The Casual Blog

April 14, 2013

Lacrosse, seeing things, and ag-gag laws

Looking west at sunrise, April 13, 2013

Friday evening was supposed to be rainy, but instead was sunny and mild, and the dogwoods had just blossomed. Looking out over Raleigh from our apartment, the deciduous trees are leafing in nicely, lots of pretty green. The pine pollen season is also here, with the yellow powder coating our cars, and causing woe to allergies.

Sally and I drove over to Durham with Sally’s mom to see the Duke lacrosse team take on Virginia. Diane, at age 82, has become a big lacrosse fan, and bought us tickets as a gift.

It was a good contest. The score was 9-9 at the half. Virginia scored three unanswered points in the first five minutes of the third period, but Duke worked its way back to a 14-all tie with eight minutes to go. The final score was 19-16, Duke.

The sport is fast and exciting, and combines some of the best things about soccer (strategy, cunning) and hockey (speed and physicality). But we’re neophytes, and still trying to figure out why some outrageous things are penalized and other outrageous things aren’t. Are they really allowed to beat each other with those hard sticks?

During timeout, I enjoyed looking at the athletes and the fans in their summer clothes. I’m still very much in recovery mode after the second surgery on my left retina a few weeks back, and conscious at times of struggling to see, and at other times conscious of how extraordinary it is to see.

Tulips outside Diane’s apartment

At my appointment this week with Dr. M, my eye doc and new hero, he declared that he liked what he was seeing, and that things were coming along nicely. The retina was still attached, the scar tissue was settling down, and the hole in the macula showed signs of healing. I did not, however, do well on the eye test: the best I could do with the left eye was identify where the chart was — no letters. Dr. M said that this could improve after the next surgery in four or five months to remove the silicone gel (isn’t that a strange thing?) and probably remove the cataract that is probably forming.

This eye injury has been a reminder of how provisional the visual world is. At times I see things I know are not there, like bizarre floaters, and at times I see double images (one very blurry and one not). My depth perception is imprecise, so that tasks like putting a key in a lock are tricky. It’s harder to find things in the dishwasher, and easier to lose things most anywhere.

Of course, I’m not the only one with imperfect vision. Apparently we all (with normal vision) have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina, but our interpretive consciousness smooths out this problem and makes the visual field seem uninterrupted. Vision involves photons and neurons in an unbelievably complex process. Our ordinary sensation of a smooth continuous visual world is both a gift and an illusion.

This is one of the many interesting points in Bruce Hood titled The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (Oxford University Press 2012), which I’m currently reading. It’s a lively assemblage of neuroscience and philosophy organized around the issue of the nature of consciousness. The brain is an amazing thing, with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, but we’re just starting to understand the correspondence between the biological processes and perceived experience. Still, the evidence is accumulating that our understanding of conscious experience as a literal reflection of reality is quite wrong. Hood’s book also builds on the work of Gazzaniga (which I wrote a bit about here) and Kahneman (whose fine recent book I noted here), and takes some of their ideas a bit further.

Hood may be right that when we think of ourselves we are thinking about a thing that doesn’t really exist, at least in the way we normally thing about it. But he also seems to think that we can’t possibly completely dispense with our conventional notions of the self. Even with his throughgoing scientific perspective, he admits that part of him still cannot let go of the notion that his self is a thing. It does shake things up to try to think otherwise.

Speaking of shaking, I was dismayed to learn this week that several states have enacted or worked on making it illegal to expose animal cruelty at slaughterhouses with “ag-gag” laws. I thought that this was an issue that almost everyone agreed on: it’s just wrong to wantonly abuse farm animals. The corollary would be, it’s a good thing to expose and prevent such abuse. Videos and reports of such conduct are disturbing, to be sure, but they help correct the system. Why would we want to make that illegal?

There is, of course, an opposing argument, which posits that secret videos distort the truth, and those unused to the sight of ordinary animal killing may misinterpret what they see. That seems pretty weak — not entirely false, but not a justification for limiting free speech and insulating unspeakable behavior. In a brilliant little op ed piece in the Times, Jedidiah Purdy, a Duke law professor, agreed to take it at face value, and proposed a solution: let’s put webcams in all the slaughterhouses. This radical transparency approach would be educational and probably discourage some abuse.

Pine pollen

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April 7, 2013

Educational opportunities

Jocelyn doesn’t use the phone for talking too much anymore, at least to her dad, but she called this week to tell me she was admitted to the Columbia University publishing program. She was thrilled, relieved, and ready to start a new chapter: life in New York City. Her boss at the apres ski bar in Telluride agreed to buy her aging Nissan Altima, and she asked me to figure out the legalities. I said I’d be happy to do so.

