^zhurnal - v.0.11

One first is spider-silk on breeze,
Threads set adrift by parents who
Have minimal control or clue
Of what genetic forces they
Release during a roll-in-hay
Unconsciously conceptive act
Of passion, love or simple fact.
(A crass process to contemplate,
But one which ne'ertheless our fate
Condemns or blesses us to try
If our own line is not to die.)

So starts a life: a random mote,
Potential energy afloat
In seas of possibility.

But soon what seemed completely free
Has settled, put down roots, and grown
Into a pattern, flesh and bone:
A bonsai sculpture, shaped by force;
Limb, twig, and leaf pursue a course
Defined by the environment
Plus countless influences sent
From families and societies.

Now in the forest of these trees
Which constitute the living world
So many plants are crippled, curled
Into burnt matchstick shadows of
What could have flourished given love,
More tender care, and fortune kind.

Some lucky few, however, find
Themselves well-placed in soil and light
To thrive and grow in beauty bright.

Then at their death they sublimate
Into a subtle, diffuse state
Of deeds and words, or flame and air.
We breathe their thoughts and sense their care
As gifts which they have left behind ---
Crystalline structures of the mind.

- Saturday, December 09, 2000 at 11:18:44 (EST)

Bennett responds (belatedly, he admits) by telling the lady that she may be too harsh on herself. Perhaps she doesn't have as much of the indefinable "energy" that she thinks she should --- or perhaps she has a latent energy which will be released some day under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Bennett advises patience and tolerance. He writes:

"Now, I do not want to defend you against yourself (for possibly you enjoy denouncing yourself and proving that you are worthless). Nevertheless, I would point out that energy is often used in ways quite unsuspected. Energy is a very various thing. Some people use energy in arranging time-tables and sticking to them, and in clenching their teeth and making terrific resolves and executing them, and in never wasting a moment, and in climbing --- climbing. And this is all very laudible. But energy can be used in other ways --- in contemplation, in self-understanding, in understanding other people, in pleasing other people, in appreciating the world, in lessening the friction of life."

...

"You, dear young woman, may or may not be one of these. I cannot decide. But, anyhow, if you are not one of the hard-striving, resolute, persevering, teeth-clenching, totally efficient, one-ideaed, ambitious species, you need not despair.

"Imagine what the world would be like if we were all ruthlessly set on 'succeeding'! It would be like a scene of carnage. And it is conceivable that you are, in fact, much more efficient than you think, and that you are wasting much less time than you think, and that you are employing much more energy than you think. You complained that you lacked resolution, which means that you lacked one steady desire. But perhaps your steady desire and resolution are so instinctive, so profoundly a part of you, that they function without being noticed. And if you do indeed lack one steady desire and the energy firmly to resolve --- well, you just do. And you will have to be content with your lot. Why envy others? An over-mastering desire and its accompanying energy are not necessarily to be envied.

"A dangerous doctrine, you say. You say that I am leaving the door open to sloth and slackness and other evils. You say that I am finding an excuse for every unserious person under the sun. Perhaps so; but what I have said is true, and I will not be afraid of the truth because it happens to be dangerous. Moreover, every person ought to know in his heart whether or not he is conducting his existence satisfactorily. But he must interrogate his conscience fairly. It is not fair, either to one's conscience or to oneself, to listen to it always, for example, in the desolating dark hour before the dawn, and never to listen to it, for example, after one has had a good meal or a good slice of any sort of honest pleasure."

(From "A Dangerous Lecture to a Young Woman", reprinted in Self and Self Management: Essays About Existing by Arnold Bennett. See also the ^zhurnal entries of 29 April 1999 and 5 December 1999 for further Bennett commentary.)

- Friday, December 08, 2000 at 15:35:48 (EST)

