I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

I enjoyed this article from the Globe & Mail, about the possibility of discovering some kind of life on other planets. It's an exciting concept that I think would force a lot of people re-think their view of life on earth, but also it's just, well, cool to think about.

I also found this interesting:

“I'm certainly pretty confident biologists will understand the origin of life on earth this century. I suspect in 20 years we will have much clearer ideas of how life began,” he said.
“And that is going to be very important to answering how likely it is to have started elsewhere and where to look.”
He added: “If we understood how life began on earth, that would give us a clue to how likely it was to originate elsewhere and what the optimum environments were.”

I like when different fields or specializations interact. For some reason, the idea of biologists on earth helping astronomers know where to look and what to look for really grabs me. Maybe it's just because I like when people cooperate.

Also, I like articles about astronomy because, and I can't emphasize this enough, the universe is huge. The position of the Milky Way in it, and our solar system within that, is non-spectacular, not central, kind of off to the side. We're neither here nor there - literally: as the galaxy is constantly moving as the universe expands. If I understand it correctly, we're basically going in one direction as part of some massive big explosion (or "bang" if you prefer), which means the idea of location and distance and motion, as we measure them on earth, are all just relative as we're not stationary in the same location in the universe. Crazy to think about.

But my basic point is that with a universe that's 14 billion years old, with hundreds of billions of stars that we know of, it's hard to imagine that there isn't life out there someplace. But considering the closest stars are about 200 light years away - ie, it takes light 200 years to reach us (which means if we were being watched from a planet near those stars, they'd be seeing not us, but Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson) - it's going to be pretty damn difficult to ever get in touch with anyone.

For a bigger version of the picture, look here.

Sweet, merciful Crapper

Today the Cirque du poulet will take a break from the usual dose of hilarious jokes and brilliant insights to commemorate the death of a man who affected more people's lives than most of us ever will.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8481283.stm

“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration... that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”
- Bill Hicks

Some thoughts on reading at 30

There's something to be said for a 30-year-old's approach to serious literature, especially for someone who, like myself, has only come to literature with such gusto fairly recently. Of course, I've been reading books my whole life, and have been reading literature since, well, studying English as an undergrad. In my case, however, I didn't really start to appreciate it, or focus so much of my reading attention on it, until the past couple of years. I used to focus my mental energy on reading history, news, current events & politics. I was more concerned with acquiring facts and less interested in exploring subjective experience the way you can with fiction. It's only lately (as I mentioned in a previous post) that I've been more interested in reading novels than history & non-fiction books. And it's the thoughts about what this means that have prompted this post. I've switched to second-person. It was unintentional at first, but I kept it that way because I like how it depersonalizes the thoughts, changing its effect from that of a confession that of a profile.

Reading fiction at 30 still affects you – otherwise you wouldn't still do it – but you take it less seriously than you did at 30. You still have the innocence that allows you to be excited by new writers and ideas, but your outlook is tainted by a bit more maturity and experience than it was at age 20 or younger. You're more skeptical of ideas, more practical about life, less impressed with self-indulgent thought and less inclined to lose yourself in your own thoughts because you have bills to pay, friends to see, relationships to maintain – you spend more time living life than contemplating its meaning. Or, even if that balance hasn't changed since you were 20, you feel less guilty about it now.

You're not unhappy but you're somewhat disillusioned because you've seen that the world isn't a place where you can really do whatever you want, unless you're damn focused and you work your ass off and you're extremely talented and, of course, lucky. You have less patience to read books like Ulysses and anything by Henry James because the feeling that life is short is no longer creeping up on you but has already tapped you on the shoulder to get your attention. Not that you're old, not by any means, but when you're 30 as opposed to 20 the future you'd always imagined is here, even though you weren't expecting it and it doesn't look quite like you'd pictured, and by seeing this future for the first time you realize that the next future will also be here before you're ready.

