The Casual Blog

February 27, 2010

War and the unfortunate killers (our children)

We should recognize that the young people we send to foreign lands to kill others on our behalf pay a terrible price.  Killing, even when sanctioned by governments and rules of war, typically leaves soldiers with chronic problems of depression, anxiety, and self-loathing.  They are prone to substance abuse and suicide.  The individuals soldiers themselves often assume these problems are due to their own weakness of character.  At any rate, they seldom care to discuss this issue, and their psychological injuries from their wartime actions is not a popular media subject.

It isn’t surprising that this subject doesn’t get much airplay.  In military recruiting commercials, soldiering is shown as a chance to prove oneself, gain respect, and serve one’s country for the greater good.  Battle is depicted as an adventure, with incredibly powerful weapons.   The meta message is that battle is ennobling, socially beneficial, and also a lot of fun.  Hollywood and major media are complicit in amplifying this message.  Exploding the myths and making clear that killing in battle leaves soldiers permanently scarred would be highly detrimental to recruiting.

Every now and again, the NY Time has  piece about the trauma suffered by veterans who’ve done what they were trained to do.  Last week, it ran an op ed piece titled Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts by Shannon P. Meehan, an Army lieutenant who served in Iraq.  http://tiny.cc/zc2AP Meehan described her rage and self-loathing after calling in an air strike that resulted in several civilian deaths.  She explained that the killing caused soldiers to lose regard for human life, including their own lives.

The NY Times also had a story this month on increasing recognition that veterans who killed in battle suffer post traumatic stress and a variety of psychological problems. _ http://tiny.cc/7Mchz The piece focussed on the difficulty of getting therapy for these soldiers, who are often unwilling to discuss their problems or seek help.  We do need to work hard to help these veterans, who are themselves victims of war.

But we also need to address the larger problem of reducing the incidence of war and politically motivated killing.   I realize that sounds sort of obvious, and at time a bit utopian.  To be sure, universal peace is probably an unrealistic goal.  But what if we tried to have just a little less killing?  Wouldn’t most agree that that would be good?

Here’s a thought experiment:  for every death we administer or suffer, what if we asked, is this act achieving a clear objective worth the terrible cost to all the victims?   We need to devote scholarly effort to study of  the best alternatives to violent conflict.  We need to have some difficult conversations on this subject.  And to sustain us in this effort, we need to learn at an emotional level what war really means.  I highly recommend as one source  the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen, who wrote about the battlefield experience in WWI.  http://tiny.cc/xypcN Owen died at age 25 one week before the end of the war.

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February 20, 2010

We won the lottery, ate, and were transformed by the ballet

I was terribly embarrassed to forget about lunch on Wednesday with my good friend Jay B.  After dealing with a series of absorbing if not gut wrenching legal puzzles through that morning, I paused around 12:15 to check the headlines in the NYT.  At that moment Jay called to ask where I was. I remembered instantly that I was supposed to be with him at noon at the Remedy Diner.  I also remembered I had put the meeting on my electronic calendar when we scheduled it, but somehow it was not on the calendar now.  After fifteen minutes of rushing and apologizing profusely, I was in my seat at the Remedy and catching up with Jay.

It’s always fun to hear about Jay’s doings, but he had a particularly fascinating story this time:  he had arrived in Haiti on January 12 five hours before it was hit by the mother of all earthquakes.  He and daughter Kate were there to do some charitable work in a village some distance from Port au Prince, and got close up view of the incredible devastation heaped on a country already unimaginably poor and broken.  The contrast between the Haitian experience and ours is indescribable.  As I said to Jay, everyone in this country has won a huge lottery prize just by being born here.