Whatever doubts I may have about job prospects in the publishing business, I’m keeping to myself for the time being. It’s wonderful to see Jocelyn, so smart and talented, moving forward and exploring. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all go to New York and be students again?

As a matter of fact, one of the great things about my job is that I get to talk to and learn from really interesting and gifted people. This week I had lunch with Jamie Boyle, professor of law at Duke and one of the most clear-eyed scholars of intellectual property law. His last book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, explains with clarity and force some of the enormous problems with our patent and copyright systems, including how IP law can hinder innovation and creativity. He really is a brilliant guy, and a delightful conversationalist.

We ate at the Washington Duke Inn, which has a cozy clubby feel, and talked about some of the usual things, like sports and food, but also about his leading role in producing the Hargreaves Commission report, which advocated an evidence-based approach to IP protection. We discussed the possibilities for patent reform in Congress and the courts. We also talked about some of the hyper conservative activity in the N.C. legislature, and the N.C. constitutional amendment against gay marriage. We agreed that this right-wing crowd has gone beyond being embarrassing and is hurting the reputation and economy of our state. I also got to see his new car, a sporty and beautiful Jaguar XK.

In other education news, the NY Times reported this week that EdX, the online education consortium, has developed software that automatically grades students’ essays. Its new software is, it says, not perfect but about as reliable as human graders, and gives almost instant feedback to the student. This could be a game changer in education at all levels, potentially helping students with instant feedback, and also potentially eliminating a lot of teaching jobs. Will the net of it be better education at lower cost? And/or will it be another nail in the coffin of the traditional university, without a satisfactory replacement on the horizon?

David Brooks wrote a good column this week about online education and the role of the university. He proposed regarding the mission of higher education as having a technical knowledge part and a practical part. Technical knowledge is about things like formulas and facts, and practical knowledge is about skills that can’t be written down and memorized. Online outfits like EdX and Coursera can cover the technical part, but at least so far aren’t as effective at the practical part. We seem to need human-to-human interaction to learn some things.

Three Sparrows and a Cup, by Byron Gin

At any rate, the human touch is a pleasant thing. On Friday Sally and I went out to First Friday, downtown Raleigh’s monthly art and food celebration. We stopped in the Adam Cave Gallery, where we’d bought a painting some months back, and met the painter, Byron Gin. His current show, titled Aviary, continues the theme of the work we bought, with abstract elements, rough textures, and birds. Byron was a pleasant, soft-spoken guy, who seemed happy to discuss how he made his paintings. We remembered the painting we bought, and it was good to be able to tell him how it had brought as daily joy. Among other things, we learned that we shared an interest in bird feeders and photography.

For dinner, we tried without success to get into Bida Manda (wait time 1.75 hours), Centro (wait time 1.5 hours), and noted crammed dining rooms or lines out the door at Caffe Luna, Remedy Diner, and Sitti. It’s good to see our restaurants doing a brisk business, but when you’re hungry, you’re hungry. We finally got a table at Gravy, an Italian place, and had a pleasant meal including a Tuscan Chianti.

On Saturday, we went over to Durham to take in some of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The festival is an annual event that this year featured more than 100 documentaries, 7 different screens, and hundreds of cinephiles, which we somehow had never managed to get to in years past. The afternoon was sunny, and there was a happy energy to the crowd, an eclectic mix that reminded me of Oberlin (where the film club screened classic films once a week) and upper west side New York. The films we saw were all sold out, as were several others we couldn’t get tickets for.

Our favorites were a double bill by featured film maker Jennifer Yu: The Guide and Breathing Lessons. The first was about a park in Mozambique and a young man whose big dream was to be a tour guide. It explored serious environmental issues with a light touch. It featured E.O. Wilson, who at 82 was still charmingly fascinated by ants and other small creatures. Breathing Lessons was about Mark O’Brien, a writer who was paralyzed by polio as a child and spent most of the rest of his life in an iron lung. He seemed very honest about living with an extreme disability. Yu was in attendance, and after each film answered questions from the audience. She seemed really smart and likeable.

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March 31, 2013

Time again to practice golf

This weekend, after a spell of unseasonably cool weather, it finally started to feel like spring, and time once again for the game of golf. It’s a noble and beautiful game, played in lovely green gardens with flowering trees and streams. It requires strength and strategy, finesse and delicacy, repetition and creativity. There’s keen competition and also warm friendship. It is always challenging, and at times amazingly frustrating!

