the idea of democracy was a problem until it was realized that A) people are generally malleable, B) democracy means never having to say you're sorry (the people bear the responsibility), C) we can buy off the people with their own money, and D) we can keep people scared all the time, then rule by the tried-and-true manipulation of their fears. But woe to the leaders in power if the people can't go to Wal-Mart (motto: Trash for Chumps) any more. Aside from all that, there is a question that needs answering: What kind of future will we have and what kind of person will best be able to live in that world? While it is a doleful exercise, one can figure out what future is envisioned by the powerful by looking at the education of the young, that is, education in the broad sense. The new youth are often glossy barbarians who are tuned into electronic culture all the time. They learn to be social manipulators in pre-school. They are feared by parents and worshiped by grandparents. Their expectations are astronomical in terms of consumer goods and high lifestyle. The subjects of a liberal education are unknown to them -- they weren't listening in school, and anyway most of their teachers were trying to emulate the young and be well-liked, not trying to pass on the inner flame of self-directedness for they didn't have it either. As a people, we have thrown away the past and stare with a religious rapture at heaps of Chinese goods piling up that we pay for when the Chinese buy our bonds. So, the future, if it is to be welcoming to our young, must be a sort of high-tech cornucopia surrounded by a nervous, shallow people ever plugged into the info-tainment network, who work longer and longer hours doing less and less real work, a people kept in line by the knowledge the whole house of cards could come crashing down and they, expelled from a consumer's paradise like guilty angels, would fall all the way to the bottom for they would have no inner resources of their own to reconstruct a meaningful existence. Try to imagine the current generation being able to handle a Great Depression like that of the Thirties. Hard, maybe impossible... Ah, a good jeremiad is just the thing to clear out one's pipes once in a while. I just finished Michael Crichton's State of Fear and am now back in that state of mind I had at the picnic where I said I was making a collection of disasters. To be sure, I was making fun of the Armageddon scenarios that were trundling out of the media roundhouse like a succession of scary trains. As you said then, we know more now. We are becoming aware of the precariousness of our situation which, in contrast to the very human tendency to think all times are like the calm present, and disasters only strike others in distant unpronounceably named countries, is full of possibilities of danger. Crichton argues that the scary scenarios, including global warming and sudden climate change, are used to create, or channel, the fear and thereby reinforce social and political control. My current take on all this is complex and ambivalent. Our science, flawed though it is by the grant process and the effect of financing generally, is making strides beyond the masters of the past. We are better able to see the past and the forces that have altered it, and continue to affect our little planet. We dabble in the chemistry of life, and think we can put it to work for the benefit of all (and the great profit of a few). Our scope is broadening at the same time our basis of wealth is becoming more precarious. I have thought for years that it is a race between the technology of destruction and the technology of a useful creation -- which would get to the future first, so to speak. Putting it differently, would it be possessive greed or would it be bountiful wisdom? As to our fears, they are not all mindless paranoia. Nature gives no guarantees of safety. Let the Sumatra quake stand for that. Though many have and will revile Crichton for his conclusions, his ideas on the role of science seems sound. He would see scientists disentangled from the bias of money by forcing a blindness as to the funding, and by separating the doing of science from the making of public policy based on the findings of science. We really need to know some things; we cannot afford to corrupt those who are attempting to do this. I will share more quotes with you as time goes on. I really have come to respect the naturalists of the mid-20th Century and read in them steadily. They have a unique perspective that is valuable. They observe, think, and write from a combination of a scientific view and a personal interaction with the natural world. It is the scientist as an individual, not as a member of a group, that pokes around ponds at dawn to find which particular frog is emitting that amazing sound, or is transfixed by a snowy bank colored by birds of cerulean hue as Teale describes, or reports on "fishy friends", as Thoreau writes. I have written more along this line. Will send it if you are interested. I have lusted through scientific catalogs many a time, to little avail. Surely the wrong people are rich! Just as youth should not be wasted on the young... I have thought off and on about this paragraph since you sent it, have made some notes even. Your point is certainly a good one. Scientists do make mental models, logical models, mathematical models to describe and simplify the complexities of the world. They use these both to teach a mountain of fact as a molehill of coherence, to exemplify theory, to develop prediction that is "tested" by seeing if observations match what the model predicts. And, though the computer is a "universal machine" in that it changes with each new program, it was literally born to crunch numbers in the aid of math-heavy models and seems to be ideal in the aid of modeling generally. I agree that "imagination, time, and fundamental understanding of the processes" is indispensable. The computer is not going to change that anytime soon. My speculations of the uses of virtual reality were along the lines of "wandering around in what we think may be true", that is, developing simulations that are compatible with our normal movements and senses such that we can have a direct experience of our ideas. My intuition tells me that some concepts which are "hard" would be less hard if we could experience them as much as we like. There is a sense in which the most elevated scientist is a student as much as any actual student. The good scientist comes humbly to the natural world, hoping to grasp some new understanding, however small. I do think if we could wander in a coherent landscape of our best ideas, truer ideas would suggest themselves. If a meteorologist could come out of Canada floating on a cold front twelve times in an hour, he would begin to think differently about cold fronts. Better to ride the real thing, of course, but second best would be helpful. Last comment: the creation of such virtual reality models is within our reach. I would like to see some made that are not some Disneyesque thing for the entertainment of third-graders, but quality work that could be altered to depict other ideas regarding the subject, and which would be used by serious scientists to explore the shape of a given current understanding. Let people poke into the corners of their own ideas, the twisted little implications. If improved understanding and new ideas did not come out of that, I'll eat my hat (or hire someone to do it ). If I were czar, I'd recommend geology as one of the beneficiaries of the virtual reality program. (Let's see now, how are we going to propel this six thousand mile-wide plate over there...) At the very least, we need a widely disseminated animation of current understanding of plate movement and continental formation. The mind can grasp this long sequence through hard work, but it would be easier with animation, and it would free the mind from pasting together thousands of facts into one view. A good example of such freeing is a map, which not only "lists" all the components, but also shows all their sizes, characteristics, and relationships in space. I have always thought that maps are one of the most impressive things of the human mind. I checked the map that I had inserted in the message -- it was dated 650 My ago. I am surprised at the smallness of the continental masses (or in the case of North America, its complete absence). Given the age of the earth, a question arises: were the tectonic forces less active during most of earth's history? Or were there forces which destroyed young continents as they were being formed? (This also reminds me of the question of heating of the earth -- if it is getting slowly hotter, that would suggest greater tectonic activity in later times than in earlier ones.) Anyway, I need to get a clearer understanding of what sea levels and land mass extents were in the pre-metazoan times. (Aside: I notice in the current National Geographic that the International Union of Geological Sciences has added the Ediacaran period to the geologic timescale, preceding the Cambrian, extending back 635 million years. [Go metazoans!]) Maybe we should get away from fingernail comparisons because we cannot perceive fingernail growth. Anything we can't perceive directly tends to get lumped together over a wide range of values. Also, if we were as large as a good-sized tectonic plate, say three thousand miles wide, then our relative fingernail growth would be much greater in absolute value. If a fingernail grows an inch a year, then it is 1/67th of a person 5' 7" tall. On the three thousand mile scale that would be 44.8 miles a year. As for me, that the India plate has been moving roughly the diameter of a softball per year is solemnly impressive -- I can hold a softball in my hand, I am familiar with that length from personal experience. I think of all that rock rolling inexorably along... (Darn, what is moving it anyway? I need a better image in my mind. I can't picture why subduction areas would actively drag masses of rock. I don't know what role the bulges have that are in the area of spreading zones (rocks sliding downhill?) The lateral pressure of new rock at rifts seems too slight to force large-scale movement. If the asthenosphere is itself in motion, then that makes more sense to me. But why is it in motion? If the answer is heat transfer (what else?), then is it circulating like ocean currents? If so, we should be able by now to map that, I would think. If it is not explainable in terms of two-dimensional motion, then how is the heat moving in the upper mantle? Is the mantle a weird "structure" of liquid and solid areas? Are there tunnels of moving mantle inside the larger solid layer? Whatever the answer, I suspect we have a lot to learn about the behavior of heat as it goes about its simple business of attempting to dissipate. I guess the Earth Sciences are all to a great extent about energy transfer in whatever medium it is, and everything else is details. Is it the point that the plates move slowly? I think of Samuel Johnson's tart remark on the news of a female preacher: "It is as the case of the dancing dog, the wonder is not that the thing is done well, but that it is done at all." These are whacking great hunks of earth's surface, miles thick and hundreds or thousands of miles in horizontal extent, moving about the planet's surface. If they did move fast, we would likely not be here to comment on it. The Sumatra quake has made me think about the "creeping" of plates -- sometimes they don't creep, they jump. The movement of the India plate relative to the Burma plate is given on the order of tens of feet. I cannot now grasp what this means as far as the rest of the India plate is concerned. Did the whole thing move in tens of feet? Unlikely. Then what parts moved while others were stretched and others simply sat there unmoving? I have no clear understanding of this. Further to this general point, there are reports of trenches in the area that were thousands of feet deep, but now are tens of feet deep, such that some ships could not navigate along them any more. Fairly dramatic change, I would say. By now, perhaps you are back into this. My preference is for theatricality in teaching to keep it enjoyable for the teacher, if no one else... I did send a reply back in the former year to the business of the chronology. Again, if the beginning date is 5 billion years ago, and that time span divided by 1000, then there were 100 units of 5 million years -- 500 million years -- from the arbitrary beginning date to the time of the origin of earth. ----- 01/08/05 Yes, it has been a while. That seems to be a common effect of the holiday season for most people, a defocusing, a lazing, drifting. Certainly true of me. If it weren't for the journal, I would have been much less active these last several weeks. The weather has been ferocious on the West Coast. We hear from a friend there that the rain is amazing for an area officially a desert, and which has had so little rain that the forests sickened and, with the fires, died. The hurricanes have brought a lot of moisture to the Midwest also plus of course the heavy pre-Christmas show storm, and recent reports say more headed your way. The East Coast got nailed fairly well too. We, somehow, have had mild weather generally, but an unusual coating of ice brought down heavy limbs and even trees a few days ago. I tried to get the jagged cutout effect of a couple of your examples from one of your programs, but did not succeed. It involves too many steps to "automate" it -- cropping, fading, drawing, etc. Even the frame above is several steps to get it to work, including carefully cropping and resizing of the image, then placing the frame on top and saving the result. It's the old "you pays your money and takes your choice", i.e. to use ready-made cookie cutter program effects, or hand-roll your own to have real control. Sometimes one is better than the other, depending on time and how much one cares... My lady uses that glucosamine chondroitin stuff, and it seems to help. As to expense, well it is expensive enough just for that -- I would need heart medicine if I paid much attention to the cost of a lot of modern drugs as it is outrageous. This money thing is getting a bit over the top. She and I were toting up some of the costs of living where we do, adding up federal, state, borough, school, and county taxes, then adding in medical and dental insurance ($12,000/yr if we alone paid the whole thing), the cost of water, power, and cable bills, the inflated cost of food, rent etc. Or for homeowners, property tax (high in PA) plus more insurance and the cost of upkeep, etc. All this seems to go up and up faster than the rise in income, at least for millions of people. As people climb the ladder of success, there is something grabbing at their heels all the way, which partly explains the general anxiety and the consumer mentality. Here, the local marketplace strongly favors those who live at home with their parents, and many do, because starting wages are too low to actually support an independent adult. By the time a person can afford to move out, the parents are often dependent on the son's or daughter's income. As to getting organized, I have found carrying a little pocket notebook and a pencil around helps a lot. The trick, which I find really hard, is to take the moment to make the note. Eventually the trail of thoughts, facts, intents, and so on becomes a useful life tool, but it doesn't seem so at first. I find it easier to do the transcription to a permanent journal easier than making the notes as I go, but I never look back and regret spending the time to do it. No, I have not been doing much picture taking, or even getting out lately. But I do not worry about it, it will happen when the time is right. Currently it is a Good Thing that I have no schedule, few demands on my time. I am getting the reading and writing done I have wanted to do. Less distraction, more thinking and learning. It feels like my mind is as young as it was in my teens, and the clamors of the world can importune as they please. Eventually I plan to do some work on the Larch site, perhaps adding a photo page, maybe posting some writing, whatever I wish. I also have been dipping a toe into the business of saving interesting quotes from my reading. I find them satisfying. I have also written a "mini-essay" on the origin of life, and later did a follow up to it, expanding some points, and I have more thoughts along that line. Am reading Krutch's The Modern Temper and it, though doleful in outlook, has some great thinking and writing in it, which excites responses