Posts (page 2)
I ran across this great NY Times article The Case for Working With Your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford which examines our cultural shift towards knowledge work and away from manual work. [NYTimes passwords]
You probably won't be surprised to find that the author proposes that this move away from physical vocations has not been wholly beneficial for society or the individuals involved. It certainly resonated with a general feeling I've had for a decade or so now.
Back at IBM in the 1990's, my colleagues and I would look wistfully at the men driving heavy machinery constructing a new office building as we trudged across the parking lo towards our cubicles. We wanted to arrange a job switch day ...just one day, please! From the article:
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
We knew the gist of our envy. At the end of the day the constructors could take a last look at their day's work before turning home and see what they had accomplished in that day. This was something we certainly lacked as bit-pushers, at least at such a manifest level. It is not just the physicality of these discarded vocations that call us back however, it is the fact that they contain their own mental challenges and rewards that we seem to have forgotten. Crawford gives some examples of this from his life where he gave up a director of policy job at a Washington think tank to open an independent motorcycle repair shop.
Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.
He talks about what it means to be an expert on something, which is one of my favorite subjects after reading Gary Kleain's Sources of Power. Klein is a cognitive scientist who studied people who have to make life and death decisions with little time for deep consideration, people like NICU nurses, firemen, war commanders. These are situations where the difference between experts and non-experts make an obvious difference. Like Klein, Crawford sees that the expert has develop rich internal models of the systems making up their area of expertise.
Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?
Other aspects of these productive vocations are examined, from the social and ethical to the personal fulfillment. I was disheartened to realize that in my current job at a startup I've somehow become a middle manager after a career spent leading teams with really no one to override my decisions above me and no reason to be trapped in a decision. It also explains perhaps why I sometimes find myself lost at sea in this role as I don't possess the evolved survival behaviors of the middle manager.
Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. [...] A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
A few years ago I took over a dozen classes at TechShop. I learned how to create things using milling machines, lathes, laser cutters, plasma cutters, carbon fiber folding, and three different types of welding equipment. It exposed me to a world I'd never known before. In high school, like most everyone else, I believed that shop class was someplace you went if you weren't academically inclined (not to mention where those of us who were academically inclined would get beat up by bullies) so I never got to explore this side of creativity, this side of societal necessity.
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. [...] Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
I suppose this all puts a positive spin on my belief that sometime soon our information culture will find itself receding into a more physical realm as we enter a low energy age which requires more local manufacturing and production (and thus more local manufacturers and producers). I just hope my abilities to function in such a world have not completely atrophied by then.
My brother-in-law Ian spotted this life-sized replica of a California Highway Patrol car driving around Finland and thumping out funk music. Brilliant.
My college friends and I have a private mailing list where we keep in touch, and Rob sent out a link to a blog post he ran across called "The 25 times I almost died" saying it reminded him of me. I had this thing back in college where no one thought I would make it alive to 30. I couldn't come up with 25, but here's what I got:
1) I think it was 1989 and there was a hurricane parked off the North Carolina coast. I was surfing Rodanthe Pier in double overhead waves far larger than my ability to handle them. There were very few people out so I was more or less alone with nobody near me. The waves were breaking really far offshore, past the end of the pier. I took off on a wave and wiped out. I was held under water for quite some time, rolling around. When I struggled to the surface again I realized my surfboard was no longer attached to my leg leash and was nowhere in sight. I was now in the area where the waves were crashing down; the water was way too rough and I was too far out to give me any hope of making it to shore swimming. After a few minutes of struggling and making no progress and seeing no one around me I started realizing that this was probably it for me. I was going to die out there. My strength was almost gone. I had been knocked under water several times by huge waves. I knew I would not be able to struggle to the surface one more time after the next one hit me. Moments later two surfers who had noticed me finally made their way over and rescued me.
2) When I was about 8 my dad had this beat up old chevy van with a bunk in the back. I spent many nights at the local VFW lounge/bar with him. He would sit at the bar getting drunk, I would be in the arcade room reading comic books, playing pinball, shuffle bowling or (later) video games. Eventually I would go out to the van and sleep in it, waking up when his drunk ass pulled into the driveway at home. One night my mom showed up pretty late and took me home in her car because my dad was even drunker than usual but refused to not drive home. That night he wrapped the van around a bridge railing. The bunk area in the back was completely demolished. He lived of course. There are some monsters that just can't be killed.
3) Sophomore year in college, I experimented with this interesting substance the kids called 'shrooms'. In the midst of a rich, confusing and wild experience, I freaked out when I saw the shadows of my friends hands shoot up the wall, across the ceiling and down the other wall towards me, the only thing that stopped me from jumping out the 4th story window was the fact that it was closed so I bounced off. Say no to drugs, kids.
