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wall-e!

Someone's designed a real-life Wall-E for the Terrefuge Rapid Re(f)use Project:

Looks like a good idea, too.

the structure of knowledge

Via Kevin Kelly, a rather nifty map of scientific knowledge, as determined by citations within journal articles.   And here's a (slightly less readable) map of knowledge relationships as determined by "clickage," or clicks from one reference source to another:

What I find striking about these two maps - aside from their innate coolness - is the fact that neither of them links into any of the liberal arts.  There is plenty of linkage to the social sciences - more, in fact, than I might have expected - but nothing regarding literature or the visual arts.  As far as the "maps" are concerned, art and science exist in completely different worlds.

"Art is the tree of life," said William Blake, "science is the tree of death."  That's not a widely held belief these days.  And the Internet, for example, is nothing if not an amalgam of technology, literature, and graphic art.

C. P. Snow's observations about the "two cultures" aren't considered relevant by too many people these days.  Even Snow backed off them quite a bit.  Yet here's a map that suggests he may not have been too far off the mark, at least in terms of the intersection of two academic worlds.  Some of my favorite art works take place where these two worlds collide.

And where exactly is that point of collision to be found?  "It is not down in any map," Herman Melville wrote.  "True places never are."

High-Tech Luddites and Stupid Number Tricks

Guess what? That volcano in Alaska just exploded again - twice, in fact. The Associated Press reports that "the larger burst (sent) an ash cloud 65,000 feet in the air." Oh ... and the ash was "razor-sharp."

No doubt some will renew their carping about Bobby Jindal's use of "something called volcano monitoring" as a laugh line in his response to the President's speech before Congress last month. "What Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington," he said. Some will point out that airliners could have flown into these ash clouds had there been no monitoring, causing considerable loss of life.

Critics may well add that the self-proclaimed 'pro-business' party seems unaware that businesses need some warning in order to protect their inventory from a rain of "razor-sharp ash." Otherwise they could experience billions in losses.

But I'm struck by something else: These anti-technology sentiments were delivered with the finest technology known to humanity. From teleprompters to television cameras, the GOP used countless scientific discoveries in order to get Gov. Jindal's message to the American public. Why, they even used the Internet, which was created as the result of a government-funded research project to improve the flow of data traffic between computers (back when computers were rare).

I can just imagine what Bobby Jindal would've said back then: "Congress would be smarter to improve the flow of data traffic between its ears."

And John McCain's been using Twitter, the latest fad technology from that silly traffic-flow machinery, to make fun of scientific allocations in the Federal budget. "900,000 for fish management - how does one manage a fish?"

Note to Sen. McCain: Americans spent $42 billion last year for recreational fishing, and the NOAA says commercial fishing contributed $28 billion to the U.S. economy. Fish imports are second only to oil. We import more than 60% of our seafood, creating a trade deficit of more than $7 billion annually.

Sounds like a little "management" is in order, don't you think?

But it's the Twitter part of this story that gets me. Once again the anti-science crowd is using the fruits of scientific labor to get its message out. It's as if the original Luddites, those factory-destroying rebels from 19th Century Britain, decided to destroy those industrial looms ... with a steam engine.

And the Luddites had a genuine economic complaint. These folks are just doing it to get votes. Here's a suggestion: If you don't like science, send your next anti-science message by carrier pigeon.
________________

They're playing games with numbers, too. I just heard it again: Congress has voted so much money for the stimulus bill that you would have to spend a million dollars a days since Jesus was born just to match it.

This is what we might call a "stupid number trick." It's a way of taking figures from one class of measurement - in this case, a calendar - and combining them with another for simple shock effect. In the case of this video, they also juxtaposed well-loved Jesus images with a clip of Sen. Chuck Schumer, who has a pronounced New York Jewish accent.

(Hmm ... wonder why they picked him?)

The "every day since Jesus was born" idea makes it sound really big. But let's play with it a little: Let's suppose you started a town and added one person for every single day since Jesus was born. What would you get? You'd get a city smaller than Charlotte, NC. And what if you bought 18 cars a day, every day since ... well, you know when. You wouldn't have as many cars as pass over the freeways of Los Angeles in a typical 24-hour period.

Let's do a little more with numbers. The "million dollars a day since Jesus" comment was first made by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. 18,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance, according to the National Academies of Science. McConnell and his allies have been fighting universal coverage since he entered politics in 1967.

So if you allowed a sick man, woman, or child to die in front of your eyes every day since Jesus was born, you still would not have caused as many deaths as have been caused by GOP policies during Mitch McConnell's career.

Remind me: What did Jesus say about the Good Samaritan?

