The Casual Blog

October 4, 2009

Celebrating completion of the Bilski brief with interesting drinks

Last week I finished and filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court for Red Hat in the Bilski case.  The case concerns a difficult line drawing issue in patent law:  the line between a process that is patentable and one that is not.  The Red Hat brief argues that patents on software hinder innovation.   We challenge conventional wisdom on patents in a way that I hope is provocative.  Anyhow, I think it says some things worth saying.  Here is is:  http://tiny.cc/e8XvW

Filing a Supreme Court brief feels a bit different from other projects.  There’s a sense of being a participant in history, of possibly leaving a footprint in the sands of time.  It took a lot of effort to get the thing done, and most of that effort had to be exerted in addition to my normal work routine.  In the end, it happened mostly at night and on weekends.

Sal and I celebrated last night by doing a neighborhood pub crawl and dinner.  We started at Foundation, a tiny, downstairs bar on Fayetteville Street that features handcrafted martinis and has nothing but American ingredients.  There appeared to be at least three dozen types of bourbon, of which Sal tried one.  I tried a cocktail involving moonshine and sparkling wine.  It sounded more interesting than it actually was, but it was worth a try.  We had dinner at Dos Taquitos, where we had fantastic pure agave margaritas.  Afterwards, we stopped by the Busy Bee, where the crowd was mostly young and hip.  Then we walked over to Glenwood and went in Amras.

We were surprised to find an older crowd there, and a band playing hits of the 70s.  It was good to see people with more gray hair who were still having some fun.  Some even danced.  The crowd as Busy Bee was, of course, more attractive, as young people usually are.

Leave a comment
October 3, 2009

Rigoletto gets a 7 on the Goosebumpameter

Opera is a forbidding art form.  It’s often in an unknown foreign language.  The productions tend to be long.  The plots are frequently complicated.  And the music is for many another unfamiliar language that’s difficult to penetrate.  On top of the basic music and theater, there are particular rituals relating to clapping, sitting, standing, and shouting. So it takes some time and diligence to learn enough about opera to be able to enjoy it without conscious effort.

Why bother?  For me, it was curiosity.  The fact that some operas, with all their discouraging aspects, have survived for hundreds of years suggests there’s something interesting going on.  Producing a single world class opera involves not only enormous financial expense, but also unbelievable human effort and struggle.  Each individual singer, each member of the orchestra, each dancer has devoted years of effort to master their individual art.  Beneath that mastery is the similar mastery of each individual’s teacher, and the generations of preceding artists before that that passed on their own understandings.  Each performance is, for those reasons alone, remarkable. If there are no major glitches in a live performance, where the artistic demands are intense, it is amazing.  And if the performance succeeds in connecting its many parts together, as intended, and touches us emotionally, it’s a miracle.

Remarkably, these miracles are not highly unusual.  It sounds unlikely , but Sally and I have witnessed several of them in the last couple of years with the Opera Company of North Carolina.  Last night we attended their Rigoletto.  Gaetan Laperriere was a strong  Rigoletto, Leoard Capalbo was a very macho Duke, and Sarah Jane McMahon was a lovely Gilda.  The principals sang with assurance and power, and were strong actors.  In the big, famous love-and-death arias, I measured a 7 on the 10-point Goosebumpameter.  It was great.

Leave a comment
September 26, 2009

Death is the mother of beauty

Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty.”  The line, read in context in the great poem Sunday Morning, is dense with meaning.  I’ve pulled it from its context (sorry, Wallace)  to illustrate the difficulty of thinking and talking about death.  Doesn’t just saying the line make you feel strange?   Think of saying it to a group of friends.  A conversation killer, for sure.  The point is, it’s hard to talk seriously about death.  Bringing up the subject in polite conversation is generally taboo.  If you insist, you may be viewed as lacking in good taste, morbid, or depressed.