But we can’t either celebrate or feel guilty all the time, and we get on with the challenges of our daily lives.  My work Friday was a series of intense meetings with lawyers from all over the country interested in doing business with Red Hat, punctuated by numerous phone calls, emails, and pop-in office questions.  It was almost nonstop activity, but I did manage to take a call from sweet Jocelyn.  She was thrilled with her first powder skiing experience at Telluride, and feeling excited about her increasing skill as a skier.  She also told me about hanging out in a Telluride bar with Ed Helms, a successful actor in The Office.  As I told her, I’d knew from the Oberlin magazine he went to Oberlin, and she confirmed that fact.  Indeed, she told him I went there, too!  It sounded like he was very friendly and quite taken with her but did not attempt anything ungentlemanly.

That night Sally and I ate at Bu.ku, a new restaurant that replaced Fins.  We had liked the food at Fins, but found the place a bit formal and cold.  Bu.ku is warm and interesting, based on the theme of street food from around the world.  The service was very good (thanks, Turner!), and so was the masaman curry.  We’ll go back.

We saw the Carolina Ballet do a Weiss’s Cinderella and several short Balanchine works.  I didn’t love everything equally, but forget the nits.  I still found the experience transporting.  After many hours of computer interactions, talking, and thinking about business and legal problems, the dancers and the dance opened doors to another world — a human world.  They use a vocabulary of movement refined for a couple of centuries to get at a particular kind of truth — emotional truth.  There’s a remarkable purity about it.  The form involves beautiful young dancers, but somehow it isn’t particularly sexy.  Cinderella, in particular, movingly expressed the old chivalric vision of romantic love, and it seemed completely real.  For me, the ultimate test is teary eyes and goosebumps, and it passed.

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February 14, 2010

Olympic Victory and Luck

Sally and I went to an early Valentine’s day party at David and Kelly Beatty’s last night.  It was our first visit to their North Raleigh place, which was not as far out as we expected, and sits on the edge of an old deep forest.  The house is spacious and beautiful in the transitional style, and Kelly has used color and form to make it lively and personal.  She also made a great lemon vodka martini and fantastic hors d’oeuvres.  It was good talking with Kelly and David, and meeting a few of their friends.  Because my car lease end date is in sight, I had some car questions for David, who proved, as always, a font of knowledge.  Kelly said little Reid was resistant to bedtime without parental attention, and so we headed out.

The winter olympics, which we enjoy, got started this week, so after the party we picked up some food from Royal India and came back to watch.   The commercials were ridiculously frequent and dumb.  But the competitions drew us in to some intense drama.  For years now, Sally has had a lively interest in speed-skater Apolo Anton Ohno.  Though I also find him interesting, she seems to have a different kind of absorption.  (I’ve noted this same absorption as to Brad Pitt.)  It so happened that Ohno was featured as the American hope in the short track speed skating 1500 meter semi-finals and finals.  The network showed a short documentary about him, emphasizing his extraordinary work ethic — four two-hour workouts per day.  He said, at one point, that at the end of every day he asks himself whether he’s done everything he can to be his best.  I was impressed.

In the 1500-meter race final, he quickly passed five or so competitors to claim the lead.  In the last three laps, though, the lead changed repeatedly, with passing maneuvers that looked impossible.  In the last lap, three South Koreans went to the front, and Ohno was in fourth place coming into the last turn.  Then one of the Koreans lost his edge and went over, taking one of his countrymen with him.  Ohno took second place, rather than nothing.

At the party I told David about The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which I also posted about yesterday.  The Ohno race illustrates it nicely.  His years of effort put him in position to compete for another olympic medal.  But the South Koreans were stronger.  There was nothing he could do to stop them.  They were unfortunate in falling at the final turn, and he was fortunate.  That’s a typical success story:   hard work plus amazing luck.

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February 13, 2010

Travel, randomness, and good fortune

Last week I spent a couple of days in San Jose and Palo Alto at meetings of the Linux Foundation counsel group.  I did three presentations myself and heard talks on virtualization, open source license enforcement, trademarks and open source, patent troll lawsuits, and other topics of professional interest.  I had a chance to socialize with some very bright and knowledgeable open source legal people and catch up on industry news and gossip.  The days were lively, but long, starting with a working breakfast and ending with a working dinner, and I was ready to head home on Thursday.