4) Drunk driver swerved head-on into my lane when I was 17 driving a 1976 cherry red camaro full of people. I was sober and had the reflexes of a cat so we escaped with only the left rear quarter panel demolished. Later while my camaro was in the body shop, I flipped a rental car whilst whipping up the emergency brake to do 180s on a gravel road. Totaled it. I had paid an extra dollar for full insurance on the rental though, so it cost me nothing. Before I got my camarao back someone broke into the shop and stole it. They totaled it while driving drunk.
5) In December of 2000 right after the beinning of the second intifada, I took an air courier gig to deliver a Microsoft DVR to Tel Aviv. While there for a few days I took a trip into Palestine and hired a guide to show me around the Bethlehem area. Things were going great until my guide found out that a public bus had just been bombed back in Tel Aviv and they were locking down the border. On the way into Palestine I had gone through a checkpoint on a paved road in a taxi. My guide told me it was best to try to get across the border immediately or else I might be stuck there for days (and miss my flight). He shoved me into a van filled with about 10 people. No one spoke English. I didn't realize it at first, but eventually it dawned on me that we were trying to sneak across the border. The back row was filled with some militant looking young men, I was in the front seat between the driver and his son. Everyone was talking excitedly in Arabic. The driver kept turning up the radio news program so we were bumping along dirt roads amid the desert hills with a cacophony of shouted arabic around me. The only words I understood were Clinton, American and jihad. Dangling charms from the rearview mirror kept hitting me in the face. It was a bit uncomfortable but I would be lying if I said I didn't think it was totally out of control awesome at the time. Every now and then the driver would stop and talk to some militant looking young guy standing beside the dirt tracks we were following. Their conversations always got to the point where they were both staring at me, but eventually we would drive on. The part where I started to get nervous was when I could begin to see the walls of the old city of Jerusalem peaking over the hills as we twisted around them. I realized that if the Israelis just opened fire on the van my chances of survival in the middle of the front seat with no seat belt were pretty slim. There was nothing I could do though, I didn't even have enough room to slouch down behind the dash. But then suddenly we turned a corner onto on a paved road in Jerusalem and I got dropped off at the old city gate.
6) There are countless times when I was doing something stupid in a car with my high school friends where I should have died. There are a lot of empty stretches of road in rural North Carolina that practically demand you do things like have the passenger slide over to take over driving while you're doing 60mph down a remote stretch of highway coming back from Emerald Isle, while you are climbing out the driver's window and onto the roof. Then jump from the roof over to the bed of your friend's pick up truck followed by sliding in his driver's window and taking over driving the truck while his passenger slides out the window, into the back of the truck and then through the passenger window of your car. There's more stories like that than I can really list here. Stuff involving driving school busses, using gasoline to set the road on fire while playing car chase and on and on. I probably have forgetten most of them.
7) In December of 2004 I went on an three week Indochina vacation starting off in Vietnam and later meeting a bunch of my SF friends in Thailand. We were going to do a New Year's Eve Psytrance party in Krabi, Thailand. We were going to all meet in Krabi, but then decided to first go to Koh Samui / Koh Phangan for the monthly Full Moon Party. The first full day most of us were on Koh Samui is when the big tsunami hit the India and Thailand coasts, ultimately killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries. Krabi, where I had a beachside hotel room booked until we changed out plans, was one of the places wiped out. Koh Samui however is on the other side of the Malay peninsula and was unaffected (except for the swarms of foreign tourists rerouting there). The irony was that the Full Moon Party was a dreadfully awful Eurotrash infested experience full of drunks pissing and tossing their beer bottles in the ocean, but it was the dreadfully awful party that may have saved our lives.
8) In high school we used to get a case of beer and head down to Atlantic Beach for the night. We'd start a bonfire and sleep right on the sand in a sleeping bag. We usually did this next to an old abandoned submarine watch tower from WW II. This was a three story tall concrete tower on a raised platform. It was a little tough to climb up onto the platform, but we had it worked out. Once inside each floor was just a bare concrete room about 20x20 feet square. The floor of each room except for the bottom platform level had a big square hole in it, about 10x10. There was also a hole in each floor where the stairs used to be. They were almost entirely gone and what was left was really decrepit, but we could manage to scramble our way all the way to the top floor where you'd get pretty nice views. It was a great place to sit and drink your beer. Inevitably someone would start suggesting we jump over the 10x10 holes in the floor. Now ten feet isn't a long way to jump, but considering how often we did it and how much drinking we sometimes had engaged in, I'm still amazed to this day that none of us ever fell to our deaths. A girl from the next county did exactly that a few years after I graduated and they tore down the tower.
