Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 35

The Two Footprints of the Information Age

At a DSO concert held at a nearby church a short while back, we sat (as usually) in the front row of a high balcony, just above the orchestra. That DSO stands for the Detroit  Symphony Orchestra. From our high perch we could easily survey the largely elderly crowd of music lovers—but here and there some young people too. I noticed that an elderly gent in the audience, waiting for the performance to begin, was operating a laptop computer. This made me curious. A More careful surveying revealed several others looking at pads and a larger number, here and there, were staring at or texting on smartphones.
This came to mind again yesterday when one of our morning conversations ranged over that topic so central to the elderly, be they Brigitte and me or, say, Miss Marple musing in Agatha Christie’s imagination.
I myself do not remember a time “before the telephone,” but you had to be a doctor to have one in the house. My grandfather was one—and I clearly remember that it once rang, and, for a joke, I got to go into a dark hallway and answer it. My memory is that of a strange sound coming from the black thing I was almost too little to hold—and its earpiece was several times the size of my ear. Buzzing and echo and what seemed to be a voice…
Remembering such things, we were soon making lists of all the extensive branchings of telephone and radio—of communications generally—that had sprouted since. Eventually we started toting up the costs of these activities tools and services too: cable and internet, computers and software, some of that software purchased yearly, like Norton’s antivirus immunization shots, cell phones and the disappearance of telephone boxes at Kroger and Safeway where, once, I used to call home for updates of my shopping list; indeed I used to head out making sure I had some quarters; these days I carry a Verizon phone with its own contract and regular monthly charges. But I digress. Part of that list includes movie rentals and DVR machines (which replaced the tape players) and a gaggle or pride or expense (not a bad generic for the category) of peripherals, cables, disk backups, portable hard drives smaller than my thumb, and a basement full of fossils filling wire baskets and boxes—obsolete electronics one simply hates to dump.
I got to wondering how much we actually spent on things like that. It seemed to me we spent a lot. And from that feeling comes my headline today. The communications age has two footprints. One is huge and one is relatively small. Turns out that I was confusing one with the other.
The large footprint comes from the importance communications services represent—and especially in the life of the elderly—and of the young. The failure of the internet is emotionally almost as bad as losing power; when the DVR misbehaves, somebody here makes energetic moves to restore the status quo, practiced in the art of applying the electronic equivalent of a Heimlich maneuver; it’s that important. Indeed it is important enough so that our collections-challenged but much loved little library is annually devoting more and more space to computers for patrons to use—instead of preparing to serve us with more words on paper when the terrorists finally take away our dreamtime.
Now the small footprint of the communications age turns out to be its total cost. Data on expenditures for internet, cable, cell phone services, movies, and such are strewn about the web; and they do tend to converge on a certain number but obviously leave much of the actual cost out. Using such methods (our own numbers are much higher), one sees a value of approximately $125 per month. I decided to look at national statistics, available from the Census Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure survey, to get a more general view. It turns out that, in 2012, the average household expenditure on communications (equipment and services both) comes to $185 per month; Canada, by the way, reports exactly the same figure collected the same way. Of this total $103 are accounted for by telephone, $82 by a category called Audio and Visual Equipment and Services. In 1989, the total was $83 per month (telephone $47, A/V $36). More to the point here is the percent such numbers represent to total household income. That percentage is the “footprint.”
It turns out that in 2012 the average annual gross household income was $65,596—and the Information Age claimed a mere 3.38 percent of that. That footprint was smaller in 1989—but not by much: 3.18 percent.
Huge impact on lifestyle, a quite small one on income. Everything depends on point of view.

Ode to an Ad

We found an ad that shows a farmerSurveying vast worlds of green.Far away a lowly mountain Bows before his stern, commandingGaze. All’s in order, all’s control Here, endless rows and rows and rows Of green extend out to a vague, A dim horizon. This isn’t nature,It’s something more, a kind of manmadeScreen where every gene is modifiedAnd only bits of puffy cloud Exhibit in a timid and thus halting Manner a touch of spontaneity.
The theme is “How the world advances,” (To where, one wonders, to what end?)The way has naught to do with Fertilizers, genetic tricks Or weed control—though such are quite Visible here. Rather, to our Surprise, the deeper secret of Control, the right to gaze emperor-likeOver a great domain, lies in tight reins Held in firm hands over InvisiblesLike price of crops, the weather, andThe satanic dance of interest rates—All achieved by riding on a relatively Newly-crafted magic carpet—Trading on the derivatives market.

Shrinking Recess, Thinning PE

Sometimes all the news that’s fit to air can give one a rude shock. News on PBS (I think) the other day informed us that Recess is shrinking in elementary schools and so is physical education (PE); in many districts PE has been eliminated outright. Here is a link to a presentation by the Center of Public Education (CPE) on this subject. Why is this happening? Well, more time is needed for English/Language Arts and Math (presumably to meet testing requirements) and the time must come from the presumably useless categories—or the expensive ones. PE is expensive and, in these days of seemingly skyrocketing bullying, Recess must be supervised. What shrinks or thins will disappear.
Per CPE’s article, in the 2001-2008 period 20 percent of school districts (translates into 1 in 5) have reduces recess; 9 percent of districts have reduced PE.
Madness—in the form epidemics of experimentation—has long plagued education. Is this another enzyme on the loose? Or does this one come from “government’s too big, so let’s cut out the basics.”
So what is growing? Childhood obesity.