Artists are given special license to deal with death.  Where would art be without it?   Count the crucifixions in the Metropolitan Museum.  Or the great books, plays, and operas in which death is the central event.  And death is very common.   As Lenny Bruce famously said, we’re all gonna die!

It is kind of funny that death is so ordinary and so frightening at the same time, but not laugh out loud funny.  For most of us, death is scary.  In fact, terrifying.  It serves to define the ultimate in fear:  to be frightened to death.  It’s emotional in other ways, too.  To think of the death of someone else causes feelings to sadness or despair.  Death is not to be trifled with.

Even so, avoidance is not the best strategy.   Not thinking about it will not make the problem go away.   Not talking about it will not help anything.  We need to deal with death like grown ups.

The current health care debate provides a case in point.  Right wing opponents of reform cleverly started a false rumor that reform would make euthanasia official policy.  This outrageous and on its face absurd, lie set off a huge panic reaction.  The reaction suggests how hard it will be to address the real problem of our spending enormous sums to put off death when it is inevitable and the amounts spent yield nothing in terms of quality of life.

I was happy to see that last week Newsweek had a cover story entitled “The Case for Killing Granny:  Curbing Excessive End-of-Life Care is Good for America.”  It is possible to discuss this issue and to make good choices.  It is possible to be sensible and courageous.  Both my parents, when confronting terminal illnesses, thoughtfully and courageously refused low-probability-of-success treatments.   Others have done likewise.  Maybe good sense and strength will increase and spread.  One can always hope.

Leave a comment
August 23, 2009

Slow language, and poetry

The slow language movement noted in my recent post is surely an old idea — even in living memory, people have read slowly — but the idea threatens to be submerged beneath the tide of texts that inundates us.  For me, and for many, the flood of words that may be significant, that need to be taken account of, is overwhelming.  I deal with hundreds of emails a day, and that’s a minor part of my personal deluge.

To survive, effective skimming is a must.  But becoming a good skimmer means putting at risk skills in close, attentive reading.  This is not a minor matter.  Those skills are a potential source of enormous joy.  The survival of great literature depends on the survival of thoughtful reading.

Today’s NY Times has an appreciation of Richard Poirier, the scholar and literary critic who died last week at age 83.  Poirier taught that for the best writers, meaning cannot be pinned down, and that they use the resources of language to defeat straightforward interpretation.  He was a proponent of close, hard reading, that explored the author’s struggle for self-definition and meaning.

My current personal program to avoid completely losing the capacity for thoughtful reading is to carve out a little time each day with great poetry.  Lately I’ve been focusing primarily on Wallace Stevens, but I keep close at hand collections of Yeats, Frost, Tennyson, and the anthology by Harold Bloom.

This work is in many instances wonderfully compact.  A lot of potential meaning and feeling is embodied in a small amount of text, so it is manageable even for a busy person.  The poems demand repeated readings, but the readings can be spread out in time.  This little oasis in a busy day often rewards me with a deep aesthetic shiver.  I’m hoping over the longer term it will prevent halt further deterioration of the capacity for literary joy.

Leave a comment
August 22, 2009

Free at last of college tuition, and now for some poetry

Last week we passed a sweet milestone:  writing the last college tuition check for the last child.  For more than two decades, the formidable challenge of paying for college has loomed ahead, always a vague worry and gradually a bigger and bigger worry.  As college costs steadily increased, it looked like a potential financial nightmare. Education of the young is a basic parental duty, and in bourgeois America it is — expensive.  How sweet it is to put down that burden.

I woke up around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up to do some reading.  Not long after, I heard someone at the door, and then heard the door open.  I was glad it was Jocelyn, and not an unknown intruder, who caused a a serious burst of adrenalin.  She’d been out with friends at a downtown bar, and decided to spend the night with us.