As a 30-year-old reader of literature the realization that your time is not unlimited means you're less concerned with impressing people with the books you've read than you are with using your remaining days the best you can. You're less likely to read a book you want to "have read" even though you won't necessarily enjoy the process of reading it because reading a book you "should" read or want to "have read" is something done by a mind that's preparing itself for something, that's looking towards the future. It's a sign that you want to accomplish things, be seen a certain way, read those classics so that you get all the intertextual references to and quotes from Ulysses and Proust that you're sure to come across later on. When you're 30 that's not as important because you're just trying to find the time to read what you want to read, and have less patience for the books you think you should read. You're not in school anymore so the only "should" when it comes to reading lists is self-imposed, and at 30 you've got enough other "shoulds" in your life that the last thing you want is to find them on your reading list.

The self-imposed discipline to develop the mind of an intellectual or whatever it is that motivates a young reader of literature isn't there with the same intensity in the mind of a 30-year-old. Your maturity allows you to read for simple pleasure, and you feel less guilty abandoning your earlier dreams of brilliance or intellectual supremacy because you've seen too many struggling academics, pathetic wannabe writers and socially awkward geniuses who've read more than you ever will to either want to or even be able to keep up with them. You still read serious literature but if it doesn't say anything to you or have any relevance to your life you're less likely to force yourself to finish it and less afraid to dismiss it as shit.

25 Blasphemous quotes from blasphemy.ie

I don't have time to comment on this for now, but I think the site does a good enough job of explaining what it's all about.

http://blasphemy.ie/2010/01/01/atheist-ireland-publishes-25-blasphemous-quotes/

Life ain't easy for the Sioux

I just read an article about the problems on what is apparently the poorest Native reservation, and the poorest county, in the United States. It's amazing how much life on this reservation is closer to life in a third world country than what is typical for the United States, and how little Native problems are talked about in general. But what really struck me, and even impressed me, where the names of some of the tribe members, which I just have to share. Some of the names I particularly liked were Bear Who Looks Back Running, Has the Big White Horse, White Tail, Liver [Living] Bear, Little Thunder, Bull Dog, High Hawk, Lame, Eagle Pipe and Tashun-Kakokipa, or Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses.

It's a bit awkward to essentially say "Wow, what cool names" because some of the names are those of teenagers who have killed themselves, like one boy with the last name Kills Enemy. The title of this post aside, I don't intend to make light of the issues the article brings up. But I think recognizing the survival of names like these is a reminder that Native American culture (in this case Sioux) is a separate, existing society in the United States, that is still alive though in terrible shape. For me, the strangeness of the names - so evocative of a world I thought had completely disappeared through genocide and assimilation - just strengthens the feeling that this the world described in this article is such a foreign one, right in the middle of the United States, but not really a part of them.

Transit City

Oh my. Toronto is planning several new streetcar routes as part of its Transit City initiative, which overall I think is a great thing - especially the Eglinton line, which will be largely underground. But I just read that the current Toronto streetcars do not conform with international standards for track widths, being about 2 inches wider. However, the new streetcar lines will, meaning Toronto will soon have 2 different and incompatible kinds of streetcars. Now, the wheels on an individual streetcar can be adjusted, so the problem is not in the manufacturing. The problem is that I predict, at some point, the city will want to better integrate its new lines with the old in order to have a better and more convenient transit system. But, because the tracks will be different sizes, they won't be able to. This sounds like a very bad idea. Reading this on the same day I read about increased commute times in the GTA doesn't give me much optimism for the future. Why must this city find a way to screw up any good idea it ever has? Do you have to be a clown to get any kind of decision-making authority around here?

There is only one way to travel east-west in the GTA by transit, and that's the subway. The streetcars are slow and cumbersome, especially as traffic worsens - making even the 401 and the Gardiner less convenient for drivers. I wonder if it would be practical to have a dedicated street for streetcars, maybe King St. or Queen St., where the traffic is already horrendous. Not a dedicated lane like Spadina or the new St. Clair line, but to make it an entire street just for the streetcar, and even reduce the number of stops to speed up the whole commute.