The flight from San Jose took me to Dallas.  As chance would have it, Dallas experienced its heaviest snowfall in history that day.  Across the eastern U.S., tens of thousands of flights were cancelled in what was described as the worst travel day since 9/11.  My flight into DFW landed on time, but sat on the runway for almost an hour.  By the time I made it to the gate for the connecting flight, which was due to leave at 3, it was 3 sharp, and too late.  The next flight was in 5 hours.  I claimed a spot at stall with a bar stool and free electricity, plugged in my laptop, and got some work done.

Eventually I came to a stopping place, gave up my precious electrical connection, and looked about for coffee and something to eat.  For some reason, people were more than usually chatty.  I normally keep chats with strangers during air travel to a minimum, primarily because I’m trying to get other things done. Also, with a tendency toward the introvert side of the personality scale, I tend to see the cost-benefit analysis of a one-time talk as more on the cost side.  But in the various lines and pauses on Thursday, I met a photographer from Dallas, a defense department weapons system specialist from Dayton, and a salesperson for highway building equipment from San Diego, all interesting and pleasant.

The snow continued to come down throughout the afternoon, and I kept expecting to hear that the Raleigh flight was cancelled.  Instead, AA loaded up in a timely manner, and closed the door.  My seatmate had the Wall Street Journal, and agreed to share it.  Things were looking good, and then they froze.  We eventually spent more than 4 hours on the runway waiting for de-icing, being de-iced, and taking off.  I finally got home about 4:15 am.  The total travel time was 17.5 hours.   Happy as I was to be home, it took me another couple of hours to get to sleep.  I was late for my 9 am interview with a prospective intern.

On the trip I finished The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.  It is an account for non-mathematicians of the history and meaning of the great ideas of probability and statistics.  Mlodinow explains that without an appreciation for probability and statistics, people have an overwhelming tendency to find patterns and meaning where there is none, and greatly overestimate the amount of control they have over their own fate.  This is almost certainly true, but it’s a bit depressing.  It’s therefore possible that people who understand it generally don’t care to talk about it.  One positive point Mlodinow makes late in the book:  success and happiness are more likely if we take more chances.  That is, you can’t win the coin toss if you don’t toss the coin.

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February 6, 2010

Our computers, ourselves

More proof that computers and humans are becoming one:  a  NY Times yesterday on the dozens of computers embedded in each of our automobiles.  http://tiny.cc/mwFgt Millions of lines of code accompany us on each on of our daily drives.  In many ways, this is a good thing.  Microprocessors assist with all basic functions of a higher-end car, including unlocking it, accelerating, steering, traction control, and braking, not to mention air bags, climate control, and entertainment.  They improve engine efficiency, warn when tire pressure is low, correct certain driving errors, and generally make sure things are OK.  We hardly notice them, but they’re always there, taking care of us.

The trajectory of this technology seems clear:  the driverless vehicle.  How long until we have them?  We already do.  Last year, in the most recent DARMA competition, cars navigated through an urban environment without realtime human intervention.  http://tiny.cc/O2tdy High end consumer cars now can park themselves.  Indeed, computers already do most of the work flying planes, piloting ships, and directing missiles.  So, how long until we’re required to give up driving our cars and let the much-more-safe-and-reliable computers take over?

This is a somewhat painful question for me, as a person who loves cars, and technology, and also has a soft spot for humans.   I’ll resist giving up (the last part of the) control of my beautiful BMW.  And I have some worries about becoming like the bloated and clumsy humans in Wall-e who had no function other than leisure.  There may be a middle way, though, between a human dominated world and a computer dominated world.

Just now, it feels like we’re an an awkward intermediate stage of evolution in relation to our computers.  A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran a piece noting that email and the internet had become a necessary part of a middle class vacation.  http://tiny.cc/CQqj0 I can confirm, as it noted, that in the last five years, checking email and the internet during vacations and weekends has gone from a novelty to a necessity.