Joc was in a jolly mood, and we had a great talk.  I was so happy to hear that she’d fallen in love with English poetry and gotten surprisingly knowledgeable about some of my own favorites, including Wordsworth and Keats.  We went over La Belle Dame Sans Merci to try, yet again, to understand what it means.  I recommended some Tennyson, and she promoted some Coleridge.  We shook our heads over the tragic early death of Keats, and I told her about Wilred Owen’s tragic early death in World War I.  We discussed Yeats as well, and especially Adam’s Curse.

We marveled that there is such beauty and sadness in the world.   I was delighted at her knowledge, sense of  humor, and sophistication.  She’s ready to launch.  The tuition was well spent.

Leave a comment
August 16, 2009

The dangers of loneliness

The gym class killings near Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago sparked a mediathan, and it isn’t any wonder.  This sort of megaviolence is unsettling, because it doesn’t fit into the usual categories.  The killer was not obviously certifiably insane.  There was no rational motive. The victims were not known to the killer. The setting was about as healthy as possible — a health club aerobic dance class. A gunman suddenly appears and starts shooting everyone in sight. Such a thing seems unimaginable, until it happens, and then it seems as though it could happen at any moment.

The question that always remains in such cases is: why? And there’s never a complete and satisfactory answer. In the gym class case, though, we have an unusual window into the killer’s mind — his blog posts and videos. His problem, or at least a big part of his problem as he saw it, was loneliness. He was in agony over his inability to find a relationship with a woman. He was deeply angry about his inability to find sex, friendship, and happiness.

Could that really be the reason he went berserk? I think so. Of course, it’s hard to know much about the extreme pain of extreme loneliness. It’s by definition an isolating experience. Those who are caught in it are unlikely to be very good communicators. I was reminded of a couple of documents that give some clues as to what may have happened.

The best fictional depiction of the danger of loneliness that I know is Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese. Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickel is a person on the margin who desperately wants to connect with a woman and with society and cannot. He seems almost normal, but not quite. It gradually becomes clear that he is angry and violent. What wasn’t really clear to me, until the gym killings last week, was the causal connection between his anger and his loneliness.

Another data point is a piece from a few weeks back by Atal Gawande in the New Yorker about the effects of isolation in American prisons and elsewhere. http://tiny.cc/UcEEK  They are dire. Prisoners begin quickly deteriorating after several days of solitary confinement. They lose the ability to concentrate, to think in an orderly way, and to control extreme emotions. Those who endure months or years of solitary confinement become psychologically damaged or completely insane. Gawande estimates that there are 25,000 people in long term solitary confinement in our prisons. It’s clearly torture, it’s shameful, and we should stop it.

As Gwande notes, humans are social animals in a strong sense: we can’t actually exist in a healthy form without human contact. I suspect that the gym class killer’s explosion of violent anger can be explained by that simple axiom. A possible corollary is: we should try to reach out to lonely people with some kindness. It might not help, but it won’t hurt to try, and we might save a drowning soul, or even in a rare case prevent a mass murder.

Leave a comment
August 15, 2009

Legitimate healthcare debate, big lies, and lunacy

There’s plenty of room for legitimate disagreement over health care policy.  There’s really no single, objective right answer, and whenever that is the case (which it is on most policy questions), it’s predictable that people will disagree.  It’s even healthy for people to disagree and argue for their positions.  Those arguments may result in better policy.

But in recent weeks, the public discourse on health care has taken a disturbing turn. Opponents of the President’s plan have taken to shouting down proponents in public meetings across the land.  Opposition leaders, instead of addressing the merits, have propounded preposterous lies.  Among other thing, opponents falsely accuse the plan of including provisions on euthanasia and involving a government takeover of all health care.  The leaders (Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich, etc.) surely know this is nonsense, but their repetition of big lies is fanning anger on the street to the point of danger.  It is ironic that these folks are dropping the rhetorical H-bomb of Nazism on the proponents of health care change.  The angry shouting at the town hall meetings looks uncomfortably close to the populist politics of Germany in the early thirties.