I keep thinking back on streetcars I've ridden in Prague, Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere and I don't remember them plodding along like Toronto's "Red Rocket," and I'm trying to remember what was different. Looking at pictures like this, from Prague I see only one lane of traffic next to the streetcar, and no parking. I wonder how that would look on King St. And if it would help.

Tablets and whatnot

I was just reading about today's announcement of Microsoft's new slate computer. It looks pretty cool, as these things always do, but the reviews didn't seem to be overly excited by it. I'm assuming anticipation of what Apple might come out with is a part of that. But in general, I'm just curious what niche these slates or tablets or whatever you call them are going to fill. Will they replace phones or laptops? They're not as small and handy as a phone, so you can't exactly just stuff it in your pocket, but they also don't have a separate keyboard like normal laptops, meaning they're not that convenient for typing, and thus for school and/or work purposes.

Is the appearance of these machines evidence of an expectation that the idea of a keyboard is going to become obsolete? I don't think so, and I don't think that could ever happen. When it comes to typing, smartphones (such as my newly-acquired iPhone) are great for short messages, like small emails or texts, or even entering a web address, but as long as people have to produce longer bodies of text, some kind of keyboard is still going to be needed. So I'm wondering if, even despite any touch-screen keyboard slates and tablets might have, they're going to be produced, marketed, and used as nothing more than multimedia entertainment devices.

My friend J. just reminded me that some laptops already have this feature, allowing you to write directly on the screen. But these are still laptops, allowing users to have all the traditional typing functionality you need for producing anything more than a quick message. I guess the best possibility for tablets to be useful for work is if they incorporate a really good note function that can read your notes and handwriting, or even just save them as you enter them without having to convert them to Times New Roman. But I don't know if they offer that, so I'm still wondering what niche tablets that are nothing more than tablets will fill.

iUlysses: James Joyce, reading, religion and technology

I had started writing a post just about reading Ulysses, but it started dragging out and soon reached more than 600 words before I even really got into the book itself. Lately I've been seriously reflecting on what I read and why I read, and my thoughts on this will probably spill over into the iPhone discussion I'm working on (see the Update, below), so for now I'll just sum up my initial thoughts on Ulysses with two essential points:

1. The Catholic/religious parts appeal to me. Having been raised in a Catholic home, by parents who still practice exactly as they have for my entire life, the idea of Catholicism and whether it has a role in my life at all is something I struggle with regularly. I'm not religious or a believer by any means, but with no bad or traumatising memories of a Catholic childhood, it's hard to just cut off something that was such a big part of your youth, so it's helpful to read Joyce, who seems to have had similar struggles as well. This is particularly true in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But the opening scene of Ulysses – about a man who refused to kneel at his mother's deathbed despite her strong wish for him to do so – really struck me. In this scene the character in question is being criticised for this by his friends, at least in a friendly manner, and it's a situation I don't consider impossible to see myself in. I've read about Joyce's non-religious but ambivalent relationship with the Catholic church, and this is one of the elements of his works that appeals to me.

2. It's a damn hard read that I don’t think I'll ever finish, at least not without expending more effort than I normally do when reading. And this is a problem for me since I'm not an academic and I'm not a professional writer, I generally read for pleasure, and there's no real need for me to read something I'm not enjoying unless I want the sense of accomplishment of having done so afterwards. With Ulysses it's a problem, though, because at this point – about 350 pages in – I can honestly say I've read those 350 pages, in that I've passed my eyes over the words on every page, but some parts of it are so confusing that I can't say that I've gotten very much out of them, and I can't really offer much in the way of thoughts or insight on large chunks of the book. There are some truly beautiful passages, but I just wonder if it'll be enough to sustain my interest over another 600 pages. Fans of this blog may remember my initial enthusiasm with starting Proust, which fizzled out after about 200 pages - about 3500 short of the finish line. Twice failing to get half way through 2 classics of literature that I was genuinely excited about before I picked them up says something about me, about what I choose to read, and about why I read at all. I'd say that's an appropriate prompt for some more fun and sexy self-reflection.

