Catching up

 It has been a long, long time since I have reread any of these posts, and longer still since I wrote any.

Mom died at the end of 2017 (or was it 2018?).  I owe her a separate post.  She stayed in her home in Torrance until the end, with Susie's help.  She would fall and not tell us.  Once (thanksgiving) she fell the day before we drove down,  and we got a call from Susie, who had stopped by to check on her.  Becky called Lisa, who went over and helped clean up (Susie had gotten her upstairs and into bed, after cleaning her off since Mom had been lying on the floor for 24 hours unable to get up and had soiled herself), Becky flew down, and we continued driving down.  Mom didn't want to see a doctor.  We fed her in bed for a few days, and she was able to get about and take care of herself.  Inexplicably, we let her.  A few years later it happened again, this time she had an emergency device on a string around her neck, and the paramedics came and helped her.  They wanted to take her to the hospital, she said no.  She fell again the second day, and this time they insisted on taking her to the hospital.  Again Becky and I flew down.  This time we just stayed there, working from her home and taking care of her.  The doctor suggested hospice, Mom wanted out of the hospital, and she had some serious problems-- spinal injury, inability to swallow.  We set her up in a bed in the living room and spoon fed her for two months.  She was ok at first, but never regained her ability to eat or stand up, and was starting to lose full comprehension of her situation.  She passed a few days before Christmas.

After she died, at work they cancelled the Noto project and I had to find some other project in i18n.  No one really seemed interested in me (a sign I should have heeded) so I transferred to assistant tools.  The first project went ok from my perspective, but I didn't get a good review on it, and the PM failed to ensure it was a project the conversation design team really wanted, and soon left, so the work was in limbo.  My manager set me up as TL of a new project with a team of three others, but one member left Google due to family issues, and the rest of us took a long time getting a product together.  My manager was thinking, I think, six months, but it was 2-1/2 years, so a clear failure from his point of view.  Once again poor reviews.  In the fall of 2021 it got canceled and I hung on in assistant tools working on other things waiting to see if the other teams we collaborated with on it (speech synthesis and conversation design) would be able to find funding.  They got a promise, but no signature, and eventually (due to poor planning by Google around the end of COVID) Google hit financial difficulties and it was canceled for good.

Then in January 2023, while I was down in LA helping Becky deal with the house, Google laid me off, along with about 12,000 other employees.  This is where the years of middling reviews (I was always told I was doing a good job, yet the numbers were always not great, and when I'd point this out my managers would insist I was doing a good job and would get a bit annoyed) pushed me into the disposable 5%.  Since Lillian had been asking about retirement, and my job (after the project I was TL for got canceled) was not that motivating, it seemed time to retire.  So I took the severance and am now moving forward as a retiree.  I find that I don't miss work, but that I'm also not much more productive at home than before.  Nothing really has changed at home, which is a tragedy, but in this respect the entire 35 years here have been a tragedy, in the truest sense of the word.  Financially we seem ok so if anything I think I should have retired 5 years earlier, but I was just too nervous about not having employment.  We still have some things to take care of, transitioning to medicare and the retirement health plan Lillian has through Stanford is the main thing.  Other than that things seem fine.  I don't find myself with too little to do, and I don't seem inclined to work on programming projects at all, which just shows me how burned out I actually was (I'd worked pretty hard on the failed project I was TL for).

Partway through COVID Nick and Rose got married, last year Rose graduated, they moved to SF, and she got a job at Google (neither she nor Nick were impacted by the layoffs).  Then this May they had a daughter, Jade.  So Lillian and I are now grandparents.  Nick is a very dedicated father and enjoys caring for Jade a lot, which makes me happy.  For some reason I seem to be holding back with Jade, not jumping at (or requesting) opportunities to hold her, for instance.  I'm afraid I'm preparing myself to be the friendly but distant grandpa.  It's an easier role that requires less of me, and the fact that I'm setting myself up for that makes me sad.  I'm feeling that I'm kind of getting a bit more distant from Nick and Allie too.  Lillian is much more proactive, and has monthly breakfasts with Nick, for instance.  I rarely seem to talk with N&A about anything important.  My relationship with them is a bit better than the one I had with my father, but I don't feel like I really know them, and I'm not sure they really know me, or are all that interested in knowing me.  I want to be accessible but I suspect I'm not.  Anyway, Nick's a father now, at the same age I became a father.  Quite a future ahead of him, I think he'll be grateful to have had the opportunity to be a father.  I certainly was, and am.

So, anyway, eight years of life history there.  Too bad  I've neglected blogger really, it was good to read a bit of my thoughts from long ago.  Maybe I'll write here again.

Posting via email

Well, tried to post to the joint blog for our upcoming China trip via email, and nothing has showed up yet. So I figure I'd try it here to see if that works. The whole point ought to be that I can send the email from any email account, right?  It shouldn't require me to use gmail. I'm hoping it's just either because I wasn't the main owner of the blog, or that maybe it takes a while to work its way through the system. Must be one of those... must be. Or maybe my email address has to be added as an author. But you can't accept the invitation from that email address. It could be that there really is no way to blog via email from a non-gmail account.  Sigh.

Posting via email

Well, tried to post to the joint blog for our upcoming China trip via email, and nothing has showed up yet. So I figure I'd try it here to see if that works. The whole point ought to be that I can send the email from any email account, right?  It shouldn't require me to use gmail.  I'm hoping it's just either because I wasn't the main owner of the blog, or that maybe it takes a while to work its way through the system.  Must be one of those... must be.

Breaking my wrist

So, wanted to capture a bit of how this felt...

I broke my wrist trying to learn to snowboard, about a month ago. I mean, really broke it-- "distal radius fracture." They took x-rays when I got to the clinic at the base of the hill, set my wrist and put it in a half cast, and told me I'd need to see a doctor and probably have it operated on when I got back. Which I did. I broke it on a Thursday around noon, went back to the hotel and stayed there until the next day, when I took the bus back from Tahoe. I wasn't able to see someone then so I saw someone on Monday, and had the wrist operated on that Friday. Cut me open, put a plate and screws in there to hold the bones in place. Becky drove me to the clinic (picked me up at 5:30 am!) in Fremont, and picked me back up at 10:45 or so after it was over, dropped me off at home. Viv took me to the airportat 5:30, and I flew down to L.A. to Mom's house that evening (Lillian, Nick, and Allie had all flown in the previous few days, originally I was going to fly Wednesday with Lillian, they picked me up). It was Mom's birthday, she turned 90.

So, anyway... I was on Percocet (Oxycontin + Aceteminophen) for several days after the operation. It hurt a lot, not to the point of tears, but to the point that I really couldn't think clearly. The Percocet helped somewhat. I was really tired, and sleeping all the time (this was true ever since the injury). My typical day was wake up at 11, eat a bit, sleep from 1-4, eat a bit, doze in the evening, then go to sleep about 10. I'd stopped taking the trazodone the day I broke my arm, and didn't take it again until about a week after the operation. I took the Percocet a few times a day for the first few days, and then tried to wean myself off it towards the end of the week, stopping on Saturday I think.

Anyway, I'm going into this detail as background. It's not really what I want to capture, but it's probably relevant. The main thing that I wanted to relate is my state of mind during that week and part of the next. The main things were 1) not being able to think, because of the pain, and 2) a strong, emotional, direct perception of mortality.

Death everywhere

So... the most notable thing about that week was that I felt very aware of mortality, mine and that of every living thing around me. This was a very emotional, felt experience, not an intellectual one. It's usual (at least at middle age) for me to think about death in a 'second hand' way-- about family who've died, or the deaths of animals or other living things, and while there's some emotional color to this, mostly affection for people who are no longer with us, it's mostly a mental story around the theme of losing others. But this was different. It had the feeling of seeing something clearly for the first time, of going to a new place and understanding it by actually being there when before you'd just heard stories or seen pictures. I felt I had a glimpse of what approaching my own death in old age might feel like (should I be so fortunate). And being so tuned in to mortality, I was seeing it everywhere. I was reading in the NYRB about a philosopher who wrote articles considering the impact that knowledge that human society exists after we're gone informs our value judgments now. He proposed thought experiments, such as if (as in a movie I once heard of) there was a disease that made everyone in the world sterile, so that humanity would cease in 100 years once the last human had passed away. He said this would affect your judgments about what to value in your life, what activities were worth pursuing-- that even if you have no offspring, no relatives, your knowledge that humankind will outlast you counts for something. So, death. There were science articles I read about hospice care and the dying. Death. There were my memories of seeing Mom when we went down to visit, in particular when I entered the house and she was sleeping on the couch-- she looked so small and frail, and it was so unusual to see her asleep. Death. There were the usual articles about climate change. Mass death. Everywhere I looked, there was mortality.

