Incommn

“Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”

—John B. S. Haldane, British scientist, born November 5, 1892

I remembered Haldane’s quip from Richard Dawkins’ classic The Selfish Gene, 1976. (If you haven’t read it, the usual run-don’t-walk directive is in force. My hair is still on fire.) The quote wittily points to a genetic explanation for altruism: human beings evolved in a world of small groups, Dunbar number (160) sized or so, and being my brothers’ or—cousins’—keeper benefits my genes. Point is, we are animals, not angels. We are parts of natural systems and we need to seek Truth in science, not metaphysics. Darwin and Nietzsche are smiling, somewhere…

Continue reading “Dunbar, Dawkins, Darwin, Desmond”

“The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but a stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich.”

—Stephen J. Field, American judge, born November 4, 1816

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve Been Thinkin’

Ha. That’ll be the day. Stephen J. Field, appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, was one of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century US Supreme Court justices who were endlessly helpful to the Robber Baron capitalists during the first Gilded Age (the one before the one we’re enjoying so much now). Income Tax? We don’t need no stinkin’ Income Tax? Unions? See the quote. He also assented to Plessy vs Ferguson, the infamous 1896 case that upheld (legal) racial segregation. Field was the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice, only surpassed by William O. Douglas. He was repeatedly asked to resign by his colleagues, as he was intermittently senile in his later years, but he refused, insisting on breaking John Marshall’s record of thirty-three years on the court.

President James K. Polk annexed Texas and led the US to victory in the iniquitous Mexican War. He gets the Last Word today. Polk was the “54–40 or fight” guy, too, dear to generations of American schoolchildren. He has been called the “least known consequential president” of the United States. Tremble indeed.

Continue reading “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”

“The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap, and they know it.”

—Fred W. Friendly, American producer, born October 30, 1915

And Then There Were None

Love this quote from Fred Friendly; kind of says it all about American media. I imagine the shameless hucksters and ideologues who are now running TV news continue “to point with pride” at their industry. Or worse, they may not give a shit at all.

Continue reading “Fred Friendly Turns in His Grave”

“A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn’t waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.”

—Frans de Waal, Dutch scientist, born October 29, 1948

I grew up in the LP era. On the good side, the experience included wonderful sound (some people think analog LPs sound better than digital recordings). The record companies churned out reissues of historical recordings, folk music (real folk music recorded in the field and performed by real folk as well as the works of Bob Dylan and his myriad imitators), classical Indian and Japanese music, Pardon My Blooper Records, comedy, recorded theater (I’m still looking for the recording of “Waiting For Godot” with Bert Lahr)…A 12 x 12 inch cardboad album cover provided plenty of room for visual pizazz on the front and for informative, interesting, or frankly bizarre written and visual content on the back.

Continue reading “You Paid How Much for Speakers?”

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

—Evelyn Waugh, English author, born October 28, 1903

Sound recording is one of the the technical wonders that emerged in the prodigious 1880s. Thomas Edison invented and commercialized cylinder recording. By 1910, the more familiar disc recordings had come to dominate the industry. Rapid technical progress continued, with electric recording and playback coming in the 20s, and vinyl records at 33 and 45 rpm replacing the long-established 78s made out of shellac. Stereo recording replaced monaural recording by the late sixties. (My copy of the original Doors album. featuring “Light My Fire” (1967) was mono. It cost $2.99. Stereo was $3.99.)

Tape recording was pretty widespread by the sixties, and pre-recorded music cassettes of record albums started to be common in the early seventies. The first cassette I owned was the Rolling Stones’ great album, Sticky Fingers, which I bought in Florence, Italy in the summer of 1971. The music industry had also created another tape format, the eight-track tape with superior sound quality and convenience compared to cassettes. It was particularly convenient in the car. My father had an eight track deck in his pale blue ’67 GTO, the small collection including Brahms first symphony, a perennial favorite of the old man’s. But eight track lost out in the lost run to the smaller, more flexible cassette.

Continue reading “Edison to Eight-Track: Reflections on Recorded Music”

“Who can wonder at the attractiveness… of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?”