Update: My mobile phone contract was about to expire so I was in the market for a new one, and I just acquired an iPhone 3GS. In the less than 48 hours I've been playing with it I've discovered that it is, above all, pretty damn cool. With this new toy in my pocket I can safely predict that in the near future I will be a) reading somewhat less and b) not be getting much closer to the end of Ulysses, but not fretting about it so much either. I downloaded 2 eReader programs (Barnes & Noble and Stanza), which so far have been less than impressive. It's a neat idea but from what I've seen I don't think the iPhone works as a medium for reading books. The rest of its features – what I've seen so far, at least – are pretty damn cool. It'll probably be worthy of its own blog post in the next couple of weeks once I've had a chance to get used to it and reflect on it.

Fiction of my imagination

I'd written some notes on reading non-fiction vs. fiction, but after reading through them I realized that a) I'd covered that ground before and b) I didn't really agree with what I'd just written. Because of that I decided to just include a memory of high school English class, and some comments on reading books on science. I don't really have time for more right now.

I recall my high school English teacher, Father Naumann, explaining to us that one of the criticisms of Dickens is that he 'sacrifices art for pamphleteering', but regardless of how faithfully I copied it down in my notes, and preserved it in my brain, at the time, it's not something I fully agree with now (at least, I wouldn't apply it universally to all writers). Novels are a subjective expression of the human experience, whether some well-known historical event or an aspect of life that is universally known but individually experienced, such as love, death, growth, that sort of thing. Poverty is part of the human experience, and part of the power of the novelist is to take that and personalize it by, instead of describing the horrors of poverty, simply showing them. Maybe Father Naumann's criticism was that Dickens was doing quite enough by showing us the poverty of Victorian London, and didn't need to harangue his readers with essays about injustice at the same time. Which, to be honest, I don't recall his doing. It's been a long time since I've read a Dickens novel. And Father Naumann did once also say that my high was home to 'boys and other idiots' so maybe everything he said should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, my point is that a novel can have a political perspective without necessarily weakening itself, and a good political rant can be an effective literary device if put into the mouths of a character and not the narrator. Unless the narrator is a character and not outside of the story, in which case it's much more involved. But this is neither the time nor the place for a discussion of the profoundly influential field of narratology.

I should probably clarify that what I said above about non-fiction doesn't apply to books on science, or scientific study in general. Reading about politics and history is essentially looking at words written by humans about what other humans have done. Reading about science is looking at words written by humans about the natural world that we have to deal with every day, regardless of our intellectual inclinations, so I differentiate it as people writing about things instead of people writing about people. I think fiction writers with a knowledge of science have the option to add an extra dimension to their work (and not just in science fiction), which I don't think I'd ever fully considered before. This is something I've been reflecting on since discovering Simon Mawer's essay on Science and Literature, providing me with a delightful and convenient bridge between my recent science kick and my love for the experience of reading good fiction. It included this line:

As an undergraduate I heard the Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen start a lecture course on animal behaviour with the words, “Some people try to extrapolate from our studies to human behaviour but if you wish to learn about the behaviour of man don’t ask the ethologist; turn rather to the great writers. Read Dostoevsky, read Tolstoy.”

Books and life

After a couple of weeks off, and more than a month of nothing more substantive than just posting amusing quotes, I'm starting to get back into the blog game. (Is there a blog game? Doesn't like like it'd be much fun). I've had a lot of literarish thoughts on my mind lately, and had an interesting conversation with J. over some Guinness & Kilkenny last night, so as long work does not demand too much of me today, I'll try to get down some thoughts on what I've been reading and watching lately, including Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything, Simon Mawer's The glass room, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, as well as articles and interviews on and with the likes of Hemingway and Roth and Bolano. Some superb books, and various life changes taking place around me as well, are providing me with plenty of fodder for the amateurish philosophical reflection which I enjoy so much, and it's a shame to let it all waste away in my brain instead of sharing it with my readership (note that by adding '-ship' to the word 'reader' it makes it sound like more than one person reads this blog).