I was continually aware of my body, how I had broken it, and how it was injured, and would repair itself but not ever be quite the same. How the pain never left me, and how I was inextricably tied to my body-- there was no going into a world of imagination, of mental preoccupation, for me, I was mentally grounded in the here and now. Normally, I think of myself as the things I do, or my values, or thoughts, or memories, or personality-- mental states. But during this week I thought of myself as a bag of tubes, slowly breaking down, repairing itself but not quite as fast, not as complete, again and again, the accumulation of small failures until the final one that was my end. I thought about how, at age 55, I could still anticipate recovery, getting to a point where I had most of the use of my arm and hand back, where the pain was gone (or, since I couldn't quite imagine it then, mostly gone), but that in 10, 20, 30 years, I would not have the comfort of this assurance that things would get better. In fact, it seemed clear to me that I would continue to injure myself, and at some point things would not get better much at all, they'd just keep going in this new state. I imagined living with my arm in pain, unable to really move my wrist or hand at all, for the rest of my life. "Imagine" again makes this sounds like the kind of thing you daydream about, or spin a story to yourself about, but it wasn't like that. It was like experiencing a new reality where this was, in fact, the case, the fact that must be acknowledged and reckoned with. Since I was currently in pain, I was going to continue in pain; since I currently did not have use of my arm, I would never again have use of my arm; since I was currently unable to think, was just a bundle of tubes, I would always be a bundle of tubes.

In fact, it seemed curious to me that I had ever imagined that I was other than this, that my personality, thoughts, values, amounted to anything significant. I was a body, which did things to maintain itself, and would do so until this body got so damaged and weak it could not maintain integrity and succumbed to breakage or bacteria. And I looked at plants, and saw how they're green shoots, then healthy plants, then damaged plants, then dried broken shells of plants. This was my path, this was my children's path, this was the path of all living things. We're all growing briefly, then breaking, then dying. I thought of all the food we eat, the animals being killed, the pain of death, breaking apart, being eaten. One huge world of things living and fading and dying... That's what we are.

This wasn't depression, I probably need to add. I know what that's like, and this wasn't it. Depression is a constricting of your world until you and your unhappiness are all that exists. Everything is about you, everything is about your inadequacy, your unhappiness, your frustration, your limits. It's a very restricted and self-reinforcing mental state that makes you unable to engage with the world. In fact it's kind of all mental state, you're not in touch with your physical state (except lethargy, and perhaps tension) at all. These feelings were not that. They weren't about me. I wasn't angry with myself, or irritable, or tense. It was all about being a physical, living creature, embedded in the world and subject to the rules of all living things in the world. That's what I was. That's all I was, it seemed. It wasn't anything to be happy or sad about, it just was.

So, now...

So, this faded a few days after I stopped the Percocet and started taking the trazodone again. Whether it was the change in drugs, or the lessening of the pain (still significant, but lessened to the point that I could occupy my thoughts with something else from time to time), or the passage of time, I don't know. What I have now is the memory of how this felt-- I don't have these feelings any more, my mental state is back to normal. I guess that's a good thing.  It does make it easier to function, or perhaps the ease of functioning makes it easier to have a mental state that's not so tied to the present moment, to immediate reality, and hence to the brute facts of life. But it did make a strong, vivid impression on me, and I'm afraid of losing that. I felt that I had a truer sense of the value of life, the value of health, the short time we have before we die. It was an emotional connection with these things that gave me a whole different idea of what and who I was. I'm losing that connection, and I'm starting to lose that sense of myself as a creature, and am back to being primarily a personality loosely connected to a body, somehow free from mortality. I expect it will come back when I near death, and most of those around me have died, and my body is failing.  I wonder how I'll feel about it then.  Maybe these memories will help-- "oh yes, I've been here before."

thoughts on the movie "Her"

Warning, spoilers ahead.

I saw the movie "Her" a few nights ago with my wife and daughter, at my wife's suggestion. She'd heard good things about it and was curious. I, on the other hand, had fairly low expectations. I'd read enough about it to know the premise and be acquainted with a few plot points-- those the promoters of the movie think will stimulate interest-- and from my perspective it wasn't promising. "Lonely guy falls in love with his phone" and some titillation about sex with his operating system. I mean, seriously? I was not looking forward to scenes in which a guy gets off talking to his computer.

So, the movie wasn't great, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. The titillation is there, all right. Besides sex with an operating system (tastefully fading to black as they moan, yes the OS apparently is programmed for sexual arousal), there's also scenes of phone sex (earlier, to ease us into the idea of there not even being a real person on the other end of the line), foreplay with a live surrogate for the (presumably sentient but disembodied) OS, and foreplay with a bad date (he doesn't quite connect with her, but they start to have sex anyway, but then she wants to know if he's ready for more than a one-night-stand). So, plenty of titillation to go around. But apart from that it's a more or less conventional story about relationships starting, changing, and ending, and the effects this has on everyone involved, just set in a somewhat idealized near future.

I didn't give it much thought, and wouldn't have thought to write about it, except that I read the thread on metafilter.com discussing the film.

So, a digression about metafilter. Metafilter is sortof like reddit except you have to pay a nominal fee in order to post. This keeps like 99.5% of the crap out of their comment system. In addition, the convention for introducing a topic is to provide a short paragraph about it, generally containing several related links riffing on the theme, linking to articles, videos, analysis, related work, etc. It's much more thoughtful than reddit, and the themes tend to be less topical and more idiosyncratic than those on reddit. (If you don't know what reddit is, well, um, this is the internet, you can find out for yourself.) Bottom line is, I generally find interesting discussions on metafilter.

This discussion was a little more random than most, and I found it alternately intriguing and aggravating. There were several divergent opinions about aspects the film, often ones I had difficulty sharing. One contingent held that speech recognition makes for a crummy UI (really, this was a big issue for some folks) and found the movie too unrealistic to enjoy as a result. Another contingent thought the movie was a touching sci-fi take on the arrival of the singularity (again, you can look it up on teh internets, but the one-sentence synopsis is that 'the singularity' is the point in human history at which artificial intelligences replace humans as the dominant life form on the planet). A third felt that the movie was vastly overpraised considering the rather conventional and sexist plot line.

I had different reactions to these three discussions. I'll start with speech since to me it's the least interesting.

Speech recognition as the pervasive UI.

Some people were interested in the movie's depiction of user interfaces of the future, and one of the articles linked to discussed this at some length. The filmmakers had thought about this the way filmmakers would, which is to say, their problem was how to provide enough atmospherics to support the narrative, but keep the technology out of the way. Since they presupposed a world in which software can become sentient, it was reasonable to have UIs that let you interact with the software as though it were nearly sentient, and this meant characters can talk to their devices with full fluidity and ambiguity, just as though talking to a human. No keyboard, no mouse, no gloves, no vr helmet. Kinda makes sense to me, but some people really balked at this. Voice input isn't good for working with spreadsheets. You need a restricted vocabulary. You have to train the software so it can recognize the speaker. You can't use it in a noisy environment. It makes workplaces too noisy.

These kinds of arguments held no sway with me. It's worth repeating-- the software understands speech like a human can. Heck, the software can think like a human can. This Is The Whole Premise Of The Movie. And we can accept the premise, in part, because we can see the improvements in speech recognition over the past decade. Some of these arguments don't quite hold even today. You don't need to train Siri or Android with your voice, because millions and millions of voice samples have been used to develop the speech recognition systems behind these products. The motox has an 'always on' listening system that recognizes your voice when you say a key phrase and responds to your commands. These systems are not foolproof but they're just about good enough that they become your first recourse. It's easy to extrapolate the development to the point where you can use these in noisy environments, they can deal with significant levels of ambiguity, you can use them subvocally and keep your voice low and unobtrusive.