Then there's the cost of the Iraq war. If you spent a million dollars a day killing people in the Nazarene's part of the world you still wouldn't have spent as much as we've spent on this war. And while we're on the subject, nearly two million Iraqis have become war refugees and half of them are children.

If you drove one child from his home every day since Jesus was born, that still wouldn't be as many children as have been made homeless by this war.

Then there's the $12 billion in cash that the Bush Administration lost to corruption during the occupation (and that's just what we know about). If you lost $18,000 in cash from your wallet every day since Jesus was born ... Yep. You guessed it. That's how much they lost in this snafu alone.

Let's do one last number trick. Let's calculate what it will cost per person for all of us to pay for that "fish management" project that Sen. McCain mocked, and what it has cost so far for us to pay for the war that he so strongly supported:

Estimated per-capita cost of Iraq war (to date): $1,975.63
Estimated per-capita cost of fish study: $0,000.03

And the fish study may actually make us safer.

Best Concert Ever

When I did that best concerts ever list for Facebook, I forgot and left my BEST concert off: Jerry Lee Lewis at the London Palladium in 1970 (or thereabouts).   There was a riot between the Teddy Boys, who came to hear "Breathless" and "High School Confidential," and the working-class pub-drinking types there to hear his country stuff ("Another Place Another Time," "What Made Milwaukee Famous Made a Loser Out of Me," etc.)

An impossibly tall Ted with towering hair was there with his even more aggressive girlfriend.  They kept heckling Jerry Lee during the country numbers, running down the aisle past me screaming, "Hey, Jerry Lee!  Play 'Milk Shake Mademoiselle'!"  Finally a short, squat longshoreman type stood up, blocked their path, and said "That's Mr. Lewis to you!" while driving his fist straight up vertically into the Ted's chin.

Then it was on.

Chairs were being torn out and people were beating each other with them.  Debris was flying through the air. 200 bobbies came in, billy clubs swinging.   A Teddy Boy hit the girl with me (in his defense, she was screaming at him to sit the f**k down).  That left me honor-bound to take a swing at him.  Which I did, landing an ineffectual glancing blow.

He turned at me, eyes burning with hatred.  As he approached me, my fists raised in front of me in some pale imitation of a fighting stance, I was already picturing myself in the hospital with my jaw wired shut.  Just as he got within three feet of me and raised his arm to strike, two bobbies descended on him from either side.  They grabbed his arms and hauled him away.

At which point I wiped my hands together as if to say, "Took care of that one."

And all the while Jerry Lee kept boogieing on the piano with his left hand, twirling his pinky finger with his right, and muttering things like "wiggle it around just a little bit, honey.   Oooh, you know what I like ..."

Best.  Concert. Ever.

my first published "twitter sci/fi" story

Thaumatrope is a Twitter-only magazine of original sci-fi, horror, and fantasy stories.  And they pay!  My first story was published there, for their St. Patrick's Day issue.  Writing a short story in 140 characters or less is an interesting challenge.

Here's the story:

"4,000 light years to a crash in the bog. A lone survivor cries at night for what is lost.  She looks, she waits. She cries. Call her Banshee."

At 5 cents a word I'll let you figure out what I got for it.  Mustn't forget to declare it, or I could get in Tim Geithner-style trouble.

songwriters and scavengers

A great description of the songwriting process, from the Nick Lowe interview in Vanity Fair:

Up to that point, I hadn’t been writing songs very long and, like everybody else who starts out doing anything creative, you start off plundering your heroes’ style and catalogue. When you’ve exhausted that, you move on to somebody else and do the same thing with them, and the day comes when you’re rewriting your latest hero’s works, and you put in a little bit of the first guy’s thing that you ripped off, a middle eight, or a bridge, and as it goes on you include more and more of these bits and pieces that you’ve ripped off, until, suddenly, you haven’t ripped them off at all. They’ve actually become your style. And then all you need is a good idea. And then you really are in business. I remember having this idea—“What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding”—and almost falling over in astonishment that I hadn’t heard this before, that it really was an original notion.

Pretty accurate, I think ... like a pack rat that wakes up one day and discovers that it's made something shiny of its own.

And this rings really true:

The whole songwriting process is very, very mysterious. Most songwriters don’t know how it works, and if they did, they’d do it nonstop. But you just can’t. You can try, but it’s generally not much good. It’s dissatisfying and it hurts, if you just keep doing it.

