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July 27, 2005
STS-300
NASA
Atlantis is already mated to its own external tank-solid rocket booster launch stack, and was slated for a Sept. 9 liftoff before today's foam find. NASA also tapped Atlantis to serve as a rescue ship for the STS-114 crew in the remote chance Discovery was too damaged to return home and its astronauts forced to take shelter aboard the space station. That contingency rescue mission is known as STS-300.
No one is faulting NASA for reacting with such care to the news that foam insulation did in fact shake loose during launch. The images of the divots and missing patches are eerie reminders of Columbia, scars of an ignorance we thought we'd overcome. But one has to wonder if the dozens of new cameras trained on the shuttle during ascent is making the problem seem worse than it is. Stuff shakes loose in the tug-o-war with gravity. Always has. In whatever we build to fly us to space next we need to attempt to prevent debris and harden whatever critical surfaces might be compromised by that debris.[*] This kind of protection was not added in the post-Columbia changes, to my knowledge.
The clock is ticking on the shuttle transportation system. My bet, we won't make 2010.
Re-entry is going to be tense.
[*] The heat shield on the Apollo capsule was safely sheathed until very close to the beginning of re-entry, for example.
Posted at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
July 26, 2005
Nation's tallest building proposed
550
feet
taller
than
the
Sears
Tower.
Wow.
I like this design for three reasons.
(1) Trump hates that it would overshadow his latest homage to himself.
(2) The City of Big (Square) Shoulders needs more curve, less quadrilateral in its skyline.
(3) It shares elements of what the the now-fortified Freedom Tower once was (and still could be). Maybe this will knock some sense back into that design.
Posted at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago
Aloft
Associated Press / NASA TV
I've been known to bad-mouth the shuttle in these parts -- mostly a tough love thing -- but I gotta admit that I got a little choked up to see it leap off the pad this morning. Bravo, NASA.
Eileen Collins and the crew had what looked like a flawless ascent. CNN noted that her voice before the solid boosters peeled off was shaky, but c'mon she's on top of 6.6 million pounds of thrust. Like trying to have a phone conversation sitting on the roof of a locomotive.
NASA's launch announcer always has a brief prepared tag line right when the countdown goes from minus to plus. This time he said "... beginning America's new journey to the Moon, Mars, and beyond." This is interesting because none of that journey involves the shuttle. NASA is looking forward, so much so that they used the return to space of the shuttle to reaffirm its retirement. I like this.
And the camera on the external tank! I've seen other launches from this angle, but never from the shuttle. That was damn cool. I'm scrounging for footage of the separation of the tank from the orbiter -- something no one had ever seen previously. Amazing how smooth that was and to see the orbiter engines direct it to orbit.
No word on the fuel sensor gauge, but, as a friend who had a flaky gauge on his Wagoneer noted, the key is just to jot down your mileage as you tank up. Isn't that what mission specialists are for?
Posted at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
July 23, 2005
Friendly confinement
For Father's Day I received a behind-the-scenes tour of Wrigley Field with my wife and oldest son. What a gift. If an unsanctified place can be holy, Wrigley is it.
One thing that struck me is how completely devoid of advertising the park is. You sense this when watching a game, but that's the thing about a lack of in-your-face advertisement: when it isn't there you focus on what matters and don't consciously register its absence. In fact, you have to look really hard to find any advertisement. Up until a few years ago there was none, zero, zip. But now it exists on seat-back cupholders (which, if you are looking at that during a Cubs game, you got bigger problems), occasional scrolls on the three small LED boards, and -- during big games -- on the green screen in back of home plate. The green screen is particularly Wrigleyesque in that visitors to the park don't ever see the superimposed ads. Only the shleps at home.
The other thing that really strikes you is what a shit-hole Wrigley is off the field. Built in 1914, the park is just a tad younger than Fenway -- and it shows. The press rooms are like veal pens, the visiting team locker room is laughably awful -- it actually smells like mildew, and I bet the Cubs clubhouse is less spacious than many minor league locker rooms. But hey. It is a ballpark. For ballplaying. No reason to dally in the locker rooms. Just get out there and play on the best field in baseball.
Fans on the rooftops. The L clanking by. Sailboats on the lake visible from the cheap seats. Manual scoreboard. Old Style beer. Amen.