in me. The general drift of it so far is that man has finally learned enough from science that the projected "humanity" of the world is fading away, and we find ourselves in a universe that has nothing that supports that humanity. With a clearer and scientific view, man has been once again expelled from the garden of Eden (of his own making), a garden that proved to be of self-aggrandizing illusions and not a perception of things as they are. All this is true enough, but the loss of illusions, though painful, is better done and got over with, I think, so we can move on to a better foundation for our lives. Not that I think it is easy to do this, but really, what choice do we have? You got the graphic Christmas card? And the little walking dinosaur? I may have to look around for other equally good GIF images. Most of them are just dumb and irritatingly repetitive, but the dinosaur made me want to see running horses, flying birds, swimming dolphins... --- Don't worry, we have broadband so no problem with the pictures. When I send images, I compress them down to 50 Kb or so for faster loading for people who use dialup. Thanks for the information about your CA son and it is interesting to see the father of his mate (I assume that is him looking aged as me) and of his mother. The float with the giant head was impressive. Yes, you are lucky to have slipped out between storms -- the whole West Coast has been hit hard, making it up for the dry years all at once, it seems. On the H. pylori, it does often amaze me how good the Internet is at finding information when you want it. There was a lot more on that spiral-shaped bacterium, but I sent the straightforward question-answer info. Just before I walked in and found your email, I had been discussing golf with my lady as she is reading an amusing golf novel published in 1902. The conversation led to us speculating that few noted athletes have been able to switch from their sport to golf with any success. I said I could only think of Babe Didrikson Zaharias having done that. So, I went on the web and found a biography, pictures, and some great quotes from her. Some think she was the greatest female athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, and others think she was the greatest athlete of all time period. Cut down by cancer, of course, or she would have no doubt broken more records. If anyone could survive happily in Paradise, it would be golfers, so maybe she's out there somewhere blowing them away still. ----- 01/09/05 First, I checked again and you had sent a reply to the Christmas card, mea culpa for the error. But I'm glad I asked about the GIF images to find you enjoyed them. Out of the 187 gazillion such images, only about 187 are any good to look at for more than three seconds at a time. I have looked at many links and images of the Sumatra quake, don't think I had seen the ones you sent. Probably none of the images really captures the scene with its full thrill of horror. I saw some amateur videos that were surreal in that they were of resort scenes and the people were in a holiday mood such that they couldn't believe the danger was real even as it was happening. There was a report of elephants and other animals not found among the dead -- they had headed to higher ground apparently. Yes, and after all the nattering about global warming and sudden climate change, here came a disaster having nothing to do with that of which people had been afraid. The backgrounds may have just been produced by the camera. If one uses a wide aperture, the depth of field is reduced, so if the images were shot at f2, for example, only a few inches that had been focused on would be sharp. To get a similar effect one can select a part of the image, invert the selection (meaning select everything else), then soften the selected part. There is the older word pixilated (from same source as pixie: magical, strange, fey). The newer word pixelated (which I made up, but found someone had beaten me to it) means to emphasize the pixel character of a digital image. That last part reminds me we can all of us do a few things better than most people, and a collaboration can be a good experience of that, and have excellent results. As to the earlier part of your commentary, we are "hardwired" to project our meanings on the world, and I suspect most other creatures do this to a degree. With animals, it means the world appears in the way most useful for the satisfaction of needs, but it is doubtless more complex than that. Experience plays a role, and feelings too. With us it has been raised to a very complex level where what is real and what is the projection of needs, desires, expectations, hopes, values, fears, etc. is impossible to sort out. New knowledge, from greater sophistication of urban life and from science, has undercut many of our projections and left us in a sterile, inhuman sort of world. What we know intellectually and what nurtures us are different things. Some people try to assert the old ways though they are no longer very potent, and others reach for something they feel must be there. These days, the natural world shines more brightly to those who have lost so much. It is profound, true, and as magical now as it was in the days of the formation of the sun and earth, the blue sky and oceans, and life itself. --- The Ediacaran reference is in Nat Geo Jan, 2005. It has no page number, but is 14 sheets of paper in from the cover and in the GEO NEWS section. Your vacation sounds great. Nice to hear that yellow disk in the sky still exists somewhere. As to books of humor, I have just ordered the last two of Patrick McManus's books to complete my collection. Great stuff -- both you and your lady would probably enjoy him. I am currently reading the sad book of Krutch's called The Modern Temper (circa 1929) and I really need to take a smile break from it, though it is a very good book. You will almost certainly like the McPhee Annals of the Former World. ----- 01/10/05 Here be your strangeness of the day: Here is some of the text from the online story: [Begin quote] Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22. These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living "brain" that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its "body" -- the simulated aircraft. "It's as if the neurons control the stick in the aircraft, they can move it back and forth and left and right," said Thomas DeMarse, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida who has been working on the project for more than a year. "The electrodes allow us to record the activity from the neurons and stimulate them so we can listen to the conversation among the neurons and also input information back into the neural network." Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn't figured out how to control its "body," but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight. [End quote] How hard is to extrapolate this stuff? How many rad rat neurons could we get in a layered cubic inch of silicon? Rats have been going down into dark holes for millions of years -- what if they suddenly decide that's what the plane should do? (And how would we administer the cheese?) Seriously, it is easy to imagine rat (or whatever) brains grown as part of control systems. I've been doing that sort of thing for many years. (Yet, my mind slides off the straight and narrow and imagines the following ad: "Don't fly our competitor's airline -- they use cheap Asian rats. We, by contrast, have bird brains in our planes! Which would you rather do, scuttle through the sky, or soar with us?!") This is actually a really interesting demonstration of substituting another "body" and having neurons respond relevantly and coherently. ----- 01/11/05 Well, bummer! However, perhaps better than spending time in an icy ditch, I suppose. Yes, I can ask my social secretary to rearrange my schedule, cancel the world tour (hotels are a drag), put off the Governor (he was becoming a nuisance anyway), skip the statue unveiling (only a bust), book-signing (haven't quite written the thing yet), and National Science Awards ceremony (others jumped aboard my bandwagon, too crowded under one laurel crown). No problem, I'll try again next week, hoping the fierce weather of much the rest of the country will not decide to visit then. Another issue has taken a bit of my attention: my lady has an email friend who writes non-fiction books for young readers and she is promoting the idea with her publisher of doing a book on insect-form robotics and, more generally, inventions inspired by the natural world. I wrote a few paragraphs of ideas and sources for my lady to send to her. In the process I read some on biomimetics and bionics, etc. It seems the general awareness of scientists and technicians is that man has learned relatively little from nature, and that, at the best, nature does "only a good enough job" and so can usually only "inspire" new understandings and techniques. If I weren't in the act of expressing myself, I'd say I was speechless. The obtuseness, short-sightedness, and arrogance of this view is amazing! Nature has informed us every step of the way as we developed into idea- and word-manipulating beings. Most of science is the humble inquiry into nature as to "what is going on, anyway?" Nearly every tool we use can be traced back to actualities and principles exhibited in the natural world. Any human who has observed plants and animals has learned what is possible, and so, if creative, he could proceed to make artifacts that, often rather lame, are derivative of nature. Did someone watch a caterpillar or bird weaving and conclude that weaving might be a good idea? Did not bats and porpoises have anything to do with the development of sonar? Did not those who longed to fly pay attention to birds, butterflies, bats? Nature so often has shown us that something is possible, and that has led us to try it ourselves. The endless questions nature proposes has lead us like children into a mature confidence in our ability to work toward the truth. It is unnerving to suddenly stumble upon monumental stupidity and feel helpless to set it right. One website on biomimetics could list only Velcro as a nature-inspired invention! And the applied science types on these sites tend to say with considerable hubris that of course nature is not to be mimicked (despite the word biomimetics), and that we can do so much improving on natural designs to make them rational and useful. They say that nature is good for suggesting ideas, when what they usually mean is they had no clue until they looked at the world of nature. Whether I will dive into this and alienate people for miles around, I don't yet know. But is has been good at least to get my blood circulating quite vigorously. (Grumble, gnash) --- Thanks for the link. The images are a good report on the unusual ice coating that we also got. I did regret not going out and snagging a few shots. I hope that he will consider the benefits of editing out repetitive shots, and working on the better photos, but it is possible he only views images as reporting anyway, and has other fish to fry. I did see some images that could use a bit of darkroom work to be good. I especially liked the curve of Canada geese on the snow. A close-up of the ice surrounding something, a twig, would have been effective. Also, as you know, I have an aversion to clicking on thumbnails on a web page -- they encourage people to upload too many images and leave the choices of what to present up to the viewer (the viewer does the work). However, different strokes for different folks... One advantage to using his approach is the images can be larger and of better quality, but it slows everything down and messes up the continuity and the mood. Along the lines of these comments, I have a friend in San Diego who fancies himself to be a good photographer, but he is a bit lazy, and prefers to be wonderful without effort. He has several times said he would burn hundreds of photos for me to a CD. In other words, he would offer the chaos of his images, and I could wander among the huge array in a state of awe and delight. I told him he would be happier if he edited the images and presented them as a coherent work. I said I knew he would enjoy showing his images at their best. The result is I haven't seen any of his images, and am not the worse for it. Bottom line: he "just can't be bothered". Ha, but he thinks I can be. Life, as they say, is like that :^D ----- 01/12/05 Sounds like you are well out of that organization. So many groups are formed by people suffused with a belief in their own importance. They usually are "people-people" which to me has come to mean those who see all others as bit-players or audience for their personal plays, with them as the stars, the spotlight always right on them. Even misfortune does not stop them, the play just becomes a tragedy or a melodrama. Sometimes they will tell you (and they don't want to hear of your problems), just how relentlessly a hard and ruthless fate has tried to drag them down, yet in a titanic struggle, they will prevail, or at least go out in a shower of glory. These things are somewhat amusing -- from a distance. The images, I sometimes lie abed and watch the images melt into one another, each one suggesting of a day, or mood, or a moment. Sometimes the lady mallards do have a wonderful expression of contentment and peace. The males often are vaguely worried, though at times they are also relaxed. Each animal is an individual, I remind myself, and if I cannot see it always, then that is my problem. There have been moments when I have just been there among them, have been one of them, relaxing in the sun, all of our minds drifting like leaves in a stream. Have begun work on the third extract page for the Larch site. It is a tedious business of copying and editing, but it is just work, the mind is occupied but certainly not strained. Probably the greater value of it is for myself, a looking back at the micro-history of correspondence, remembering, sometimes with surprise. Later, I plan on doing a photo page or two. I kind of like the photo walk; I've posted two of them so far, the second less obvious. I may think about doing more of them because the idea of a walk, i.e. a short journey, gives a basic unity to the work. In fact any explicit goal in a work has this effect of giving form and mood to the finished effort. I have thought more than once that all good fiction writing is a form of mystery with questions posed, stakes set, doubt raised, then the story is the record of attempting to satisfy the goals, solve the mysteries, being temporarily thwarted perhaps, and finally the denouement which has whatever drama of resolution the writer achieves. Not sure how this applies to non-fiction, guess I'll have to muse about it some... But I'm fairly sure there is some theatricality in much of art, self-conscious beings that we are, but some creations are from a grace that needs no ornament. It is nice to be there when that happens. Much reading of late, I have at least six books going at the moment. I love winter for that, the relaxed pace, the days flowing on without flutter, time to think and feel, time to write and wander about -- an introspective time. Lots of ideas too, courtesy of some of the books I've been delving into. Sometimes the information is a bit like a heap, with gravity sloughing off the surplus. And sometimes I shake my head, something dumb comes into view and I react, but I try to remind myself it should not be taken seriously. Sometimes I listen and move on, sometimes not. And if not, it is probably time to go see a duck. ----- 01/14/05 Am pleased our presents are getting good use. The calendar is surely good for a year, and the Christmas ornament could go on for many years. Too, it is nice when the images are enjoyed, that is their raison d'etre. Yes, that your CA son shook off concerted attack of tiny, but dangerous, spiral bugs is a very good omen for the new year. This is a strange bug that supposedly is, at one time or another in two thirds of all people, but seems to have particularly harsh results only occasionally, is one of many causes for wonder. Your gift of the zipper vest is getting good use -- I really like it. I am partial to zippered clothes, or at least ones that can be opened when the temperature rises because, in me, regulation of body temperature is a continuing thing. I can easily overheat and that is not conducive to comfort. Many times I have risked getting cold to avoid that overheating. For example, on only the very coldest of winter nights do I have both a sheet and a good blanket over me. And it is rare when I have not thrown off my bedclothes by morning. Since my body temperature naturally falls toward the end of my sleep period, I am commonly chilly when I wake up. Only a blanket that responded perfectly to my body temperature in each square inch could result in complete comfort. That will be invented the day after I croak, no doubt. The colorful microfiber coat you gave me years ago gets put on during chilly mornings as I read and dazedly ponder the great questions, such as will it be pancakes or waffles for breakfast, or is one's back jealous of the front that gets most of the attention? Found a wonderful etymology a couple of days ago while reading an Eric Sloane book -- gossamer. This word derives from Middle English "gos somer" or Goose Summer which is what we call Indian Summer. It seems that the ballooning of spiders (where they rise in the air) happens at that time of year and the delicate shimmer of the spiders' webs in the sky was so associated with Goose Summer that the word gossamer was born of that experience. Neat, eh? --- I suspect your are a "woman of action" rather than otherwise -- have not heard from you since last August. Probably that time has seen many changes in things chez you, and you are right, I didn't know of the motorcycles. They should be great to explore AZ with. I am writing as I check back and forth to the NASA site to find out what I can about the Cassini Huygens probe which has entered the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. This is definitely big stuff because it is a strange atmosphere of methane and other chemicals, and there is already signs of something like drainage valleys leading to what -- a methane sea? This is breaking news... If all goes well, the probe will send back a lot of information about the atmosphere, and hence give some information about the origin of life. Also, the probe will be able to survive both a land and a sea touchdown (temperature -200 C) and continue sending back information until its batteries fail. I have included the above info partly to recognize that each letter (and an email is just an electronic letter) is colored by its specific time and place, though we don't always see that later on re-reading them because no reference has been made. The job sounds enjoyable for the purposes you mention. People on holiday are probably in a good mood, and more open than usual to talking and being excited about new experiences. As to "staying sane", we vary there maybe. I am growing happier as time goes on with less and less hubbub, prizing the stretches of time without interruption. One's own "garden" so to speak, can get full of the weeds of other people's concerns, especially since many people are quite theatrical about themselves, and see themselves on stage in a drama of deep significance, though from the outside, it is sometimes real hard to see what is the big deal. Just about everyone has problems, but it is the faith of many acquaintances that your problems are minor and hardly worth mentioning, but theirs are profound and fascinating. Such, of course, is merely the human condition, but worth noting and compensating for. Anyway, your way of life, focused on home, family, friends, wild lands, and especially horses has more potential for richness of experience and deep satisfaction than most. I have little concern for your sanity, or for a plentitude of things to fill your time and pleasure. Sometimes I think the main business of life is to generate great memories. Isn't it true the hassles and confusions pass away like bubbles in the stream, and the beautiful and the true remain? Too bad that knowing guarantees nothing. Every day is a baby squalling for attention. So it goes... Loved the picture. Now that you have a digital camera, I hope you will send images and observations as you go, especially of your AZ trip. My lady loves the desert and dreams about it. I like it a lot, but am more a water fan. That does not mean I have turned down any chance to see the desert. Some bright memories remain of Ocotillo Wells in the Anza-Borrego desert bright birds, a red dragonfly, a pool of water with a flowering Century plant, bees swarming to create a new hive... Question: do you keep a log of the good ship Manitou? If not, it might be of some interest twenty years from now. I began on my last birthday, after years of delay, a journal and have many pages of it transcribed from small notebooks. All kinds of things in there from the trivial (1 smidgeon = 7.25 trivials) to the not so bad. I even tossed in a couple of images. Have not heard from your mother since I answered her general call for email. But her interest in politics seems to have revived -- gives me the willies to think of politics (seedy), but different strokes... The trip for your daughter's graduation sounds like a great family time. (More pictures?) Am pleased your mom is carrying on with her usual energy, I didn't figure she would just sit still, not in her nature. We are more or less flourishing. I am doing more cooking now, being a gentleman of leisure with a spouse still stuck in the "ten thousand things". Alas, I am of the invent-it-on-the fly school of cooking, but am robbed of complaint about the cook. Still, there are fairly good salads, and desserts of a pie-orientation, and a lot of variation to keep up the spiciness of life. Am devouring more books than ever lately -- winter is a good time for that. I may even be learning some things. Our birds continue their daily lunacy, reminding us of what is beyond our doors in their insouciant yellow-headed way. The universe is unfolding, and everything else is trundling, along as it should. ----- 01/17/05 Got your CD and note from May 30. Thanks for both. Much appreciated. No, I don't remember Peter Narvaez, but he is doing his thing on the computer as I write. Somewhere I have a Sandy Bull album on tape -- remember him? Fame and appreciation is often a very fickle thing. Some get Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, others 15 days, 15 weeks, 15 months. Buffy St. Marie -- where are you now? (Yes, I could easily check the good old Internet to find out...) On Thursdays when I bathe in music for hours, I always notice anything by Leo Kottke -- don't know if you have paid attention to him, but he is an amazing all-round master of the guitar who seems to have devoted his life to the elaboration of guitar skills. "All of my good times, all my roaming around / I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown..." Interesting song, sort of a thanks to sweet Pamela for preferring someone else, thus leading the singer to an adventurous life. Don't know when you are heading for Florida to baby-sit or whatever. I hear the alligators are doing well compared to former days and are moaning, barking, bellowing it up in them there swamps. Saw a picture recently of a bull alligator bellowing for a mate (O, where are ya, Lulu Belle?) The water was vibrating like mad from the low frequencies of the bull's call. Florida also has some interesting weather. Will you be able to access email from Florida? If not, then I know that paper, pen, and the USPS will work OK. You mention my request for comment re the so-called global economy. Yes, by all means do send your thoughts this way. I have got too few interpretations of what is going on. As a news fan, I figure you must have some fairly potent opinions on the passing scene. Perhaps your way of life has made you look over your shoulder, or maybe you mistrust whatever ideology is lurking in the byways of your mind. I tend to mistrust all ideologies as automatically flawed by wrong assumptions and a too rigorous consistency with the same. Life always has mysterious qualities like one of the painter Rousseau's works. The really interesting observations come from a personal point of view, as far as I am concerned. Both the "unexamined life" and the unfelt life are not worth living. Looking back on my global economy comments, I think now I rather like the idea of people developing ways of doing life-supporting things outside the somewhat inhuman construction that is a large corporation. Wouldn't it be interesting if such entities were beaten at their own game, not in some artificial socialist prison of a culture, but in free association of ordinary people? If one thinks that could never happen, what does that say about the assumptions of the thinker about the nature of man? Can only a gross corporate entity that commandeers the pieces of the individual psyche be successful because a) it is immortal, b) it is patient as a spider in a web, c) even meaner and colder than a nest of lawyers, d) it, like politicians, can manipulate people with their own money, e) is adaptable like the ragweed that sends out a million seeds, and grows wherever it can, and f) it can and does form partnerships that allow otherwise illegal collusion and market manipulation? Maybe more important than all these things is the fact that the business corporation has a clear purpose -- to make money -- and that is a potent thing. The political body, socialist or not, has no such simple and clear goal. Despite planning, the fact is that the reins of power are forever clutched at by those who have a particular goal in mind. The ship of state weaves and wanders all around, while the enemies of the good life just want the simple things -- money and power. We who have some experience and sophistication in dealing with these megasharks are barely able to contain them, in fact we are slipping backwards in that. How do we expect the more primitive technical cultures to deal with them successfully? Well, to hell with all that for the moment. This is but one example of "large" questions that have been plaguing me recently. I have been trying to contemplate the following subjects: 1) geology, especially the Big Picture spoken of by geologists, 2) the effect of computers on our society and culture (good vs. harmful effects) 3) the weather (again, for the umpteenth time) 4) man's debt to nature in the development of the understandings we call material culture: scientific knowledge, design, fabrication, etc. Not only are these time-consuming and irritatingly large questions, but even if I did come to some conclusions about them, the effort to convey that would be even harder than understanding the issues! To be sure, I have made some headway in each of these questions to which my nose has led me, but now I am thinking about the nature of large questions, and even thinking about the interactions of these things. If all that sounds fatuous, I don't blame you, it is pretentious, but I don't care. The real reason I consider matters like these is that I have a sense there is something I need to learn, not from the answers to the questions so much, as from the ways I go about thinking about them. I have always been interested in noetics and pedagogical theory, that is, how do we process information into a coherent and useable form, and how do we best convey that to others. There are quite a number of scientists who flatter themselves they are far ahead of nature's designs. They only condescendingly go to the natural world for "inspiration", and if inspired with an idea that is identical to what nature has done, they say they had the idea, as in "I've got an idea. Let's do this feature that is illustrated in detail in nature. Wow, I'm brilliant. Of course, we won't make the mistakes that nature has done; we will do the design right -- nature does things 'just good enough'." This drivel (the single quote phrase is a real quote) is from someone who does not have the ability to duplicate nature's productions -- not even close. But they are confident that, being engineer types who routinely do hack work with off-the-shelf components and with the frowns of accountants drilling them in the back of the head -- they will improve on nature. What a joke. What hubris! "Improving on nature" is really an adapting of natural principles and techniques to our current level of technology and understanding. Often it is a dumbing down of nature for the benefit of man. So, if you would enjoy dilating on a topic, try your hand at this: whence cometh the arrogant obtuseness of these dopes? And is this telling us something about why we aren't doing so well at adapting to the world, and instead mangle the world into a grotesque shape to meet our ill-perceived needs? Ah-h, I do enjoy a touch of righteous frenzy once in a while. I'm sure it is good for the circulation. Will send some notions about computers eventually, probably. I read Clifford Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil recently. Some of his points are good ones, it is best to be dubious about anything so strongly hyped. Like the TV (that I haven't had for years), it is a projection of the human mind, except it is more two-way than TV. There is a lot of good promise there, if we can learn to use it effectively. Big if. ----- 01/18/05 Sounds like you have been busy and productive. I'll have to try that sometime, sounds like fun, though you performed inspirationally well for my normal habits -- always in training for the Procrastination Stakes -- with that 5-year delay. Sorry your daughter is ill, but good you two could cheer her up. ----- 01/21/05 Thanks for the note. No, I didn't get anything from you regarding the New Year, but Happy New Year to us both (I think it is still legal to mention New Year on the 21st of January). On staying busy, yes, much of the "secret" of the good life is to be interested in things, and to involve oneself in them, though the particulars vary spectacularly from person to person. You would have to pay me big bucks to play bridge, or about any such game, possibly excepting poker that has human insight and drama in it. Bridge to me is like chess, over-intellectualized, and the conventions seem to make it a sort of institutionalized cheating. Obviously this is fun to lots of people, but not to me, as it is too much like the lesser character of society. But I am unusual in that the justification for a gathering of people is always conversation and sharing experiences rather than games, but some few games, like perhaps charades, can add spice to the conviviality once in a while. As to the lake and sky coloramas, I think these are among the finer messages from whatever is the highest one can conceive -- in my case I just think of it as reality or nature with all its infinity of appearances and effects. "Old Mother Nature" as the Michigan uncle said. It is like always being in church, and not a solemn one either, not frowning in admonition, but beckoning as to a celebration. How come no bird feeders? They would pay you back manyfold in the visions of colorful life for your efforts. Perhaps the creative local daughter could concoct a way for you to keep these going without undue effort on your part? Now you have no cats, I would think the wildlife would be greater than ever. The turkey hen and chicks I saw at your place gave me a memorable pleasure, and a few good images. Our doings? We continue our steady way, my lady working, the work not without interest, but the people often lack, shall we say, a smoothing of the way? I am plumbing the heights, to deliberately mangle a phrase, of retirement. Am going deeper and deeper into reading and even, occasionally, some reflection. I started a journal on my last birthday, using small notebooks for jottings, and have transcribed them to a main document. It has over 80 typed pages so far, and I take pleasure in keeping it up. I have much to learn about keeping a journal, which is really how to slow down and think, a process that the entire culture and zeitgeist is inimical to. Now that we have become civilized and technological, we should all be becoming philosophers, but I suspect we are moving more in the direction of barbarism. Perhaps we are panicking because we now are beginning to have the leisure, health, and freedom to be as wonderful as our pride always said we were, but now we can't think what to do after all. This would probably be pretty funny to an outside observer. Your last comment was about a book. So I looked up a review on the Internet and have added it below (it is positive about the book). I suspect you gravitate, like most people, toward partisanship. Life is thereby always divided into two camps: the right and the wrong, the us and the them, the ins and the outs, etc. To give you a clue about me -- I don't care a bean about sports. Are the Pittsburgh Hellgrammites contending against the Detroit Lampreys? I am utterly indifferent, they can eat each other as far as I am concerned, in fact, I wish they would. The only reason I mention this oddity of mine is to explain my different take on things. (Letters can have opinions in them.) I tend to look on abstract politics as different aspects of the human psyche. If that is correct, then you and I have a lot of George Bush in us. And a lot of Hubert Humphrey, Nixon, Kennedy, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and so on. Maybe some Talleyrand, a touch of Napoleon, a dash of Genghis Khan, Caesar, Brutus, Machiavelli, and on and on. But the partisan (or group) mentality picks a side, adopts the planks (whatever they are today) and rolls on. Where is the truth in all this? What is all the furor about? Often it an argument on what color to paint a building that perhaps should never be built, a controversy about molehills when the mountain is at risk. As to the Left, your favorite team, it has spent many years treating the feelings of millions of Americans as if they were contemptible and sneering at values that were cherished by the lesser beings that held them. I have observed this, and do not accept any self-serving denial. The result of this is a backlash that was as predictable as the dawn itself. To use the biblical phrase, "sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind". Do not expect tolerance now that those millions have found a way to affect the course of the ship of state. Am I in sympathy with the specifics of their philosophy? No. But I see that many of the negatives were as much crafted in the camps of the Left, as of the Right. Arrogance breeds arrogance. The wheel turns, the pendulum swings, blah blah blah. While we waste our energies, and offer ourselves as troops to the more sophisticated manipulators with the aphorisms of cheerleaders ringing in our ears, many real issues are not even considered, they are lost in the hubbub. Where will the wise come from to lead us into the dangerous future? Will they be of this or that partisan camp? I doubt it, because I haven't seen it happen that way. Every recent child is preyed upon by partisan recruiters, and that person rarely can develop a personal understanding and philosophy. The techniques for the creation of the true believer have been honed to a sharp edge. The true believer cannot think, cannot any longer search for and find larger truths. In short, I am not a group person, let alone a partisan. Partisan books, like football cheers, sound like a call to abandon the service of truth and, instead, wallow in the warm bosom of the group. I always ask: "Qui bono?" and "Whose ox?" Who is really being served? In the end it is probably some fat senator who sells out his group routinely. Or some corporate slug, serving the interests of Megacorp International. Or some union leader willing to assist the export of jobs. Or a city that vampires away the water of thousands of square miles in the service of more money, more votes. It is not a pretty picture, but it is the picture that millions of team-players have brought us. Partisans are infinitely manipulable and are the natural prey of those who know what they want. Curiously, the real manipulators are more interesting than the team-players, they at least have a clear vision, and have something of the sleek grace of a panther or eagle. But the partisans are just fools. As you can see, I sometimes use letters for real communication -- a funny notion I have about the nature of human discourse. The point of it is not to irritate anyone, but to say things that seem to be significant to me. I would not have written this, if you had not shared your political thoughts with me, for I assumed you wanted to know what I thought about that sort of thing. Answer in kind, if you wish, and I will reply. Meanwhile, the sun keeps rising, the ducks continue to float in Spring Creek, and the earth tilts more in the direction of Spring every day, joy is for the taking, ----- 01/24/05 I downloaded it last night and installed it today. I have let it sniff around on my hard drive until it was fat and content. I messed with a few images, but have only begun to test its capabilities. Will let you know later what I've come up with. I especially want to be able to make settings and apply them to multiple images. You probably know that the current version is Picasa 2. Picasa was created by a company that Google bought, and it has several doors for the spending of money and dancing around with Google business. To be expected, I suppose. Anyway, it does have lots of interesting features, as well as good algorithms for much-needed functions, as you said. Other than that for today, I worked in PhotoShop and of course am impressed with the subtlety of the adjustments. I improved an image, cropped and enlarged and generally mangled, with the function that counters JPG noise -- I was able to use just the minimum amount that did the necessary fix. Hard sometimes to get away from "fussing with the image" as in the old smelly darkroom, alas. But anything that helps is a good thing, and the more a function can be applied in a batch capability the better, even if a few finishing touches are still needed. ----- 01/28/05 Thanks for the reply and the political care package. I guess my comments rang a bell to get such a reply :^D Yes, the journal is kept daily. I don't wait until the muse decides to drift by. This yields a lot of second-rate stuff, or just factual notes, but it also increases the good stuff. It also makes for a habit of mind that looks forward to writing, rather than feeling it to be a time-out from life, it's part of life. No, I don't read much liberal stuff -- I gave that up years ago. The tone is usually morally superior, and when it is intended to be clever and appealing to the "in-the-know" group, it is often just superficial and snotty. The Garrison Keillor piece comes to mind. I had read that before, and at first it was impressive because it seemed to be a genuinely heart-felt plea to conservatives to return to their classier roots, but on closer reading I saw the same partisan sneering that I have long since got my fill of. There is an elitist air to most liberal writing that cannot be successfully masked. My feeling is these writers do their cause a real disservice in that it alienates the reader who does not already feel himself to be a member of the perceptually and morally superior group. It is great though, for bolstering the self-congratulatory tendency of liberals everywhere. I've wondered often, since liberals have been in charge since FDR, how they have continued to cast themselves as moral voices-in-the-wilderness. It makes me laugh when I see it, and I see it a lot, so it has in a painful sort of way given me a lot of pleasure. However, to be sure, the wheel has turned. I remember when the word liberal began to be used as an insult during the Reagan administration, and probably that was a clear sign of the conservative shift in America. I gave up on Ellen Goodman long ago when she wept crocodile tears about the issue of women soldiers being in combat. While complaining bitterly and insincerely about the responsibility of vile men for this anti-feminist policy, she also said that women were inherently more decent than men and they shouldn't be killing other people. I was embarrassed to see such bad faith revealed so clearly, and put her in the ashcan. I don't have time for ideologues, life being too short. If you want to read something funny and with a real edge, skip Molly Ivins and try Florence King (curl your toes, I bet). Yet, for all that, I have no love for the Republican Party, and especially not for the fat cats that periodically seem to capture it, as they have done lately. The Democratic Party has been similarly captured by those with interests quite far from the ordinary liberal American. Does Garrison Keillor regret the "far right" elements that have crawled out from under the rock? But did he ever express regret for the equivalent outré types that have climbed aboard the Liberal Express -- such as the lesbian Nuns, those who wish to disarm ordinary Americans, marriage for gays, revisionist Marxist history, feminists spitting nonsense and demanding academic tenure or compensation for the last ten thousand years? Remember "Hey, hey, ho ho, western culture's gotta go!"? Remember the left that committed various outrages against the Vietnam war? Didn't the anti-abortion types learn from them? In fact, my impression from a lifelong reading of history is that the Right learns its tactics from the Left. Then we get to watch the outraged Left demand, and often get, restrictions against the tactics they had used themselves. Question: did Joe McCarthy, that monster that so haunts Liberals' dreams, ever do as much to stifle freedom of speech as "political correctness"? Not even close. Nothing else has made millions of Americans look over their shoulders and whisper lest someone bring them in front of the thought police. Do liberals now fear that the right might use the same tactic? If so, it is a cruel, but just, result. I remember when the downfall of the Soviet Union released information that showed that Gus Hall, of the American Communist Party, did in fact receive money from Stalin, just as conservatives said. But how the liberals laughed and sneered at this at the time. I never heard one later say he was sorry about it. In fact, I don't recall liberals admitting error, though there have been plenty of goofy, even dangerous, actions of liberals over the years. It seems just to be impossible for a liberal not to embrace any craziness that comes along, if it seems to be good for social chaos. Is George Bush wasting money now? He learned from the liberals. Money is a drug -- historically taxes are not reduced in any significant way. Liberals and conservatives alike are hooked on it -- it is the best thing to buy votes with. Leadership in a democracy means never having to say you are sorry (the people rule, ha ha). One of the worst things done to America has been the swarms of illegal immigrants that have been allowed in and even given amnesty. The Left and Right share this blame equally, but for different reasons. We are well on the way to damaging America so badly with undigested and fertile populations that it will be a lot less worthwhile for future generations. Question: you who are interested in birth control with its consequent lessening of numbers of people, did you ever speak out against uncontrolled immigration? If not, why not? Because it wasn't acceptable to your liberal friends? Why control our own fertility, yet open our doors to those who have not controlled theirs? Doesn't make much sense, unless our aim is to destroy our own people in favor of another people. Sometimes it appears that is the desire of liberals -- to annihilate themselves in favor of the downtrodden. This is guilt taken to its most extreme conclusion -- suicide. If this is in error, feel free to correct my conclusions. To get away from politics a bit (though not very far after all) and get into a topic I know you are interested in, here is some research I've done on the density of human population on the earth in the year 2050: Land area of earth in square miles: 57,500,000 sq mi. According to the US Census Bureau, the number of humans on the earth in 2050 will be about 9 billion. Since I do not know what the accurate percentage is of habitable land as compared with total land area, I made the table below to show the different numbers of people per square mile for different percentages of habitable land area. Percentage of land that is habitable Number of people per square mile in 2050 (9 billion people) 100% 157 50% 313 40% 391 30% 521 20% 782 (my guess) 10% 1562 I find it fascinating that people interested in population do not take quality of life into account, nor do they pay much attention to real density of people. That is, they take the population of countries, divide that by the area, and that is the density. With this reasoning counties A and B with the same area and population, but with country A having all its land being good farmland and country B having 90% desert would each have the same official population density. But in reality (what a thought!) country B would have a very high density because the people would occupy the 10% of good land, and that land would have to provide the roads, farmland, dwellings and other buildings, and recreational areas for 10 times the people as in country A. Anyway, the future will have at least a density of 1 person per acre of habitable land. And that acre will have to handle all the demands human life puts on it. Where will the wild animals and wild plants be in this future? SOL, I guess, in large part. Or maybe wild lands will be seen as more precious than jewels. Hard to predict what we clever little simians will do as we explode over the earth. And, I think, the danger lies not so much in what we think to do in calm times, but what social dislocations and natural disasters lead us to do in a panic. Would some people advocate killing all birds in a severe avian virus pandemic? To save their grandkids, they might want to annihilate all non-human life and sterilize the planet if they thought it would help. This is interesting -- I always wondered how your husband voted and what he thought of politics generally. I would have guessed he was mildly conservative. But if he voted for FDR consistently, then I guess not. Yet you both liked Eisenhower?! He was a moderate conservative. Carter was a moderate liberal, I guess. He is better by far as an ex-President than as President. My own voting record is similarly all over the map. I actually voted for Johnson, and lived to bitterly regret it. I have at times been open to liberal arguments, but have come to see liberals as generally useless as conservatives. Again, the reason for that is the partisan nature of our politics. Washington was afraid of partisanship, and he was right to be. It has done more harm to us than our enemies. For your sort of thing -- groups, meetings, staying in touch, mass mailings, sharing hot items, etc. -- email is THE easiest and fastest way to go. To be sure, a walk in the woods is to free ourselves of human vanities and time-bound concerns. To walk in the natural world is a stroll in the cathedral of the universe where our fevered brain can relax and recall its origin in the countless ages of realities far beyond the understanding of mankind. It is our real home. As for being a people person, well, I hope not. In my opinion being an individual is a much greater thing than being a group component. All of us are social by birthright, but the group is a feeble thing compared to a person. Groups do not write poetry, or wonder about the stars, or invent cures for diseases, or ponder the ways of woolly bears in the fall. They do not aspire, or suffer, or attain ecstasy, or pet purring cats by the fireside. They are pleasant, but restricting, even dangerous at times. They are not intelligent or creative, they aren't capable of companionship. They are long-lived, too much so sometimes. They have their uses, but only just so far. So much for groups. As to bridge, well, I already said something about that :-) Again, thanks for the response, send me something from your journal, and something of the wild creatures who live lakeside with you, have fun, ----- 01/30/05 Really, the original image was in poorish light, and the composition so off that I could not correct it completely, but I still saw something I liked in it, so with a total of four different programs used -- Picasa, MS Photo Editor, PhotoPlus 4.0, and IrfanView -- I finally got something I liked a lot better. Of course, there are times when nothing needs to be done to a photo, the gods have smiled, but other times a little change is all one needs, or maybe a particular image program gives a function that does the trick. Whatever it takes, a little or a lot of tweaking, is what one does to get the best final product. And there is no guarantee one will not wake up in the night convinced that something better could have been done... I dropped in to your sites devoted to him and all seems to be well there. You are continuing to document his life and thoughts. This is far better than any stone marker could be to illuminate a mind. Some people are very cautious about accepting the Web as a place of expression, but it seems to me that his pages show a way the web can be a force for humanity's good in that the face and voice of a real person is there. And I continue with my journaling. Just as he kept up several conversations with himself with his various journals, I realize my emails, mini-essays, notes, pictures, and journals are all of a piece and are intended, as he intended, to be a log of existence and discovery. I may have to borrow his use of the red book for good quotes, as mine tend to get lost in the voluminous writings and are not available when I want them. By the way, weren't a couple of your friends going to write some articles for your newsletter? A phrase from my Canadian days comes to mind: "lazy hounds" :^D ----- 02/01/05 Nice letter from you. Too bad about Sufi, it is as hard to digest as a stone in losing a much loved animal friend. Yet you had 14 years together and that is what is important in the long run. I have never understood those who suffer so much that they never want the pleasure of another pet -- as if the pain of loss were so much greater than the pleasure of many years. Not a very well balanced response. I agree the red eye is perfect for the shot and should stay. In fact it is an image good for St. Valentine's Day that is coming up. Years ago, I gave my lady a red teddy bear that was on sale somewhere after February 14. The bear has horns and a pitchfork and is unbearably cute: so cute even anti-knick-knack I could not resist it. It did serious damage to my reputation as one impervious to "cute". She has it in a place of honor on her bookshelves, and somehow other red bears have come to keep "Baron" company. He still guards his little basket where goodies may nestle, and Toughy sometimes goes to his shelf to keep him company and nibble his red ribbon. The cost of pet health these days is staggering -- a sort of slop-over effect from the rapacious health industry. Pet health insurance is a reality, though it would have just been a joke 50 years ago. One of my interests is to figure out how to convey to younger people how little money there was in bygone days. In my childhood, the money fountain was just getting cranked up, and people still had the habits from rural life and from the Depression. Borrowing was uncommon, and there were few frills. People thought a while before any significant purchase. My mom stretched every dollar by doing extensive gardening, canning, and clothes making and mending. Then, as one looks backward in time, money was rarer and dearer. The knight's suit of armor and caparisoned warhorse was probably worth a half million of today's dollars, or maybe more. I keep trying to figure out why we seem so wealthy as a society, but frankly I don't get it. And people say there is no such thing as magic! :^D Devoting a newsletter to Sufi is a fine idea. And (he said, still promoting the guest article idea), maybe some of your contacts might write something for a future "Pets" newsletter. While many people resist writing like cats resist baths, they might loosen up when asked to remember a favorite pet. The shots you have of Sufi will be perfect for illustration of the days of your little pal. I have an old image of the little girl cockatiel Sweet Belle Pepper whom I still think about and miss. Her crazy mother stripped her and her sister of all feathers, yet she was feisty. Her baby name was Striker, for she defended herself from all comers. As the months passed, she showed her independence and dignity, and became Pepper, then as her true nature revealed itself, the final name was given, and Sweet Belle Pepper she was. The tweaking of photos is both troublesome and enjoyable. Too be sure, it takes time and patience, but the results are so rewarding when it all works out well. The secret, I suppose, is not to try to do too much at one time, but rather to have a small set of photos to optimize, and focus on those. And there is no result that says clearly "Stop, this is the best you can do." It remains an attempt to get what the mind wants, whether this is possible or not. The other requisite is experimentation -- trying things, most of which fail in some way. That is something that I do, and am not sure others do so often as I. Short of taking a course from a master digital photographer, I don't know any other way of learning this stuff. I do know I have been much influenced by black-and-white photography, and I try to recapture qualities of that which tend to be missing in color work, such as texture and rich tone. I think you will like having a digital camera. I recently read a review of cameras under $300 dollars, and I was impressed with what I read. Quality is improving and price is dropping. While Picasa and other graphics programs have some very nice features that I use, good old IrfanView remains my favorite and most useful program. Its batch capability allows one to apply effects to copies of as many photos as one wishes in one quick operation. For example, I often make a selection of images, then resize and compress them all at once. Sad indeed, sorry it is happening. There sure is a lot of cancer around now, more it seems than in the past. That and immune problems, including allergies. Something to do with the toxic byproducts and unnatural habits of our technological society? Surely not! I too have dreamed "works of art", including a sort of ballet that involved the evolution of music. Each dancer was a single note, and when the magical composer appeared, he taught the notes to move in rhythm and to make chords and to dance out melodies on a stage like a huge piano keyboard. The plot was a fantasy version of the evolution of music. There may have been a "bad guy" who tried to foster discord, I'm not sure, as it was years ago I dreamed it. Hope all this proceeds OK. Feeling blah, I understand quite well. It is all a roller coaster of energy and mood. We do the best we can. The only thing I've done recently to improve that situation is to try to support the feeling that binds together my life, without waiting for the conditions of my life to be optimal for the feeling. It is not a magical cure, but it helps me to realize that one can carry on without waiting for a ticket from the hand of luck. I have put another extracts page on the Larch site. As always, it was a fairly big job to do that, but at least something is changing on that site, and maybe a new photo page will show up eventually. ----- 02/07/05 I use it or another program to restore a decent range of tones and richness of hue, and use other programs to make small modifications -- whatever it takes to do the job, as I've said. Someone needs to add the more sophisticated functions to batchable IrfanView, I suppose, but since each photo is unique, in the end there is no substitute for individual attention. Send these desert shots hitherward. I assume the rains brought out the flowers? Flowers are a bit tricky, I find. They are of course beautiful, but even so not necessarily great photos. I have always noticed that a series of shots of flowers has pretty much the same affect for me each time. I find myself wanting to work in black and white, then going back to add, with restraint, the color (I actually did this once, to some good effect). It is the form of the flower that tends to get left behind as the showy color acts like a neon sign's gaudy glow overwhelming the shape and texture. Oh well, no one said photography is easy (except for a few early depressed painters who let their brushes slip from their hands)... ----- 02/08/05 Glad you liked the "researcher really means..." table. Like all good humor, there is a bit, or bite, of truth in it. We have more scientists alive and active now by far than all that have lived before, but the real output is not in proportion to the numbers. We really need to modify our society's way of life such that there is a lot more uninterrupted time to do the research and the mulling. To treat the search for truth the same way we do the production of sausage is laughably obtuse. The money race is getting to be almost a living satire on how not to live the good life. Here we are, supposedly coddled by technology and freed from the constraints of the natural world and what do we do but go back to slogging. Jeez. I agree about on-line research, though you may have contacts and special knowledge I don't have that gives better access to some data. Yes, often the information is there, but fractured, incoherent. Or it isn't there because someone wants to put the knowledge in a book and sell it. Or it is located, but it is a thesis at UCLA, the Library of Congress, Hamburg Research Institute, University of We-Have-It-And-You-Don't-Haha and all you have to do is hop a plane and go to it. Or it is locked up in the vault at some company headquarters. Or the image is too small. Or the table is nearly impossible to copy. Or the small (and copyrighted) image is useless for the purpose. Or the PDF file won't print. Or... Remember the web pages I sent a long time ago? They were along the lines of you being able to produce your own illustrations and place them usefully in the text. I still think this is worth pursuing, though, as you say, more learning curve. Most of your needed illustrations would not be that hard to do. You can take your own digital pictures. You can make tables, charts, and graphs. You can draw the simpler illustrations of geological processes. The question is: exactly at what point would the illustration be beyond you? I'll bet if you think about it, you would decide that only a few illustrations need be so complex, or so "professionally" done, that it is beyond your capability. These few could be commissioned from an artist, or a graphics illustrator, as needed. In many cases, no such super-duper illustrations would be necessary. If you have studied the inner workings of PDF files, then you are beyond me, but I doubt it is very hard to use. The real learning would be to learn to use Word, or even better, a program that is a high-level desktop publishing program, and use that to make the document, then turn it into a PDF file. Another way of doing this would be to use programs that are web-oriented, but are sophisticated in terms of text and image placement, but I know little of this, and doubt it would be as easy as simply creating the pages as if they were to be printed, but placing them on the web instead. Besides the magical hyperlink, the best thing about web pages is that they can be updated and corrected anytime, where a book will go on being wrong for years. I am glad you got a digital camera. What brand/model did you get? The camera and picture-taking will not give you much trouble. Uploading the images to the computer is easy because the software does the work. However, modifying the images later is where the challenge comes. Based on what I have observed, people are flummoxed by this -- they expect it to be as easy as having a roll of film developed and the images returned. No, it is more like old-fashioned darkroom work. Yet to make an "acceptable" image is still fairly easy. The real struggle comes when your own standards rise, and for most folks, that does not happen (they never get that far). Then you inadvertently slip into the role of artist, and find yourself fighting to get that next little improvement. You get better, your standards rise again, and so on and so on. You can mitigate this scenario by developing a firm attitude that this "is good enough", but I warn you, one can get away with fooling others a lot easier than one can fooling oneself, alas. Hmm, a laptop too. My goodness, what a high-tech guy. Well, you can pour your shots into the laptop as you go. Make sure you take plenty of batteries and a recharger. The laptop might like a nice thermal bag to protect it from the heat. Those things are good for notes too, by the way. Have a great time in the great American West! You will fall in love with all that naked geology, and wonder how you put up with all the blankets of vegetation all these years. There is space and sky out there that gets under the skin. I daresay you might have to go back several times to explore some things further. I hope you keep notes as you go, and take pictures of course, and share some of the experience when you return. I read recently that 96 percent of the universe has been discovered to be either dark matter or dark energy. With only 4% left over for galaxies, stars, planets, chickens, and us, I figure if science continues advancing in this way we shall soon have nothing left for breakfast, and no place to sit. Yes, we will have to get together after you return and have wound down. I look forward to it. As to "your bio-physics project", I assume you mean my desire to show how wunderkind mankind has been holding nature's hand all along the way? Well, I had a good fume about the arrogance and ignorance I found in a bout of research, but I have written nothing much more than what I emailed you. I suppose it would be as good a topic as any to focus on, but my dominant feeling is that life is too short to correct foolishness. Foolishness is ubiquitous. My forte, if I have one, is as a generalist. I love big inclusive understandings and feelings and visions. For depth, I go to good people like yourself, and I always envy those who have depth, though through intuition, I can share in it. For example, when you travel in the West, you will have a sort of X-ray vision of the landforms. You will also see the underlying structure, and be aware of the monumental force of time with its busy little friends: wind, rain, and frost. This is a wise seeing I have never had, though I am always acutely aware of its desirability. Always aware of looking, but not seeing, sensing but not understanding. In fact, dumb as a box of rocks, as a friend says. Well yes, to be fair to myself, I have gained some understanding and better seeing, but not a hundredth of what I would like. Photography helps, through it I sometimes I see more deeply than is my wont. Nice when it happens. Besides the cost of my religion of sloth and comfort, I do pay a price for being a butterfly. Kind of fun though. Will sign off now and crawl onto my reading pallet/bed, let me know how the trip goes, have fun, --- [Responding to an email with a content of four words] Very sorry to hear of her illness. Hope things improve soon. Also, try not to go on and on in your communications -- succinctness is best and modern sensibilities cannot handle the leisurely wordiness of a Dickens or of your esteemed self. I know you imagine your style would suffer by a more rigorous editing, but I assure you it would be for the best. Yours in brevity and concision, ----- 02/11/05 Found this free photo editor that has all kinds of capability, including a nice little trick called soft relief (gives added definition), and drawing, cloning, etc. And it has some batch capability -- definitely worth adding to your arsenal. It is called PhotoFiltre and can be got from here: http://www.photofiltre.com/ What would be nice, is just more detailed batch capability. To date, IrfanView has the best range of effects that can be batched. Ideally one would be able to make many settings, apply them to all the images, batch all to copies and then view the resulting effects, modify the settings, etc, then batch the originals again. IrfanView is very close to that right now -- it just needs some more sophisticated batchable effects, like the soft relief of PhotoFiltre (same as a mild setting on embossing in MS Photo Editor), a framing function, lighting filters or histogram control, etc. ----- 02/16/05 I am enclosing your email of February 5, but am also responding to the images emails. Too bad you and she are somewhat estranged, but it is not easy to maintain closeness from a distance, and even when physically close, there is no guarantee of an easy relationship. People are complex. It is more amazing that sometimes emotional closeness does happen. I suppose it can occur when people want the relationship to continue and work at it, or if there is a magical kind of communication that overrides the growing differences, as with friends you may not see for years, but in five minutes of talk the old state of mind is there again. A declining few use writing to stay in close touch, but that is beyond most persons. Things and immediate concerns have become more important than relationships for many, perhaps most, people. I read somewhere recently that some country, maybe Indonesia, had developed a dog corps for the purpose of searching for survivors and used pound dogs, rather than purebreds, because the dogs knew what hard times were and they appreciated a home, companionship, the respect of being useful. Our bird George was missing once for nearly two weeks. He landed on my shoulder just as I was stepping out onto the back porch area at an apartment house in Pacific Beach in San Diego. I tried to grab him, but he hopped to a horizontal rail, looked around a few seconds, then just flew away. Man, that was tough on us. Besides all the obvious things one does when losing a pet, I went every day up onto the apartment roof and scanned the sky. My vision seemed to expand -- I could see for miles, and in all that volume of air, there were birds in all directions. Eventually we called a person who found a cockatiel, but it wasn't George, but the person had heard of someone else... It turned out George was with the someone else, and he brought our little friend back to us. He said he couldn't handle the way the bird would plaster itself on him whenever he got back to his apartment. He never did buy a cage for George, but let him fly freely around the apartment. The bird rode in the car the same way. So it was doubly lucky we got George back. I'll never forget how confused George was, but in the midst of the chaos, he recognized us. I won't ever forget that moment. He was so so glad to be back home. He was very hungry and he walked right up and over another cockatiel to get at the food dish. We've had him now for nearly 15 years. Speaking of birds, I saw a story about bird intelligence. It seems that scientists had discounted it for many years due to theoretical reasons, but they have decided the theory was wrong, and maybe they should look more closely. Science may be the best technique we have to uncover knowledge, but it sure has a lot of foolishness in it. It was the old "argument from authority" error again. Glad you like the etymology link. I have a bunch of my most-used links as buttons now, and I quite like it. In fact I had been grousing about not being able to do that when I found out I could! As to "self-esteem", well it is not uncommon that children are treated as know-nothings or "can't-do's" or some other hurtful label. I had my share of it. I guess my objection comes from the "self-esteem" movement or whatever it was, that came and went as such psychological fads do. My instinct is that self-esteem is not the place to focus on problems -- the problems are otherwise, and self-esteem suffers as the result of them. The fad types always focus on symptoms it seems, they say fix this and everything will be OK, but I always doubt it. Many people have high self-esteem, but still have serious emotional or behavioral problems. Just consider some of the people you have known who thought very well of themselves, but were fools nonetheless, and arrogant to boot. Some people diagnosed as having low self-esteem are actually suffering from unresolved guilt. In that case, it is the guilt that must be dealt with, not the self-esteem. For myself, I realized somewhere along the line, that I was not here to meet the expectations of others. I had my own path through life, come of it what may. I decided if I were not perfect, so what -- who must I impress? More important was the need to be comfortable in my own skin, to enjoy the workings of my own mind. No one else is going to live my life, and I am not going to live theirs. That understanding left me alone with myself, out of the reach (to some degree) of the busy people who always knew what I should be and be about. Since then, I have cast a dubious eye on the legions of humans who want me to think this, do that, or always remember to [fill in whatever aphorism you like]. It is all about control, it seems, the control that leads to power or wealth or just the joy of proselytizing. I will say this for them, they certainly are persistent. He was indeed conversing with himself. I have used tape recorders like that to "write" long verbal letters, and I had not much trouble doing it. Conversation is similar in that it is an action to reaction to reaction to reaction... An active mind can do that easily enough, but maybe the problem for some in doing it is capturing the state of mind necessary for it to occur. It is characterized by a kind of focus of the mind, not like meditation I suppose, but like a bloodhound following a trail. Many people are not focused at all on their own -- they need some external stimulus, and even then they often are rather poor at conversation because they have no inner drive toward what is to be known. That has baffled me for years, that many people have no will to penetrate the veil of current understanding toward a better one -- even in small things, daily things. In a sense, they are asleep. Perhaps she is such a one. Sleeping with a cat -- sounds nice. A good way to rest and dream, don't be surprised if it is of catnip mice scurrying through a green field. Another web site to check out, though you probably know of it: http://www.snopes.com -- they have a lot of interesting things to look into. All the fake (and some real) urban legends are there. I learned a new word from that site: glurge. It means the gooey nonsense that poses as feel-good stuff on the web, but is fake or manipulative, and often with bad information. I sent them an example that I had received from a gullible friend, but they already had a version of it. I have another that I may send them because I really dislike that stuff. I liked your brother celebration. Good use of images, though would have liked even more writing of yours with it as the writing carries so much of the weight of the feeling. But I think I understand -- the production of an image piece is surprisingly time-consuming, and images thus tend to shoulder aside everything else. ----- 02/18/05 Whilst waiting for some longer missives from you that are no doubt bubbling away on the back burner, I thought I'd write a letter in your style -- the long quoted pieces with maybe a comment or two added. To be sure, this does project something of the person writing: the choices are personal and the desire to share what has been meaningful is part of what constitutes communication. I came across this while looking into information on Kate and Anna McGarrigle whose music I have always liked: ...written by Richard Silverstein based on an interview with Kate McGarrigle [Begin quote] Kate described how she came to be interested in the New England mill towns that she writes about in Jacques et Gilles: "I came to write it because of my interest in Jack Kerouac and On the Road. Ten years ago, I realized the similarities in Kerouac's and my own backgrounds. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, his family came from the same Quebec region as mine. Like him, I learned French in school and spoke English at home. Both of our upbringings were terribly insular. Our contact with the outside world was minimal. Perhaps that's why he wrote a book about traveling. But you'll recall that all his traveling, searching for a better life, ended up back in his mother's home, where he died a terrible death." "I didn't come to understand any of this until I took a trip to Lowell. I brought along a video camera and asked a local woman for permission to film the local cemetery, where Kerouac is buried, from her balcony. When we got to talking, I realized how similar her background was to Kerouac's and my own. She was born in the States, yet she knew almost no English and spoke only French. I found it amazing that you could live in this country for so long, yet still be apart from it. This woman lives through French Canada. Those are the only photographs on her wall. "It wasn't until I began doing research on this subject that I discovered that fully half the population of French Canada left for the factory mills of New England! That's an astounding fact, yet very few people are aware of it. Despite these huge numbers, French Canadians have had nowhere near the impact on the greater American culture that Italian, Irish, and Jewish Americans have. There are no traces of their cuisine, language, customs, etc. I think Kerouac responded to this insularity by writing On the Road. Yet his search for freedom and liberation ended with death." [End quote] This underscores an interesting aspect of Kerouac: that he was a cultural orphan, a true "stranger in a strange land". To introduce you to this next topic, a definition from http://astron.berkeley.edu/: [Begin quote] DARK MATTER We believe that most of the matter in the universe is dark, i.e. cannot be detected from the light which it emits (or fails to emit). This is "stuff" which cannot be seen directly -- so what makes us think that it exists at all? Its presence is inferred indirectly from the motions of astronomical objects, specifically stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations. It is also required in order to enable gravity to amplify the small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background enough to form the large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. [End quote] Another quote: [Begin quote] The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy," says Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project headquartered at Berkeley Lab, "and we don't know what either of them is. [End quote] I've read that according to large-cerebrumed individuals, the universe is about 96% dark energy and dark matter. No one has any clue what these things are. So, with the advance of science, we are down to only 4% of the universe for galaxies, stars, planets, rock concerts, vegetable gardens, pancakes (with ham), and us. If the scientists continue advancing knowledge in this giddy way, we will not have enough room left to sit down to eat the pancakes. Now, when you consider our situation in the light of our best knowledge, is it any wonder that philosophy has wandered away in confusion, and poetry and art are hard-pressed to be imaginative and emotionally coherent? Both society in its neo-barbarism, and science in its quantum mechanical and multi-dimensional non-rationality are threatening to break down our world views that we have cobbled together over time as a home for the mind. Edwin Way Teale on autumn: [Begin quote] Painted Forests Looking about us, where the mirror of the water reflected sky and clouds and autumn leaves, we speculated on how far the stirring colors of fall go in stimulating our minds. The clear, bracing air of this third season, with its lowered humidity and its touch of chill, is given credit for the alertness and sense of well-being that characterizes our autumn mood. But is there not a corresponding lift to the mind in this riot of color, exciting and exhilarating? In the forest, fall is the season of light. The aureate leaves, the golden carpet of fallen foliage reflecting rays upward from the ground, these fill the woodlands with a luminous radiance unknown at other seasons of the year. Henri Amiel noted in his Journal Intime: "The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activity; the gray autumn for meditative feeling." Later in the season there would come slaty skies, brown leaves, gray autumn. But now we wandered in the multicolored early days of fall, the time of vigor and elation. [End quote] Taken from: Teale, Edwin Way. Autumn Across America. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950. 109-110. Teale is one of my favorite authors. I have read seven of his books, and will probably eventually read them all. He was in contact with virtually all the American naturalists of his time, wrote extensively, traveled widely, photographed with skill, studied much, had a lifelong attraction to Thoreau and Muir about whom he wrote. Quotes from him on the web: --Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. --It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. --You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour is qualified, and the answers of the year contradictory. From the chapter "Beavers In The Moonlight" in the book A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm: [Begin quote] Among the witch hazels above the swampy valley on the Old Woods Road, that early October afternoon, Nellie stopped and listened. In the trees below, she thought she heard the calling of rusty blackbirds. In descending to investigate, she made an exciting discovery. The whole lowland, perhaps three acres in extent, was flooded. Where there had been a swamp in the spring, there was a pond in the fall. And it was no ordinary pond. It was a pond produced by the earliest dam-builders in America. How much wilder our wild acres seemed: beavers had come to Trail Wood! It was November - the month of the Beaver Moon - before, in rather unusual circumstances, I caught my first glimpse of one of these wary creatures. Toward the middle of that month a freeze covered the pond with half an inch of ice. About four o’clock in the afternoon, on the seventeenth, I had finished nailing up signs on trees, warning that the beavers were protected. I was standing not far from the edge of the pond opposite the lodge. Like a rifle shot, a sudden explosive crack came from that direction. A moment of silence followed. Then a second crack. Out on the pond, no more than ten paces from where I stood, the ice was heaving up and down. Long white lines of fracture radiated away. Then the ice burst upward. Fragments shot into the air and skidded over the frozen pond. Bubbles cascaded up through the water and the dark dripping head and back of a beaver appeared in the opening. Standing in a shallow place in the pond, it had heaved rhythmically upward with its back until the ice gave way. [End quote] Imagine the pleasure of having your own beaver pond, and observing the beaver who decided he didn't want his pond covered with ice, and took matters into his own paw. I read some of Ernie Pyle, Hoosier, recently, and was impressed. He wrote without guile, without the self-flattery that one realizes is in most others when you read someone without it. Here is a quote from him: [Begin quote] It was soon after crossing into Iowa, coming south from Minnesota, that I gradually became conscious of the wind. I don’t know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily across the hundreds of miles of Midwest flat lands in the summertime. If you don’t, it will be hard for you to understand the feeling I have about it. Even if you know it, you may not understand. To me the summer wind in the Midwest is one of the most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far, and it blows so gently and yet so relentlessly; it rustles the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesn’t pass on and leave them still. It just keeps coming, like the infinite flow of Old Man River. You could – and you do – wear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind, still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless, is still blowing across the prairies, and will blow in the faces of the little men who follow you, forever. As soon as I became conscious of the wind, I was back in character as an Indiana farm boy again. Like dreams came the memories the wind brought. I lay again on the ground under the shade trees at noon, during my half-hour rest before going back to the fields, and the wind and the sun and hot rural silence made me sleepy, and yet I couldn’t sleep for the wind in the trees. The wind was like the afternoon ahead that would never end, and the days and the summers and even the lifetimes that would flow on forever, tiredly, patiently. It’s just one of those small impressions that will form in a child’s mind, and grow and stay with him through a lifetime, even playing its part in his character and his way of thinking, and he can never explain it. [End quote] I think I'll read more of Pyle, his straightforwardness is like a relaxation after reading the high-powered prose of so many. I admire the work of Joseph Wood Krutch. He was professor of English, a major reviewer of plays, a social philosopher, a naturalist. Here is one of his shorter works: [Begin quote] The Colloid and the Crystal by Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) Excerpted from The Best of Two Worlds The first real snow was soon followed by a second. Over the radio the weatherman talked lengthily about cold masses and warm masses, about what was moving out to sea and what wasn't. Did Benjamin Franklin, I wondered, know what he was starting when it first occurred to him to trace by correspondence the course of storms? From my stationary position the most reasonable explanation seemed to be simply that winter had not quite liked the looks of the landscape as she first made it up. She was changing her sheets. Another forty-eight hours brought one of those nights ideal for frosting the panes. When I came down to breakfast, two of the windows were almost opaque and the others were etched with graceful, fernlike sprays of ice which looked rather like the impressions left in rocks by some of the antediluvian plants, and they were almost as beautiful as anything which the living can achieve. Nothing else which has never lived looks so much as though it were actually informed with life. I resisted, I am proud to say, the almost universal impulse to scratch my initials into one of the surfaces. The effect, I knew, would not be an improvement. But so, of course, do those less virtuous than I. That indeed is precisely why they scratch. The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way that the other of demonstrating power. Why else should anyone not hungry prefer a dead rabbit to a live one. Not even those horrible Dutch painters of bloody still - or shall we say stilled? - lifes can have really believed that their subjects were more beautiful dead. Indoors it so happened that a Christmas cactus had chosen this moment to bloom. Its lush blossoms, fuchsia-shaped but pure red rather than magenta, hung at the drooping ends of strange, thick stems and outlined themselves in blood against the glistening background of the frosty pane - jungle flower against frostflower; the warm beauty that breathes and lives and dies competing with the cold beauty that burgeons, not because it wants to, but merely because it is obeying the laws of physics which require that crystals shall take the shape they have always taken since the world began. The effect of red flower against white tracery was almost too theatrical, not quite in good taste perhaps. My eye recoiled in shock and sought through a clear area of the glass the more normal out-of-doors. On the snow-capped summit of my bird feeder a chickadee pecked at the new-fallen snow and swallowed a few of the flakes which serve him in lieu of the water he sometimes sadly lacks when there is nothing except ice too solid to be picked at. A downy woodpecker was hammering at a lump of suet and at the coconut full of peanut butter. One nuthatch was dining while the mate waited his - or was it her? - turn. The woodpecker announces the fact that he is a male by the bright red spot on the back of his neck, but to me, at least, the sexes of the nuthatch are indistinguishable. I shall never know whether it is the male or the female who eats first. And that is a pity. If I knew, I could say, like the Ugly Duchess, "and the moral of that is..." But I soon realized that at the moment the frosted windows were what interested me most - especially the fact that there is no other natural phenomenon in which the lifeless mocks so closely the living. One might almost think that the frostflower had got the idea from the leaf and the branch if one did not know how inconceivably more ancient the first is. No wonder that enthusiastic biologists in the nineteenth century, anxious to conclude that there was no qualitative difference between life and chemical processes, tried to believe that the crystal furnished the link, that its growth was actually the same as the growth of a living organism. but excusable though the fancy was, no one, I think, believes anything of the sort today. Protoplasm is a colloid and the colloids are fundamentally different from the crystalline substances. Instead of crystallizing they jell, and life in its simplest known form is a shapeless blob of rebellious jelly rather than a crystal eternally obeying the most ancient law. No man ever saw a dinosaur. The last of these giant reptiles was dead eons before the most dubious halfman surveyed the world about him. Not even the dinosaurs ever cast their dim eyes upon many of the still earlier creatures which preceded them. Life changes so rapidly that its later phases know nothing of those which preceded them. But the frostflower is older than the dinosaur, older than the protozoan, older no doubt than the enzyme or the ferment. Yet it is precisely what it has always been. Millions of years before there were any eyes to see it, millions of years before any life existed, it grew in its own special way, crystallized along its preordained lines of cleavage, stretched out its pseudo-branches and pseudo-leaves. It was beautiful before beauty itself existed. We find it difficult to conceive a world except in terms of purpose, of will, or of intention. At the thought of the something without beginning and presumably without end, of something which is, nevertheless, regular though blind, and organized without any end in view, the mind reels. Constituted as we are it is easier to conceive how the slime floating upon the waters might become in time Homo sapiens than it is to imagine how so complex a thing as a crystal could have always been and can always remain just what it is -- complicated and perfect but without any meaning, even for itself. How can the lifeless even obey a law? To a mathematical physicist I once confessed somewhat shamefacedly that I had never been able to understand how inanimate nature managed to follow so invariably and so promptly her own laws. If I flip a coin across a table, it will come to rest at a certain point. But before it stops at just that point, many factors must be taken into consideration. There is the question of the strength of the initial impulse, of the exact amount of resistance offered by the friction of that particular table top, and of the density of the air at the moment. It would take a physicist a long time to work out the problem and he could achieve only an approximation at that. Yet presumably the coin will stop exactly where it should. Some very rapid calculations have to be made before it can do so, and they are, presumably, always accurate. And then, just as I was blushing at what I supposed he must regard as my folly, the mathematician came to my rescue by informing me that Laplace had been puzzled by exactly the same fact. "Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration," he remarked - and by "integration" he meant, of course, the mathematician's word for the process involved when a man solves one of the differential equations to which he has reduced the laws of motion. When my Christmas cactus blooms so theatrically a few inches in front of the frost-covered pane, it is also obeying laws but obeying them much less rigidly and in a different way. It blooms at about Christmastime because it has got into the habit of doing so, because, one is tempted to say, it wants to. As a matter of fact it was, this year, not a Christmas cactus but a New Year's cactus, and because of this unpredictability I would like to call it "he," not "it." His flowers assume their accustomed shape and take on their accustomed color. But not as the frostflowers follow their predestined pattern. Like me, the cactus has a history which stretches back over a long past full of changes and developments. He has not always been merely obeying fixed laws. He has resisted and rebelled; he has attempted novelties, passed through many phases. Like all living things he has had a will of his own. He has made laws, not merely obeyed them. "Life," so the platitudinarian is fond of saying, "is strange." But from our standpoint it is not really so strange as those things which have no life and yet nevertheless move in their predestined orbits and "act" though they do not "behave." At the very least one ought to say that if life is strange there is nothing about it more strange than the fact that it has its being in a universe so astonishingly shared on the one hand by "things" and on the other hand by "creatures," that man himself is both a "thing" which obeys the laws of chemistry or physics and a "creature" who to some extent defies them. No other contrast, certainly not the contrast between the human being and the animal, or the animal and the plant, or even the spirit and the body, is so tremendous as this contrast between what lives and what does not. To think of the lifeless as merely inert, to make the contrast merely in terms of a negative, is to miss the real strangeness. Not the shapeless stone which seems to be merely waiting to be acted upon but the snowflake or the frostflower is the true representative of the lifeless universe as opposed to ours. They represent plainly, as the stone does not, the fixed and perfect system of organization which includes the sun and its planets, includes therefore this earth itself, but against which life has set up its seemingly puny opposition. Order and obedience are the primary characteristics of that which is not alive. The snowflake eternally obeys its one and only law: "Be thou six pointed"; the planets their one and only: "Travel thou in an ellipse." The astronomer can tell where the North Star will be then thousand years hence; the botanist cannot tell where the dandelion will bloom tomorrow. Life is rebellious and anarchical, always testing the supposed immutability of the rules which the nonliving changelessly accepts. Because the snowflake goes on doing as it was told, its story up to the end of time was finished when it first assumed the form which it has kept ever since. But the story of every living thing is still in the telling. It may hope and it may try. Moreover, though it may succeed or fail, it will certainly change. No form of frostflower ever became extinct. Such, if you like, is its glory. But such also is the fact which makes it alien. It may melt but it cannot die. IF I wanted to contemplate what to me is the deepest of all mysteries, I should choose as my object lesson a snowflake under a lens and an amoeba under a microscope. To the detached observer - if one can possibly imagine any observer who could be detached when faced with such an ultimate choice - the snowflake would certainly seem the "higher" of the two. Against its intricate glistening perfection one would have to place a shapeless, slightly turbid glob, perpetually oozing out in this direction or that but not suggesting so strongly as the snowflake does, intelligence and plan. Crystal and colloid, the chemist would call them, but what an inconceivable contrast those neutral terms imply! Like the star, the snowflake seems to declare the glory of God, while the promise of the amoeba, given only perhaps to itself, seems only contemptible. But its jelly holds, nevertheless, not only its promise but ours also, while the snowflake represents some achievement which we cannot possibly share. After the passage of billions of years, one can see and be aware of the other, but the relationship can never be reciprocal. Even after these billions of years no aggregate of colloids can be as beautiful as the crystal always was, but it can know, as the crystal cannot, what beauty is. Even to admire too much or too exclusively the alien kind of beauty is dangerous. Much as I love and am moved by the grand, inanimate forms of nature, I am always shocked and a little frightened by those of her professed lovers to whom landscape is the mort important thing, and to whom landscape is merely a matter of forms and colors. If they see or are moved by an animal or flower, it is to them merely a matter of a picturesque completion, and their fellow creature are no more than decorative details. But without some continuous awareness of the two great realms of the inanimate and the animate there can be no love of nature as I understand it, and what is worse, there must be a sort of disloyalty to our cause, to us who are colloid, not crystal. The pantheist who feels the oneness of all living things, I can understand; perhaps indeed he and I are in essential agreement. But the ultimate All is not one thing, but two. And because the alien half is in its way as proud and confident and successful as our half, its fundamental difference may not be disregarded with impunity. Of us and all we stand for, the enemy is not so much death as the not-living, or rather that great system which succeeds without ever having had the need to be alive. The frostflower is not merely a wonder; it is also a threat and a warning. How admirable, it seems to say, not living can be! What triumphs mere immutable law can achieve. Some of Charles Peirce's strange speculations about the possibility that "natural law" is not law at all but merely a set of habits fixed more firmly than any habits we know anything about in ourselves or in the animals suggest the possibility that the snowflake was not, after all, always inanimate, that it merely surrendered at some time impossibly remote the life which once achieved its perfect organization. Yet even if we can imagine such a thing to be true, it serves only to warn us all the more strongly against the possibility that what we call the living might in the end succumb also to the seduction of the immutably fixed. No student of the anthill has ever failed to be astonished either into admiration or horror by what is sometimes called the perfection of its society. Though even the anthill can change its ways, though even ant individuals - ridiculous as the conjunction of the two words may seem - can sometimes make choices, the perfection of the techniques, the regularity of the habits almost suggest the possibility that the insect is on its way back to inanition, that, vast as the difference still is, an anthill crystallizes somewhat as a snowflake does. But not even the anthill, nothing else indeed in the while known universe is so perfectly planned as one of these same snowflakes. Would, then, the ultimately planned society be, like the anthill, one in which no one makes plans, any more than a snowflake does? From the cradle in which it is not really born to the grave where it is only a little deader than it always was, the ant-citizen follows a plan to the making of which he no longer contributes anything. Perhaps we men represent the ultimate to which the lion, began so long ago in some amoeba-like jelly, can go. And perhaps the inanimate is beginning the slow process of subduing us again. Certainly the psychologist and the philosopher are tending more and more to think of us as creatures who obey laws rather than creatures of will and responsibility. We are, they say, "conditioned" by this or that. Even the greatest heroes are studied on the assumption that they can be "accounted for" by something outside themselves. They are, it is explained, "the product of forces". All the emphasis is placed, not upon that power to resist and rebel which we were once supposed to have, but upon the "influences" which "formed us". Men are made by society, not society by men. History as well as character "obeys laws". In their view we crystallize in obedience to some dictate from without instead of moving in conformity with something within. And so my eye goes questioningly back to the frosted pane. While I slept the graceful pseudo-fronds crept across the glass, assuming, as life itself does, an intricate organization. "Why live", they seem to say, "when we can be beautiful, complicated, and orderly without the uncertainty and effort required of a living thing? Once we were all that was. Perhaps some day we shall be all that is. Why not join us?" Last summer no clod or no stone would have been heard if it had asked such a question. The hundreds of things which walked and sang, the millions which crawled and twined were all having their day. What was dead seemed to exist only in order that the living might live on it. The plants were busy turning the inorganic into green life and the animals were busy turning that green into red. When we moved, we walked mostly upon grass. Our pre-eminence was unchallenged. On this winter day nothing seems so successful as the frostflower. It thrives on the very thing which has driven some of us indoors or underground and which has been fatal to many. It is having now its hour of triumph, as we before had ours. Like the cactus flower itself, I am a hothouse plant. Even my cats gaze dreamily out of the window at a universe which is no longer theirs. How are we to resist, if resist we can? This house into which I have withdrawn is merely an expedient and it serves only my mere physical existence. What mental or spiritual convictions, what will to maintain to my own kind of existence can I assert? For me it is not enough merely to say, as I do say, that I shall resist the invitation to submerge myself into a crystalline society and to stop planning in order that I may be planned for. Neither is it enough to go further, as I do go, and to insist that the most important thing about a man is not that part of him which is the "product of forces" but that part, however small it may be, which enables him to become something other than what the most accomplished sociologist, working in conjunction with the most accomplished psychologist, could predict that he would be. I need, so I am told, a faith, something outside myself to which I can be loyal. And with that I agree, in my own way. I am on what I call "our side," and I know, though vaguely, what I think that is. Wordsworth's God had his dwelling in the light of setting suns. But the God who dwells there seems to me most probably the God of the atom, the star, and the crystal. Mine, if I have one, reveals Himself in another class of phenomena. He makes the grass green and the blood red. [End quote] Hmm, "the animals were busy turning that green into red", a colorful thought. I have read that octopuses have green blood, because it is copper-based, not iron-based as ours is. And the octopus lacks staying power in a tussle, as the copper cannot carry as much oxygen as does good old iron. So, eat lots of raisins. To comment on your letter with Xeroxed sheets: I read it and liked the information about Lucien Carr about whom I knew nothing. Stabbing a homosexual to death -- seems unhip, even, dare I say it, uncool. But it also is a sharp point of reality in a world of people who lived much in their dreams. It must have made a heck of an impact on the others, especially Ginsberg. The Fritz Stern thing was not impressive to me, but more of the same. Some people do play the Hitler theme incessantly and they are the source of the Left being so ready to cry Volf! whenever someone dares not to agree with them. I laughed when Stern warned of "mass manipulation of public opinion often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation". Well, he would perhaps know about that. I like your comment about paranoia often not being needed when stupidity explains so much. Still, paranoia has its appeal: when the effects of both premeditated vileness and of stupidity are sufficiently dangerous, the intellectual quality of the source is of less interest than survival. Well, I was going to go on, but on checking back over this email, I think it is time to send it off. You should like this epistle -- it is your sort of communication. And I rather like it too. I have come to really appreciate high-level writing that says much and says it well. Yet it is not possible to do this oneself all the time, so why not share some of the best we find with our correspondents? ----- 02/20/05 The urge toward a Terminator-style computer is alive and well. The info below (especially note the text in red) comes from the hype, er musings, er cogent self-description of company at the following web site: http://www.imagination-engines.com/index.htm [Begin quote] The World Brain One of IEI's main themes is that it is single-handedly building the required artificial intelligence technology to emulate and perhaps exceed the capabilities of the human brain. Thus all of the key cortical functions recognized by brain scientists, perception, learning, and internal imagery (a.k.a., imagination) have been developed at the IEI laboratory purely using artificial neural networks to emulate the biological neural networks of the human brain. Of course the effectiveness of a system that integrates all of the IEI technologies into a creative synthetic intellect will be dependent upon the quality and the scale of the hardware used to implement our technology. Looking around, the largest computational platform now available to perform the necessary parallel processing is the Internet. That is why some of the most ambitious computational tasks of our time have been undertaken using distributed computing techniques, as exemplified in the SETI screen saver project. Note however, that the SETI program is not a neural system. It is simply a scheme to divide an ambitious computational task among many scattered machines, via the Internet. Therefore, IEI is busily transforming all of its advanced neural network paradigms into TCP/IP based systems. The overall intent is to convert many, if not all, of the TCP/IP nodes on the Internet into functioning neurons. The resulting freethinking entity will be capable of introspecting upon all human-originated content residing on the Internet and World Wide Web, and from that knowledge store creating new ideas and strategies that will inevitably transform our thinking and our planet. As this World Brain accumulates new knowledge, it will begin to create a "SuperNet" above the Internet, vastly overshadowing the present content stored there. This coming World Brain will not be accessed via search engines. We will simply ask it to introspect on the information we, as humans, seek. [End quote] As if you were not sufficiently uneasy... P.S. I have thought for over thirty-five years that the human mind uses a pattern-generating mechanism as a means of assisting it to make sense of incoming sensory data. --- I'm still messing about with images, keeping a journal (amazingly, I have been doing it for 3.5 months), noodling about with books, thinking randomly, enjoying the good and quiet life. Photo manipulation programs are generally of two types: the click-and-change type, and the detailed control type. The first sometimes does some very nice things with great ease. It might reset the tones and colors nicely, sharpen the image, and pop a frame around the image, for example. Quick and easy. Yet for many images, there is not enough control to produce a satisfying result. The second type of image editor is great for problem images that need a lot of work, or for special effects that are impossible to do with the simpler programs. But the learning curve is steeper, and the time spent is greater. I may do something with comparing "before" and "after" images on the Larch website, at least I'm playing with the idea. As to thoughts on this and that, I have passed on politics mostly, though I did give my liberal relative a dose of reality to which unfortunately she has been unable to find a way to respond. She can't quite grasp my analogy that partisans are directly analogous to screaming fans at a football game. There is more to the question of course, but not as much as people imagine. I suppose my abiding thought of late has been the constant theme of the importance of feeling, of what some would call "soul", in the transactions of life. Without it, life is a barren wasteland of objects, living or not. With too little, existence is a coolish continuity of habits and duties. Given its importance, it behooves one to embrace it and support it without waiting for good times to come along to justify it. One should support it in good times and bad. Compared to it, the rest is not so important, and if there must be a choice between it and some theoretical good, the choice is clear -- go for the feeling, or soul, or whatever one calls it, that is the main source of richness in one's life. Strange joke from an old book: "A very shy young man experienced considerable difficulty in summoning up sufficient courage to propose to the girl of his heart. One day he took her for a walk in the cemetery and stood awkward and tongue-tied in front of the family tomb. At last he blurted out: 'Irma, darling, would you like to sleep here some day?'" And that is a flavor of is what is happening, ----- 02/22/05 Thanks for the your long response to my email. Will reply in the not too distant future. I have an unusual project now that is taking some time: building a Scottish "broad dialect" dictionary with the goal of computer-translating Rabbie Burns to English. This is not by any means to "improve" him, but to help understand the unfamiliar terms as one reads. The poetic feeling, of course, is in the original language. I have over 1600 terms so far, and that is good enough to start with, but I'm editing this stuff and it is time-consuming. Will send some examples to you at some point. ----- 02/26/05 Don't know when you arrive back home, but whenever, welcome home. I actually wish for you to have thrown your schedule out the window and just have kept on roaming in the Great American West for as long as you pleased. So many people of this area think of Philadelphia as about as far as they can imagine going. In fact, the locals are a species of throwback to past centuries where visiting a neighboring village was a rare adventure. I had one lady ask me, when I said I was originally from Ohio, where that was! I said go to I-80, turn left, and drive 180 miles. I could see I had lost her in visions of great dangerous vastnesses. I heard the wildflowers were magnificent this year in the Anza-Borrego desert. I hope you saw some of them -- unforgettable sight in a dry land where life announces itself so exuberantly. Hope you have time to fill me in on all your western doings. I could use some vicarious adventure. Just finished a phase of a project that has been rattling around in my head for years. Much as I enjoy reading Scottish dialect authors, like Rabbie Burns, I had a desire for a "translated" version to aid in understanding. I finally developed a Scottish-English dictionary (which needs more work), and created a simple program to provide a translation that I then used to do a final edit. Here are some lines from Tam O' Shanter by Burns to give you a feeling for what I've done so far. Each pair of lines is made up of an original line, then the translation. I have retained anything that I thought would be understood without translation. The "poetry", of course, is in the original lines. Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely, Fast by a fire-place, blazing finely, Wi' reaming swats, that drank divinely; With brimful frothing ale, that drank divinely; And at his elbow, Souter Johnie, And at his elbow, Cobbler Johnie, His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony: His ancient, trusty, thirsty crony: Tam lo'ed him like a very brither; Tom loved him like a very brother; *** The reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, The reel'd, they set away, they cross'd, they linked arms, Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, Until every witch sweated and smoked, And coost her duddies to the wark, And cast off her clothes to the work, And linkit at it in her sark! And linked at it in her shift! Now Tam, O Tam! had they been queans, Now Tom, O Tom! had they been lasses, *** For ae blink o' the bonie burdies! For one glance of the beautiful maidens! *** Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, Withered hags would wean a foal, Louping an' flinging on a crummock. Leaping and capering on a crooked staff. I wonder did na turn thy stomach. I wonder did not turn thy stomach. But Tam kent what was what fu' brawlie: But Tom knew what was what full heartily: There was ae winsome wench and waulie There was one gay wench and jolly That night enlisted in the core, That night enlisted in the party, *** Her cutty sark, o' Paisley harn, Her short shift, of Paisley linen, *** But here my Muse her wing maun cour, But here my Muse her wing must restore, Sic flights are far beyond her power; Such flights are far beyond her power; To sing how Nannie lap and flang, To sing how Nannie leapt and flung, (A souple jade she was and strang), (A supple jade she was and strong), *** Even Satan glowr'd, and fidg'd fu' fain, Even Satan glowr'd, and fidgited full glad, And hotch'd and blew wi' might and main: And jerked and blew with might and main: Till first ae caper, syne anither, Until first one caper, then another, Tam tint his reason a thegither, Tom lost his reason all together, And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!" And roars out, "Well done, Short-shift!" And so on. What I will do with this stuff, I don't know. But I find the act of translating quite interesting. Simple expository language is easy to translate, but either literary or informal language is hard, full of traps and anxious considerations where one tries to balance the needs of brevity and clarity and usually fails to do it perfectly. So many things may be encompassed in a word or phrase: explaining is possible, but not without much digression, and that acts against the flow. However, my goal was to make the meaning clear, but leave the poetry to the original lines, and I think I have succeeded to a degree. (Note: interesting that the name of the famous clipper Cutty Sark comes from the witch in Tam O' Shanter, not the mundane meaning of a woman's undergarment!) Anyway, looking forward to a whiff from the old West, --- Sometimes I become a bit obsessive in pursuing an interest: the interest becomes a flame I have to keep feeding! In this case, there is a natural break because I have shown myself what I wanted to do has been done. Huge amount more to do, of course, if I choose to pursue it. Time will tell on that. You comment interestingly about different styles in email. The "style is the person" to paraphrase someone's quote on that. I'd have to modify that statement though, because some people do not develop a style, any more than they develop a personhood. To so many people, communication is just a chore. They would always act whenever there is a choice to act or think. It is a sort of drive toward "becoming" rather than one of "being". Becoming is handier: the result never arrives, and one is always in motion, so no time to reflect on the journey. An image for it would be the self as meteor blazing across the heavens, shooting out sparks, and generally making a big loud deal of things. Look at me, they seem to say, am I not a fascinating being? Sure, I think, all wild animals are interesting, and fate has a drama built-in. But to be human is to reflect. Having lived, and reflected, the style emerges, as you say. Some people are fascinated with the visible surface of life, and to be sure it is interesting. Others are wrapped up in other people -- their infinite layers of complexity and sundry happenstances. Many folks have a key interest, or maybe two or three of them, and they think of life as being the enjoyment of those things, such as painting or gardening or travelling. There are people who live psychological lives and who wander in the realms of the mind and the mind's special children -- art and the making of magical things. Personally, I always find myself looking behind curtains and props, curious about the layers beyond layers. What is the Khayyam? "Tis all a magic shadow show/Round which we players come and go." Perhaps the main difference among people is whether they live their lives, or do their lives live them? Are they harried from hour to hour and day to day, or are they connoisseurs of the hours and days? I suspect if people really realized how alone each person is, and could accept that, then the rest would be easy. It gets better after such a realization -- it can't get worse. Then one can really appreciate the magics of the world which act to mitigate the lostness of real life by providing a way to connect with things and people. What magics? Well, magic by nature cannot be reduced to the simplicity of words, but it has to do with the natural empathy each of us has for the world as we know it internally. It is ourselves, but through it we can touch the rest of the universe. In my view, intuited rather than a system of thought, there is a necessary division of self and other. Probably we would not exist at all if there were no such division. The psychological pain we feel parallels the regret of nature that this be so. And through the magic I speak of, we restore a connection to the other. It is the impossible done routinely every day. As I say -- magic! When two friends talk they create a bridge in empty space and meet at the middle to overlap their worlds and walk companionably around in the result. If that's not magic, I don't know what is. Thanks for all the emails sent from your graphics experiments. This kind of thing makes us more and more ready to try things, experiment, and of course there are some real skill which slowly take root and give us better results. Try, fail, try again -- with a goal of course. The goal is the target and the attempt is the arrow, and the goal just makes it easier to focus on something while we learn. Off to eat something: I have neglected the "inner man" as they say, though the outer man is not adverse to a good meal either. ----- 02/28/05 It reminded me of an experiment I did several years ago. A friend wanted to add material for students to a geology web site. I thought about it for a bit, wondering what was the very simplest thing he could do that would be professional and helpful to students, but with html knowledge not needed, and no learning curves to handle. How could he use MS Word, that he was familiar with to do the job? OK, remember that the K.I.S.S. principle was the key one in this. Fact: web pages are not good for advanced formatting, but an image of something which is formatted shows up with no problem. So I created a mock geology page in MS Word to see how it worked on the web. Well, it did work fairly well, but his career path took him away from that project, so the experiment was not pursued. ----- |