I’ve been re-reading my favorite golf instruction book, a book that changed my life, Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons (co-written with Herbert Warren Wind, the great New Yorker golf writer, whom I crossed paths with back in the day). It is remarkably careful and thorough, dissecting the intricate mechanics, helpful for beginners, but also with many details that will be understood only by more advanced students. It inspired me to check the details of my grip. Non-golfers, and many golfers, may not realize how intricate a matter it is to hold the club properly. Hogan (and Wind) realized. Anyhow, I decided to switch from the interlock grip to the overlap, with a view to hitting the ball farther. Will it help? We’ll see. For putting, it seemed promising. In practice I rolled in my first two hard breaking ten footers.

Practice, they say, makes perfect. An overstatement, of course, but practice is the way to cultivate a complex skill, like playing an instrument or a sport. I credit my early music training with instilling in me a belief in practice as a road to accomplishment. (Some of my thoughts on piano practice are here.) Fortunately, I actually like to practice golf. When things are working well, and the ball is flying high and long, it’s immediately satisfying. And when things aren’t, it’s an interesting puzzle: what’s not working properly? You can change a little of this and try again, and if that doesn’t work, try something else. It requires perseverance. It also requires patience. It takes time.

On Friday (a holiday), I took a couple of hours to practice each of the basic skills — short irons, medium clubs, fairway woods, drives, finesse pitches, chips, and putts. (I didn’t have a chance to do sand shots.) In the full swing shots, I was focusing on getting more of my body into the shot by leading with the hips. Some were flying too much to the right, but I tagged a few quite properly. My sight problem made it difficult to see where the balls landed, but didn’t hinder my hitting.

On Saturday I played my first eighteen holes of the new year with friends at Raleigh Country Club. A lot of the grass was still brown, and the greens were bumpy from core aeration, but it was still good to be back. My playing was uneven, and the score was disappointing, but there were some good shots, and hope for the future.

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March 24, 2013

No illusions, but not disillusioned

At my post-surgery eye checkup on Thursday, after being scanned, poked and peered at, I was happy to hear Dr. Mruthyunjaya declare, “I like what I’m seeing.” My retina was back where it was supposed to be. This doesn’t mean everything will be just fine. Vision in my left eye is quite blurry now, and it will be some months before we’ll know how much there will finally be. The likeliest answer is substantially less than before. But as Dr. M’s fellow, Dr. Martell, pointed out, even if there’s a lot of blur, it could still help with peripheral vision, and serve as a backup in the event of a right eye catastrophe.

Anyhow, it is what it is. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died this week at age 82. I have not read his work, but the Times obit made me think I might like it. It quoted Nadine Gordimer as saying he was “a writer who has no illusions but is not disillusioned.” A good way to be.

I was also happy that Dr. M cleared me to resume exercising, though he suggested I wait another week before my next killer spin class. So early Friday morning, my usual spinning day, I happily did a functional fitness routine and a half hour on the escalator stairs. The stairs are a relatively new machine at O2 Fitness, and they are remarkably effective at pushing up your heart rate. As usual, while sweating away I listened to some opera (the incredible second act of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro) with my MP3 device and read on my tablet device.

I reread some on the ideas of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics, whose name is pronounced “Hite,” as I learned this week when I heard him give a lecture at Duke. My earlier thoughts on Haidt’s theory are here, but I’m still processing his big ideas, which point dramatically away from traditional political theory and its reliance on rationality. His TED talk on the differences in ethical systems between liberals and conservatives is a nice introduction to his theory.

As Haidt observes in the TED talk, there are two types of people: those who like new ideas and experiences and those who prefer the safe and familiar. He notes that the latter are the people who like to eat at Applebee’s.

On Thursday Sally and I tried for the second time to eat at a new restaurant in our neighborhood, Dos Taquitos, and again failed. The place was cheerily hopping but the wait time was too long for us, so we went down Glenwood Avenue to the uncrowded Blue Mango for some Indian food. We had a delicious meal featuring masaledar allo gobhi (cauliflaur and potatos) and eggplant bhartha. We couldn’t finish it, and I asked for a take-home box, which I carefully prepared and then accidentally left on the table. Darn!

For more new musical ideas, I had a piano lesson with Olga on Saturday morning. It was invigorating! I played Liszt’s Liebestraum (Dream of Love) No. 3, a famously beautiful piece (here played wonderfully by Evgeny Kissin). She gave me a massive compliment, and I quote: “Wow!” She thought I’d vastly improved, and was getting a richer sound. But of course, it can always be better. We worked on getting a more stable connection between the body and the instrument, including not just the fingers, but also the back and the core. She showed me on a type of touch involving a very relaxed hand with mostly arm movement. She also gave me some new ideas on pedaling, including using a slow, slightly delayed release. As she noted, it makes magic.