The Right Mix

One of the maddening aspects of human experience is that no belief system rooted in a single, clear concept ever works effectively—but that the “clear concept” nevertheless has genuine value. An example of this is liberty and the various doctrines that it has engendered beginning with the Enlightenment: laissez-faire, human rights, libertarianism, and the like. Evidently, the word “libertarian” was initially used in 1789 by William Belsham, an English political thinker. He opposed those who held a “necessitarian” view.” This contrast sums up the whole problem: human’s have free will while, simultaneously, we have to live in the realm of necessity. We can no more advocate a purely libertarian approach to ordinary life than we can support, philosophically or otherwise, a purely deterministic view. In both cases either one will immediately energize its opposite. Every movement of our body involves the flexion of some and the extension of other muscles. Maddening. But when it comes to muscles, we do not split into camps of flexarians and extensionists. We happily shovel snow, go up and down the stairs, and stir the tea using both in harmony.
Curiously libertarianism, unfolding in various ways, not least into democracy, developed at the same time as modern science—both born of the same rationalism. But science has fathered scientism, which is pure determinism; in that view it swallows free will, which becomes an illusory epi-phenomenon: humans are just puppets pulled by the springs of stimulus and response.
The unavoidable data of reality, which contain both real freedom and undeniable necessity produce the maddening situation in which keeping it simple renders one stupid. Laissez-faire worked reasonably well when society was still firmly anchored in the traditional synthesis of Christendom. As that creative impulse cooled, monarchy added more and more necessities to those supplied abundantly by nature—and these had to be shaken off. But in our day the traditional synthesis has decayed to such an extent that chaos grows all around us and yet more liberation seems downright crazy. I need not go far for an example. I just ponder watching a three-minute part of the recent Superbowl half-time show.

Upbraiding Modernity--Then

Thou has traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be u’sd, and, contrary to the King, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill.
The speaker here is Jack Cade, a rebel, addressing one Lord Say. The work is Shakespeare’s King Henry the Sixth, Part II, Act 4, Scene VII. The play is thought to have been written in 1591. King Henry VI lived his forty-nine years on earth between 1421 and 1471.
The context of this entry. I used a quote from Christina Rossetti in the last post then followed that up by reading other Rossetti snippets to Brigitte. We got to talking about linguistic changes between the nineteenth century (Rossetti’s years were 1830-1894) and today. She sounds quite modern. We went on then, armed with Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to see how much had changed since the sixteenth century. And Mr. Cade’s little railing just happened to come up.
We both laughed. Ah yes. Arsen’s endless railings about Modernity are a mere echo of what came naturally to Shakespeare—looking back about a century himself. “You must put that up,” said my Editor in Chief—just seconds before the same thought would have occurred to me too. But then, you see, she is fast!

Snow on Snow

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,Snow on snow,In the bleak midwinter,Long ago.  [Christina Georgina Rossetti, A Christmas Carol]
Is one’s sense of extreme weather a function of age? Does frequent and massive snowfall produce dreads in men with creaky joints as shoveling is yet again ahead? So it seemed this morning. Snow on snow today, but in the here and now, and in such dense veils that I could barely make out the garage this morning at eight. It’s all way too much, I thought this morning. The “too much” included the contents of the Wall Street Journal; I only found it after groping about in the snow; it had been buried on our front step and well enough so that even its shape had been obscured. My rational self, which always only echoes the patterns of the past, put a sarcastic stop to such gloomy reflections. “Look it up,” it said. “I bet it’s not even a record-setting season.” So I did.
Well, it turns out, that snow on snow this year is certainly record-breaking. I looked up snow fall in December and January for 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. Two years ago we had 15 inches of snow in these two months, a year ago 19.4 inches, and this year 56.5 inches ( link ). These numbers apply to the Detroit Metro area generally; we know from Monique that results were even more extreme on the other side of the Metro.
For once the rational self was wrong—and Brigitte as usually right. Therefore writing about snow seems justified by the actual results out there, carefully measured by the Weather System.

Flowers Are Bought

On this day flowers are bought. My phrasing, obviously, is up-to-the-minute modern. It was in one of Theodore Dalrymple’s fascinating if also depressing books that we first encountered this sort of “objective” phrasing—when, writing about some man who had stabbed some relative,  Dalrymple quoted the man as saying that “The knife went in.” Well, on this day flowers were bought, and the very distant phrasing arises from my overhearing a conversation between wife Brigitte and daughter Michelle. They were discussing the role of birthdays in the life of women, and Michelle suggested that “We ought to return to the old days—when people didn’t know how old they really were. I think it should start after you turn thirty.” Flowers were bought because a recurrence in time took place. Whose it was will remain a secret, and the number of the recurrence is safe with me.
Flowers were bought because, on this occurrence, the retail system user has inexplicable urges to hasten the arrival of Spring. But the flowers were bought in the middle of a Winter Weather Advisory, which means that the snow was coming down and, once down, was piling up—so much snow the driver barely saw that the lights were blinking yellow, which they do on Saturdays on the thoroughfare that got labeled Moross.
There are no agents in this modern world. Cyclamens do not know their own name. No one waters them, but the water sprinkles down.