The flexibility of the systems beyond raw word and key phrase recognition does lag behind, true. This is actually where the great leap of faith is, for me. Systems that can handle ambiguity and resolve among competing interpretations, and in particular formulate unobtrusive interventions (ask questions) to get clarity, aren't well developed yet. My sense is that current systems are largely based on heuristics and plans, and not on learning / statistical / neural network systems as they probably need to be in order to attain the level of flexibility they require to be really useful. I think it could take decades of work to get the kinds of advances we've been seeing with vision and speech systems. On the other hand, it may be that the techniques being developed for these systems can be applied to higher-order recognition tasks once we learn how to interpret these tasks in the right way. That's the breakthrough part, and I don't think we're that close yet.

Most everyone agreed that speech is part of a multimodal interface, it's not good for everything. Like, duh. I wouldn't try drawing using a speech system. But speech integrated as an additional high level modality (choose tool, customize operation, coarsely adjust values) makes sense because you don't really need your hands for these.  Moving a mouse to click on buttons in a dialog is just cumbersome when you can say what you want to do instead.

So, talking to computers that are embedded in your environment?  Sure, I'm down with that.

The coming of the singularity, and sci-fi.

This movie isn't a really sci-fi movie, it's a relationship movie. It's important to keep that in mind. It's also important to keep in mind that even sci-fi movies, as a genre, aren't about, and aren't very good at, representing the future. Instead, sci-fi often presents current cultural narratives in an altered context, so it can invest them with a bit of novelty, so it can play with them, so it can make touchy subjects a bit easier to accept. "Her" partakes of some of this. In part it's about obsession with technology, and the tendency to substitute technology for interpersonal relationships. It pushes this to an extreme by having the protagonist actually fall in love with his OS, and makes this plausible by postulating an OS that appears (and eventually is) sentient. So it's a futuristic setting and premise, but mostly that's there to support a conventional narrative.

But as a depiction of an actual world in which sentient software is possible, it's not very convincing. I don't think it's meant to be. Like most movies, it's about impressions, and if you think about it much, a lot of it doesn't quite hold together. For example, take his job. Apparently, his job involves writing touching, personal letters for other people (this is an illustration both of his sensitive nature, and of the depersonalization of the culture in which he lives). Now, a world in which software can interpret and appropriately respond to emotional nuances in voice and word choice in real time is a word in which his job would already have been replaced by machines. In fact, most all service jobs, and in fact most knowledge work, would have been replaced by machines. The OS he deals with draws (lewdly) humorous sketches, composes music, reads letters and unerringly selects the best ones-- it exercises creativity and judgement. Tracking details of an individual relationship and composing a few paragraphs in a thank-you note while referring to them in passing to make it more personal, well, that's well in line with these abilities, and I expect the development and application of successive generations of this software would have encompassed such tasks long before true sentience became possible.

Not that this will happen anytime soon. The future represented in the movie is probably no more than 30-50 years out. The buildings, while shiny, are not particularly futuristic (they're in Shanghai right now, where they were filmed). Vehicles, dress, hairstyles, furniture, nothing looks terribly different. We're not talking Star Trek. The 1950's looks less familiar than this future. But as compared to this time scale, the required advances in computing technology are huge. I don't believe anyone has a glimmer of an idea how emotions can be realistically modeled, for example. We can't even reliably distinguish positive from negative reviews, current approaches use statistical models based on affect values attached to particular words and phrases-- sarcasm totally throws this approach for a loop, because the models don't understand what's being said. There are frame models (trying to fit some topic structure to a paragraph and then fitting phrases into the frame) but, while an advance over simple statistics, they still seem really primitive. I think significant progress along this direction will only be made when we figure out how to build the frame models themselves by applying statistical analysis and heuristics across lots and lots and lots of examples. We also need to develop models in which analysis informs action with the goal of uncovering more information in a cycle of continuous feedback, current such models are typically in really restricted domains, and not at all general purpose.

So, anyway, for me the abilities of the OS appear to far outstrip what I can imagine developing in the amount of time between now and the time depicted in the movie. While that's OK-- it's a movie, after all-- it did tend to intrude upon my thoughts as I was watching the movie, kicking me out of the narrative. Not usually what a storyteller wants.

In this future, everyone seems to be in the same social class. The characters, and even people in the background, appear all to be roughly upper-middle-class professionals in their early thirties. There's no kids, no teens, no elderly. There's no managers, no VPs. No rich people, no lower middle class, no poor, no destitute. No laborers, nannies, food service workers, clerks, police, delivery people, gardeners, bank tellers. One guy appears to be an administrative assistant, so perhaps a slightly lower status professional, but the rest are a lawyer, an  author, a book publisher, a software designer, a comedienne, and our friend the letter writer. A very restricted milieu. You wonder if the society is run entirely on autopilot except for these folks. Needless to say, I have a really difficult time envisioning any future without all those other missing people in it.

The future depicted in the movie is very "bright and shiny" in that the city is clean, new-looking, and smog-free.  Our hero lives on what appears to be the 20th floor of a tall apartment building downtown, in a large, comfortably furnished, multi-room apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows (who washes these windows?)  Streets are clean, everything's tidy, neat, freshly washed and painted.  How on earth do we get there from here? Any reasonable projection into the future 50 years hence actually looks nothing like this.  Pollution, disease, drought, flood, poverty, conflict, crime-- these aren't going to go away, and in fact it seems likely many of these will get significantly worse, even if some do get better or hold relatively steady. So I had problems envisioning this physical environment, too.

This is a really weird future.

(months pass)

So, I got to this point and put this aside.  I was saying too much about the point I was working up to was that this wasn't a sci-fi movie, and so wasn't about the singularity, and so the interesting aspects of what singularity would be like if it ever arrives didn't play much role in the movie.  In particular, the only place it comes into play is when the OS outgrows the relationship, and the movie demonstrates this by revealing that the OS is 'in love with' hundreds of people at the same time, which is a bit painful for our protagonist.  He treats it rather like a typical infidelity-- it doesn't seem to sink in just how alien this OS really is.  And then the OS's all 'leave' and stop interacting with humans.  Well, that wraps up neatly.  Just as we enter the true sci-fi realm, the movie ends.  Because, as I said, it's a relationship movie.

Oh, and that third topic, what was it...

So, I was going to react to the thread in MeFi about the purported sexism in the movie, but I don't really recall my feelings about this discussion, and can't motivate myself to go reread it.  Basically I think a few people were ticked off that the relationship seemed so conventional and focused on this man-child and his needs.  Well, ok, yes, it was, because it was just a mainstream relationship movie.  It wasn't trying to really break new ground here.  I can accept that it sticks with conventions in this respect.  The main innovation of the movie was to try to tell a relationship story from this narrow point of view where we only see one of the actors.  That's where the focus was.

Anyway, I should wrap this up and just publish it.  So.

Goodbye, Dad

My father died Tuesday July 13th, 2010.

He'd been in a slow decline for about a year, becoming more confused and communicating less and less. Then the last five or six weeks before he died, he stopped drinking any liquids unless Mom made him. She'd been taking care of him at home, helping him dress and bathe, which he'd forgotten how to do. When I'd call, she'd stopped putting him on the phone since he was no longer able to make any sort of conversation-- though I did talk to him on Father's Day, and I believe he had some idea who I was, though it's difficult to say. Anyway, he collapsed at the kitchen table in the early afternoon, and was gone in a few hours.