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March 17, 2013

More eye surgery, healthy habits, a gay marriage revelation, a new veggie restaurant, and the shame of the processed food industry

This week I had eye surgery to repair the effects of scar tissue from my previous eye surgery, with the understanding that there would probably be more surgery needed in future. And so in the space of a few weeks I’ve gone from an adult in remarkably good health with no history of hospitalization to a fairly experienced consumer of modern American medicine. There are, of course, some negatives, such as worry, fear, and pain, but I’m trying to stay positive. It’s a learning experience.

Most of my healthcare team at the Duke Eye Center, including nurses, orderlies, anesthesiologists, and doctors were surprisingly cheerful and supportive. The anesthesia was designed to keep me partially conscious, which it did, and so I was able to listen to the conversations of the team and the music they listened to (vintage rock, unfortunately). I was instructed to let them know if things hurt, and I did speak up a couple of times when it got fairly intense.

The operation involved removing scar tissue from my left retina and eye wall and reattaching the retina to the wall. It was an extremely delicate procedure and took about three hours. When Dr. Mruthyunjaya checked me the next day, he was pleased with the initial results, but noted that it would be some months before we’ll know how much vision I’ll have with that eye. At some point I’ll need cataract surgery as well. But that day I was able to see the top couple of lines of the eye chart, which was an enormous improvement from last check, when I couldn’t make out any letters at all.

Healthy Habits

I was banned from all strenuous exercise for at least a couple of weeks and possibly more. I’m not sure Dr. Mruthyunjaya appreciated that this was a fairly harsh sentence for a person like me, with a big exercise habit. Getting to the gym or other physical activity most every morning is something I just do. It makes me feel better for the rest of the day and is part of the long-term plan of staying healthy and happy. But I don’t think about the pluses and minuses at 5:15 a.m., which would be way too much work. It’s taken a long time to get to the point where exercise is almost automatic, and does not feel like dreary work. I don’t want to lose the habit.

With this partly in view, I decided to recommence my computer programming studies during the newly freed up early morning. I signed up with Codeacademy for their free online Python course. It should keep me in the habit of getting up early. So far, it’s been interesting and mostly fun, though also frustrating at occasional junctures when I get stuck. I’m thinking of it as a lot like learning Spanish: an exercise that at a minumum serves to stimulate the brain in a healthy way, and could turn into a skill that could come in handy.

Gay Marriage Switcheroo

Speaking of brains, in the news this week was a report that Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, had decided to switch from an opponent to a backer of gay marriage. His reason? His son came out as gay. I had two reactions to this:

1. good
and
2. you’ve got to be kidding me!

As to 1, I’m happy that Senator Portman has seen the light, and come to view gay people as entitled to the same civil rights as everyone else. But as to 2, coming to this view really shouldn’t depend on having a gay child!

All of us place special weight on the welfare of our loved ones, but that isn’t a very reliable starting place for broader moral reasoning or policy making. Otherwise, those with healthy families would have no concern for the less abled, and those in a majority race would ignore the rights of minorities. This would be a morality with severe myopia. I wonder how much conservative family values blather is accounted for by such myopia.

I don’t mean to be too hard on Senator Portman, who must surely possess more-than-usual courage to take issue with the conventional and rabid views of his party. We could all benefit from exercising our empathy muscles. Here’s a suggestion: what if we all spent five minutes a day imagining that a specific human in a group we generally dislike is our dearly beloved child? Our imaginations could extend the diameter of our circle of caring and feeling. This would be a good thing. I’ll go first, and try to think loving thoughts about a rightwing fringe Republican.

Trying a New Vegetarian Restaurant

Last night Sally and I tried Fiction Kitchen, Raleigh’s new vegetarian restaurant on Dawson Street. It was full when we got there, with a wait time of 45 minutes, which would exceed our usual supply of patience, but we found a place to stand near the bar and had some Chardonnay. The vibe was hip-funky, similar to Poole’s, but with a younger, edgier crowd — think tatoos, grad students, gays and lesbians, interracial couples, and even a few babies. Oh, and one middle-aged guy with a strangely red left eye swollen half-shut. The place hummed with the sound of many conversations.

The food was creative, with an emphasis on local seasonal ingredients. For appetizers, we had the wintery spring rolls with spicy peanut sauce and seasonal fritters, which had NC apples, spices, and bourbon-agave. We split two entrees, the sweet potato sushi rolls with sashimi tofu and braised tempeh with pesto grits. Every bite was tasty.