Other Sports

We’re now on the eve, almost, of the nation’s biggest sports event, the Superbowl. By tradition we number these in the Roman style—hence once a year I have to spend five minutes figuring out what structures like XLVIII mean. That comes to 48. (Maddening, really, these traditional ways of doing things. Logically XL should either mean 500 or 60—not 40, but I digress.)
The other day some announcement alerted us to the growing popularity of soccer among American women and girls, and we got to talking about the “other sports.” This then led to wondering what the big traditional sports of India and China might once have been. And had they survived? These days getting a quick look at such things is easy. What became clear is that among individual sports for males, wrestling is universal, for females dancing in some form certainly is. Among team sports what we call soccer had as big a footprint in China in ancient times as it now has in the Western world; the U.S. is the only major country that treats “football” with benign neglect. The Chinese cuju goes back to the second or third centuries BC—so that is pretty old. After a while we also remembered that Native Americans had also had a sport; it was (and is) played with a ball moved about by using a basket mounted on the end of a stick. I describe the game that way because, for the life of us, we couldn’t think of the sport’s name.
We couldn’t think of it despite the fact that the sport is played in Spring and Fall almost daily at the two middle-schools we routinely drive past—by girls as well as boys. Off I went to discover the name; as I was returning, Brigitte was calling ahead. Her memory had produced it: Lacrosse. “No wonder we couldn’t think of it,” I said. “It has a French name.” Yes. Canadians named the game, jeu de la crosse, crosse here meaning “a crooked stick.” The Ojibwa called it baaga’adowe…
Well, today—here is that vast weather of endless associations swirling in the collective mental air—came a story in the Wall Street Journal titled “Team Sports Don’t Make The Cut With American Kids.” The upshot of this story is that of six popular sports played by youths up to age 18, four have lost participation between 2008 and 2012: tackle football, soccer, baseball, and basketball; basketball is the biggest loser, having lost 8.3 percent of participation. Two sports have gained following: ice hockey, 64 percent, and lacrosse—a stunning 158.3 percent.
Will such shifts in popularity have any impact on the Superbowl? Of course not. Or, come to think of it, maybe. Superbowl Sunday is also undergoing transformations. Every year it has less and less to do with football and is more and more becoming the greatest religious holiday of Modernity, the Day of Advertising.
My images come from Wikipedia here and here . The first shows a Chinese drawing from the fifteenth century, the second the 2005 NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championship.

Black Hole Denial Revisited

A while back (December 2011), I had a post entitled “Flirting With Black Hole Denial” ( link ). It surprised me, therefore, that Stephen Hawking appears to have doubts of his own, the doubts released January 22, 2014. Hawking, of course, is a top-ranked physicist and foremost student of black holes. The story is here . In his paper he says: “There are no black holes—in the sense from which light can’t escape to infinity.” His conclusion is based on the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity. He is quoted as saying to CBC News: “The conflict is that with quantum mechanics, you’re never destroying information. If information gets completely lost and falls into a black hole, there’s no way of reversing this. So either Einstein’s theory of relativity is incomplete, or quantum mechanics is incomplete.”  It will be fun to watch this one evolving over time.
What’s likely to fall into the devouring jaws of Doubt next? Dark matter perhaps? ( link ).

Full Moon Soon

For voluntary lunatics like us, 2014 begins auspiciously. The month began with a new moon on the 1st and will end with another new moon tomorrow on the 31st of January too. I stress that word, new, because, well, it will also be a full moon tomorrow; here is why.

What with the snow and cold—and hearing about Atlanta (Atlanta!??!) being paralyzed by ice—I might have overlooked this fact, distracted by the immediately here and now. But by happenstance I was reading one of Stephen Jay Gould’s books of essays, Eight Little Piggies, in which he reminded me that until 1959 of the current era no humans could possibly imagine the backside of the moon. In that year the Soviet Luna 3 probe photographed the far side; in 1968 Apollo 8 orbited the moon; hence Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were the first three humans to see that side of the moon with their own eyes.
Now it so happens that when the Moon is New for us, it is Full Moon on the other side, on the one we sometimes refer to as the dark side of the moon. We would, of course, thus designated it; we are always seeing things from our peculiar perspective. I found a full image of that side on Wikipedia here —then got to wondering how come the moon persists in staring at us with one of its faces only.
The name of the explanation is synchronous rotation, also called tidal locking (a good visual example is here ). The moon rotates around its own axis as it simultaneously rotates the earth. But its own rotation takes exactly the same amount of time as its circuit of the earth. Therefore one half of it is always oriented to our planet. The deeper explanation (hidden in that name, tidal locking, is that the earth’s gravitational force deforms the moon slightly, which aids and abets the moon’s rotational behavior.
What we see is what we get. But what we see depends on where we are.