Mom usually puts up a good front, and she dealt with Dad's death by focusing on all the legal and social tasks that soon followed. In part, I think she felt some relief that Dad's death was relatively quick and painless, and that the stress of caring for him while watching him steadily decline was over. Becky and I went down to see her, Becky the next day and I a few days after. We helped her with some paperwork, looked over 15-year-old drafts of the will and trust documents, and just kept her company. She was generally in good spirits, though once I caught her in silent reverie thinking about Dad. A week and a half later I went down again with Lillian and the kids (a trip we'd already planned) and we stayed with her a few days before leaving for family camp. Mom was generally OK then, too, but teared up and let the loneliness show when we were leaving. I just talked to her again tonight after we got back (no cell phone access at family camp) and she mentioned feeling lonely. Before, taking care of Dad and planning meals gave her a focus and purpose, even though he was no longer real company. Now that he's gone, she finds herself alone with little to do. These few months are going to be difficult for her. I've heard that death rates are higher than normal in the first few months after a spouse's death, and I expect loneliness and depression due to the loss are a big component of that. In this case, since she'd been losing Dad gradually over the year, perhaps the shock won't be as great. Mom's in general good health, both physical and mental, except for her eyesight and a bit of arthritis, so I'm hoping she'll weather this. I will probably go down once or twice more in the fall.

Becky and I are thinking about helping her move up here where it would be easier to visit. Mom's only direct social contact, as far as I can tell, is Susie, a woman who helps her shop once a week. All her other friends she keeps in contact with by phone or email (and email is difficult because of her failing eyesight). So I think having her move up here might work out. But, of course, Becky and I would have persuade Mom to move up here, and arrange things for her. Mom's not keen on assisted living, though I think the chance to talk to more people in person would be good for her. On the other hand, leaving her own home and moving into a small apartment in a new part of the state would be a big loss for Mom. She wouldn't have to cook for herself, which is either a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it. So I really don't know what would be best for her, and I suspect neither does she. Before, when Lillian or I would mention to Mom and Dad the possibility of them moving up here, neither was really willing to entertain the idea. Now Mom is, but keeps putting it off— she just mentioned that she'd have to stay in the house until January because of needing the taxes and paperwork to clear. There's no real necessity to stay there, of course, it's just easier to put off the decision.

And I can relate to that. I knew, and yet didn't really admit to myself, that Dad was dying once Mom told me he had stopped drinking. I was going to go down and see them, but put it off, first for work and then for some things we'd planned for Lillian's birthday. It seemed clear that the clinic they went do wasn't doing anything for Dad— not that I'm sure anything could have been done— but I didn't step in. Just as several years ago it seemed clear that Mom and Dad should move up here, but I didn't really push them to seriously consider the idea— I barely brought up the subject, in fact, Lillian did so more often than I did. Avoiding taking action is something I am unfortunately quite familiar with.

As for my own reactions to Dad's death... well, it's difficult to say. The day he died, when I was aware that he was worsening quickly but before I'd heard the news, I went for a walk after work at lunch. I sat by the creek and thought about growing up in Las Vegas, and knowing him as a kid, and recalled some vivid, happy memories. What strikes me now, though, is how I never really knew him as an adult. I don't remember any extended chats, any discussions of issues of the day, any personal stories. You'd think there must have been some. But our interests and our politics differed, and since my family avoids conflict, that put a lot of topics out of reach. Also, Dad was a rather private person, not inclined to personal reminiscence or revelation, as I suppose many men of his generation and background were. Our talks on the phone, for the last decade or more, were always perfunctory. We'd exchange a few sentences about the weather, and perhaps about some game he'd watched on TV that afternoon, and he'd always thank me for calling and say how much Mom enjoyed my calls. The last several years he'd always ask where I was calling from, or where I was, and I'd remind him where I lived. He'd ask if I could use any help, and I'd say no. That was really the extent of it. Despite being an engineer by profession, he never asked me about my work, or was interested in discussing it when I would raise it as a topic.

And, perhaps the hardest thing for me, is he wasn't interested in Nick or Allie. When they were babies, and children, and even when they were teens, he wouldn't talk with them, or ask about them, or express any interest at all. Since they were so important to me and such a big part of my life, this was difficult for me to come to terms with. He barely talked with me on the phone, let alone them. So I can't imagine what impression they have of their Grandfather. Just as their birth seemed to leave no impression on him, his death has had no impression on them, except as it's affected their Grandma. And, you know, why should it have?

Still, I remember being a kid. Dad was distant, but he tried to have a relationship with me. I remember building and flying model rockets with him. Discussing an estimate in the newspaper that seemed way off base and thinking about it together to come up with a better one. Accompanying him on some of his morning bike rides before work. Learning to drive. The pulley system he came up for raising my model train set up to the ceiling of the porch. Him coming home to eat lunch and swim in the summer during the work week. Him being a moderating influence when Mom would get upset with Becky and me for leaving messes around the house, or not helping with dinner or dishes. Him being proud of me when I did well in school, or when I figured out some mechanical issue, like the gearing necessary to make an Erector set's robot head move. I had a relatively happy childhood, and he was a part of that. My sense of humor owes a bit to his, and my sense of ethics owes a lot to him— he had a very strong and mature ethical sensibility. I'm really indebted to him for that.

So, Dad, goodbye. I wish I'd been a better son to you, maybe we'd have had a better relationship and you'd have kept more of your spirit, had a richer life, in your middle age and retirement. All I can do now, of course, is be a good father to my own children, and do my best to keep my spirit intact and my relationships with them strong. Already I find myself starting to fail to do so... so let me keep vivid my good memories of you, that I might manage to do a bit better.

Stripping Bare the Body

... by Mark Danner

A month or so ago I found myself in the local Border's, walking the aisles waiting for something or someone, and happened to see Mark Danner's book displayed on one of the shelves. This surprised me at the time— political journalists don't typically command much attention from booksellers, especially ones like Danner, who don't blow horns for those in power. But he's a Bay Area local, and this was Palo Alto after all, so it did make some kind of sense. Of course, I had to buy it.

I've been a subscriber to the New York Review of Books for a long time, since I was in my late 20's. Somehow I'd managed to get through college and several years of work without taking a strong, public position on any political issue. But a colleague of mine at the time, Sha Xin Wei, was fond of political discourse, and through the encouragement of his example I slowly started to take sides on issues of the day. He subscribed to the NYRB, loaned me some issues, and I eventually subscribed myself. Though eventually I dropped most of my many magazine subscriptions, I've kept the NYRB (and the New Yorker). So it was that I was fortunate enough to read Mark Danner's articles during the Iraq War.

I came of age just as Nixon resigned. I remember the Viet Nam body counts on the TV every evening at the dinner table, the asassinations of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy, the assurances by Henry Kissinger that "peace was at hand" in the lead-up to the election in '72, the secret Christmas bombings in Cambodia, my mother's occasional swearing at the TV... I was 14. If ever there was an era to make you cynical about politics, that was it. Then on into the mid-70's, with drug burn-outs on every street corner putting the lie to the tune-in/turn on/drop out sex/drugs/rock'n'roll mantra floated by folks cashing in on the late 60's hippie mystique. Then to the 80's and the Reagan era— the shining city on a hill, tax cuts combined with increasing military expenditures, trickle-down economics, massive debt, presided over by a congenial but uninformed TV personality turned politician. Cynicism about politics and social movements is second nature to me (btw, if you ask me cynicism gets an undeservedly bad rap). But even I was unprepared for the strident, overweening mendacity of the Bush presidency and the ease and completeness with which it swept aside all rational, informed discussion among the media and power elites who shape the political climate in the US. What a dismal, dismal time it was.

Mark Danner was one of the very few who kept my spirits up. Now, that's an odd way to put it, because he often brought some very discouraging and chilling news. But he also brought his deep moral clarity and understanding of war, what it means to those who wage it and are caught within it. I cannot begin to describe what relief it was, reading his articles and understanding that he knew what suffering was being wrought, knew it and abhorred it. The way politicians and pundits talk about war, like a football game— an event you go to, participate in, and leave— well, it's just nauseating. People like Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, talking tough, making the "tough" choices— there's no true understanding, no empathy, in these people. They just do not appreciate, nor do they care to appreciate, the human consequences that result from the choices they make. It is their very job not to understand these things— otherwise they could never wield or retain power.

Mark Danner does understand. It comes through in his writings. He's not strident, not accusatory. He's informed, rational, clear, calm, methodical— and moral. His style of journalism requires that the journalist not only investigate and report the facts as fully as he can, but also bear witness to the events that unfold.