When Blackberries first came on the scene a few years back, I initially thought the increasing frequency of people checking their email — whether in exotic locals, local restaurants, elevators, or bathrooms — was mainly a new type of status display.  It seemed to say:   I have new technology and I’m so important many people must get their orders from me, and I cannot pause to pay attention to anyone else or my surroundings.

Old fashioned ego is surely part of it, but I no longer think it’s the largest part.  The technology requires that we work harder.  It has made it possible for more people to contact more people (not to mention that more bots contact more people), creating an escalating flood of information.  This has an overwhelming effect on those who rely for their livelihood on being a bit smarter than others, whether they sell products, provide advice, manage projects, or offer services.  For those people, information is necessary for survival.  The flood of data in their in box may  include something important.  Success depends on knowing more than the competition, and survival depends on not falling behind.  There is no rational choice other than to try to keep up.

So how can we keep from being devoured by our technology?  That is the question.  Yoga?

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January 30, 2010

Green smoothies

For the past few weeks, most mornings I’ve created a green smoothie for breakfast.  A green smoothie consists of a couple of cups of a fresh raw green leafy vegetable, a couple of cups of fresh fruit, and a cup or so of fruit juice mixed for a minute or so in the blender.  This morning I combined spinach, pineapple, blueberries, orange juice, cranberry juice, and soy milk.  It was shockingly green, but delicious.

Making the smoothies has been an adventure.  I’ve focused new attention on the leafy vegetables available at Whole Foods, and tried ones like kale,  collards and dandelion greens that I previously knew almost nothing about.  At the market I’ve sniffed and smelled various exotic fruits and learned how to deal with some of them, like pineapples, mangoes, and papayas.  I intentionally make each one with different proportions of juices and other ingredients, so each one is a little surprising.  My success ratio keeps improving.  Even the ones that turn out less well (sometimes they taste a bit too much like grass) involve some amount of satisfaction in the exercise of creativity and the knowledge that they are incredibly nutritious.

My relationship to food continues to evolve.  It has come a long way since my days as a beginner vegetarian about 15 years ago.  Recently I cut milk and seafood out of my normal rotation.   This is more consistent both with my personal ethics and with what I know of nutrition science.  And so I’ve reached a state that I would have thought of in years gone by as a true health nut.

Is it worth it?  Definitely, but not just for the obvious reason.  I feel very healthy, but after having seen various loved ones, friends, and colleagues battling cancer, I realize that some disease could strike me as well with sudden and brutal force no matter what I’m eating.   It is satisfying to be more consistent with my ethical principles of respect for animals, but I doubt I’ll ever achieve perfection beyond all question.

The most unexpected dividend of my plant based diet has been how much more sensually satisfying eating is.  The tastes and textures of plant food are unendingly varied and complex.  This approach to food leads to trying new foods and new restaurants.  It inspires experimentation and discovery.

Last night, for instance, we ate at Zely and Ritz, one of the most interesting restaurants in Raleigh, which is about two blocks from our place.  I ordered sweet potato gnocchi with rutabaga sauce.  I’ve never cared for sweet potatoes or rutabagas, but it was the dish they offered that was most consistent with my rules.  And it turned out to be very tasty.  I had no room left for dessert.

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January 16, 2010

The crucible of a massive earthquake in Haiti

Last week an earthquake hit Haiti with devastating force.  The destruction was so massive.  Airports, ports, roads, bridges, utilities, and communication networks were all shut down or disabled, and rescuers, aid workers, and journalists still cannot even see much of the area affected.  We know that the scale of death is huge, and the scale of suffering is enormous.  Reports yesterday said there had been 40,000 bodies recovered so far, and without food, water, or medical care, people will continue to die.

Disasters are natural crucibles.  They can reveal unexpected kindness and generosity.  At Red Hat, the population that insists on broadcasting company wide emails on their personal concerns is on an average day a minor but continual annoyance.  After the Haiti earthquake, though, there were many of those emails concerning how to contribute to charitable efforts effectively.  Many people everywhere pity the Haitians and wish they could help. For most Americans most of the time, if they think of Haiti at all, it is as a far away place of unfathomable poverty.  Some may be discovering, as I am, an unexpected feeling of solidarity, kinship, and shared sorrow with Haitians.

