The Casual Blog

August 26, 2012

Upfitting my new Android phone and thinking more about accelerating technological change

This week I got my new Android smartphone upfitted with my email accounts and a variety of apps. I’d been reluctant to give up my old smartphone partly because of the investment, both in money and effort, of apps, but on reflection I realized that a good many of the apps I’d previously downloaded were seldom or never used. The move to the Galaxy was sort of like moving to a new apartment — a good opportunity for some app house cleaning.

I easily and with little expense replaced those things that were useful, like internet searching, weather reports, navigation, travel support, news, and music. I got my most used apps organized in folders that I could quickly get to. I installed personalized wallpaper (our dog Stuart). Everything seems to work fine, with the exception of the voice activated search feature, which is not ready for prime time.

Through clumsiness, I dropped the device a couple of times in the first few days, fortunately without causing damage. This provided some proof of its durability and toughness, but also served as a reminder that devices are not immortal. I ordered a Seido case for protection, which fits well and looks good. It has a neat little kickstand on the back.

I’ve been reading The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, by Martin Ford. Like Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Ford starts with the premise that technology is developing at an ever-accelerating rate, and examines the economic implications of that development. As our machines get smarter and smarter, they will replace people in more and more jobs. At some point, the kinds of jobs that most people do will be taken over by the machines. Those people who’ve become redundant will not be able to earn an income, and so will not be able to buy goods and services, and their numbers will continue to grow. Producers of goods and services will eventually have no markets. Then the economy collapses. Q.E.D.

Ford thinks there is a possibility of avoiding economic meltdown, but he thinks that will require dramatic shifts in the economic order. To continue production, we’ll have to find a way to sustain consumption. Ford’s solution involves taxation of producers to redistribute wealth to consumers. He suggests that we think about a system where supplemental incomes is distributed to sustain the cycle of production and consumption. In this vision, the individual’s primary contribution is as a consumer, rather than a producer. Production is done by the machines.

I came upon a lengthy essay by Marshall Brain on this same subject titled Robotic Nation, which is well worth reading. Like Ford, Brain accepts the premise that Moore’s law and its corollaries are leading inexorably towards computers so powerful that they will render a great many human workers redundant. To address the problem of economic meltdown, Brain has proposed a concrete solution: the government pays $25,000 to every citizen. He sets out a variety of ways this could be financed, from selling advertising to a smorgasbord of taxes.

Assuming Brain and Ford are correct and we manage to avoid economic collapse, the question I keep coming back to is what are humans going to do once they’re obsolete as economic producers? How are they going to find meaning and joy?

I’d like to think that when robots have taken over most of the world’s work, people who get Brain’s $25,000 payments would devote themselves to communities and caring for others, exploring the mysteries of the physical universe with science, creating aesthetic wonder with the fine arts, expressing their physical energy in competition and travel, appreciating the delights of the world of the senses, and otherwise expanding and expressing their creative powers. But I have some concern that they might just watch more TV and eat more junk food. Think of WALL-E, the touching and intelligent animated Pixar movie about the eponymous robot, and the degenerate blobby humans in his world.

To avoid massive blobbiness, we’ll need to revise and expand our value systems. Fortunately, that’s something that we can get started on without a major political reform or expenditure of funds. Even if the robot-driven future never arrives, it would be a worthwhile project, since there’s a certain amount of blobbiness already.

The place where I’d begin is with a deeper understanding of how our brains function, how human communities function, and how our systems of values and morality currently work. There’s a lot of exciting cross-disciplinary work being done, and I’ve written about some of it in the last few months (including on books by Jonathan Haidt,Michael Gazzaniga, Daniel Kahneman and E.O Wilson). I’m on the lookout for more.

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August 19, 2012

My new free smartphone, and some thoughts about technology and unemployment

I got my first free (aka open source) smartphone a couple of days ago, a Samsung Galaxy S III with the Android operating system. I love the larger screen, with its excellent resolution, and the form factor in general — light, thin, and rounded, and still small enough to go in my pocket. It comes with a good array of apps, and there are thousands more available at free or low cost. The touchscreen interface is intuitive. The voice command option does not seem as smart as Siri is reported to be, but other apps load fast and work beautifully.

Will this change the place of a smartphone in my life? Probably a bit, because the bigger screen and faster speeds (4G) make it easier to use. The civil libertarian in me worries somewhat about the ability of such devices to track me and potentially invade my privacy, but I’m also amazed and happy with all the useful things it can do, such as helping me with directions, accessing every type of knowledge on the internet, performing word processing and other computing functions, entertaining me with movies, music, and photographs, and connecting me to people through text, email, and phone. Smartphones can potentially make us more productive and happier.

At the same time, our technology is transforming us in other ways that are more worrisome. This morning’s New York Times has a long story on remarkable advances in robotics, which are replacing skilled manufacturing jobs in electronics and logistics, along with lots of others. The story cites a book I recently read and would recommend: Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

The authors, economists at MIT, present a clear overview of technological change, which they describe as increasing exponentially. Moore’s law continues to double processing power every 18 months, and software advances are moving much faster than that. Technology harbingers like Watson the Jeopardy champion and the Google self-driving car are the tip of the iceberg.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee recognize that computers can’t yet do everything humans can do, but they have already replaced many kinds of routine work, and inevitably will replace more and more skilled work. This accounts for part of our persistent problems of unemployment even as the economy is growing. Traditional economics assumes that new technologies will eventually produce new jobs, but B and M point out that if technology continues to improve exponentially, computers will be able to perform more and more human jobs better and more cheaply. It’s difficult to see how new jobs could equal those that are eliminated.

If they’re right (and I think they are), we’ve got major social dislocations ahead. In our society, people work not only to earn a living, but also define each other and themselves in large part according to their work. Thus unemployment is not just financially threatening — it’s humiliating. With more and more people unemployed, unable to buy goods and services and without social moorings, our social and financial system will face an existential crisis.

What is to be done? We’ll need to change the way we organize ourselves, the way we distribute wealth, and the way we think about value. We’ll need to find new approaches for valuing and caring for others, and for thinking about the meaning of our own lives.

I had a small epiphany on this yesterday when our friends Ken and Carol took us out on Falls Lake for some water skiing. They both retired early, and do things they enjoy doing, like boating, tennis, and travelling. I have trouble imagining myself retired in this sense. But as we sat on their boat on the lake in the late afternoon, we talked about our lives, told stories, and swam a little, and enjoyed the lake and surrounding forest. Then we took turns getting pulled by their quick little boat on one of their various toys. Ken rode a hydrofoil chair and a wakeboard, and I had a go with old school water skis, which I enjoyed enormously. These things have deep value: sharing stories and experiences.

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August 9, 2012

Wreck diving off of Cape Hatteras

Sally and I did a diving trip out of Cape Hatteras last Thursday-Sunday. Although we live in North Carolina and love diving, these were our first NC dives. We’d assumed that the sea life in the vicinity would be sparse and the visibility poor, and that we’d find it a bit of a comedown after our Caribbean trips. It turned out this was way off. The NC ship wrecks we dove had a profusion of sea creatures and ample light. Thousands and thousands of little fish, and some very big ones.

The most dramatic species we saw was the sand tiger shark. These shark are large (around 10 feet) and look mean. Apparently they are often used as the stock image for news stories about shark attacks. However, we saw dozens of them, and all were placid. They didn’t seem frightened of us, as was true of most of the species we saw, and we swam within a few feet of each other. They are beautifully designed and graceful, and of course, imposing.

I try to think of sharks in the way I think of bears — creatures that are potentially dangerous, but also fascinating parts of the natural world. They are not programmed killing machines or embodiments of evil. Shark attacks on humans are rare, and fatal attacks are freakishly rare — about ten a year worldwide. The risk of being killed in a shark attack is substantially less than being struck by lightning, or by an elephant. Also, as I learned this week, way less than the risk of being killed by a dog.

Why do most people fear them so much more intensely than, say bears or lightening? Shark phobia runs deep, and it’s unfortunate both for sharks that become victims of humans (100 million a year) and for humans who experience pointless fear rather than rapturous awe.

On this trip I tried underwater photography with a beginner-level underwater camera by Sea Life. I was glad I’d waited till I was reasonably competent as a diver to try this, because it could distract from doing the things that have got to be done in diving and enjoying the basic experience. But I was ready to give it a shot. Most of the images I got were not great, but I liked a few, and I had fun hunting for interesting things and fun looking at them afterwards.

NC wreck diving involves boat rides to the ship wrecks. Our longest trip, to the Proteus, took about two and a half hours. I wasn’t looking forward the boat ride part of the experience, but we had good weather — mostly clear skies and calm seas. Our vessel, the Under Pressure, was a 41 foot former commercial fishing boat that was substantially unfitted to accommodate six diving customers. It had a special lift on the back of the boat to haul out divers.

Once well offshore, out of sight of land, I was struck by how horizontal the landscape was. 360 degrees of flatness. At the same time, the quality of the water, its color and its energy kept changing. We saw flying fish, jumping dolphins, and one sea turtle on the surface. There were various gulls, pelicans, terns, and other sea birds. I spent part of the travel time recalling some of the great poems of Yeats, Frost, and Stevens.

Besides the Proteus, we did dives on the Dixie Arrow, the Kashena, the Monihan, the Abrams, and the tug near the channel. The wrecks were in varying states of ruin, but had attracted lots if life. Besides sharks, we saw a good number of sting rays, barracuda, tuna, snapper, a large sea turtle, and the occasional butterflyfish. Several people saw an octopus on the Arrow, but we missed it. We saw enormous clouds of thousands of tiny fish, which the locals refer to as “bait balls.”

Visibility for most of our dives was good — more than 70 feet. Our deepest dive, to the Proteus, was about 120 feet down. Bottom temperature was around 80. Current and waves were minimal for the first three days, though more challenging for the final day. I had an oxygen leak (which turned out to be from my BC inflator), which required me to cut the dive short and to ask Sally to share her air as we came back. Fortunately, she agreed. It was a learning experience.

Speaking of learning, I need to give a special shout out to Scott Powell, owner of Down Under Surf and Scuba, who organized the trip, led our group, and taught my course in wreck diving. Scott is a diving professional of the highest caliber, but he seems to really enjoy helping those of us less accomplished. He’s one of those rare gifted teachers that just loves his subject, never make you feel inferior, but make you excited about getting better. His passion and enthusiasm for diving are infectious and inspiring.

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July 28, 2012

The way to San Jose, Ridge Winery, and E.O. Wilson on human nature

I missed my flight out of RDU on Tuesday morning after trying to send off one too many emails. On the drive to the airport, as reality set in, I went through the five stages of travel anxiety: concern, serious concern, alarm, panic, and finally, acceptance. By the time I made it through the American Airlines queue and the agent said I was too late, I was able to agree calmly, and ask politely what my next best option was. She put me on standby for a flight three hours later.

With my unexpected airport time, I got an excellent shoe shine and a half-hour chair massage at Express Spa. A couple of times a month I try to get a chair massage from the Red Hat massage therapist, which I had to miss because of my trip. I was interested in some work on my shoulder, where there have been minor issues. I assumed that an airport massage would be more about feeling pleasant than serious therapy, but I was not averse to a release of some endorphins.

My masseur, a small guy from China, asked how hard I liked it. I said pretty hard. He obliged with a serious deep tissue approach. It took all my determination to resist begging for mercy. At one point I took note that massage therapists are required to pass a licensing exam, as it was coming into focus that massage could cause bodily harm. Then I realized I had no way of knowing if my guy was licensed. He finished with some blows that shook me like a punching bag. It was almost frightening. But once it was over, I felt great!

Being on standby involves a degree of anxiety. You’re either barely making the flight, or you’re going back to square one. On this trip, the gate agent said the I had a good chance of getting on the flight out of Raleigh, but a less good chance of getting on the connecting flight in Chicago. When I felt a wave of tension, I took a few deep calming yoga breaths, and tried to stay positive. Eventually, four and a half hours late, I got to San Jose, got a rental car, and headed to the hotel.

I was assisted by a Garmin GPS device, which smoothly directed me through every turn. This little tool has greatly reduced the anxiety of travel to unknown lands. Getting lost is almost a thing of the past. I still carry printed directions as a fail safe system, but I haven’t used them in a while. Thus have I outsourced a part of my mental load, and in using this now-common tool become a little more of a cyborg. I could lament the possible loss of map-reading skills, but won’t. Thanks to Garmin and all the scientists, engineers, and technicians who’ve reduced my worry level and bestowed more creative mental space.

There’s something about northern California that I really love. It isn’t the glamor, which I was far from, but it may be something about the light. After various meetings, I got a chance to tour Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz mountains. It involved a drive ascending 2,0000 feet along narrow roads with hairpin turns. The landscape was dry and craggy.

Our tour guides were experts and scholars of wine making, and I got a deeper understanding of the significance of soil and water conditions, vine life cycles, vine placement and spacing, pests, harvesting techniques, pressing, oaking options, considerations for blending, and aging decisions. The vineyard mountain views were beautiful, and the wines were excellent. It was also a great pleasure to meet our guides and experience their joy and passion for their craft.

On the long flight home, I finished reading for the second time The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson. Wilson, a senior professor at Harvard, is one of our foremost experts on ants, but his scientific passions are wide-ranging. In this latest book, he attempts to revive and develop an approach to evolution that includes selection not only at the individual level but also at the level of groups. He argues that this accounts for some of the defining characteristics of homo sapiens, including our intense desire to be part of a tribe or group and our superlative skills at interpreting the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others.

These skills made it possible for our ancestors to cooperate in a way that led to success versus other animals (including predators and our close relatives the Neanderthals), and to collaborate in agriculture, technology, and artistic expression. He also thinks multilevel evolution (individual and group) accounts for our never-ending interior conflicts between the urge toward cooperation and altruism (which benefits the tribe) and the opposite urge to seek competitive advantage over other individuals.

Wilson has a persuasive account of the origins and persistence of religious thought. In his view, it is characteristic for human animals to generate narratives to explain the unknown, and thus natural for communities to compose creation myths. Myths and rituals are adaptive in creating group cohesiveness, which contributes to tribal success. Religion has inspired great art and helped groups and individuals in difficult times. But Wilson ultimately concludes the costs of religion thinking outweigh the benefits, particularly once humankind acquired the tools of science.

Wilson would admit that the evidence for his multilevel approach to evolution is incomplete, and his theory is bound to be controversial. But right or wrong, I admire his willingness to engage and take some intellectual risks on the big questions, like the nature of human nature and the foundations of morality. He brings to the table spirited curiosity and the ability to draw on recent discoveries from biology, neurology, genetics, anthropology, climatology, and paleontology, not to mention, of course, myrmecology. He demonstrates the use of science as both a method and a world view — a world view that is both practical and inspiring.

My flight out of San Jose left 20 minutes late for Dallas, and my original Dallas connection was only 25 minutes. Dallas is a big airport, and getting from a gate on one side to a gate on the other can easily take 30 minutes. It seems I never leave from a nearby gate, so I had some worries, and took some yoga breaths. We came in at A37, and the flight out was at A33. I heard the announcement for final boarding for Raleigh as I stepped into the terminal, and took off in the OJ Simpson airport sprint. (I’ve noticed that gate agents sometimes look around for last second sprinters.). I was the last to board. Kind Fortuna!

Shortly after I got home, we had a thunderstorm and a strange sunset.

There were some birds this morning at the boardwalk off of Raleigh Boulevard. Most of them hid from me (like that small bird in the Frost poem), but a robin, a great blue heron, and a mallard family didn’t.

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July 21, 2012

Make way for Segways, Scouting intolerance, and speaking of ear protection

This week a group of us took an hour-long tour of downtown Raleigh on Segways, those self-balancing two-wheeled scooters. I learned that several Raleigh street names were the names of councilmen who approved the purchase of farmland for the city in 1792, and other similar facts. But more important, I learned how to move forward, backward, and turn. It takes approximately 5 minutes to learn, and 5 more to feel reasonably confident. A few minutes later at the old Capitol I was wondering how fast the thing would go, and the guide was begging me to slow down. I felt like one of the Jetsons.

When I think of fun adventures, I still think of my early years with the Boy Scouts. Even at the time, I thought the uniforms were a bit goofy, but I valued the friends I made and our close encounters with the natural world while camping, hiking, and canoeing. With this happy history, it pains me that the Scouts decided last week to reaffirm their ban on gay members. The Scouts instilled in me a highly serviceable code of conduct: a scout is “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

But there’s at least one cardinal virtue missing from the list: tolerance. Willingness to tolerate and accept differences is vital for individual and collective happiness. It doesn’t come easily or naturally, and it needs continual tending and encouragement. The Scouts should be promoting it without exception. As much as I was a committed Scout, as long as they have a policy of intolerance of gays and non-believers, I cannot support them.

At times it’s unclear whether unhealthy behavior is the result of ignorance or wilfulness. I’ve generally assumed that exposure to dangerous noise levels was an issue of ignorance. But a story in the NY Times last week suggested that some noise polluters had something close to a criminal mindset. Certain retailers, restaurants, and clubs have raised noise levels to the point where hearing loss is almost inevitable, and have done so with a view to attracting youthful customers to buy and drink more, and to repelling oldsters. If this is done knowingly, it’s despicable!

Young people, and indeed most people, assume that businesses and governments wouldn’t knowingly expose them to serious harm. It reminds me of marketing that used to hook kids on cigarettes, and still hooks them on sugary cereals and fatty fast food. According to the Times story, employees of noisy businesses have hearing and other problems, but regulations are almost never enforced, and few people complain. Here’s a thought — let’s start complaining.

Stuart, who had his tenth birthday this week, says, “Protect your precious ears!”

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July 15, 2012

Chilling with Robert Frost and a new camera

The hot weather finally broke last week, after setting a temperature record here in Raleigh for most consecutive days over 100 (6) and tying the all time high of 105. Most of the time, I’m in air-conditioned environments, but still, I usually try to spend some time in unprocessed air. During the recent heat wave, though, the idea of communion with the natural world seemed rash. The brutality of nature was in full display.

To cool off mentally, I refreshed on The Wood-Pile, a poem by Robert Frost. I memorized this chilly thing a while back for no good reason other than its stark strangeness. It begins, “Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I …” The narrator at first sees nothing but “tall slim trees.” It seems matter of fact, but it’s completely strange! Who goes walking in a frozen swamp? Especially when the sky is gray and gloomy?

As with other great poems by Frost, what seems at first to be simple factual reporting turns out to raise question after question. The nominal focus of the poem is on a well-formed cord of wood incongruously left in the middle of the snowy swamp. The narrator has personal knowledge of the hard work required to cut so much maple with an ax, and is baffled and offended that anyone could invest such effort in a fine wood pile and leave it “far from a useful fireplace.” He speculates that such a person must be someone who “lived in turning to fresh tasks.” This is, from the narrator’s viewpoint, a strange and disturbing thing. And so we wonder more about the flinty narrator.

A woodchuck near the Buckeye Trail

Is it a bad thing to turn to fresh tasks? The poem make us wonder, but still I think, generally not. New challenges are, more often than not, good. I undertook one last week and bought my first digital SLR camera with the thought that I’d like to engage with the visual world a little differently and take better pictures. I’ve been drawn by photography since I was a kid, but in the pre-digital era was discouraged by the difficulty of working with film (dark rooms, chemicals, and so forth) and the expense.

I also worried about that the camera sometimes shuts off the photographer from experience. Think of gaggles of tourists taking snaps of the Grand Canyon — and forgetting to look at it. Direct experience of beautiful things, or even not-so-beautiful things, is a terrible thing to waste.

Balancing that risk, though, is the possibility of finding a different way of seeing, and also a different pathway for communication. I’ve enjoyed using my little point-and-shoot to share images with friends, and noticed that at times taking a picture created an interesting shift in my own visual perspective. A photograph is an abstraction from a larger visual reality, but being conscious of this can focus attention on the larger reality. Deciding whether something is worth snapping and how to snap can open things up.

Anyhow, I got a Nikon D3200 with two Nikon lenses (an 18-55 zoom and a 55-300 zoom). Although the D3200 is an entry-level SLR, it is, to me, amazing technology. 24 million pixels! Four shots per second! ISO 100-6,400! Fast autofocus! A vibration reduction system! HD video with sound! And it fits my hands perfectly. All that it requires is knowledge, experience, and creativity.

I was thinking that it would be fun to photograph wildlife, and especially birds. I’m also interested in trying to look at human-built places that are not intended for show, places that happen as a by-product of other objectives, to see what we might be missing. Above and below are some of my first efforts.

Mallard ducklings at Lake Johnson

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July 7, 2012

Science news — the Higgs boson, global warming, the nature of consciousness

I’ve been trying to follow the story of the search for the Higgs boson for a long time, and so I felt excited by reports this week that scientists at CERN have discovered a new particle that could be it. Quantum mechanics is not something I would ever aspire to have a deep grasp of, but even skimming the surface is mind bending. The subatomic world has different rules from ours.

I also really like the purity of the enterprise. It’s primarily driven by curiosity, rather than motives of profit or power. These scientists aren’t much interested in practical applications; they want the truth. (Of course, they also may want tenure, grants, Nobel Prizes, dates, etc.) It’s cheering that there is still, in some places, political and financial support that makes their (very expensive) experiments possible.

Another thing that’s particularly cool about the Higgs search is that it is a massive collaboration. Thousands and thousands of scientists are involved. According to the Times account, there were two teams of 3,000 physicists each analyzing the data from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in the latest round of the CERN effort. They’ve found ways, which I’m sure involve the Internet and massive computing power, to share their knowledge and coordinate their efforts. This is very different from the model of scientific discovery I was taught as a kid, where individuals worked by themselves in their laboratories until their eureka moment. It’s encouraging that scientists are learning to collaborate better just as they take on ever larger problems.

The practicality of the Higgs work may be to the researchers’ advantage in making them a low-value political target. This contrasts sharply with global warming research. In my home state of North Carolina, a majority of our legislators (mostly Republicans) embarrassed themselves again this week by enacting legislation designed to suppress, or at least defer, scientific reports of rising sea levels caused by global warming.

The coastal development lobby seems to have been involved. As my friend and House representative Deborah Ross cleverly observed, putting our heads in the sand is not really doing property owners any favors — they need real information. I’d also note that the sea is not going to read the study anyway. It is both funny and scary that a significant portion of our political leaders (for now a majority in NC) are either willfully ignorant or cynically determined to oppose science where it conflicts with their self-interest.

Yet science hasn’t thrown in the towel yet, and I’ve got to think that the truth will out. Speaking a little more of science, I’ve been reading a new book by Michael Gazzaniga titled Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. It’s about recent discoveries and theories in neuroscience, and parts of it are mind boggling. Gazzaniga is a distinguished professor (University of California) and researcher in cognitive neuroscience who made ground-breaking discoveries in the area of split-brain research.

Gazzaniga covers a lot of territory, and I will not attempt to summarize (indeed, I’m not certain I completely grasp) his view of free will. For me, the most stimulating sections had to do with his his model of conscious thought. At least since the time of the Periclean Athens, we’ve thought of our conscious experience as objective — that is, what you see is what there is to see, what you hear is objectively present in nature, and so on as to other senses and perceptions. In everyday life, we experience all these sensations predictable and reliable, and have difficulty imagining them as error prone and misleading.

I’ve read several interesting books recently discussing research on this, including Jonathan Haidt’s, Daniel Kahneman’s, and Jonah Lehrer’s, but Gazzinaga seems to have the clearest theoretical model and best supported theory for why we can’t accept that our conscious perceptions are at best an incomplete and fallible approximation of physical reality. His model of the mind involves hundreds or thousands of modules working on, say, vision, and forwarding their data to a module in the left brain which he calls The Interpreter.

The Interpreter takes in what it can (not everything), makes some quick guesstimates as to what data is reliable and what should be tossed out, fills in any gaps in the data with best guesses, and presents the result to consciousness as reality. Despite all the guesswork and potential for errors, the result feels to us instantaneous, smooth, continuous, and objective. If there are glaring problems or inconsistencies, The Interpreter comes up with a narrative or story that “explains” them. We are, in a really fundamental sense, story-telling animals.

Another aspect of Gazzaniga’s model struck me as particularly thought-provoking was his discussion of emergence theory. While giving respect and consideration to the researchers working at the scale of neurons and brain structures, Gazzinaga deems it unlikely that that approach will never explain conscious experience. The brain is just too complex.

Emergence theory addresses itself to phenomena are matters that arise out of inputs so numerous as to be incalculable. Examples include snowflakes, traffic jams and weather, which are in the aggregate clearly products of much simpler phenomena (hydrogen atoms, carburetors and other auto parts, breezes etc.), but which contain too many variables to be predictable. The brain’s 100 billion neurons and vastly larger number of synapses far exceeds the complexity of our analytical tools.

Finally, I was intrigued that Gazzaniga suggests the possibility that the basic unit of analysis for the study of human consciousness should not be an individual brain, but rather, groups of brains. That is, intelligence may be best understood as emerging from humans interacting with each other. The individual brain in isolation knows nothing that we would call intelligence, but needs other brains to develop. Prisoners in prolonged isolation quite literally lose their minds. We’ve barely begun to consider consciousness in terms of systems of brains, rather than individual brains. It could change the way we approach education, law, and most everything else.

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July 1, 2012

It’s too hot for golf, and catching up on Mad Men and Girls

On Friday the temperature got up to Fahrenheit 105 here, setting a record. As happens periodically, I’ve been thinking lately about improving my golf game, and I was planning to do some practicing after work. My thought was to hit a 20 or so mid irons/hybrids, about the same number of three woods, then about the same number of drives. Then I thought I’d’d hit some finesse shots of thirty to sixty yards, some sand shots, some short chips, and some putts.

I enjoy swinging a golf club and watching the arc of the ball, and I don’t mind a bit of heat and sweat. But there comes a point somewhere in the high nineties when it’s just not fun anymore. I decided Friday was such a day, and cancelled the golf idea. Instead I went home and had one of Sally’s cocktails, a new recipe called Dirty Dick’s Downfall, involving Bombay Sapphire gin, dry vermouth, and Campari. It was delicious.

Lately we’ve been watching the early episodes of Mad Men, which we continued on Friday. We don’t watch much TV for the obvious reasons — it’s mostly dreck, we’re busy, and we usually have more interesting things to do. But after listening to enough interesting people make provocative comments about Mad Men, I decided to give it a chance. It still amazes me a bit that this is so easy with our little Roku box and streaming Netflix. We’re now up to episode 19 of the available 52.

The first thing I liked about Mad Men was the look. I was a kid in the early sixties, and the mise en scene take me back to when I was beginning to take shape as a personality. The clothes are spot on, as are the interiors and the ugly cars. The show reminds me of how much people smoked and drank — a lot! Smoking was, and is, a terrible habit, but the depiction seems true and evocative.

At first I had my doubts that a show about the advertising business could avoid boring clichés. I didn’t particularly like any of the characters, and the rampant sexism made me wince. But after a few episodes I began to see that beneath the gleaming, glamorous surface of the show there was another level. The writing and acting don’t call attention to this, and this is part of what I like. We are often unsure about the interior lives of the characters, which at first I took to be a failure, but I gradually came to see it as a conscious artistic strategy. Not all questions have answers. It’s bracing, and leaves room for imagination.

For all the boisterous high living, there is something fundamentally sad about the characters. Sadness is a part of normal life, of course, but is not usually visible or sustained on TV. This is part of what makes the show provocative. I don’t know if this eventually adds up to real tragedy, but even if it loses its way and flames out, it’s been worth watching.

Apropos of television, I’ll note one other show I thought well worth watching this season: Girls. The HBO comedy written and directed by and starring twenty-five-year-old Lena Dunham is about a group of young women living in Brooklyn. Dunham went to Oberlin, my alma mater, and I recognize something in her sensibility of my Oberlin and my early days in New York. It manages the amazing high wire act of being original and funny, at times scandalous, and at times undeniably true and moving. N.B., it is most definitely not suitable for children and may offend those offended by sexual subject matter.

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June 23, 2012

My Father’s Day trip to a new race track (CMP)

Last weekend, I took Clara down to Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, S.C. for some track driving. My Garmin GPS guided us down country roads and through small Baptist towns. I’ve gotten to like as a companion the Garmin’s female voice, except when she says, “Recalculating.” This can be interpreted as, “Can’t you even follow a simple instruction!” I’d like to defend myself, for example, when she didn’t describe a particular turn clearly, but we cannot have a dialog — yet. Anyhow, this was a pleasant trip of just three hours.

CMP is a road track with 14 turns, and my first objective was to learn the line for each turn. Even with this clear commitment and my experienced teacher beside me, I found it challenging to memorize the exact turning points of the track. There’s so much kinetic sensation, so much noise. After a dozen or so laps, I started to build up a body of knowledge, but even then, I had a few lapses.

In addition to learning the track, I learned more about performance driving techniques, including rev matching, dealing with understeer, the beginnings of trail breaking, and assorted other bits of car stuff. Not surprisingly, almost everyone at the event was into cars, and some were clearly crazy for cars.

Car-philia seems to be less common today than in my youth, as young people adore their smartphones more than their wheels. I remember my dad talking to relatives, acquaintances, and strangers about their cars and his, Ford versus Chevy, this year’s models versus last year’s, and on and on, and remember wondering why adults were always so boring. But the worm has turned, and now I find it all enjoyable. Even technical discussions of specific engine problems that I know absolutely nothing about, which I used to make me feel incompetent and confused, now seem intriguing, even though part of me realize we’re talking about relatively ancient technology.

At this event, organized by the Tar Heel Sports Car Club, there were some cars like Clara, pretty street cars with lots of power and a racing heritage. A Lamborghini stood out as the exotic queen of this subgroup.

But there were also a fair number of cars that at first glance looked like sad junkers, and on closer inspection turned out to be highly elaborate racing machines. I began to see how it could be fun to have an ugly car for which the only concern would be track performance. It would be nice, in a way, to not worry that Clara’s beautiful body might be seriously maimed by a poorly judged turn followed by a high-speed encounter with the tire wall.

On the other hand, this would involve a significant investment in infrastructure: a trailer, a vehicle to tow a trailer, a place to stow the trailer and vehicle, more tires, tools, etc. And a lot more time to take care of it all. There’s the rub. This would be fun, but there’s an opportunity cost — other fun foregone, other thoughts unthought.

My teacher, John, was a friendly, funny guy who turned out to know not only a ton about driving and cars, but also a lot about contemporary technology. We had a great conversation about robotics and economics.

He predicted that in the not-distant future driverless cars would end the need to buy a personal car, as groups of people subscribe to a share of a fleet of driverless cars that can appear to convey them at any time. In his view, states will eventually put strict legal limits on human driving, on the grounds that driverless cars are so much safer and more environmentally sound. The driverless cars will go much faster safely, and work together in a network to police themselves. If one should go rogue, the others will cooperate to avoid being damaged and to deal appropriately with the offender.

I told John about a story the prior week in the WSJ about the bomb-squad robots of the US Army in Afghanistan. The robots have saved plenty of human lives, which is good. But the surprising thing was that the units get attached to their particular robots and treat them as companions. When a unit’s robot gets blown up, when feasible it is shipped to the robot hospital. Its companion soldiers at times are specific that they want their robot repaired and returned to the unit, rather than a replacement.

I stayed at the Colony Inn in Camden in a ground floor room that opened onto the parking lot. It featured the three c’s: clean, comfortable, and quiet, and entirely worth $65 dollars a night, even if they didn’t throw in breakfast. I watched some of the Master’s golf tournament on non-HD TV and sipped some wine from the Piggly Wiggly. At the urging of Larisa, my personal trainer, I’d bought some TRX portable trainer cables. In the morning, since the Colony had no gym, I hooked the the TRX systen to the door and got in a workout.

It is my custom in all hotels to leave a few dollars for the housekeepers, which I figure they can use and which may create good karma. I was glad that I followed this custom at the Colony. When I checked out I left behind my phone charger. The manager gave me a call to let me know, and I was able to retrieve the charger. This was excellent karma.

There was nothing remotely like healthy vegetarian food at the snack bar at the track, but happily I found a Subway sandwich shop a few miles down the road. Oh Subway, you are the best! In the ugly wilderness of industrialized and unhealthy fast food, so many times you have nourished me well. I ordered my usual: whole grain bread, a variety of greens and vegetables, and that delightful honey-mustard dressing. It was tasty. My Subway sandwich guy made eyes at Clara.

I did not have any serious driving errors on this trip, but as I increased my speeds I also increased the stress on my brakes, and learned what happens when brakes overheat. It is more exciting than desirable to have big speed approaching a tight turn, to hit the brake pedal hard, and find that it goes all the way to the floor with half the usual braking power. I somehow stayed on the track. John counseled me to take the last few laps of that session slower and to drive a few minutes afterwards to cool the brakes down.

On the trip back, I got a call from Jocelyn, who wished me a happy Father’s Day. I regard this holiday as even more synthetic than Mother’s Day, an occasion for retailers to encourage watch and tie consumption and, except to them, of little real value. Yet it was ever so sweet to hear her voice. As I told her, she was one of my two proudest achievements as a father.

She’s currently working her first retail job in a high-end sportswear store in Telluride. It doesn’t sound like her ideal career path, but at least it’s a job. She’s been going out with a cute guy, a river rafting and fly fishing guide whom she really likes. It seemed like she was doing OK.

Later I got a Father’s Day text from Gabe, which said I was the best dad, which I am sure is not true, but I was grateful for the thought.

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June 17, 2012

Our thirtieth anniversary celebration

Sally and I celebrated our thirtieth anniversary last weekend. Thirty years! This struck us as a considerable milestone, and we considered taking a major trip to commemorate it. Because of work and other commitments, we couldn’t make that happen. Instead, we decided a weekend getaway to Fearrington Village.

Fearrington is in Chatham County, one county over from us — about a forty minute drive from Raleigh. It was once a working farm, and still has a barn, a silo, and some pastures with unusual oreo-striped cows. It also has a few shops and our destination, the Fearrington Inn, where we had a sumptuous and charming room. It had a bowl of fresh fruit, and a bar of dark chocolate. After settling in, we walked across the square to the Spa, and had a couples massage — our first ever! It was extremely relaxing. Afterwards, we went into a housewares shop and perused the glassware and various objets, and smelled the floral candles.

When we got back to the second-floor room, we looked out the window and saw a wedding just beginning on the lawn below. The bride looked lovely. We talked about our wedding day, when we said our vows before family and close friends in Diane’s apartment on East 63rd Street, and then went downtown for the reception with a large group of family and friends. It was a happy day.

How wonderful it is to fall in love, and build a friendship that deepens with the years. We’ve had many remarkable chapters, and are looking forward to many more. The marriage contract involves a tacit NDA (corporate-speak for a non-disclosure agreement) that makes possible a special level of trust and confidence between the married persons. It creates a zone of safety where we can be something closer to our true selves.

In view of Sally’s and my NDA, I will not be writing about certain intimacies of our weekend, except for this sentence. That evening we ate at the Fearrington Inn, one of the finest restaurants in the region. When last we were there, several years ago, I’d found the food excellent but the service mannered and fussy. But that was not my impression this time: the food was excellent, and the service was both professional and friendly.

On Sunday morning I went for a run, then came back and read most of the Times before Sally got up. We had a breakfast with excellent coffee at the Inn, and then walked through the little village. There were dozens of barn swallows nesting in the barn. The parent shot in and out and rested near to the their nests, letting us get quite close to them and their babies.

Then we went over the McIntyre Books. It’s a bookstore with charm and taste. I was pleased to see a lot of books I’d cared about displayed as though someone else cared about them. Bookstores like McIntyre’s were never common, but now they’re vanishingly rare. To show a little support, I bought the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since I finished volume 3, ten years ago.

We took a circuitous route home along the beautiful country roads of Chatham County, across Jordan Lake, and through the farmland and forests.

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