Shameful Goings on in the Processed Food Industry

It was really cheering to see a new vegetarian business in Raleigh doing so well. As regular readers know, I’m a big proponent of healthy, ethical eating, which is another habit that’s good for humans, and also fun. But there are powerful forces promoting unhealthy food. For evidence, see an op ed piece in today’s NY Times, by Michael Mudd, a former honcho with Kraft Foods, titled How to Force Ethics on the Food Industry.

As a former insider, Mudd seems credible when he characterizes the business of large food processors as “enticing people to consume more and more high-margin, low-nutrition branded products.” He describes how “relentless efforts were made to increase the number of ‘eating occasions’ people indulged in and the amount of food they consumed at each.”

According to Mudd, “Even as awareness grew of the health consequences of obesity, the industry continued to emphasize cheap and often unhealthful ingredients that maximized taste, shelf life and profits. More egregious, it aggressively promoted larger portion sizes, one of the few ways left to increase overall consumption in an otherwise slow-growth market.”

Mudd also describes the food industry’s clever PR efforts to deflect attention and regulation, such as attributing the obesity epidemic to other factors. There are, of course, multiple factors, but none with the same despicable level of conscious intent. At the same time, they contend they are giving the victims “what they want.” These wants, of course, are the product of advertising and food engineering. (There was a very interesting piece in the Times magazine by Michael Moss a couple of weeks ago on the dark art of synthesizing junk foods that are almost irresistible.)

For solutions, Mudd proposes federal and state taxes on sugared beverages and snacks that undermine health, which would generate funds for education programs and subsidize healthy foods for low-income people. He also recommends mandatory federal guidelines for marketing foods to children and better food labeling. This makes sense.

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March 9, 2013

An eye exam, a veggie burger, and a new ballet

It was a busy week at work, with many new issues popping up as I tried to address the existing backlog. I also made a visit to the Duke Eye Center for an exam in preparation for my eye surgery next week. My ophthalmologist, Dr. Prithvi Mruthyunjaya, seems both brilliant and humane, but his patients have to spend an awfully long time in the waiting room. This was also true of Drs. Denny and Casey. Is this a retinological tradition? Are damaged retina patients more-than-usually patient? Dr. M. described my prognosis as “guarded.” At a number of levels, I felt not so great.

On Friday Sally and I did dinner and a ballet. For dinner, we made our first visit to Chuck’s, a new place on Wilmington Street that features in gourmet hamburgers. We quit eating cows many years ago, and so initially assumed Chuck’s was not for us, but then were told on good authority that they made the best veggie burger in town. It was, in fact, really good. It had flavor and pleasing, chewy consistency. And it didn’t fall to pieces.

The Carolina Ballet led off with a new work called A Street Symphony by Zalman Raffael. It was set to hip hop music, which, as almost everyone knows, is music emphasizing pulsing polyrhythms and rhyming gritty lyrics, and deemphasizing melody and harmony. I developed a taste for hip hop a few years back, when I found the Sirius radio hip hop channels, and found it to be good music for driving a sports car. I liked the raw immediacy and experimental transgressiveness. It is also, of course, good dancing music, but hip hop dancing seems worlds away from the ballet tradition.

Combining radically different movement vocabularies could be a banal experiment or a disaster, but Raffael succeeded brilliantly. His work Rhapsody in Blue, presented earlier this season, was soundly designed and had some marvelous flashes, but seemed more the work of a skilled apprentice than a master. With A Street Symphony, he has arrived, with a strong sense of architecture and humor.

The work is made up of seven songs, with the dancers arrayed in solos, couples, and ensembles. The set and costumes are minimalist, with the women wearing gauzy tutus of various colors pulled above their tights. In the beginning, the pounding rhythm is unsettling, and the first piece, Clockwork, uses a robotics theme that is fairly familiar. But Alicia Fabry’s replicant is both energized and vulnerable, with limbs shooting about at amazing speeds and a startled doe-eyed gaze.

I also really liked Jan Burkhard and Yevgeny Shlapko in Best of Me. Jan is a dancer with an sensual quality, and here she was fearless. Classical dance walks a fine line with respect to sex: it candidly reveals dancers’ bodies and deals with intimate subject matter, but almost never references the act itself, and is careful not to push the red button. But hip hop is sexy, and Jan embraced it. So did Eugene, who had a rangey freedom that recalled the hood.