But disasters also expose character flaws and crazy ideas.  Pat Robertson, a well known religious TV personality, had this take on the Haitian earthquake:  that the Haitian people made a “pact with the devil.”  He was referring to Haitian slaves’ successful revolt at the end of the eighteenth century against their French rulers.  Robertson thus suggested that Haitian slavery was God’s will and that struggle against it was the work of Satin.  He implied that God personally gave the OK last week to kill tens of thousands of Haitians.  And God was justified in undertaking this slaughter based on the sins of ancestors several generations back.

To judge from press reports ridiculing Robertson, a great many people appreciate that such a view is morally demented.  But it does bring up in a starker-than-usual form difficult issue for religious people who are also concerned with ethics.  If  God is all knowing and all powerful, why would He trigger, or even permit, an earthquake to kill tens of thousands of innocent people?  Indeed, what possible justification could He have for the violent death of one innocent child?  Or for any of the other atrocities that we all see in the ordinary course of  life?  This line of questioning was really valuable to me in finding the courage to step off the path of conventional religious thinking.

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January 10, 2010

Frontiers of Terrorist Sociology

Why do individuals agree to strap on a bomb and blow themselves and others up?   The rhetoric of the “War on Terror” suggests that individual terrorists are soldiers, but such calculated self-destruction is not typical military behavior.  Indeed, it is so far outside the norms of any behavior I’ve encountered that it seems completely insane.  Yet it also seems increasingly commonplace.  A piece by Sarah Kershaw in today’s NY Times takes a quick survey of the state of research on this question.  http://tiny.cc/awmDM

No matter how much hatred an individual feels, it is difficult to explain the decision to kill unknown strangers and oneself.  The most intriguing perspective, I thought, was thinking of the terrorist less as an individual and more as part of a radical group.  The group’s self isolation allows for increasing radicalization.  The individual feels social pressure to conform to the group consensus.  Being part of the group allays feelings of loneliness and worthlessness.  A prospective bomber gains status once the decision made.  At the same time, the prospect of loss of face discourages changing one’s mind.

It was encouraging to learn that some radical terrorist recruits leave their organizations when they find the reality of  life in the groups is harsh and boring.  What can we do to stop creating more terrorists and get more of them to leave?

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January 10, 2010

Reading the Confessions of Nat Turner

One of the rewarding things about travel is the flip side of downtime:   having substantial chunks of time to read.   Once I’ve made it to my gate and found a spot to stow my roll, I look forward to the part of the journey when there is nothing physical that needs to be done, no problems that immediately need to be solved, and no talking that is strictly necessary.  For lovers of books, it’s an oasis.  And reading makes the time valuable.  I really don’t know how non-readers can stand airplanes.

During our travels over the holidays, I managed to finish William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which gave a shot in the arm to my sometimes shaky faith in the importance of the novel.  Sally read the book long ago and kept it, and it has sat on our various bookshelves as long as we’ve been together (27+ now!).  During all that time, I had no idea it was such a great book.  It turns out Sally always thought it was a great book, but we never got around to discussing it.

The book is based on an actual person (Turner), a slave who led a bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831.  Styron explains in “afterword” essay that the historical record of Turner is slim, and that he consciously made a character different in important respects from what he believed about the historical Turner.  (The real Turner was apparently a psychotic religious fanatic, whereas Styron’s is a religiously inspired poetic and practical genius.)  Styron’s aim was to illuminate slavery and race relations during that period, and his own.  He succeeded brilliantly in bringing to light multiple dimensions and paradoxes of the Peculiar Institution.

It is certainly a beautiful book in its details and its sweep, but also a deeply painful.  There is, of course, the sickening cruelty of some individual slave owners.  (The narrator Turner concedes that there was a wide range of behavior among slave owners, and some of them were thoughtful and relatively kind.)  There is the pain of Turner and millions of others who endured forced servitude.  There’s also the deep pain is that our forefathers with knowledge and intent supported and defended slavery for generations.  The anti-black racism that continues to plague us is proof that this legacy is still with us.