Posted at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago
Terror incognita
News from London. News from Egypt.
The latest from the UK shows just how cowardly terrorism is as an act. The image of a smoldering, confused would-be suicide bomber running out of a tube car looking for his partner -- but you said it would blow me up -- is simply pathetic. Too incompetent even to remove himself from the gene pool correctly. Terrorism is like any kind of media-borne meme. The more it spreads initially the more powerful it is. But there is a point at which it saturates and after fails to have the impact it once did. When horror turns to anger terrorism has failed. The problem is that terrorism is also a last-ditch effort, an act of desperation, and when people are desperate logic rarely works. It will take a long time for these cowards to realize that the initial power of their acts has long since dissipated.
I was thinking about why the London transit system, particularly the Underground, is such a target and I think the answer is fundamental to terrorism itself. Mass media of course is the accomplice of terrorism, the mechanism for global broadcast and amplification that allows a relatively small act to frighten millions. Terrorism succeeds or fails on this basic premise of small-to-large. The tube system is nothing but a physical network, the very embodiment of a vast, interconnected system where a small event ramifies outward until a much larger effect is achieved: total system shutdown. But there is a difference. Mass media is unidirectional; the tube is a true network. Media can only echo, amplify, send out. The tube -- and all networks -- adapts, re-routes, compensates. Human society is a network too and it adapts just like the tube does. Another lesson likely lost on the desperate.
And then Egypt. Beautiful, idyllic Sharm. When I was there in 2003 a shopkeeper ran after me on the boardwalk and begged me to come to his store. I thought he was just a pushy bazaar denizen, but when I got inside with my brother and co-worker he pulled out a book and showed us entries from people all over the world. He asked visitors to write something representative of their country, a kind of guestbook passport. He had dozens of European entries, but no American. It took me a moment, but I ended up writing the words to "Take My Out To The Ballgame." The shopkeeper loved it and asked me to sing it. I'm no singer, but I didn't care. I did my best. National pride, I guess. The shopkeeper shook my hand, hugged me, and sent us out with a massive smile. I have nothing but wonderful memories of Sharm. It cuts deeply to see the destruction there, like watching a gorgeous person senselessly disfigured. But there's no fear, no terror. Only anger.
Posted at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Topic: Egypt
July 22, 2005
Three movies you do not need to see
I had close to 48 hours of flight time while in and in route to China so I watched a bunch of movies, my full Netflix backlog plus a bunch of DVD's I had ripped to my HD. I scored with House of Flying Daggers (though I didn't love it quite like I did Hero) and Napoleon Dynamite (the dramatic power of a vacant teenage stare!), but oh did I bomb on my other selections. I don't mind bad movies, movies who know they are awful and revel in it. But truly terrible movies try real hard and still suck.
You know you have a winner with a line like this: "For maximum damage we use bullets coated in a photon-accelerated luminescent resin. Cuts right through 'em." For you laypeople, that's a glow-in-the-dark bullet. Scary! Alone In The Dark was incomprehensible. It started with many paragraphs of written prologue, apparently because test audiences were completely befuddled. It didn't help. And the funny part is that this movie derives from a game (never a recipe for success) and intends to provide the backstory to it. So when the backstory needs an explicit backstory you know you're not telling the story right. Part Aliens, part Relic, part Night of the Living Dead, part Men in Black, with a silhouetted Top Gun love-making interlude and dashes of glamband hard-rockin’ video, Alone in the Dark isn't comically bad (that'd be watchable) -- it is irresponsibly bad.
Boogeyman wasn't much better. When the one and only plot point of the whole movie is for a grown man to confront the fears from his bedroom of youth there just isn't a lot of room for drama or even fear. The dark is scary. We get it.
Hide and Seek could have been decent. Dakota Fanning and Robert DeNiro do a pretty good job. But it is a plodding movie. The payoff twist at the end doesn't offset the pain of making it there. Though seeing Elisabeth Shue shoved out of a second-story window is almost worth it.