Lindsay Purrington was really touching and beautiful in Cry Me a River. She did various transformations, including a streetwise tough and a Swan Lake swan. At one point her tutu started to fall to pieces, which added an unplanned degree of tension to the performance, but she dealt with the issue with grace, eventually ditching the thing stage right, and strutting boldly forward. Adam Crawford Chavis lifted her magnificently overhead.

This was unquestionably ballet, with pointe shoes and the traditional vocabulary, but augmented with exciting movements from urban street culture. The most successful dancers seemed to personalize their roles, though some stuck close to the familiar classical lines. For one, Margaret Severin-Hansen, who is a fantastic classical technician, was sharp and intriguing, but seemed to me to hold back a bit from the street. On the other hand, I thought Sokvannara Sar, Nikolai Smirnov, and Cecilia Ilieusiu all found interesting individual ways of combining the upmarket and downmarket.

Anyhow, I really liked A Street Symphony, and also Robert Weiss’s new work Idyll, set to Richard Wagner’s lovely Siegfried Idyll. It featured three couples and flowing lines. I was looking forward to The Rite of Spring, but it came after the second intermission, and I was just too tired to take it all in. Sally thought it too was wonderful.

It’s time to subscribe to next year’s ballet season. We’ve been going on Friday nights for fourteen years and have excellent front-center orchestra seats, but I think we’ll switch to Saturdays. On Fridays I often find myself tired after a busy week that includes 5:30 a.m. workouts, and not always able to hang in there intently for a full evening of beautiful performances. Our NC Symphony subscription has been on Saturdays, and so we’ll have to manage some conflicts, but it seems worth it.

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March 3, 2013

Utah ski tips

As much as I love skiing the big mountains of Utah, I had mixed feelings last week as we headed out to Park City. Vision in my left eye has been very limited, which has affected my depth perception and balance. But exploring physical limitations is part of what makes skiing interesting. I was looking forward to the kinetic excitement and raw alpine beauty, and to seeing old friends.

Our flight through Dallas went smoothly, and it was snowing hard when we landed in Salt Lake City. We took a shuttle (which our driver called “the Love Van”) up to Park City over snowy roads through limited visibility. When we arrived, some of our friends who’d arrived a day earlier were sitting by in the living room by the fire, and others were in the hot tub in the back. After saying hello, we walked three blocks to the lift area and to rent skis. I went with Volkyl Mantras, an all mountain ski I’d liked in previous editions, and which turned out again to be highly versatile in changing conditions (powder, groomed carving, chop, and bumps).

The next morning I cracked a good sweat trying to jam my feet into my ski boots, and for a few moments I thought they simply would not go, but in the end they did. The day was cold (low teens), but we were dressed adequately (five layers over the torso and two over the face). There was not as much powder on the mountain as we’d hoped, but on the whole the snow was light and workable. After doing two or three groomed runs, Sally and I tried some bumps. We were a little rusty at first, but managed ok.

We ended up skiing the first two days at Park City and the last two at Deer Valley. The usual knock on Deer Valley is that it’s too sweet, with such amenities as good on-mountain restaurants, comfortable lifts, and careful grooming. This is not untrue — the food, lifts, and grooming are quite nice — but it’s also not the full story. We loved the skiing there. The system is elegantly laid out and linked together. There were almost no lift lines. Yes, there are a lot of cruisers, but they’re really good cruisers, some quite steep, and there are also some exciting bumps and gladed areas.

At this stage of my ski career, I enjoy the rush of shooting down groomed cruisers, but I soon find myself craving more varied and challenging terrain (typically rated as black or double black diamond). Finding the right degree of challenge is part of the secret of happy skiing. When you’re right at the inside edge of what you can handle, you experience a special type of happiness. During th event, you don’t know your’re happy, because you’re completely focused and absorbed in solving the intricate speed chess problem of the next few dozen yards. The challenges are constantly changing.

This is an aspect of flow, which I read about last year in Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another book which has some worthwhile ideas but too much padding. Anyhow, I try not to spend too much time just doing those things that come easily. This trip I was focusing on steep moguls,and found myself getting more adept at them.

Here’s my tip, which I got from a teacher in Telluride: getting pressure to the inside edge of the down hill ski about twelve inches from the tip. Particularly when coming into the backside of a mogul, force this spot down into the snow. This causes you to press your weight forward, with your shins driving hard into the tongue of your ski boot. This technique helped me stay out of the back seat, which is where problems usually develop, and to feel well in control.