You might also like to note the new additions to my links section. I just discovered the love german books blog today, and it looks like it might become a part of my daily blog rounds. Maybe I should create my own called love Czech books - tough this site seems to be doing a good enough job.

Douglas Adams, talking about the internet in 1999:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Source: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

When JFK visited Berlin he was mocked a bit by Germans for saying "Ich bin ein Berliner," which is apparently some kind of a jelly doughnut. Of course to an English speaker this sounds fine. It just occurred to me how funny it would have been had he given the same speech in Vienna, where he'd have said, "Ich bin ein Wiener."

Quote of today

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

More on libraries

...and why some places are better at providing public services than others. As usual, no comment because it's late and I'm tired.

http://www.thestar.com/article/698252

Quote of the day

All things are subject to interpretation - whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

To be followed by a quote from Monty Python:

It's all very well to laugh at the military, but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear! That is why we'll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
- from The Meaning of Life (of course, lightning strikes him down as he finishes the last sentence)

Phoenix envy

In the 'cities are broke' category, I learned about (via cryptogon) serious budget problems in Phoenix, which is forced to cut 10's of millions of dollars from its budget. This article doesn't give any details specific to library cuts, but based on what other city agencies are losing, I'm sure it won't be pleasant.

This is also the first article for which I'm finally adding tags. I don't know why I never bothered to before. Probably because 2 people read this blog. Anyway, maybe I'll go back and add them to some older articles as well.

Information-rich and attention-poor

I don't feel like commenting on this article right now because it's Sunday morning and I want to get outside, but it's a really well-written summary of how information-gathering is changing us and the idea of 'knowledge'. This is one of the most interesting parts of being a librarian - thinking about issues like this. Unfortunately, all I tend to see are calls for understanding or adapting, rather than actual suggestions on how to do so, but still, I thought it was worth sharing. I'm starting to think it might be worth having a whole blog just dedicated to posting articles, with the occasional commentary, on such issues.

Some highlights (the italics are mine):

Knowledge is evolving from a “stock” to a “flow.”...A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a quasi-permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library – whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge...Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation....Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock.
.....
Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow moves on. This has a subtle and pernicious implication for the production of knowledge. When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the “market” for depth is narrowing.
.....
There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public.
.....
What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even amateurs to access a growing fraction of the corpus of human knowledge...the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content. Moreover, the value of traditional expert authority is itself being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of what is fast and stripped-down.
.....
The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today's “cult of the amateur” will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.
.....
Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
.....
For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind.

There's not always money in Philadelphia

I learned of the inevitability of the closing of Philadelphia's libraries on October 2 via a library listerv I subscribe to, and after looking into it very briefly I realized the problem goes well beyond just libraries. Serious cuts to fire and police services, not to mention garbage pickup and daycare (after living through this for 6 weeks here, I can only imagine if it became permanent - even though these are just cuts and not a total cancellation).

I was drawn to the story because it relates to libraries, which I think are an essential and fundamental part of any city - they serve as active cultural centres and also repositories of a community or society's cultural memories. They also often act as a key gateway to information for many people, from books & CDs to internet service. However, it's clear that the city of Philadelphia has problems beyond just access to information, and when you're cutting police and fire, I can understand that it's hard to justify keeping libraries open. I don't know enough yet about the details of the situation, so I don't have any real commentary or insight to offer, but it is a shame that any city would reach the point of cuts to so many essential services. It is frightening to think how much the loss of these services will hurt the quality of life for the people of the city. I wonder how widespread this sort of situation is across the United States.

For the record, here is a more or less complete list of what's being cut.

SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

After reading this article, I have just decided on a new and improved way to transfer my information. I can't afford to wait for my broadband connection to download data and information, especially not when there are so many unemployed pigeons in the world. I wonder if Winston has any relatives?