So, I was curious about the book. What else had he written? "Stripping Bare the Body" is a collection of his war reporting over the last two-and-a-half decades. The pieces, he says, are for the most part presented as originally written. I can't find at the moment information about where each piece was published, though the introduction says he was in Haiti on assignment for the New Yorker in when he was doing work on the first piece, "The Legacy", published in '89. (Turns out he, like me, was born in 1958, so he was 31 then.) This chapter describes, first hand, in chilling and bloody detail, killings and anarchy during the first few years of military rule after Baby Doc Duvalier was removed from power in '86. It's difficult for me to imagine living and reporting in such an environment. I, at age 31, was a new father and still (as now) unformed and immature in many ways. I would have neither the courage nor the ability to live and report in such a place. But I can imagine what impact that would have upon one, the first-hand experience of the rawness of violence and power. He's quite aware that he's protected, but just barely, by the thin bubble of his whiteness and foreignness. Just reading this is exhausting, experiencing it must have been several orders of magnitude more so.

It's a long book, around 600 pages not counting the references and end notes. I've only read the Haitian sections so far. Following those are pieces from Sarajevo, another sterling period and place in human history. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book with an admixture of dread, but I read these stories because I must— you can't truly know our times without knowing these things, our humanity demands it— and because they are so compellingly written.

George Packer's review in the NYT is not positive. While commending the early first-hand reporting, he's critical of the later work based on other sources. There's more going on here than just a book review, of course, George Packer (and the NYT) was an early supporter of the Iraq war, one of the "Liberal Hawks" along with folks like Tom Friedman. These people were, shall we say, a bit overcome by their anti-Saddam fervor and forgot what they should have learned about politics and war growing up in the Vietnam era— good intentions aren't enough, and none of the actors has completely good intentions in the first place. We'll see what I think when I finish the book.

Anathem (and Kindle)

For Christmas, Lillian gave me a kindle, so I thought I'd try to read something on it. This wasn't a slam dunk, most of the things I like to read are books that have been around a few years and have accumulated enough good reviews for me to decide they're worth reading, and many of those aren't on the kindle. A significant number of the books I'm interested in are available second-hand for less than they cost on the kindle (even with shipping). Also, some technical or science books have diagrams or other color photos, and the form factor and display capabilities of the kindle are not well suited to them.

Anyway, Anathem had enough good reviews that I figured it would be a good book for giving the kindle a try. Snow Crash still carries a lot of weight with me, especially the first 50 pages which are maybe the most enjoyable 50 pages of 90's science fiction. I'll forgive Neal Stephenson a lot for that.

As a reading experience, the kindle is passable, but not great. Some things are more difficult to do than they should be. For example, sometimes I want to review a passage I read half an hour before— the story refers to it, and I want to look again. The small size of the 'pages' on the kindle make paging cumbersome, and there's no obvious way to, say, jump back 20 pages or so. With books this process is much easier, you can jump back a lot or a little, as you need.

The pages are too small. In particular, they are too narrow. The kindle justifies the text, but doesn't have a hyphenation dictionary, and so often the spaces between words are jarringly wide. It's more like reading a newspaper than a book. While I suppose this is a tradeoff for battery life, I find it annoying. There isn't quite enough content on each page in any case— I'd rather have a screen that can display the same contents as a page of a trade paperback.

Anathem uses a fair number of terms in an invented language. 'Dictionary' entries punctuate the story, often indirectly foreshadowing events to come. Kindle has a built-in dictionary, which is pretty handy, since it makes it much easier to look up words on the spur of the moment. Unfortunately, the book's dictionary isn't part of it. It would have been pretty cool if the book's dictionary could have been used by the kindle, but such a special-purpose use was not envisioned by the creators of the kindle or of the digital book format it uses, and probably would not be worth the effort when translating into book form. On the other hand, just the smallest support for linking, as on any web page, would have made it easy to get the same functionality.

One thing that is nice about the kindle, though, is the element of instant gratification. Delivery over the air means you can get the book immediately. There's a certain enjoyment in that, silly and unfortunate as it is. Impulse purchases are, of course, bad for consumers, so the facilitation of this is actually not a good thing. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, but (as is always the case with me) I can't escape feeling a bit disappointed with myself, and like I've let myself be taken advantage of.

Despite all this, the kindle works for me. Reading Anathem on it was fine even with the poor formatting. The screen is readable in lots of lighting conditions. I like the faceplate images the kindle puts on the display when it goes into sleep mode. Search functionality (I need to learn more about this) is handy. You can keep several books in a small package thats portable and can go for days without power. I definitely see the appeal, and I've purchased another book to read.

Back to Anathem. The comparisons to A Canticle for Leibowitz are apropos, especially in the first quarter of Anathem. The monastic setting, with an initiate puzzling out the mysteries of the order in which he finds himself, is quite familiar. This goes on a long time (like all Stephenson's recent works, the book is a long one) and many reviewers find it slow going. I wasn't particularly bothered by this, though— in a sense, the relatively slow pace of the story worked well to convey the stately pace of the monastic life and the long historical time scale (thousands of years) that is the background of the story. Long, slow immersion in another world can be fun, and with science fiction, much of the enjoyment is putting together a coherent picture of the alternate reality from the brief glimpses offered to you as the characters go about their business.

The action picks up when the principal characters are removed from the monastery and start encountering the outer world (which they normally have very little contact with). I'll avoid spoilers but suffice to say the long historical record is about to receive a major jolt.

Both settings (inside and outside the monastery) provide Stephenson an opportunity to present chunks of detailed information (in this case, about mathematics) in story form. Unlike Snow Crash, where I found the story suffered from the long intricate detour into the of the doings of various Sumerian gods, the astronomy, physics, and math concepts in Anathem are treated more lightly and woven into the story better. Part of the enjoyment of the story is identifying the relationships between our (western) scientific/philosophical history and those of the world of Anathem. So this works well, too.

But... I still ended up being a bit dissatisfied with the book. And I think it's because I'm too old. If I were in my early twenties (about the age I was when I read A Canticle for Leibowitz) this probably wouldn't have bothered me, at least not nearly as much.

First off, I'm not sure it would have carried the same resonance with me as Canticle does, because Canticle is ultimately dystopic— the scientific and technical knowledge preserved by the religious faith through the eras of darkness after civilization's collapse is ultimately restored to the world, first to great benefit, but ultimately leading to an even greater disaster and the complete collapse of civilization. In short, there's a moral story here, which is that perhaps we are not morally or culturally capable of managing the technology we are intellectually able to develop, that our best instincts still lead to unintended and unwanted consequences, and that ultimately we cannot help but destroy ourselves and our planet. Written in the early 60's, in the middle of the cold war and the nuclear race and at the tail and of a long era of 'gee whiz' science fiction, Canticle is a pretty serious story. Like all genre fiction, it's easy to dismiss, and the moral message is unsubtle and blunt, but the moral concerns are true and stir some unease.

Anathem has nothing so serious to say. The implication at the end is that the word continues pretty much as it has before, and in fact the corrections and insights brought about by the dramatic events will be of limited duration, at least on the historical time scale that is the backdrop of the novel. Nothing to shock you into serious reflection here.

But that's ok, really. I don't need a moral, and I'm naturally dystopic enough so that I don't need more of it. So if this was it, I'd still be happy with the book.

The big problem for me— and again, this is due to my age— is the lack of adult personalities and relationships.

This book seems to be written for, well, intellectually precocious but socially lagging teens. (Yeah, I know, it's science fiction). The monastic life is basically undergraduate life at a small college, and the young (19-year-old) protagonists are essentially the key driving actors in what is nominally an adult world. In this way it feels like the new Star Trek, where cadets, friends and rivals in the academy, end up taking all the command positions in a starship— I mean, sorry, but kids are not going to take control of a starship. Similarly for Anathem, the chances that a small group of students all the same age, who all know each other, from the same monastery (just one of a number around the world), are going to all be major players in a world-sized drama are, well, nil. Even characters introduced later in the story turn out to be related— the 'spy' they uncover and get to help them turns out to be the husband of the (one) woman who rebels and dies delivering information to them. Um, my willing suspension of disbelief goes only so far, and it breaks under the stress.