Posted at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Movies
July 19, 2005
Decompile
Sentence diagramming. Man, did I love sentence diagramming. I can almost hear Sister Bernadette, my obese, structuralist 7th grade teacher, coming up with ever-obscurer sentences to slice-and-dice. It is so out of vogue to teach sentence diagramming now. I'm not even sure they teach the parts of speech anymore. This is a shame. Diagramming was like a game, a kind of puzzle where you were forcing organic, fungible elements of language into a Cartesian, controllable structure. Diagramming a sentence was like decompiling a program, with similar messiness. There are tools now, but nothing beats the one-on-one encounter with a hellishly convoluted syntax:
All this ... the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me.
Never heard of sentence diagramming? I know some people similarly handicapped. Read up at Wikipedia.
Posted at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words
Blown home
Typhoon Haitang has blown through Taiwan and buried itself on the mainland. As category 5 hurricanes go this one was surprisingly mild, I'm told. The eye skirted Taipei to the south so we missed the worst, though it did get damn windy there for a few hours. Trees that were individually lashed down were uprooted and rows of parked scooters were scattered like Matchbox cars, but there was very little flooding and no broken windows that I could see. Frankly, it was anticlimactic -- which is probably exactly how extreme weather should be. From my hotel window I could see a lone 7-11 convenience store. It was my little measure of how bad things were getting. It never closed.
Unrelated. If a cell phone company can know enough about your whereabouts on the global network to charge you international roaming rates then surely the technology exists to warn callers that a call recipient is in a radically different time zone, no? It would be great to receive an alert like "Are you sure you want to dial [name]? It is 3 AM in his timezone right now." Oh, and to the person who called for a password in the middle of the night: I have virtually no recollection of our conversation. How's that for password security?
Time to go home.
Posted at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: China
July 17, 2005
It's a long march to the melon
The meals in China have truly been great. We've commented repeatedly on how the communal Lazy Susan-style delivery of multiple dishes is the perfect way for Westerners to encounter new foods. Take a bit, leave a bit, or just keep on spinning the wheel if you don't like black jellied mystery meat. The only difficulty is that it is hard to know where you are in a meal. The number of dishes is sometimes unknown even to our hosts. Watermelon is always the last dish, but, as you learn quickly, it can be a long march to the melon.
Thanks to Jack Blanchard for this exquisite piece of gastronomical propaganda. Gastroprop?
Posted at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: China
July 16, 2005
The beast approacheth
Haitang is now a Category 5 Super Typhoon. And it is headed straight for the island of Taiwan. The eye will likely make landfall on Monday night. The red arrow helps you locate me. If you look closely I'm the one inadvisably standing in front of a big plate glass window.
Who would have guessed my first hurricane would be in the Pacific? Batten down the hatches!
Posted at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: China
Divine ship
The day after NASA scrubbed its return to space China announced that Shenzhou VI, its second manned flight, would go into orbit in October. China Daily reports that the announcement came on the occasion of the handover of a meteorological satellite from its maker to the Chinese government. Let's call it what it was, though. They're rubbing it in NASA's face!
Keeping with the China and excrement theme, Shenzhou VI will apparently contain a new toilet. Useful, since there'll be two taikonauts this time.
By the way, there's an official bottled water of Chinese taikonauts. Can you even imagine such a thing in America nowadays?
Posted at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
July 15, 2005
Typhooey!
I'm headed to Taiwan tomorrow.
So is Haitang.
Lovely.
Posted at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: China
July 14, 2005
Yin to the yang
The amazing growth of Beijing continues. Construction cranes everywhere, miserable traffic, mundane and mind-bending architecture all mixed together. In some far-future time when urban archaeologists are excavating the once-mighty Chinese capital they will be able to date it like a tree merely by counting the number of ring roads.
I haven't given Chinese public toilets -- and by that I mean putrid holes in the ground -- much consideration, but then this is the first real working trip I've had here with a female teammate -- and she ain't happy. Doing the right-angle levitation thing seems tricky indeed. I suggest two innovations:
(1) How about a belt-like waist harness that attaches to the door of the stall (if there is a door) which allows you to lean back, almost as though you were sitting throneward? Heaven help you if the harness breaks, but would be a lot easier on the calves.
(2) Disposable plastic heel protectors, like reverse sandals, in case your bombadier skills are lacking.
It did occur to me that Westerners must seem like the dirty ones to Chinese accustomed to hole-squatting. A skilled squatter never touches his/her skin to any surface whereas we occidental types must actually come in contact with germ-laden toilet seats. While it has been noted that levitating over a toilet is easier than levitating over a hole, I think this might be psychological. (My co-worker's blog Why We Work has much more on this.)