9) We were having a party at my place in college. It was a house everyone called The Barn because it looked like one. I lived on the second floor where the party was, and the property manager Larry lived downstairs. It was late in the night and the party was just beginning to wind down but there were still a dozen or so people there. I had retired to my room where I was busy trying to hook up with someone I had been hoping to hook up with for some time. So when I heard the first scuffle outside my door I ignored it, hoping my housemates would take care of it. A few minutes later though I hear "he's got a gun" and decide maybe I needed to investigate this. I come out of my room and I see my housemate John Ray and Larry wrestling over a shotgun. At this point I didn't know who was crazy, so I figured I would just get the gun away from both of them until we could sort it out. So the three of us are now wrestling over this shotgun. We're pulling back and forth, twisting around. We do this all the way down the hallway and down the stairs off the back deck into the backyard. When we reach the bottom I finally convince them both to let go of it. At that exact moment I'm blinded by lights as the cops come around the corner of The Barn, weapons drawn on me and yelling to drop the shotgun. Take your pick where I could have died in that one. The upside is I totally got lucky afterwards.
I'm probably forgetting a few. It's been a long life. I've been held up at knife point, thought I was going to die another time surfing, almost had my head taken off when an SRL robot called the Hand o' God spun around suddenly, been caught offshore in bad weather in a canoe...
Fortunately I take it easier these days, being a dad and all.
Finally, the Wolfram Alpha engine is able to answer one of my questions. I suppose Kurzweil is one of the few humans on its birthday calendar though.
<paul2> "The Cove" got a pretty big distribution deal from Lions Gate...should end up in quite a few theaters
<dav> that's the dolphin thing?
<paul2> yeah, it was really good, as good as any doc I've ever seen
<paul2> had a ocean's 11 vibe to it.
<paul2> got all these people that were total badasses in their field to try and get to the cove in japan
<paul2> really really messed up stuff going on there
<Jeff-S> in Japan?
<paul2> yeah
<Jeff-S> do tell
<paul2> there's town in Japan (Taiji) this is the larget supplier of dolpins used in amusement parks..
<paul2> there's a area of the town that's on dolphin migration routes..so it's east for fisherman to heard them to a bay..
<paul2> for each dolphin that's sold to a place like sea world, they get $150k per
<paul2> so the rest, porpoises, or just not the right look, they wouldn't say what happened to them...but sure enough each next day the cycle started again
<paul2> and they wouldn't let anyone monitor what's happens...so this guy gets all these people together to sneak to a cove where they believe the netted dolphins are herded..
Last night I had this great dream. I was hanging out in some weird but fancy hotel with my friend Irene and a bunch of other people. The scene seemed a bit like a dream sequence from Satoshi Kon's Paprika right on the threshold of where it gets weird. Irene (who works for Google) started showing me this new thing she'd been working on that I think she called Google Fabric of the Universe™. And then she started pointing at objects in the room and suddenly a floating overlay of scripting code would popup between us and the object and she would start manipulating it. It was a bit like the Javascript console in Firebug, except it was shimmering half opacity entire multiline blocks of code. In fact the code looked like Javascript, which I found annoying. Surely the fabric of the universe source code should be
something designed for concurrency like Erlang.
Anyhow, she started adding methods on objects and dispatching events. I guess it looked a little like Second Life except with an interactive console and hella better graphics. Tables started floating in the air, a toy fish started swimming around us. She showed me how to access the console (unfortunately I don't remember that part now) and I started experimenting. It was like being Neo from The Matrix. I was doing things like adding speech modules to the toy fish, connecting motion drivers to the callback delegates on people's shoes and making the wallpaper start to play YouTube videos. It was fun. It turned a bit darker when someone else started playing and they spawned a succubus that I spent most of the rest of the dream fending off. I made physical shields out of other objects in the room and brought in a flood and spawned a kayak to escape. Not sure what happened to Irene, but I'm sure she was OK. She works for Google.
p.s I've been hacking a lot lately, in case that wasn't obvious.
Throw away those 20th century boxers with holes in them, time for some 21st Century Space Underwear (from Japan naturally): designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, dry quickly, resist flames and do away with that pressing concern of modern fashion — static cling. They're also comfy and stylish.
Surely they'll also have the anti-skid mark, auto-tweeting and self-shaking options by the time it hits the mall.
Smell wars: Japanese astronaut testing stink-free underwear
In space, no one can hear you scream, "Change your shorts!" So, in the name of odor-free orbiting, the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station is the guinea pig for some new high-tech underwear developed at Japan Women's University, Reuters tells us.
Koichi Wakata's zero-gravity "J-ware" is designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, dry quickly, resist flames and do away with that pressing concern of modern fashion — static cling. They're also comfy and stylish.
"He can wear his trunks more than a week," said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Another Japanese astronaut gave the clothes a dry run last year during a shuttle mission. "The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn't have any sweat. He didn't need to hang his clothes to dry," Yanagawa added.
The new space skivvies are likely to cut down on the amount of clothing sent to the ISS, which lacks a laundry room.
Once development is finished, the Japanese space agency plans to make the clothes available to NASA and its other space station partners. After that, look for them at your local mall.