—Marsilio Ficino, Italian philosopher, born October 19, 1433

My goodness, the US House of Representatives is actually doing something constructive. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) introduced a bill that addresses the widespread and destructive “patent-trolling” business. A patent-troll “… is a person or company who enforces patent rights against accused infringers in an attempt to collect licensing fees, but does not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question….” (Wikipedia). The proposed legislation incorporates good ideas from a number of recent proposals to control patent-trolling, and has the support of both major congressional leaders and industry. (A systematic approach to ending these abuses from the open source community here.)

Continue reading “Congress Goes Trollhunting”

“He never wants anything but what’s right and fair; only when you come to settle what’s right and fair, it’s everything that he wants and nothing that you want.”

—Thomas Hughes, British judge, born October 20, 1822

Boy and man, I have always loved systems. I was a software developer for most of my career. I devised, built, and ran lots of them. (Made a lot of money as a direct result of systems I built, too; but that’s a story for another day.) I think my very favorite kind of history is the history of systems, what Fernand Braudel called l’histoire de la la longue durée, the history of things that last a long time. He distinguished it from the history of events, which is what we normally think about when we think about history. Braudel favored the study of long-lasting phenomena like climate, trade, routes, land-use, communications, and technology instead of the more traditional gossipy, biography-oriented history of great men and events.

Just finished the second volume of Vaclav Smil’s magisterial history of 20th century technical innovation, Transforming the Twentieth Century. The first volume traced the development of the key inventions, mostly between 1867–1914, that formed the modern world. The second takes the story through the twentieth century, with detailed studies of key technologies like electrical generation and transmission, the automobile, container shipping, the oil and gas industries, and electronics and computing. Smil ends with reflections on the gains and losses humanity has achieved: comfort, health, and leisure for billions of people on the one hand; dire, existential threats from global climate change, the potential fragility of systems, and grotesque (and growing) economic inequality on the other.

Continue reading “God Is Still Dead”

“To some, the ’50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.”

—Annette Funicello, American actress, born October 22, 1942

Linked to an article yesterday Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex? that seems alarmingly prescient. The author stresses that uniquely local, purely Japanese conditions contribute to the trend: twenty years of economic stagnation; 2011’s earthquake, tsunami, and radioactive meltdown; and conservative attitudes in the home and workplace. These are great reasons to avoid marriage, and cohabitation or unmarried parenthood is unusual in Japan.

But young Japanese go way beyond avoiding marriage. They avoid intimacy and sex altogether, even one-night stands. They have come to actively dislike sex and even physical contact with other people. They live in a sort of permanent state of pre-sexual adolescence, dedicated to their circle of friends, consumerism, and media. It’s like “Brave New World” without sex. It’s like a society of twelve-year olds, without the imminence of raging hormones. I suppose a future society of sexless consumers will work out just fine for the corporate masters of Japan, but it seems unspeakably tragic to me. (The image is from Yasujiro Ozu’s sublime “Tokyo Story,” 1953, a masterpiece about family life from an earlier, more human world.)

Continue reading “Gimme That Wine”

“Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies.”

—Thomas Love Peacock, English author, born October 18, 1785

Spent all day on Friday and the morning on Saturday at Baystate Medical Center (not as a patient). They’re building a lot, there’s obviously lots of dough sloshing around, and they’re one of the largest employers in Western Massachusetts. In our rather quiet—somnolent?—local economy, this is going to need some attention from InCommN. More to come.

Work in the Future: I reread this essay, A Few Notes on The Culture, by Iain M. Banks, my favorite science fiction writer, who died earlier this year. He set his stories and novels in a galactic culture called, oddly enough, the Culture. I find his ideas about how a technologically advanced culture with artificial intelligence might arrange politics, society, and the economy both plausible and attractive.

The future has been arriving in Japan ahead of schedule the last few decades. Japan is at the forefront of economic and demographic trends that will soon affect the rest of the world. Is the lack of interest in sex among younger people in Japan something unique to that culture? The decline of traditional marriage is an obvious response to changes in the economy and society, but finding sex “too troublesome” seems weird.  

Continue reading “Troublesome”