Speaking of excrement, I climbed the Great Wall again a few days ago. On my descent from the top I encountered a small child being urged to take a crap in a plastic bag. (See photo.) Gross, but that's about all you could do up there. When he finished the mother packaged up the bag like an urban dog-walker -- and then proceeded to pitch it over the wall! But the wind caught it and blew it right back on to the poor kid! The gods of the Wall had the last laugh. But I had the second-to-last laugh.
On a brighter note, I haven't yet been barfed at on this trip. (Hey, it happens.) Still some time to go though.
Much of meal conversation has been about language. (Thought I'd say excrement or something, didn't you?) We were talking about regional differences and the difficulty of using idioms when the topic of sun showers came up. Specifically, the ways different cultures refer to the phenomenon of rain when the sun is shining. I always called them sun showers but was recently intrigued to learn that some people in the American South refer to this as "the devil is beating his wife". The Chinese loved this euphemism. In China a sun shower is known as "love-not love" or unrequited love. I like that a lot. In Russian (according to a Moldovan teammate) this phenonmemon is known as "blind rain" because the rain cannot see that it is also sunny out. See, conversation like this is good when you're not in the mood for the duck tongue that's just been served.
I played in a small ping pong tournament at the Forbidden City a few days ago. Me and three colleagues -- two Chinese, one American -- took on the best that the Palace Museum could offer. We got killed. I mean, these people had ping pong shoes on, for god's sake. Scary part was that after the whomping they brought out two "professionals" who they clearly had waiting in the wings in case by some miracle we didn't suck as bad as they figured we would (and did). They played an exhibition match and it was exactly what you'd expect: standing ten feet back from the table, paddles upside-down, smacking the hell out of the ball, forty-hit rallies. My neck was sore from watching.
See also new phonecam pics at Flickr.
Posted at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: China
Anxiety of influence
It takes a very bold person to admit that Rave 'Til Dawn, one of the first compilations of rave electronica in the 1990's, is on his favorites list of the last twenty years. Or maybe just realistic. Kottke is just this person.
This is the worst album on the list but may be the most influential in terms of my future listening habits. For a kid who grew up in the country and went to college in a small Iowa city, hearing rave music for the first time was a complete revelation for me. I had no idea people were making music like this, so fast, so joyous, so unlike anything that anyone I knew would enjoy listening to. I loved it immediately and have been a huge fan of electronica ever since.
I remember a few years ago when I was digitizing all my music, selecting certain CD's that I wouldn't bother with. I dumped nearly all the post-RTD rave compilations (not sure there ever was a rave album by a single artist) either because it was simply too cheesy or of no redeeming music value whatsoever. But I couldn't quite let go of Rave 'Til Dawn -- and it certainly fit both those criteria. Maybe I just accorded it some respect for where it led me.
Perhaps the best thing about this album is that I smile whenever I think of the looks that my too-cool fellow DJ's at the college radio station would throw my way when I pulled it out of my bag. What, no navel-gazing?! How dare ye?!
Posted at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Music
Fuel for thought
Gotta admit I was selfishly pleased to see the launch scrubbed. It ain't easy catching a mid-afternoon launch when you are Houston +13. That fuel sensor problem really seems like the undead issue. Can't kill it.
I bet the commander, Eileen Collins, had deja vu when the window cover fell off on the launch pad -- and not because of the falling foam that doomed Columbia. Collins had her foot on the gas for the scariest ride up in recent shuttle history, STS-93, when three cooling lines were ruptured by a falling pin during main engine ignition. Collins and her crew ended up short of their orbit, but the mission was a success. I'm pretty sure NASA had this in mind when they selected her for the program's return to flight. She's apparently quite cool under pressure.
I really wish NASA had a shuttle alternative in the functional prototype phase in the next year or so. By my calculations, even if the shuttle makes it to the 2010 mothballing date there will be several years -- akin to the post-Skylab pre-shuttle era -- where the US has no operational manned space vehicle program.
Ironic that that the two bright areas in manned spaceflight are private industry and communist China. What an odd space race.
Sidenote: You can get uncluttered live video and often telemetry data from United Space Alliance, the contractors who provide many of the ground operations to NASA.
Sidenote II: Does anyone know of any good space blogs? Why can't I find this?
Posted at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
Anti-bacterial
Never read this blog before in my life, but I really liked this assessment of the extremist tendencies in political blogs.
Conclusions: The left is full of crop circle paranoids. The right is full of stupid angry people. The sheer volume of information in both does manage to strip things to bare bones facts, but not by virtue of intelligence, just volume - like a colony of bacteria feeding on a corpse.
Posted at 2:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Web
July 13, 2005
Forget brain radiation
Yikes! Three possibilities come to mind.
(1) The phone itself makes you more likely to get hit. (But what cellphone today has a significant enough amount of metal on it?)
(2) Lightning bolts can follow the invisible paths of cellular radio signals right to the handset. That'd make a great urban legend.
(3) Standing under this tree using a cellphone makes you more likely to get hit. But then why this tree? (There were other signs around following no discernible pattern.)
Seems to me that it must have something to do with the phone being on, otherwise why note anything?
This reminded a colleague of mine of a story of a woman in a park in London killed when lightning struck her bra underwire. Only one way to prevent that, I think. Be safe, ladies.
Posted at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech
July 12, 2005
Macro-genealogy
A little while ago I posted the results of my participation in the Genographic Project, a comprehensive attempt to fill the holes in our knowledge of human migratory patterns around the globe based on genetic evidence. I just finished Spencer Wells's short, accessible introduction to this topic and, coincidentally, spent a 14-hour plane flight sitting next to the producer of a documentary who is using this data to help African-Americans determine their home areas in Africa in the absence of genealogical information. (Sitting next to him wasn't coincidence; he's with me on business. That we're both interested in population genetics is coincidence.) So I understand things a lot better now.
The first realization is how incomplete the picture is. The Genographic Project looks for markers (chromosomal mutations passed on from generation to generation) in the Y chromosome for men and in mitochondrial DNA for women. What this means is that my information only reflects my lineage via my father and his father and his father and so on (called the "patrilineal line"). At the very least I'm missing the story from my other three grandparents. Three of them are deceased, but luckily I have relatives who can be tested.
Here's what I know so far. My patrilineal line comes from the second migration of modern humans out of east Africa after what is known as The Great Leap Forward, an evolutionary moment where homo sapiens, through a truly lucky genetic mutation, acquired long-term memory, which allowed for the development of language (since thoughts could be strung together linearly), and thus to the ability to think more complexly. They made their way to Mesopotamia over the millennia and then 10,000 to 15,000 years ago my people -- my exact line descended from a single person -- were the instigators of what is is called the Neolithic Revolution, the birth of agriculture. My ancestors were the first farmers. They were the peoples who expanded into southern Europe and northern Africa, literally sowing the seeds of modern society.
The marker that denotes all this is called M172. It is relatively rare in Europe, occuring in only 20% of peoples in southern Italy; 10% in Spain. My ancestors were sedentary and Meditteranean-hugging. Somehow agriculture was transmitted via this line to the rest of Europe. (How this happened exactly is hotly debated.) If this isn't fascinating, I'm hard-pressed to describe to you something else that is.
But, again, this is only my Dad's male line. There's more to be learned. For instance, my paternal grandmother has always said there is Native American blood in her. This test will prove or disprove that right away.
Get ready, Grandma, cheek swab incoming!
Posted at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Genealogy
July 11, 2005
Hey, what's the food like in China?
Here's a partial dissection of a truly wonderful lunch in the Imperial Kitchen of the Forbidden City. (Click for notes.)
Today was a scorcher full of meetings in Beijing. I started the day in a coat and tie and ended in an undershirt and sweaty socks. Fill in what you like.
Posted at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: China
July 8, 2005
Toot toot
Eternal Egypt is Macromedia's Showcase Site of the Day. Thanks, Macrodobe! (Remember when Cool Site of the Day was a must-visit web destination in the Netscape era?)
Might as well mention that the site also won a Webby Worthy award recently and, from a while back, a Best of the Web at Museums and the Web 2005.
Toot.
Posted at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Egypt | Topic: Work
July 7, 2005
London strong
In World War II the subway tubes were used by Londoners to escape the inferno of Nazi aerial bombardment. Today a new enemy made the Tube itself a hell.