The book is a powerful example of how a work of fiction can bring to light certain truths that cannot be illuminated any other way.  History in its conventional form is distrustful of imagination, which means that undocumented feelings and behaviors can be completely lost.  But combining historical research with imagination and literary skill, as Styron did, opens doors to the past.

Styron’s essay recounts the strange history of the book itself, which was initially a critical and popular success.  It then became the target of fierce attack by a number of prominent black scholars.   By Styron’s account (which is obviously self-interested), most of the attacks missed the larger points of his work.  In any case, the attacks effectively marginalized the book by discouraging the attention of black readers.  It is a sad irony that this great book that could easily have been an inspiration for more great historical and imaginative work and another bridge over a racial divide became a point of division.

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January 3, 2010

Skiing at Telluride with love and fear

We went to Telluride, CO lasts week in part because of it jagged mountainous beauty,in part to be together with Gabe and Jocelyn, and in no small part to ski.  The town is a repurposed Western mining town with squared-off storefronts and Queen Ann style houses, and has part of the vibe of  a college town, with a wholesome, natural charm.

The ski resort is famous for its rocky alpine beauty and high level of challenge.  The stats are impressive:  4,425 of vertical (3,845 served by lifts), base elevation 8,725, lift served elevation 12,570, maximum elevation 13,150, longest run 4.6 miles, 2,000 skiable acres.  The significant percentage slopes are classified as double black diamond, and a few double black slopes have the further warning EX, which stands for extreme.   The place gets about 300 inches of snow a year, and we had about 17 inches arrive in the middle of our stay.  It was extremely light — snow champagne.

Gabe led us on some substantial journeys down the double blacks.  We did one “hike to” — Genevieve — and felt we earned our turns.  In the deep fresh snow of our  last two days there , we did, among other runs, Dynamo (“EX”), Electra (“EX”), Genevieve again, the Rose, Apex Glade (3 times), Northern Chute, and Locals, the last of which is a fairly tight glade run that does not appear on the official trail map.  Sal and I also had memorably challenging runs down Allai’s Alley, Kant-Make-M, Mammoth, and Lower Plunge.

As we followed Gabe, I hoped he had not overestimated our experience level.    Hiking up Genevieve, Sal was heard to say “Holy God,” which appeared to relate not only to the beauty of the sheer walls around us, and the rigors of the hike, but also to the question whether the very steep and  narrow way down was going to kill us.  Skiing with Gabe, I was reminded that I was not 25 years old, but I also noted that I was skiing fantastic deep powder with new authority, which made me cheerier.  Sally also raised her game to a new level, taking on more mountain at higher speeds.

One afternoon we met up with Jocelyn and her friend Britt for lunch yesterday in Mountain Village.  At 1:00 pm every eatery was jammed, and there was no possibility of a seat inside.  Although it was too cold to take off hats and gloves, we ended up eating deli sandwiches at a table outside while it was snowing.  At least we had food.

We skied one run with Jocelyn after lunch, after which she said she was calling it a day for reasons of tiredness.  At dinner that night, she acknowledged that fear was a significant issue for her skiing.  I said that this is true for most people.  Those that end up loving it are those who overcome some of their fears.  But as Gabe noted, good skiers are continually seeking a new level of challenge, which means a new confrontations with fear.

It is one of the satisfactions of skiing to confront and overcome personal fears, but there’s much more to it than that.  At times it’s hard —  cold fingers and toes, weary thighs, fogged goggles, wind blowing snow.  But at times the struggles fade, and there is something pure and clean remaining.  On demanding slopes, there is no faking.  It’s time for truth.  Everything is in sharp focus.  There is kinetic harmony, turns perfectly suited for a particular stretch of rock and the snow, the human body synchronized with the moment, the season, and geologic time.

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