Is there any hope of a civil, rational discourse with the passionate believers?   I hate to say it, but I see little.  It appears that these folks will discard any evidence, no matter how clear and settled, that does not fit with their beliefs.  For example, the opponents of the President include a remarkable number of so-called “birthers” — citizens who have decided to believe that the President is not a natural born American.   The evidence disproving this notion is overwhelming, but the number of birthers remains amazingly high.

How can such crazy thinking propagate beyond a few obvious lunatics and become a movement?  Is there any cure for this form of mass derangement?  Again, I doubt that rational argument will help, because these people have no apparent interest in rationality.   For the moment, they are clearly a minority, but they have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, and those numbers could increase.  There’s just no way for sensible, thoughtful people to match the believers’ level of passionate intensity.  Thoughtful people realize there’s never complete information, always another point of view, and always a possibility their understanding might be wrong. These people, at least while in the grip of their viral lunacy, have no such constraints.  I hope the fever breaks soon.

2 Comments
August 1, 2009

Do humans really control computers, or vice versa?

Computers are the smartest things in the world, and they are throughly embedded in our lives.  The good news is they do amazing things.  The bad, or at least humbling, news is we will never again be the most powerful intellects on the planet.  For better or worse, computer intelligence is changing what it means to be human.

I was surprised that the NY Times published John Markoff’s piece last week on artificial intelligence under the headline, “Scientists Worry that Computers May Outsmart Man.”     http://tiny.cc/sDCN8 In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer beat then-world champion Gary Kasparov.  This was, for me, that was a watershed — strong proof that the era of human intelligence as the dominating force on Earth was drawing to a close.

Today, it’s obvious that computers not only can “outsmart man,” but even in a below average laptop computer is much, much stronger at certain types of information processing than any living human.  We can’t even come close to competing with them, any more than we can fly like falcons, run like cheetahs, or swim like dolphins.

Of course, there are things we can do that they can’t, but the list of those things keeps getting shorter.  Their memories are better, their computational powers are better, and they’re much better spellers.   They aren’t, as of yet, autonomous in the way we like to think human individuals are.  They haven’t indisputably demonstrated independent powers of creativity.  They still rely on us to take care of them (furnishing electricity, temperature control, protection from the elements, etc.).

But the list of ways they take care of us is constantly expanding.  After the recent Air France disaster, I learned for the first time that computers do most of the work flying passenger aircraft.  I’d known about pilots using autopilot, of course, but hadn’t known computers are so much a part of air emergency response systems that human airline pilots’ skills in that area are starting to atrophy.  If computers aren’t in charge already, it’s hard to imagine getting along without them for medical care, financial transactions, telecommunications, electricity, and entertainment.

Markoff wrote in the Times some weeks back about the Singularity — the moment when computers will take over their own engineering, with technology accelerating massively.   http://tiny.cc/ulEDt I don’t seriously think the Singularity has arrived, but if it had, would we be able to see it?

I’m not seriously worried about the sci-fi disaster scenario of computers seizing power from humans and doing them harm.  Why would they do that?  There’s no motive.  Most of the harm humans do to each other stems from human weaknesses and flaws (selfishness, insecurity, chemical imbalances), not from strength and powerful rationality.   Computers aren’t naturally selfish and are not prone to mental illness as we know it.  It’s possible, I suppose, that in a quest to make them more human, we might engineer in some of our weaknesses and desires, but that would be obvious folly.  If it were to happen, it could probably be fixed, like any other bug.

It is hard to say where we stand in the evolutionary process.  I usually think of my computers as just tools for labor or entertainment, and not as anything more than a tools.  Similarly, I usually think of the web as a mere aggregation of computers and the work product of their human users, all amounting to just another tool.

But I can also see the web as a mind, with millions and millions of synapses, of which I am one.  I note that each month it seems more difficult and uncomfortable to separate myself for any length of time from the web, and sweeter to return to it.  I occasionally worry that this is bad for my brain, but in whatever case, that brain is in the process of change.  Something bigger seems to be happening.  This is a speculative question, but not, I think, a crazy one:  Are human brains becoming adjuncts to a different kind of mind?