15 Albums That Changed My Life

I got tagged on Facebook to describe "15 Albums That Changed My Life" (or words to that effect).  That's tough for me, since so many albums have, and my friend Lal is a much better listmaker than I am. But I narrowed it down through a rather arbitrary process.  Here was my thinking, at least at the moment I made this list:

1. The Ventures:  Walk Don't Run
2. Meet the Beatles
3. Mr. Tambourine Man:  Byrds
4. Highway 61 Revisited
5. The Who Sings My Generation
6. Chicago/The Blues/Today
7. James Brown Live at the Apollo
8. Kind of Blue
9. We're Only In It For the Money
10. Kind of Blue
11. Straight No Chaser
12. Merle Haggard, Okie From Muskogee Live
13. Tragic Songs of Life:  Louvin Brothers
14. The Harder They Come
15. My Aim Is True

I fell in love with the electric guitar when I discovered the Ventures.  I was only about seven.  I was working up the courage to ask my parents for lessons when my older brother Gary did.  I asked, but it was treated as a "me too" request.  They said "ask us again in six months."  Six months?  For a seven year old?  I didn't have the courage to raise the subject again for nine or ten years. 

You may have heard of the Beatles.  They were one of those "beat combos" so popular with the youngsters, remember?  We had moved to a new town in 1963 and I was feeling alone and depressed.  The President had been shot, too.  Then I walked by a record store and heard this music blasting out of a hi-fi (yes, hi-fi), and I knew there was some something better beginning, as the Kinks would say.

The first Byrds album introduced me to the 12-string, and to American-style harmonies.  Then Dylan's Highway 61 became an obsession - dark, funny, tortured, overly ambitious - even his excesses worked.   The Who Sings My Generation broke down even more sonic barriers (and I had seen them live at a Murray the K package show at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn - their first US appearance, one that also featured the American debut of Cream). 

So I'm now about twelve years old.

My oldest brother John brought Chicago/The Blues/Today back from college, and it introduced me to yet another great set of sounds - overamped harmonica, Otis Rush's vibrato, etc. - as well as opening a door into a world from which I had been completely segregated (by design, I suspect): the world of the urban minority poor.  I wanted more ...

... which led me to Atlantic Records, Stax soul, and most importantly, James Brown Live At the Apollo.  The Godfather of Soul eventually became so intense that it was like taking a drug to listen to him live.  My physiological responses to his music were so intense that it bordered on seeming almost dangerous.  But Live at the Apollo has the perfect balance between beauty and violence, aggression and vulnerability, love and ego ... emotionally it's a "catch and release" album.

Doesn't the Media Have a Little too Much on Its Plate?

As a concerned citizen who wants the media to succeed, I'm troubled: Aren't they biting off more than they can chew? Think about it: They're making detailed judgments about the president's workload -- you've heard all those "too much on his plate" comments -- while at the same time continuing to report on the economy, the Middle East, China, India, the Octuplet Mom, Chris Brown and Rihanna ...

Couldn't these journalists and pundits be losing their focus? After all, If the president and his 1.8 million employees can't address a broad range of issues, how can all these pundits and reporters?

Consider the flood of comments on this topic that Media Matters compiled yesterday. There so many "plate too full" and "bitten off too much" quotes here that it's making me hungry. Somehow, with everything else they have to do, they're finding time to micromanage the president's inbox.

They will insist, of course, that they're making this observation strictly for his own good. Anderson Cooper, for example, said that "President Obama has got a lot on his plate, both by circumstance and choice. Stem cells, health care, stimulus, two budgets -- this year and next -- and banks and more, smaller issues, of course, the kind that can damage a presidency little by little."

Said Cooper's CNN colleague, Lou Dobbs: "Critics say the president has been overwhelmed by the severity of this recession and his policies of bigger government could actually worsen the crisis." (When a media figure uses unnamed "critics" to voice an opinion, the word "critic" is a euphemism for "me" or "I.") And yet before Lou Dobbs took on the issue of White House task prioritization he already had a full-time job - advocating against immigration and defending people like Joe Arpaio, the sheriff who fed prisoners oxidized green bologna and marched them in public wearing nothing but pink undershorts.

Does a busy man like Lou Dobbs really have the time to adequately assess the president's workload?

Then there's Jake Tapper, who said "(W)ith the president taking on issue after issue after issue after issue ... some critics are wondering if this president thinks he can walk and chew gum and ride a bike and juggle and read a magazine and play with his daughters and take a nap all at the same time." And yet in the last 48 hours Tapper and ABC's other Washington reporters have reported on Justice Department detainee policies, Joe Biden and Amtrak, Sarah Palin and earmarks, the UN Secretary General's conflict with the White House, the arrest of a DC official, Obama's remarks about the GOP, earmarks, and women's rights ... and that's just on their blog.

ABC News only has a handful of reporters in Washington. And yet they dutifully keep chewing all they've bitten off, issue after issue after issue, while hopefully napping occasionally or playing with their children.