• "... Mr. Thornhill observed with an oath, that he never knew any thing more absurd than calling such a fright a beauty: 'For strike me ugly,' continued he, 'if I should not find as much pleasure in choosing my mistress by the information of a lamp under the clock at St. Dunstan's.' At this he laughed, and so did we: the jests of the rich are ever successful." (Chap VII)
• "His refusal appeared to me a little extraordinary, nor could I conceive how so sensible a girl as my youngest could thus prefer a middle-aged man of broken fortune to a sprightly young fellow of twenty=two. But as men are most capable of distinguishing merit in women, so the ladies often form the truest judgments upon us. The two sexes seem placed as spies upon each other, and are furnished with different abilities, adapted for mutual inspection." (Chap VIII)
• "Glorious liberty! that theme of modern declamation. I would have all men kings. I would be a king myself. We have all naturally an equal right to the throne: we are all originally equal. This is my opinion, and was once the opinion of a set of honest men who were called Levellers. They tried to erect themselves into a community, where all should be equally free. But alas! it would never answer; for there were some among them stronger, and some more cunning than others, and these became masters of the rest; for as sure as your groom rides your horses, because he is a cunninger animal than they, so surely will the animal that is cunninger or stronger than he sit upon his shoulders in turn. Since then it is entailed upon humanity to submit, and some are born to command and others to obey, the question is, as there must be tyrants, whether it is better to have them in the same house with us, or in the same village, or still farther off, in the metropolis. Now, sir, for my own part, as I naturally hate the face of a tyrant, the farther off he is removed from me, the better pleased am I. The generality of mankind also are of my way of thinking, and have unanimously created one king, whose election at once diminishes the number of tyrants, and puts tyranny at the greatest distance from the greatest number of people." (Chap XIX)
• "My remarks, however, were few: I found that monarchy was the best government for the poor to live in, and commonwealths for the rich. I found that riches in general were in every country another name for freedom; and that no man is so fond of freedom himself that he would not choose to subject the will of some individuals of society to his own." (Chap XX)
• "I armed her against the censures of the world, showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would teach us to endure it." (Chap XXII)
• "The consolations of philosophy are very amusing, but often fallacious. It tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; and on the other hand, that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted." (Chap XXIX)

- Saturday, December 02, 2000 at 21:00:40 (EST)

• "He kept putting feet in his mouth --- and sometimes they were not his own feet." (JL)
• "Don't hire suspect people, and don't suspect the people you hire." (BH)
• "That ought not to be a problem --- but lots of things ought not to be a problem." (?)
• "I don't mind being a bouncer, but somebody has to tell me who to bounce." (NS)
• "It's proooooooooooobably a net plus." (BH)
• Heard in Berkeley, on the radio a few days after the US Presidential election, during a talk show featuring two astrologers: "Of course they haven't reached a decision yet --- Mercury is still in retrograde!" (NF)
• "I'm interested in everything --- so I have no time for anything!" (^z)

- Friday, December 01, 2000 at 06:00:05 (EST)

Today's bureaucracies (governmental and corporate) have evolved mechanisms to distribute the load and permit their leaders to survive --- more or less. But it's easy for a person "in charge" to attempt too much, to take on too many responsibilities. The consequences are well-known: loss of creativity, loss of focus, and loss of health, both personal and organizational.

- Thursday, November 30, 2000 at 05:47:02 (EST)

- Wednesday, November 29, 2000 at 05:49:09 (EST)

• "... in the matter of looking without seeing we are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat resembles coma. We are all content to look and not see. And if and when, having comprehended that the rôle of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems."
• "Good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in the shortest possible time."
• "Human curiosity counts among the highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of human conduct. Observation is not practised directly with this high end in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness --- whether we like it or not. It also sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed --- such as a deed of cruelty --- takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended."
• "... all physical phenomena are inter-related ... there is nothing which does not bear on everything else. The whole spectacular and sensual show --- what the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches --- is a cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible, as not forming part of the equation."
• "The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is like other artists --- he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell --- the affair is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this --- that what most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner of existing."
• "In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of beauty --- indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works under the stress of instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards material which repels him --- the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by it, he is under its spell --- that is, he has seen beauty in it. He could have no other reason for writing about it. He may see a strange sort of beauty; he may --- indeed he does --- see a sort of beauty that nobody has quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd spirits ever will or can be made to see. But he does see beauty."
• "The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree."
• "A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the novelist --- the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile all the rest --- is fineness of mind. A great novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his mind --- the glass through which he sees things."
• "First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. ... When the real intimate work of creation has to be done --- and it has to be done on every page --- the novelist can only look within for effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end. ... In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. ... Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind."

Arnold Bennett goes on to discuss the differences between plays and novels. He finds plays much easier to write than novels --- plays are shorter, more limited, less subtle vehicles. A dramatic production also has a unique advantage of immediacy: the audience sees events happen, and does not need to be persuaded that the improbable is probable. But the fundamental distinction between the novel and the play, Bennett contends, is the fact that the dramatist only "... begins the work of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that then upward the lifting had to be done by other people." Bennett sketches out the collaborative process, involving theatrical manager, producer, director, actors, and audience. (Along the way, he notes that "... a rehearsal is like a battle --- certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the thing principally fights itself.")

Bennett continues his essay with a discussion of the tension between art and popularity. He counsels compromise: "The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former." Bennett feels that a real artist, in order to succeed in creating, communicating, and making a living, must respect the limitations and prejudices of the audience. "You can only go a very little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's modest share in the education of the public." