The Casual Blog

March 19, 2011

A bird walk

It’s spring in Raleigh. The redbuds, forsythia, and pear trees are blooming, and the hardwoods are budding. With sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s, I had a powerful yen to get outside yesterday, but stayed hunkered down in my office dealing with a series of conference calls. But today is Saturday! I celebrated with a walk in the woods at Swift Creek Bluffs.

I haven’t been birding for a while, even before the winter doldrums, and had almost forgotten how pleasant it can be at sunrise on a beautiful day. The cardinals were particularly vocal this morning, perhaps still working out their spring pairings. Most of the birds I saw and heard were typical NC residents, but I was happy to get a good view of a magnificent Pileated woodpecker. I got some of the rust off my binocular skills in preparation for the arrival of the spring migratory birds.

But leaving aside the birds, it was good being out in the woods, walking along the path by the creek. It was enlivening but also peaceful.

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March 12, 2011

A White House meeting and a Black circus

On Friday I flew to DC for a meeting at the White House. I joined top lawyers from three other technology companies to speak with four of the President’s top advisors on economics and technology about patent reform. Addressing the serious damage invalid patents are doing to innovation is a cause near and dear to my heart, and the chance to discuss it directly with Administration officials was one of the high points of my career.

My cab ride from Washington National (or Reagan, as some call it) was driven by an older African American with a mellifluous voice. I asked him about the weather so I could listen to his lovely baritone, and he answered with enthusiasm. Then he began reciting poetry. The poem concerned how each minute of life is valuable. In response, I recited Rudyard Kipling’s If, which builds toward the idea of filling “each minute / with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” My cabbie was delighted, and asked me to read along to check his accuracy as he recited a poem by Maya Angelou. He was nearly perfect. I suggested that he get a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, and he asked me to write the title down. At the end of the ride, he said he was so glad I got into his cab, and I told him, with feeling, it was a great pleasure.

I was really looking forward to looking inside the White House. It turned out the meeting was in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, but I guess a meeting with White House personnel qualifies as a White House meeting. The meeting room reminded somewhat of my days as a clerk at the Supreme Court, where the inner sanctums have a similar old-fashioned clubby opulence. Everyone there was surprisingly young and incredibly smart. We covered several big ideas very quickly. It was invigorating. And the officials seemed to appreciate that we have a big problem with patents that hinder innovation. It gave me hope for the future.

Back in Raleigh that evening, Sally and I went to the UniverSoul Circus. It’s basically a an old-fashioned, under the big top, African-American circus. Lots of the performers, and practically all of the audience, were Black. The music was urban accented (lots of hip hop) and very loud. I enjoyed, among other acts, the African-American tight rope walkers, the Chinese girl trick bicyclists, the Trinidadian stilt boys, the Columbian motorcyclists in the globe of death, and the African female contortionist, who appeared (I’m still unable to believe this is possible) to set on her own head and also (I’m less certain of this) to rotate her hips 180 degrees.

But I also really enjoyed the audience. They actively participated in the show, singing, dancing, and shouting their approval. Being in a racial minority for a couple of hours was bracing, and being with these folks was really fun. I couldn’t stop smiling.

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March 11, 2011

Artificial intelligence, vanishing legal jobs, and art

Is technology rendering humans obsolete? The answer is, as to some activities, yes. But could it help us better understand our true nature? It could.

Last week the NY Times reported that new computer programs were able to do legal review of electronic documents more accurately and much cheaper than human lawyers. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?scp=1&sq=computer%20legal%20document%20review&st=cse This is a milestone in technology, and one with big implications for the legal profession, and other professions, too.

In my professional capacity at Red Hat as a purchaser of legal services, I’m happy to consider using these money-saving tools. And having as a young lawyer spent hours doing dreary document review, I’m happy to think that humans may be able to hand such drudgery off to computers and do more stimulating things with themselves. But lots of law firms survive and thrive by selling document review services. Automating such work will cause painful dislocations, as many legal jobs go down the tubes.

It’s strange to think of part of lawyering going the way of the gas station attendant. As computer-driven technology replace partially or completely entire categories of work, such as huge swathes of manufacturing, educated professionals have assumed that they were immune. But that is clearly wrong. The triumph of Watson on Jeopardy a couple of weeks ago and the success of legal document review programs shows that more change is on the way.

This is somewhat frightening. But it also forces us to confront the interesting question of what we can usefully do, other than the logic-driven work that computers are now taking over. Since Peraclesian Athens, we’ve assumed that human reasoning was the crowning glory of creation, but we need to revisit that understanding of nature, and human nature.

A few months back I read The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, which offers some interesting thinking on the inherent flaws in human rationality. Gardner focuses on how we systematically underestimate some risks, like the risk of highway accidents, and overestimate others, such as the risk of terrorism and violent crime. Our journalism establishment is heavily invested in promulgating scare stories on such subjects, and we seem in general to like such stories, or at least eat them up. Gardner discusses the psychological basis of this odd characteristic, and the possibility that with more quantitative analysis we could work around the problem. I’m in favor of more careful quantitative analysis of problems, but I doubt that will much affect how human minds work.

David Brooks wrote a surprisingly thoughtful (especially for a conservative) column in the Times this week about human nature. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage He posited that various kinds of scientists are coming to think of humans are fundamentally social, and that it’s a mistake to think of them as isolated individuals. He also emphasized that our unconscious, emotional capacities are more important than our reasoning. In other words, the way our minds work is mostly non-rational. We aren’t just poorly fashioned reasoning machines, but a different kind of being.

This is worth a lot more exploring. There are various things that humans do that are non-rational, but not unintelligent. Artistic activity is a prime example. When we sing or dance, we’re connecting to our selves and others in a way that is richly human. Telling stories in various media is a constant of our lives. These are things that we as a species are really good at, and we enjoy. They aren’t peripheral to our lives and culture — they’re central. Our computers may get at making art, but they can’t replace us in those activities, because we realize ourselves in them.

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March 6, 2011

New dancers, and a new restaurant

On Saturday afternoon we went to the Carolina Ballet to see the same show we saw three weeks back, but with different dancers. The first work, the Ugly Duckling, by Lynn Taylor-Corbett, is a bright, jazzy ballet. It’s plainly engineered with children in mind, but the sweetness is balanced by stabs of darkness and menace. We saw Lara O’Brien, the original UD, at the beginning of this run, and on Saturday saw Lindsay Purrington in the title role. It was an interesting contrast. Lara was both regal and comic. There was never a question, though, that she was a swan. Lindsay brought to the surface more of the pathos of the story — the moments of confusion, hurt, and fear — and her transformation into a swan was a difficult journey. I found it surprisingly touching.

Margaret Severin-Hansen and Richard Krusch performed a pas de deux entitled Flower Festival in Genzano. It was very classical, and very beautiful. For moments the law of gravity seemed to be suspended, and the dancers seemed to be impossibly light, almost floating. Peggy is such an awesome technician that she makes you forget about technique, and get to the essence. She projected innocence, charm, and love.

Robert Weiss’s newest ballet is entitled Grieg: Piano Concerto. I played a version of the piece as a young piano student, and have never been overly fond of it since. But Weiss has put its somewhat diffuse Romanticism to good use. The ballet is in parts fast and furious, with dancers shooting about both horizontally and vertically. The allegro ensemble sections seem almost frighteningly complex. There are some wonderful quiet, tender moments as well. On Saturday, Lara O’Brien, Jan Burkhard, and Lola Cooper took the principal female roles, and were lovely. Lola performed the role created for Melissa Podcassy, which includes a long adagio solo. She radiated confidence.

After the performance, we talked for a while with Lola and her father, Brian, who was visiting from New York. She described days of five-hour rehearsals for the next show followed by a two-hour performance in the evening, and then the same again the next day. Grueling, clearly. But she wasn’t complaining.

That evening we ate for the first time at Market, a relatively new restaurant in Raleigh’s Mordecai neighborhood. It features fresh, local ingredients, and has a simply furnished dining room that makes you think organic. The service was friendly and helpful. The had the sweet potato latkes and the vegetarian stir fry, neither of which were like anything I’d ever eaten and both of which were delicious. We split a piece of pumpkin cheesecake, which was also unexpectedly delightful. We liked the place.

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March 5, 2011

Paradise Lost — surviving air travel with some good books

On plane rides to and from Dallas this week, I experienced above average travel headaches — absurdly slow security checks, bumpy air, noisy talkers all around, and somebody who had beans for lunch. But the fast metal tube is a good place to read, and I made substantial progress on Paradise Lost. John Milton’s great poem is intimidating in several ways – long, complex, and religious. But sweet Jocelyn had spoken of it with animation during her studies, which inspired me to sample it in Harold Bloom’s poetry anthology. It was beautiful, and so I decided to begin at the beginning.

It creates a world that is at times fantastically vivid. And there is a powerful music to the language. Parts of it are part of our vernacular, and it’s pleasant to come upon them. Other parts are highly obscure, and challenging in their complex syntax. But it moves forward with confident, powerful authority, telling a really big story, bejewelled with glittering details.

I thought I might be put off by the religious subject matter, because I generally have a strong allergic reaction to such ideas. It’s true that Milton uses the Genesis story for his basic material, but he makes it into something much more dramatic and thought-provoking than the original. His transformation of early religious writings into drama is similar to what Wagner did in the Ring cycle with the Norse myths. The Creator is just one character in the drama, and hardly the most interesting one.

I also spent some time reading A Culture of Improvement by Robert Freidel. Freidel traces the elements of technology that transformed ancient and medieval life. I used to think that technology changed little between the Romans and the eighteenth century, but there are all sorts of interesting things that happened earlier. His chapter on medieval cathedrals addresses both why and how they got built. Lots of trial and error — like technology today.

My kick back book was Sabbath’s Theater by Phillip Roth. I think Roth is the best living American writer of fiction (and I know of no better in other languages), and I was pleased to see that President Obama honored him with the National Humanities medal this week. Sabbath’s Theater is a masterpiece of a dyspeptic sort. Sabbath is an aging former puppeteer and theater director who has left his callings and devoted himself primarily to seducing women. His enthusiasm for each new female is at first humorous, but it gradually becomes clear that he is deeply disturbed. It’s like Portnoy’s Complaint as King Lear. I would not recommend Sabbath’s Theater as an introduction to Roth, or to anyone uncomfortable with sexual subject matter. But for some readers, it will open doors.

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February 26, 2011

Ups and downs in Telluride

My life is full of technology and intense mental activity, and I’m glad of it, but from time to time I crave an interlude of pure natural beauty and physical activity. And so for a long President’s Day weekend, we skied Telluride, Colorado, where the San Juan mountains look something like the Alps — jagged and imposing, yet peaceful in a way.

Set a human body sliding down the snowy slopes, and interesting things happen. Exhilaration at the speed, microbursts of fear, quick happy recoveries, or minor disasters. I had my most dramatic fall on Bushwacker, reportedly the steepest groomed run in America, where I’d got off the groomed terrain and into the bumps. Tips crossed, I launched over the top of my skis, which came off the boots as designed, but rather than stopping I then found myself sliding fast downhill headfirst and accelerating. I eventually managed to flip over, spin around, and dig my boot heels into the snow to brake. By this time, one ski was 200 yards below me and one pole was 50 yards above (a classic yard sale). I am always happy to rely on the kindness of strangers, and gratefully accepted assistance of one who picked up my pole and another who helped me resituate on one ski. Then I lowered myself inelegantly down the slope to retrieve the other.

A couple of my colleagues at Red Hat have written about failing fast and often as a means to success, which in skiing translates as falling fast and often. It entails some moments of embarrassment. But by golly, I’ve really improved this year. I took on steep, deep powder runs, glades, and double black moguls, as well as carving on high-speed cruisers, all with great joy (and occasional terror).

We had fresh snow falling our first day and night, and a classic powder day the second day. I insisted that our group (Sally, Charles, Chuck, and later David and Kimberlie) move out early to try for first tracks. We found lots of beautiful light snow and varied terrain. Those first two days I stayed well within my comfort zone and had great fun. Each night we ate in good restaurants, (Excelsior, Rustico, Honga’s, and Siam), and one night had delicious pizza served by my sweet Jocelyn at the Brown Dog. The group included old familiar friends and lively new ones, and there was good conversation and laughter.

On day three the skies had cleared, and Gabe and Lindsey, who live in Telluride, had days off and came out to play. They knew the mountains well, and managed to locate pockets of non-skied-out powder. For the first time I felt reasonably comfortable on steep gladed runs. I was inspired by their beautiful skiing, and proud that I could more or less keep up with them. Riding up the long chair lifts, we caught up on things in general, considered the state of the world, and got to be better friends.

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February 19, 2011

Watson, human games, and the twilight of the gods

Sally and I flew out to Telluride, CO yesterday for a late winter ski adventure. On the flight from Raleigh were our good friend Charles and Chuck, and we looked forward to meeting up with Gabe and Jocelyn. The flights took off on time and progressed in an orderly way. I made some progress getting through back issues of The New Yorker, Scientific American and Golf Digest, listened to Mozart and Debussy. And as often happens when I travel at 35,000 feet, I found myself in a contemplative mood. As Garrison Keillor says of his private eye character: one man’s still trying to find the answer to life’s eternal questions.

What is the meaning of play? When humans have taken care of the essentials — food, clothing, shelter, sex — it is a large part of what they do. I suspect the same is true of all animals, based on the birds, squirrels, fish, cats, dogs, and other creatures I’ve observed. They all love to play. Children love to play. Put a random group of four-year olds together and a game will almost always develop.

The games people play vary widely according to their age, traditions, fitness, intelligence, financial resources, and moxy. Some like skiing, some prefer bowing. Some go for chess, and others like checkers. The arts are unquestionably a form of play; we even refer to musical activity as playing music. A lot of our verbal activity has little to do with survival and qualifies as mostly play.

Smarter-than-normal people tend to like games requiring a good memory and a quick tongue, and to view success in those games as a badge of honor. Before this week, we mostly felt confident that, whatever our weaknesses and failings, we were superior to all other known beings at such activities. After Watson’s triumphant performance at Jeopardy this week, that’s over.

I didn’t see the entire three Jeopardy sessions, but I saw enough to get the idea. The gifted engineers at IBM have taken artificial intelligence to a whole new level. (By the way, congratulations, guys.) Watson has incredible facility with language and memory. The humans never had a chance. I was reminded of the song about John Henry, the great swinger of the hammer, who drove himself to death but couldn’t beat the machine. (Bruce Springstein does a great high-energy version of the song.). Admittedly, Watson’s abilities don’t extend to the entire range of human intelligence. For example, it isn’t good at creative reasoning — yet. But the day when it will be considered hopelessly romantic to think that humans could be more intelligent than machines is well within view.

So where does that leave us as a species? Consciously or subconsciously, we justify a lot of atrocities on the theory that we’re superior as a species to all others, Could Watson make us just a bit more humble? Could it inspire a bit of self-examination? If intelligence isn’t our greatest achievement, if compared to our computers we’re not really very bright, perhaps we’ll come to view our most important defining characteristics as other human qualities, like love and kindness. What if we consciously cultivated those qualities?

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February 14, 2011

Nixon in China

Saturday afternoon Sally and I made it to North Hills Cinema to see the Metropolitan Opera’s simulcast of Nixon in China by John Adams. I’d been looking forward to the event all season. Although I’d never seen NIC, I’m a big fan of Adams’s music for orchestra. It builds on the spare vocabulary of American minimalism both rhythmically and harmonically towards something that I think of as edgy romanticism.

The idea of an opera about Nixon going to China seemed at first outrageous and possibly hopeless. For those of us who observed Nixon in his lifetime, he seems a most unlikely hero. In retrospect, he looks a lot more moderate, responsible, and intelligent than we liberals thought at the time, particularly in comparison with today’s leading so-called conservatives. But even after giving extra credit, Nixon simply does not fit any standard opera hero template. At his very best, he was awkward, unsexy, and egotistical in an almost comic way.

Nixon in China takes all that and works with it. There is a comic and ironic aspect to the work, but that’s only one of many levels. The historical events are treated with some respect, and the humanity of the characters is acknowledged. But the music takes this material in surprising directions. Along with the simple storyline (the Nixons go to China) are several individual story lines that have the gauzy jumpy quality of dreams.

Adams himself conducted the performance on Saturday. At one intermission, he referred to the Met orchestra as a Ferrari of an orchestra — one of the best in the world — which I think is true. As Nixon, James Maddalena captures something of the weird contradictions of the man, though he seemed to have some difficult moments vocally. Janis Kelly was surprisingly touching as Pat Nixon, and had the vocal strength of a Wagnerian soprano. Kathleen Kim was funny but also terrifying as Madame Mao. It was good to hear the interviews with Peter Sellars, who’s both brilliant and comic, and Mark Morris, who’s brilliant as well.

I liked the music a lot, but I didn’t think this was necessarily the ultimate Nixon production. The Mark Morris dance sections were wonderful, but elsewhere big chunks of Sellars’s staging were surprisingly static. I thought the sets were in places too literal and in places too conceptual. But I would definitely watch it again, and I will be thinking about it for a while.

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February 12, 2011

Congratulations to courageous young revolutionaries of Egypt, and best wishes

Yesterday a group of brave young people in Egypt accomplished something astonishing. They rid their country of a tyrant. They did so mainly through peaceful but strenuous protests. The group is hard to sum up. They didn’t fit into one of the few usual story lines that Western news sources normally recycle, such as radical Muslims or corrupt elites. The protesters lacked a clear leader or ideology.

But one thing they had in abundance was courage. They faced a security apparatus famous for torturing opponents and making them disappear, an awesomely powerful military, and leaders with no apparent humanity or conscience. The faced a very real risk of widespread imprisonment, injury, or death. No one before had ever done exactly what they did. But they overcame their fears and doubts, and changed the world. Their accomplishment bears comparison to those of Gandhi and King — but they did it faster, with less bloodshed, and without a Gandhi or King.

Was technology an enabler of the Egyptian revolution? There were early stories about Twitter and Facebook facilitating organization of the protests. However, the protests continued to grow after the government crippled the internet. It seems too simple (and suspiciously western-centric) to give too much credit to Twitter. Still, it may have played a role. Even this possibility will make dissidents, and entrenched dictatorships, think differently about the internet from now on. It isn’t hard to believe that new internet tools will help humans organize more powerfully.

Exciting revolutionary moments have often been succeeded by periods of monstrous brutality, as in France, Russia, and China. But it doesn’t always work out that way. The revolution generation in the United States somehow managed to fashion a fairer government. Plainly, the young revolutionaries of Egypt believe it can be done. So we shall see. Whatever the outcome, I honor those courageous young Egyptians and wish them well.

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February 6, 2011

Piano lesson

One door closes, and another one opens. My piano teacher for the last four years, Randy Love, left for a sabbatical in China last month. Our piano lessons, at intervals of once a month or so, have taken me a long way along the path of the great western piano music tradition. The tradition is based on written texts, but much of it is unwritten, transmitted from teacher to student. Randy has transmitted much, and been an excellent master and a good friend.

During that time, I’ve enjoyed gaining fluency at the keyboard, but I don’t view increased technical mastery as the most valuable accomplishment. Much more important, and also much harder to express, is a change in the experience of the music. “Music is feeling, not sound,” according to Wallace Stevens (in Peter Quince at the Clavier). Stevens was on to something, although music is, obviously, sound. There’s a type of emotional energy stored in written musical texts and released and renewed with each performance. And there are many levels to that emotional experience.

So I went in search of a new master, and found myself yesterday at the music building at N.C. State in the studio of Olga Kleiankina. She’s a Russian with degrees from schools in Moldova and Romania, a masters from Bowling Green and a doctorate from University of Michigan, and joined the NCSU faculty last years as head of the piano program. She’s got an impressive amount of performance experience, and is an active concert artist. She was friendly but focussed. Straight away, she invited me to try out her two pianos, and after playing a bit of Chopin on each, I settled on the Mason and Hamlin over the Yamaha. Then she asked me what I’d brought to play for her. I played the first half of Chopin’s nocturne in D flat, Op. 27, No. 2, one of Chopin’s most beautiful, lyrical pieces, very like an operatic aria, with a broad emotional range. I played it rather well, with real feeling, I thought.

Olga was polite, but wasted no time with compliments. She said she could help me with my technique, and plunged in. It was quite bracing. We worked hard on weight transfer, activating the back and arm and relaxing the wrist. She showed me different ways of positioning the fingers on the keys for different sounds. She also talked about the shape of the gestures of the hand as it related to the flow of the music. She demonstrated this in various ways, including taking my hand and guiding it. I’ve usually thought of the physical aspect of piano playing as supporting but separate from the musical part, but Olga seemed to view the two as unified. Beautiful movements make beautiful sounds. She also demonstrated a level of attention to detail that was inspiring, and daunting.

At the end of the lesson, I felt like I could be at the foot of a new mountain. There’s a long way to go to reconfigure my playing along the dimension Olga pointed to. It will be challenging, and maybe transformative.

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