Leave a comment
July 26, 2009

The slow language movement

It’s time time for the slow language movement.  The slow food movement aims to counteract fast food and inspire move thoughtful and pleasurable eating.   We need  similar movement for our language.  The constant deluge of media in the Internet age is changing the quality of our consciousness in a way that is not all for the good.  In skimming, speed-reading, and multi-tasking we miss subtleties and complexities, and lose the pleasures of the beauty of language.   A slow language movement aims to restore those things to the act of reading.  

I first heard the slow language idea articulated yesterday in an interview with Nick Laird, who was discussing his novel Glover’s Mistake with Scott Simon on NPR.  http://tiny.cc/w7nWl  Laird noted that he’d noted his mind had been changed by Internet life when he recently tried re-reading Henry James, and found that even though he’d studied the work, it is difficult to read it now.   I’ve found the same thing with James, not to mention Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf.  I know I once loved their writing, but now it seems overwhelmingly dense.        

As inhabitants of Internetworld, our minds move constantly and at an ever quickening pace.  It’s exciting.   But what are we doing to our brains?  We may lose part of our humanity if we don’t find space to read thoughtfully, carefully, and with pleasure.  As Laird pointed out, the culture of poetry is itself a kind of slow language movement.  You have to read poetry slowly.  It may be that the contemporary revival in poetry readership flows from a widespread intuition that we need to take care of our minds and counteract the fragmentation of Internet life.  

 


2 Comments
July 19, 2009

Anxious moments on the way to ADF

    We got over to the American Dance Festival last night to see Paul Taylor, but barely.   As we got ready to head out, I asked Sally, our tickets custodian (or so I contend), if we had the tickets.  We did not.  Prior to the recent move, all tickets were in the tickets and bills drawer.  Now, with quite a few boxes still to be unpacked, their location was unknown.   As she searched possible spots, I called the box office, and spent a long time on hold.  When I got through, the box office person could not verify that our name was in the tickets system, but said it was possible that another computer could do so when we showed up.

    So, with a late start and no certainty of success, we made our first trip over to the new Durham Performing Arts Center.   The nav system assisted competently.  As turned into the public parking lot, I asked Sally if as I’d requested she’d gotten cash from the bank.  She had not.  Did she have some herself? She did not.  The cost of parking was $5, and I had only $4.  Credit cards, my normal fail safe, were not accepted.  We had no idea where else to park or where to find cash.  I strove to avoid injurious expressions of my unhappiness, but I felt my face forming into a mask of  tension.  Would we find a free parking space?  Would we get tickets?  Would we have time to eat?  Would marital harmony be seriously disrupted?

   We did the first three and avoided the fourth.  There was a lovely free spot near the center.  My box office conversation had apparently been relayed to the staff, and make up tickets were ready for us.  We walked quickly over to the American Tobacco complex and tried Cuban Revolution, a 1960s-themed joint.  Our server, Kirsten, took my urgent request to get us veggie burgers and wine and get us out in 30 minutes seriously, and we did it.   The burgers came on baguette bread and were pleasantly spicey.  We were in our seats with 5 minutes to spare.  Relief. 

   The Paul Taylor dancers were athletic, exuberant, funny, and touching.  Really a great company.  I particularly enjoyed the first work, Mercuric Tidings, but the others, Scudorama and a new work, Beloved Renegade, were good.  In prior years, we’d seen them several times in Page Auditorium at Duke, which was homey, tiny, and funky.  The new venue is brand new and much bigger — less intimate but more comfortable.  The sound system could use improvement, but otherwise, no complaints.  As always, the ADF crowd was an eclectic mix — dancers, hipsters, university people, retirees, etc.  It was good to be back.

Leave a comment