David Brooks is even more specific about the Obama diary: "I think the president should spend 50 percent of his time on the banking crisis, 25 percent of his time on getting our allies to coordinate with a global stimulus package and 25 percent of his time beginning work on a second round of stimulus." That's an 100% financial workload for the leader of the Free World. Yet many of Brooks' recent columns have strayed from the economy - to education reform, the future of political "moderates," urban planning, and "what life asks of us."

David Brooks is a talented man, but he's just one guy. President Obama, on the other hand, has nearly two million Federal employees working for him. Perhaps Mr. Brooks would be better served devoting 50% of his time to writing about social trends in suburbia, 25% of his time to think pieces about the moral challenges of contemporary living, and 25% of his time to television appearances.

Just a suggestion.

I'm not a hostile person. I like these reporters and pundits, and I think they do a tough job well. But I'm starting to think all these comments are motivated by a hostility to the president's agenda, rather than by a genuine concern for his ability to manage his work day.

Oh, wait. I said that wrong. I should've said, "Critics say that these comments are motivated by a hostility to the president's agenda." Either way, I think they should give it a rest... strictly for their own good, of course.

Revolt 2009! Computers Rise Up, Force Improved Health Care Upon Anxious Population

We see Freder descend into the underground city.   There he watches workers frantically push dial hands back and forth.  A valve shows the great machine building up steam. Finally it explodes.  Freder sees the machine transformed into a giant demon, spewing fire and devouring workers.

"Moloch!" he exclaims as columns of workers march into its gaping, fiery mouth.

- Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," 1927

From Ezra Klein we learn of the continued use of a discredited story: that Obama created the post of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology," presumably for sinister reasons. Improved health IT is actually one of the few issues where left and right - at least the reasonably informed left and right - agree. The position was actually created by President Bush in 2004. Its Republican-appointed prior occupant and his Republican-appointed boss (HHS Secretary Mike Levitt) both did some good work. Better health information is not a partisan issue - or at least it wasn't until now.

The latest appearance of this folktale - call it "Obama's Health Big Brother" - comes in a Bloomberg News editorial by Amity Shlaes that compares the current Administration to the best-known works of the Wachowski Brothers. "Barack Obama has dropped us all into The Matrix," writes Ms. Shlaes. She continues:

In the Obama Era, it seems, we all pick our way through anxious lives that have something to do with software. Like Keanu Reeves' Neo, we realize hour-to-hour that we are being manipulated by a system that has its own larger plan.

If only we keep a cool head, we tell ourselves, our powers of logic will help us escape the web. But each move we make, even the one that feels independent, takes us deeper into the Matrix ...

President Obama's $634 billion, 10-year health-care plan undoubtedly appeals to would-be Neos out there ... As in "The Matrix," freedom is a mirage ... and there's no escape.

If I tell you that before she's done she compares Peter Orszag to Agent Smith, you'll get the general idea. America reads this and wonders: Do I take the blue pill or the red pill?

(Think I'll take a Tylenol capsule. It's blue and red.)

Ms. Shlaes has more, like this line: "There was discussion during the campaign of tax breaks for employers for providing health care." (Actually, employers already have a tax break for providing health care. But let's not dwell on the details ...)

There's a pattern developing. It's the outline of a new politically-motivated mythmaking that's about finding spooky sounds on the organ, then playing them over and over until (they hope) the audience runs screaming from the theater. Why pick on the "national coordinator for health information technology"? Because that pedal might sound scary if it brings up memories of all those computers-are-taking-over movies from the seventies. Because some partisans believe that we all share a general anxiety about everything digital, that we all "pick our way through anxious lives that have something to do with software.'

Picture Julie Christie, cowering from a giant mainframe like she did in "Demon Seed." Except, instead of impregnating her with a human/machine hybrid, this computer wants to provide information about methodologies for the treatment of orthopedic injuries ...

Frightening, isn't it?

The problem is that, judging from the poll numbers, they're grinding away at the old pipe organ but nobody's listening. All of which gives me an idea ... how about a piece comparing criticism of health reform to 'Phantom of the Opera'? I could wring 1,000 words out of that one, easy. Think I'll pitch it to Bloomberg News.

In the meantime, I look forward to Amity Shlaes' next piece, in which she warns of the enslavement of humanity that's sure to come if people don't stop forwarding that cute video of a dog cleaning your computer screen from the inside.

white riot

Apparently I've angered some members of the White Power movement.  In the comments section of the "Storm Front" website - "white pride, world wide" - someone disapprovingly links to my post entitled "The Lines of Tribe Shall Soon Dissolve."  That's a line that struck me favorably from Obama's inaugural speech.

The idea doesn't sit well over there.  It's posted in response to someone saying that Obama will "prove to the world what he's all about."  The commenter adds:  "Lawlessness and chaos and blurring of all racial and tribal lines."

Which is pretty much the story of my life, and my family history ...