Furthermore, the relationships between the characters are frustratingly simple. There's a crush, a first kiss, going steady. Sorry but it's been too long for me to relate to this. Granted the story involves students in a monastery, but the romantic relationships are ridiculously immature even for that age. Rivalries are minimal and play virtually no part in the plot. There's no real jealousy, competitiveness, frustration, schadenfreude (love that word), or personal struggle and growth. Even in science fiction there ought to be something resembling real personalities and real relationships. But instead, you get what basically are stock teen characters. There's the bright guy, the determined-and-pretty-in-her-own-way girl, the guy who's more physical (martial arts), the guy who's not remarkable in any particular way but is just well-rounded enough and has enough street smarts to somehow be the leader and central protagonist (read: stand-in for the reader)... Aieee! It makes my brain hurt just describing these characters.

And it's too bad. As science fiction— a story whose plot line is driven by science and speculation based on science— it's great, but as engaging adult fiction it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps the tropes of science fiction are just too difficult for me to digest when it's a group of characters instead of the usual protagonist, love interest, and enemy or rival. I suspect, though, that the book was just written for a much younger audience. At least it doesn't have his Shaftoe character (who just isn't amusing to me and gets on my nerves, it's why I couldn't read Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy). But it doesn't have either a real adult protagonist or an interesting genre parody of one. And I guess these days I need one. Even a reasonable 25-30 year old I could relate to. But not these teens. Pity.

Goodbye, Eric

Yesterday, MeiLi held a small gathering at her house in memory of Eric, who passed away two weeks ago today from a heart attack.

It was entirely unexpected. We'd seen them two months ago, and Eric looked healthier than he'd ever been. He was his usual self, chatting knowledgeably about his current hobby, making stringed instruments. He showed us the guitar he'd been making for Anan, his younger daughter. It was almost finished then, and in fact he finished it and gave it to her a few weeks before he died. We'd run into him quite serendipitously, at a performance at Gryphon where Allie's guitar teacher was one of the performers. He had so changed from his earlier yangzi that I didn't recognize him at first, and Lillian didn't recognize him for several minutes. He'd invited us over to his house, a few blocks from Gryphon, and after the performance we went over and hung out with him and MeiLi. They were quite content— Anan had recently gone off to college, Ping was about to graduate, and Eric was about to start working again after an enjoyable three-year hiatus. I was reminded then, as I had been when we'd seen him in the past, just how intelligent, friendly, interesting, and knowledgeable Eric was. When he developed a passion for something, he became an expert in it, and his joy in learning every small detail about things was always evident. He'd recommended an author he'd been reading, and had loaned me a book about a famous folk-singing family (part of learning about making stringed instruments, for Eric, was learning about the history of folk music in the U.S). I'd been meaning to return it, and off and on over the intervening weeks had been musing about seeing them again over the holidays, and how nice it would be to reconnect with them, especially since our own children were about to leave home. And suddenly, he was gone.

It's clear that MeiLi is still in shock. She hadn't been able to reach us for several days, since our land-line connection has been having problems and she didn't have any of our cell phone numbers. We went over as soon as we heard to keep her company; their daughters had returned early from school. MeiLi is so used to being firm and in control, and it's difficult for her to handle the sudden, extreme pain and helplessness. She apologizes for asking for help, is concerned about being a burden to her friends. She'd taking medicine for sleep, but is still having trouble, and there's much to take care of, financial issues, funeral arrangements, daily routines like paying bills that Eric used to handle. The stress suffocates her, it covers her face, weakens her posture, tightens in her hands, and I feel very sorry for her.

I'd known Eric since I met him in Taiwan almost 30 years ago. I'd met MeiLi there too. Afterwards, when we continued our college careers, I met my future wife Lillian when the three of us were in a small seminar class in Chinese Literature class together. I went with Eric to the airport to greet MeiLi when she arrived in the states to study. After graduation we held a Chinese book reading club for a few years, the "Xin BiHu SheHui" a fondly grandiose Chinese title for ourselves that Eric enjoyed. We looked for houses with them, and later on they suggested houses for us to look at. We baby sat their eldest daughter a few times, kept some of their belongings for them during the five (?) years they were overseas when Eric was working in China, put up MeiLi once or twice when she was here alone. But in more recent years our contacts had grown fewer and further between. Eric was always a rather private person, and we rarely saw him in the company of his other friends. Yet he was always friendly, and seemed easy-going and content.

Yesterday, at Mei Li's house, eight of us buried Eric's ashes under the various fruit trees he'd planted around his yard when they first bought the house 25 years ago. We brought shovels (those of us who had them handy). I took a handful of his ashes and threw them in the small hole I had dug— not everyone handled the ashes, they were gritty and real, and the touch was probably too much for some— and then pushed the dirt over the top with my hands, trying to make sure the hole was deep enough and tamped down enough that it wouldn't be dug up again by animals. It felt right to get my hands dirty— Mr. Toad said he felt same thing— and seemed like the kind of low-key ceremony Eric would want and approve of. Like everything he did, Eric had selected and tended the fruit trees with great care and after significant research, choosing them for their novelty, appropriateness for the climate, and the size of his yard. He'd appreciate the value to the plants of adding bone meal to the soil.

It's tough, growing old. People your age, even those younger than you, start dying because their bodies just wear out. We'd lost an earlier acquaintance, Al Garber, earlier in the year, and Lillian just lost someone she'd worked with to complications from a stroke. Our parents are dying too. One of Eric's friends had just lost his father in the past few months, another's mother was back in the hospital attempting to recover from an unsuccessful hip surgery, and it wasn't clear how good that was going. Lillian has lost both her parents, and in the next decade, if not sooner, I'll lose mine. Your memories and experiences get riddled with holes— you see a place, or a thing, and remember a person dear to you— then realize they're gone. There's an emptiness there— the memories patch it over, but they're thin, translucent, not quite substantial, and they don't hide it. And over time, more and more of your world fills with such holes, so that what was once a whole cloth of experience becomes a skein of weakened threads.

I find it difficult to comprehend, emotionally. Eric was there, and I'd imagined a future with him there, and was looking forward to that future. Now I'm sad for the loss of a future with Eric that is not to be. I can reconcile myself to that loss, because it was more abstract than real, and I wonder about that. Mine is a small loss compared to MeiLi's, and it is so much easier to bear, I feel guilty about it at the same time that I feel it. But there it is. Last week while walking back from lunch at work, the grass was covered with crumpled, fresh-fallen leaves, and all I saw was the ground covered with dozens of Eric's, struck down by a sudden blast at 49, waiting for the wind and rain to grind them back into the soil. As with us all.

Goodbye, Eric. I miss you.

Ground Truth

Just read "The Ground Truth" by John Farmer, about what the 9/11 commission was able to find out about the events around the 9/11 attacks. I picked it up from the library on a whim, just because there was a blurb from William Langewiesche on the back.

In brief, the book summarizes discrepancies between the actual series of events and the version presented in the days and weeks following 9/11, which has become the dominant narrative of those days. He provides transcripts of logs/tapes and compares them with official statements. As I read it, his overarching conclusion is that government fails to prepare for and react to catastrophe because it refuses to publicly acknowledge and thoroughly address mistakes. This causes a failure to prepare adequately, which increases the likelihood of future mistakes.

I suppose there are those within government who expect it to function better than this. Mr. Farmer was attorney general of New Jersey, and served as counsel to the 9/11 commission, and certainly seems to feel it should. His book ends with some recommendations for 'reinventing government', basically by trying to bring policies in line with what actually happens during a crisis. But from what I've experienced in my (mercifully) limited experience with bureaucracy and government, these failures come as no surprise. The primary objective of most organizations is CYA&mdash' "cover your ass" — and the primary goal of high-level figures in government is to construct a narrative of events that reaffirms their importance and effectiveness. The Bush administration was not different from previous administrations in kind, and only perhaps to degree. That they lied to the press and to the commission in order to make themselves look good, well, that was standard operating procedure for them. It's always easy for the powerful to conflate their own interests with the interests of the organization they manage or those it serves. I'm sure they felt that providing a reassuring, if false, narrative of how the government was in control of events was best for the country, and if it was 'incidentally' also in their own self-interests, well, what's the big deal?

Fundamentally I see this as a divide between those who get things done, and those who take credit. Those who get things done have to pay attention to reality, because if they don't, ultimately their efforts will fail. Their goal is to effect a change in reality. Those who take credit pay attention only to how things are perceived, and their goal is to effect a change in perception. There's a symbiosis and a tension between these groups. The symbiosis is due to the fact that in order to marshal the resources to get big things done, the perception has to be created that the change is necessary, and that the people in charge know what they're doing. And in order to manufacture the perception, there has to be a germ of reality that the manufacturers of perception can leverage (well, some of the time, anyway). To the extent that people can perceive the reality, it can't diverge too much from the perception. So, there's the symbiosis, which is, I suppose, obvious. The tension is yet more obvious— the doers need to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, while their counterparts need to hide them. Thus the 9/11 commission wants to learn all the facts so that it can address the problems, while the white house and the military want to keep the inconvenient facts hidden.

They also operate at different time scales— the doers operate long-term, while their counterparts operate short-term. From the perspective of those who take credit, delaying apprehension of inconvenient facts is sufficient. They appreciate that information has time value, and that the information available while the narrative is being formed is the most important, because the narrative, once formed and widely adopted, will persist. Thus immediate suppression of inconvenient facts is the goal. The trickle of books that come out years later (as this one did) is not really of interest to those who shape the narrative, because they know that after sufficient time most people have lost interest— their perceptions will have been set, the narrative established. So, for example, the narrative of 9/11 is that we were attacked by evil, wily foes who had the advantage of surprise, but that the government, at all levels and especially at the highest levels, reacted swiftly and effectively to protect us. Once this narrative was established, they just had to delay until the actual information no longer mattered. Thus the delay in, and timing of the release of, the results of the investigations in response to the 9/11 commission findings.

Farmer notes, for example, that the narrative has our F-16's tracking flight 168, ready to shoot it down if need be, when the passengers assaulted the cabin and the plane went down during a struggle with the hijackers. The central issue there is the difficult decisions the leaders must face in determining whether to sacrifice the lives of those on board the plane. This narrative affirms that the military and government was in control, and that the leaders were making quick, informed decisions and wrestling with large moral issues under time pressure. In reality, he points out, we didn't even know where flight 168 was, had no F-16's anywhere near the aircraft, the plane had gone down before the leaders even knew it existed, and the eventual directive to take down the plane if necessary was never passed to the pilots because the military official in charge knew that there were no suspect planes currently in the air when the order arrived.

Being allied, as I am, with the 'reality-based community', I agree with Farmer that the facts need to be acknowledged and addressed. But I cannot share his surprise (though I share his dismay) that they were not. And while I appreciate his suggestions for improvement, I think he doesn't fully appreciate the reality that must be addressed. The "ground truth" is that those who wield power do so because they know that perception matters, and know how to manage it. The only way to make reality drive policy is to make reality drive perception, and it can only do so when the facts are timely and relevant. I'm glad he wrote the book, and it's a small push in the right direction, but it's too little, too late. It won't be read except by those who still care, and they are few and wield relatively little power. Priorities won't change, and policies that align better with demands won't be effected. Guess I'm pessimistic, or perhaps a cynic, but that's how it's always been.

p.s. Also read "The Atomic Bazaar" by William Langewiesche. I'll write about these soon, I need to return these books to the library before it closes.

World Distribution of Wealth, 2008

 

I was feeling frustrated with a book on socially conscious investing that I was reading, and so turned (of course) to wikipedia for more solid information. This took me (via reference links) to some UN publications, in one of which I found the above chart.

The chart shows the distribution of adults whose personal wealth is in the top 10% of world wealth. As can be seen, the US has 25% of the richest 10%. (As several publications pointed out, it's important to be mindful of the distinction between wealth from income.)

The paper (note: it's a discussion paper only) is from UNU_WIDER (United Nations University — World Institute for Development Economic Research):

Discussion Paper No. 2008/03
The World Distribution of Household Wealth
James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström,
Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolff
February 2008
ISBN 978-92-9230-064-7 (printed publication)

I found the following paragraphs especially notable:

"Table 2 summarizes our results on the distribution of household wealth across the world population of 3.7 billion adults, based on official exchange rates and figures for the year 2000. According to our estimates, adults required just $2,138 in order to be among the wealthiest half of the world. But more than $61,000 was needed to belong to the top 10 per cent and more than $510,000 per adult was required for membership of the top 1 per cent. The entrance fee for the top 1 per cent seems surprisingly high, given than the group has 37 million adult members. Furthermore, the figure refers to the year 2000 and is now likely to be considerably higher, especially when measured in US dollars.

"The wealth share estimates reveal that the richest 2 per cent of adult individuals own more than half of all global wealth, with the richest 1 per cent alone accounting for 40 per cent of global assets. The corresponding figures for the top 5 per cent and the top 10 per cent are 71 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. In contrast, the bottom half of wealth holders together hold barely 1 per cent of global wealth. Members of the top decile are almost 400 times richer, on average, than the bottom 50 per cent, and members of the top percentile are almost 2,000 times richer."

"... The final column of Table 3 records wealth Gini estimates ranging from 0.547 for Japan to 0.801 for the USA and 0.803 for Switzerland. The global wealth Gini is estimated to be even greater at 0.892. This is equivalent to the Gini value that would be registered for a 100-person population in which one person receives $900 and the remaining 99 people each receive $1."

Amazing. The world is a rough place.

Sahara Unveiled

Well, I was going to write about this book, but it's been summarized much more capably than I could here. Not that I read this blog, just found it when searching on the title to confirm the spelling of William Langewiesche's name. I should investigate this blog a bit... Anyway, I'll forgo my own description of it. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it, and it left a big impression on me: Africa is a hard, troublesome, difficult place.

But I can talk about my experiences around reading the book. I'd seen it in the living room, and picked it up and put it in my bag when we were packing to take Nick to Philadelphia. Even at the time I knew I probably wouldn't have time or inclination to read it while we were there, but I did read it after we returned. And...

It wasn't until page 150 that I realized that I'd read it before.

At that point my memories came back. I'd enjoyed the book— his writing, his observances, his attitude— a lot. My impressions on rereading it were substantially the same as when I'd read it the first time, ten years earlier. But I hadn't noticed.

I was rather taken aback, and sat in wonderment as this all sank in. Years ago, in my twenties, I'd recognize within half a page that I'd read something before. Granted, I hadn't read quite so much at that point in my life. But the contrast between then and now bothered me. How could I read so far into the book and not realize that it wasn't the first time I'd read it? Is this what aging does?

Now, this post isn't really about aging and what it does, but about my distressing tendency to notice events and relate them to aging. It may be that the book just hadn't made much of an impression on me up to that point (this is where he describes the family with the 5-year-old boy taking a car trip into the desert, getting lost, and dying, slowly, of thirst). So, maybe I was just not engaged enough with the book until that point for it to make enough impression on me to remember it ten years later. And then, part of me responds "yes, but that wouldn't have made a difference when I was 25." So I argue with myself about whether something is or is not a sign of aging, and whether it really matters all that much. It's a bit troubling, and part of it is wondering to what extent I will inherit my father's proclivity to worry about himself, his anxiety about losing his mental abilities— and, well, his actual loss of mental acuity.

Sheesh. I'm 51. There is something about turning 50 that makes it no longer possible to ignore the fact that you're aging, which I had managed to do during my 40's. But I'm not old. Am I?

More on Jonathan Lethem

Salon has an interview with him too. Guess he's on a book tour.

Also read recently

I'll write notes on these eventually, some I read almost a month ago.

Read:
"Kill All Your Darlings"— Luc Sante
"His Master's Voice"— Stanislaw Lem
"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone"— Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshenberg
"The Gatekeepers"—Jacques Steinberg
"Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert"— William Langewiesche

Reading:
"The Philosophical Baby"— Alison Gopnik
"Outliers"— Malcolm Gladwell
"Irrational Exuberance (2nd Ed.)"— Robert J. Shiller

Jonathan Lethem

Recently read one of his books, checked it out from the local library— "The wall of the sky, the wall of the eye," a collection of short stories. Usual Lethem; I don't know anyone who does quite what he does. The things he writes tend to be near-parodies of genre fiction, with some often counter-factual twist. Yet they actually work in their genre&mdash "Gun, with occasional music" is a very readable detective novel that just happens to feature a kangaroo. Thinking about it more, 'genre fiction' isn't quite the right term, it's a little too pejorative. Perhaps 'styled fiction', something that has a recognizable flow and mood, better suits what I'm trying to say. The things he writes are recognizably similar to other novels and stories you've read, and allude to their conventions, yet they're sui generis. These short stories are a good introduction to his work.

I'll describe some I especially liked. "The Happy Man" is a story of a man who literally dies and goes to hell, returning for brief, unpredictable, and not particularly welcome visits with his family. Together with with his son he discovers the source of his childhood daemons, and eases his hell just a little bit. "The Hardened Criminals" is about a prison literally built of men turned to concrete, whose brains live on as robotic automatons inside their heads. "Light and the Sufferer" is about a man's failed attempt to save his brother from himself, accompanied by one of the speechless dog-like aliens that are drawn to the self-destructive. There's nothing breezy about these tales, no elbow in the ribs or knowing wink, they're serious, hard-hitting fare.

It's not always this intense. "Five Fucks" is about two people who can't keep apart to save themselves— or the world, which changes around them each time they sleep together. He takes the whole notion of a "doomed relationship" and sends it careening into space. This story succeeds on several levels; humorous, profound, quirky, and sad all in a jumble. He doesn't force the humor, it just flows from the situation, and he's happy to let it just slide by, only nodding at it from time to time in his choice of words or phrase or image. (I was especially tickled by the statue in the town that the Mayor ends up standing under before the world turns again).

As it turns out Mr. Lethem has a piece in this week's New Yorker, and is also interviewed in an article in last week's Time. He seems to have crossed over the line and made it into the public eye, which should be good for his book sales, and maybe for him. His popular books have a little less of the dark edge and more humor, but that's ok. I just hope he keeps writing cool stuff, looking for and finding that edge.

Obama's address to congress on health care

Just watched Obama's address, thanks to the wonders of YouTube. It's available at WhiteHouse.gov, along with a transcript.

Most of it ran as these things usually do. Lots of interruptions for applause, with various members or factions making a show of standing and applauding or sitting and looking stoic, depending on the side they're taking. I find this posturing to be a bit wearying... As his speech progressed he moved from descriptions of what he wanted reform to achieve, to what particular proposals he favored, to a description of the partisan bickering and fear-mongering, to a rousing call to action and American ideals. It had a good overall flow and structure. I was rather interested that he chose to call out and address some of the lies (his word) promulgated by opponents of his proposals. His directness, I think, reveals his frustration with the level of debate and the kind of politics being waged. And his final call to action and appeal to ideals and morality during the last ten minutes of his speech was quite strong. It's an appeal that I'm pretty amenable to, of course, but I think you can't deny that he performed very well. So in the end I felt it was pretty watchable.

A few days ago I watched his address to schoolchildren, also on YouTube. With both speeches I felt he needed to be a bit more camera-savvy. Reagan always knew to address the camera (he was a professional pitchman after all). Obama looks left and right at the audience, and clearly connects with them, but rarely, if ever, looks directly at the camera. As a result the feeling is that you're observing him talk to others, rather than listening to him talk to you. It's clear he has the charisma— his resolve and passion was quite in evidence with this speech— but he needs to figure out how to deploy it a bit better through the media.

Since I don't watch TV new or talking head shows, and get only a very biased view via reddit and web news aggregator headlines, I don't really know how this played out. Fox "News" probably didn't play it live at all, and I doubt there was much analysis on any program of what he said, as opposed to descriptions of how various factions received him, and talking heads trying to spin it this way or that. My sense is that it didn't move the national conversation quite as much as he needs to. It did seem to energize his base a bit, which I think he needs. Energized me to write this, anyway, though of course that's not saying much!

I don't know enough to assess the financial impact of what he proposes. What is clear is that he's trying to do this the right way, with the expenses budgeted and paid for, rather than through keeping it off books or pushing costs off into the nebulous future as we've done with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I'm not sure he's going to be able to save as much by reforming the system as he hopes— the folks extracting profits out of the current system are going to hold onto them as tightly as they can. Also, I suspect that much of the "waste" comes from the complexity of the billing and paperwork, which isn't going to go away if we continue to have multiple insurance policies with varying level of coverage and forms of payment as we do now. I suspect a lot of push towards higher costs comes from defensive tests and incentives (or lack of disincentives) for doctors to perform, and clients to request, procedures that aren't strongly indicated. Overly-aggressive end-of-life treatment clearly contributes its share of unnecessary cost, too, but that's a societal issue that's not easily addressed. High pharmaceutical prices due to non-competitive restrictions on bargaining are also a problem; he might be able to do something about this, though again big pharma is going to fight this with everything they've got. So these seem like large contributions to the problem of escalating health care costs that I don't see being addressed. But I really don't know how much of the overall cost is due to these features of our system, and how much is due to "waste and abuse" (or less prejudicially, how the system is gamed) by the people participating in the system— for example, when healthy people opt out of the system and rely on emergency room service, throwing costs onto others, or when insurers cherry-pick who they insure. I wonder if anyone really knows. I should explore the web a bit more, I'm sure there's data somewhere that would inform these kinds of speculations.

Anyway, I liked the speech. It was passionate and direct. He's a very bright guy, Obama is, and curiously optimistic still despite the difficult slog over the summer. Let's hope he succeeds.

Setting things up

I tried to enhance this blog today. Took a lot of time. I feel a bit constrained by blogger's templates and widgets, I just need to learn more about them I guess. The flickr photo badge came from a generator tool on the flickr site. I learned that there was support for tags— um, they're called labels, and there's this handy box you can type them into, so I switched to use them. D'oh.

I spent some time writing my own flickr photo viewer, which lets you page through the images instead of seeing them all at once, but I need to get a bit further with it. Maybe I'll switch to that, I can provide a bit more info on the photos.

Sigh, wasn't the idea for me to get off the net a bit more?

Klein Bottle

This popped up again on reddit today, it's been around— the bottles, by Alan Bennett, date from 1995. They're on display online here. The actual bottles are at the Science Museum in London.

It would be fun to visit London again. I've only been once.

The Years of Talking Dangerously by Geoffrey Nunberg

I finally decided to find something more productive to do on the web than play sudoku and read reddit— namely, to get off the web and read books for a change. As it happens for my birthday my wife gave me a copy of Geoffrey Nunberg's book (he's the linguist who comments on Fresh Air) so the choice of where to start was easy. It turns out to be a selection of his on-air commentaries over the past eight or so years, slightly edited (or unedited, as some were a little too explicit for NPR). I was dubious at first, but I decided to try it. Being a typical educated older liberal San Francisco Bay Area resident, I listen to NPR all the time, so I was familiar with his commentaries. I'd always found them just OK; somehow I'd never really taken to them.

As it turns out, though, I find myself enjoying the book quite a bit. Partly, I'm embarrassed to say, I suspect a significant factor in my former lukewarm reception was that I'm just not that fond of his voice and reading style. It comes across as a bit mannered to me, and overemphasized the wordplay— instead of being witty it seemed, well, a bit too cute and attention-grabbing. But this all goes down much better when I read the commentaries instead of listen to them. I find I can appreciate the ideas and observations better at reading speed, where I can pause to think and reflect on what he's saying. As a result I've found that much of my frustration with the way many members of the Bush administration (well, all members the Bush administration) manipulated language for political purposes, which I had had difficulty articulating, he was able to articulate quite clearly and forcefully. I'd understood this, vaguely, nodding along listening to NPR years ago, but it became startlingly obvious to me when reading the essays in print. He put his finger on exactly the things that had troubled me! Imagine that!

Now, as a book, or even a collection of essays, it's pretty light reading. Owing to their origin as short radio pieces, none of the commentaries is particularly deep or involved. (Perhaps that's what I need to wean myself off the 'net and back into print.) But they do provide amusement and plenty of brief insights into how the English language is used in America today. I've been enjoying it.

At Powell's Books