If anyone can look this ghastliness in the face and not blink it is Londoners. Not only because of the decades of domestic terrorism that they have lived with but because of their resolve during WWII. I'm finding myself awed by the British people's organized and strong response to the tragedy.
Viva Britannia.
Posted at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
July 6, 2005
Win Ben Stein's seat
Recently I saw Ben Stein in the airport. He looked like any other business traveller, harried, laden with luggage. Except that he was at a pay phone, which I thought was odd. Who except a philandering spouse, a scrooge, a luddite, or someone who just left their cell at security would use a pay phone? Certainly no seasoned traveller. Imagine my perplexity, then, to see that Ben Stein has written an article full of tips for business travel in the NYT. And I disagree with nearly all of them. I'll summarize.- Pay for or upgrade to first class if you can. Well, no disagreement there, except that I would say that often times the exit rows and bulkheads have just as much legroom as first class so if you're not in it for the free champagne there is often an alternative to upgrading.
- Get the aisle seat. I hate the aisle seat. Your elbows get clocked, you have to get up to let your seatmates out (stow laptop, etc.), and worst of all there's no good way to sleep since you run the risk of laterally dumping into the aisle or the stranger next to you. Better to take the window where you will be undisturbed and can nuzzle against the wall.
- Use a travel agent. I have no great experiences with travel agents to convey. Unless you are in a complete bind with no access to a computer or direct access to the airline why would you go with an intermediary? Like real estate agents, the era of travel agents having information that their customers do not is coming to an end.
- Make friends with your fellow passengers. Stein advises this so that it is less awkward when you have to ask them to stop kicking you. I disagree. The last thing I want on a plane is smalltalk. Who knows what hell you're in for on an international trip if you drill a bit too deeply and hit a motherlode of incessant chitchat? And if you have to ask someone to stop kicking you, just ask. Must you have befriended them?
See also: Stuff in my backpack, international edition | Travel tip
Posted at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Travel
Surrogate band
Having watched the four songs performed by the reunited Pink Floyd at this weekend's Live8 concert I'm now wishing I hadn't. Oh, it was nice to see all four blokes on stage at once, sure, but there was no sense of real camaraderie or even musical cohesion. The reunion was supposed to demonstrate something along the lines of "if a rock 'n' roll band can work things out, can't we end poverty?"
Waters seemed more like a devoted fan who has been pulled up on stage to sing a few numbers with the band. He was clearly way more into it, melodramatic even, than the other fellas. And, insult to injury, Gilmour has been singing the Waters lines live for so long that they sound a little odd coming from the original. (I know, I know, Waters performs Pink Floyd live too.)
Maybe Pink should have stayed back at the hotel.
Posted at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Music
July 4, 2005
Bang!
The Deep Impact probe successfully slammed into the Tempel 1 comet early on July 4th. Nice fireworks!
NASA hopes to analyze the cometary innards for clues about the composition of the early solar system.
See also video from the impactor point-of-view just prior to collision and
images from the flyby probe, Hubble, and an elated Mission Control.
Happy July 4th, America!
Posted at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
July 3, 2005
Attention span is overrated
Recently I finished the gigantic Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson -- a monumental tale of the struggle for sustained progress in an age unaccustomed to it. And by that I mean my reading was such a struggle. 3000 pages -- more if you count the 900+ "sequel" published in 1999-- is a hell of a task, even for a bibliophile like me. With other reading priorities, book clubs not to get kicked out of, magazines piling up, movies to watch, blogs to cover, and TiVo to play catch-up with I bet it took me two-and-a-half years to read it all. Like Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle was a fantastic, mythopoeic intertwining of real events and people with fictional threads. Not quite historical fiction, not quite science fiction, just geek epic. (Quick test: if this intrigues you, you'll like the book.) But long. Way long. And long enough that more than a few people I know just said screw it. I'm glad I didn't. Back to this in a sec.
Right after I finished the last volume, The System of the World, I eagerly began Steven Johnson's long-deferred Everything Bad Is Good For You. Johnson's book took me less than a week to finish, mostly on the train. Having followed Johnson's blog throughout the book's writing I felt I knew its argument going in. Johnson targets the cherished piece of conventional wisdom which holds that popular culture seeks the lowest common denominator, that it dumbs-down content to hit the widest possible audience. He effectively argues the reverse, that today's television shows, videogames, computer interfaces, and movies to some degree are all much more complex entities than they were 20 or 30 years ago and that this complexity -- the storyline of an episode of 24 or gameplay in Sim City -- makes us smarter or, at the very least much better at problem-solving, pattern-matching, and long-term recall. Actually Johnson retains the "largest possible audience" part of the equation, but he suggests that the complexity of contemporary pop culture is aimed at creating that large audience through repeat viewings over time rather than during a single moment of programming as in the past. For example, Johnson argues that the complexity of a single episode of Seinfeld or The Simpsons rewards repeat viewing far more than one of Starsky and Hutch. This argument reminds me of author Michael Joyce's admonition that these days "a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings."
Something I've not seen addressed in commentary on Johnson's book is the short section that deals with what he calls the "peripheral effects" of pop culture's current state that may be seen as "less desirable". Johnson writes:
Thanks to e-mail and the Web, we're reading text as much as ever and we're writing more. But it is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred-page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in short bursts, following links across the Web, or sifting through a dozen e-mail messages .... But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form.
He means novels, of course.
You have to commit to the book, spend long periods of time devoted to it. If you read only in short bites, the effect fades, like a moving image dissolving into a sequence of frozen pictures.
Which brings me back to The Baroque Cycle. I've already admitted that it took an effort bordering on masochistic to complete such a long work when I rarely have more than a few minutes of time that something else isn't forcing itself into my cognitive foreground. But what's interesting is that I experienced Stephenson's magnum opus exactly as Johnson suggests a novel shouldn't be: in short bites, short bursts, successive attendings -- and I still loved it. Were the The Baroque Cycle a monothematic, page-turning best-seller I probably couldn't make this claim. But the sheer density of arcs, allusions, ideas, and characters allowed me (or, perhaps drove me unwillingly) to return to it consistently.
This drive didn't come from a longing to know what happens next -- in a story of such complexity things happen somewhat slowly. I'm pretty sure what kept me going was the complexity itself, the likelihood that, even if I could not remember where I was in the storyline (which gotta admit was often), some allusion would trigger a memory from hundreds of pages ago, like picking up on a reference in a Seinfeld episode from one many seasons before. This is Johnson's precise argument in Everything Bad, but he stops short of extending it to contemporary novels. As with movies, where Johnson notes that only a subset of overall output provides viewers with the structural complexity that most kinds of pop culture demonstrate, Johnson reels in his argument when it comes to today's written fiction. And I'm not sure why. The Baroque Cycle is an extreme example, but I think, like film, complex narrative exists and, while it might not be the dominant form (thank you Oprah, et al) it certainly partakes of the trend that Johnson describes. More succintly: believe it or not, certain forms of contemporary literature, heirs of the dense novels of the past, actually fit quite nicely into the hectic, multimedia culture of today. Their complexity rewards successive attendings as well as sustained attention.
Sidenote. As I am writing this I see that Kottke posted about Stephenson and Johnson too, though not with quite the same slant.
See also: Urban Library | Wheels and Towers
Posted at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Words
July 2, 2005
At least it ain't a Friday
Launch set for July 13. Countdown begins July 10.
Posted at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
July 1, 2005
Resolution review
It's been six months since I laid out my resolutions for 2005. Let's review. (It ain't pretty.)
- Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present.
Non completo. - Get a goddamn backhand.
Many lessons later, complete. Whether it'll hold up in match play is a wholly different matter. - Fall in love with NASA again.
Not yet, but I feel that I could be seduced more easily these days. - Be nice to political bloggers.
Publicly, yes. Lots of private cursing, though. - Learn to match beats when remixing.
Nope. Still a stutter-step crossfader. - When home, watch only high-definition television programming.
I achieved this for a few months. The Cubs season ended my streak though, as only a handfull of games are in HD. - Convert all old mix tapes to MP3.
Not going to happen. Quality too low; quantity too high. - Become able to change my son's diaper with one hand.
Ashamedly, no. - Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
Done. - Avoid the Black Death.
And done. (But that mole is a little worrisome.) - Get to know my nephews better.
Eh, sorta. - Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths.
Hell, I don't think I've even been to the baths since January.
Posted at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