Anyhow, I felt stronger and more confident on the slopes than last year, or ever. It could be my personal trainer’s innovations, yoga, more swimming, foam rolling, or eating a healthier diet. Or perhaps a combination of some or all of these. At any rate, we skied hard every day, with many exciting challenges, and my legs never gave out.
My vision problem didn’t hamper me too much. Especially in more crowded areas, I tried to be conscious of looking around carefully for other skiers, but we usually stayed away from those places. It’s possible that my hearing and sense of touch were carrying more load. It’s also possible that adrenaline increased the speed of visual processing, and cropped some of the bad signals from the left eye. At any rate, I was able to forge ahead.

Sally really lifted her ski game this year. She was going much faster and looked relaxed and happy. I persuaded her to change out her trusty white cap for a white helmet, which she agreed was comfortable and warm as well as safe. It was a pleasure to watch her.

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February 26, 2013

Tire service, and new interior design

Tire care and repair is something I don’t usually think about very much. But there are times when it comes to the forefront of vital issues, and last week was such a time.

Some weeks back, my left front Michelin Pilot Super Sport (a primo tire) developed a slow leak, and was nearly flat by the time I first noticed it. I began stopping at the quickie mart every few days for air. On the latest fill stop, I apparently broke the valve stem on the left back Sport, which began hissing. Replacing the cap stopped the noise, but I wasn’t confident that it stopped the leak. I had visions of flat tires, waiting for a AAA tow truck, and the slightly condescending sympathy that car rescue guys can’t help feeling for those that need rescue.

In the end, I kept enough air to drive to the repair shop. I did a bit of Google searching on Raleigh tire shops, and settled on Murray’s New and Used Tires. The web site emphasized that it was a family business and an ethic of service to the customer, and had several positive costomer reviews.

When I got to Murray’s, even before I was completely out of the car, a young man was asking how they could help me. He went to get some pliers and made an adjustment to the back valve stem that fixed it immmediately. Hurray! He then offered to check the front tire, which he had off in a matter of seconds, and he located the hole a few seconds later. He said they’d fix it for $28 and guarantee the patch for the life of the tire. Not bad! I waited in their main office, where they offered me a coffee in a friendly way. Ten minutes later I leaving fully repaired and only $28 to the negative.

It is really cheering to discover a great service provider — one that can not only perform the service competently, but does it with pride and a certain style, and seems to enjoy displaying their expertise. The team at Murray’s had that air of competence and also of getting a kick out of life. I thought I might enjoy such work, though perhaps not for very long. In any case, I was really grateful that they could do it.

One downside: in a moment of weakness I agreed to give them my email address, and shortly after rhey began sending spammy ads to my email and phone. I guess they need more business. Please go over there if you have a tire problem and tell them it was not because of the spam, which they should stop.

Service, or helping othere, is a beautiful thhg. As social animals, we are always seeking ways to connect, and the services we give are primary connections. When we serve others and receive services, we build relationships and communities. With this in mind, I look differently at the person who is helping me buy groceries or clothes, or repair tires. The exchange is not just about money, but also about being humans together.

This has been one of the satisfying things about upgrading our apartment decor. Working with Blair Sutton has reminded me that there are types of skill and talent that are both enormous and sometimes barely noticeable. Blair makes good design look really easy, and fun. I know it’s not that easy, but it seems an authentic expression of who she is. In this sense and others, she is a true artist.

Our most recent project, the guest bedroom, was in full flight this week. The reason — once we got the other room looking good, the guest bedroom looked dowdy — the slippery slope when you start improving things. Blair consulted with us on functions we needed, like a desk for me and more storage for us both, and came up with a design that seemed like it had been somehow buried in our subconscious.

Blair hooked us up with some excellent painters, who covered over the cherry walls, which just never worked, with a cool gray. The painters seemed to like to paint, and were really good at it. The new furniture arrived, including a cute and functional desk that reminds me of Shaker furniture. We got sconces, and got electricians to put in the sconces, as well as to reroute the cable hookup to the other side of the room. The electricians also put spot lights on our new paintings, which makes them pop. They also gave good service.

We’re still waiting for the new headboard and a couple of other items, after which I’ll post some photos.

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February 16, 2013

Snapchat, engineered forgetting, and a status update on my left eye

Snapchat is one of those ideas that sounds either silly or useless, and then turns out to be brilliant. It’s an app that allows sharing of photos that after a few seconds automatically disappear. It’s like engineering in a very human characteristic — forgetting.

We tend to forget how important it is that we are forgetful. We know we don’t remember everything, but tend to think of this as a bug rather than a feature. But think how social life would be different if we all remembered everything. How could we talk if we knew every word would be preserved forever? Every stumble, every foolish idea, every faux pas, every little falsehood? Who could bear to be accountable for each and every interaction?

Until the digital age, our basic problem was how to remember the things that mattered. Preserving memories was difficult, while forgetting happened naturally. As the digital age has progressed, this ordering has been turning upside down. Anything that can be digitized and send through the internet (words, images, sounds) is easy to save and hard to discard. Inevitably among the frozen perceptions are ones we’d rather forget.

We’ve only recently started to understand that this is not a trivial problem. We know or should know that change is constant and inevitable. Our ideas and opinions change, and the things we love today we may love much less of in years to come. This is one of the reasons that tattoos are generally a bad idea. There’s an element of risk every time we express ourselves in digital form — a risk that we’ll change in an unforeseen direction, and our expressive gesture will be something we come to regret.

If teenagers just can’t resist the urge to send naked pictures of themselves on the internet, it would be great for their present and future selves if they could avoid the potential of embarrassing themselves before an audience of billions. If Snapchat achieved no more than that, it would be a good thing. But it could point the way towards more nuanced and flexible digital communications. Lowering the stakes for our internet lives would open new possibilities for creative expression.

In writing posts for the Casual Blog, I try to imagine whether a future self, quite different from the current one, could comfortably coexist with this record, including parts that may be disagreeable. Of course, if my future self were really hateful, I would want nothing to do with him, and my current self wouldn’t mind unsettling him. It’s strange to think of battling a future self, but to some extent, each fixing of a position does so. It could even prevent the development of some aspects of the future self. Is that good or bad? Is there any way to know?

For friends who are following the saga, I’ll note that this week I got scheduled for additional eye surgery to be done in March. The operation on my left eye last November has not healed properly, and scar tissue on the eye wall has left me with very limited vision. At last test with the eye chart, I couldn’t see the topmost E.

This has made all the activities of daily life that involve depth perception (like moving or eating) or seeing things on the left side (like driving or going to parties) more challenging. The good news is that my original retina surgeon has passed me on to Dr. Prithvi Mruthyunjaya, a professor at Duke, who appears to be a rock star in this area, and who is experienced in the unusual procedure I need. I’m looking forward to recovering.

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February 3, 2013

A new novel about AI and the Turing test

Sally’s re-reading Anna Karenina, which seems to me both admirable and exhausting. The recent movie version with Keira Knightley was highly stylized, but reminded me of what I enjoyed about the book when I read it in my twenties. It is rich book, full of feeling and thinking. But it’s long!

As a teenager and young adult, I read a lot of long novels, including ones by Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Elliot, James, and Proust. My “big novel” period was a time when I was coming of age and constructing a particular consciousness. Those big books were part of the process.

Nowadays most of my waking hours are spent working, and there is stiff competition for precious non-work time. I’m still interested, though, in novels, and especially ones that take on issues that haven’t been thoroughly mined out. I just finished one such: A Working Theory of Love, by Scott Hutchins (Kindle edition). It’s about a guy who’s working on an artificial intelligence program designed to pass the Turing test, which is a real competition suggested by Alan Turing.

The Turing test is designed to probe whether machines can think. The challenge is to build a computer that can persuade 30 percent of humans that it is human. (I wrote about a very interesting non-fiction account of the test and artificial intelligence, The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian, here.)

Hutchins’s narrator bases his program on his father’s diaries. After getting the computer to converse coherently, he works on humanizing it by adding emotion and sex drive. As the program improves he has the feeling that his father is coming back to life. This creates an interesting moral dilemma. His father had committed suicide, but the project seems to be denying him his freedom to choose death.

I found Hutchins’s premise thought-provoking, but I ultimately didn’t care very much for his narrator. But he’s where the action is. It’s exciting and terrifying to see how fast robotics and artificial intelligence are transforming the world. The AP did a good overview piece last week, which I recommend highly. As they note (and as I’ve noted before), jobs involving any sort of routine (most manufacturing, transportation, retail, and office work) will soon be gone forever, taken over by robots and AI. This means increasing efficiency and wealth for some, and unemployment and anomie for a great many others.

We’re going to need to re-think and re-size our social programs for a world where humans are not needed to produce most goods and services. This is a daunting task, even leaving aside the extreme polarization of our politics. The shift away from human labor as a process that is the source of economic value and meaning is hard for us to grasp and accept. But we somehow need to provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected.

I’m not prepared to propose a program, but I do have the name for one: the Big Deal. It will need to be bigger than FDR’s New Deal. It will surely involve some sort of cash payments and medical care. I’d also add a work program that channeled redundant workers to activities that would provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose, like caring for other humans.

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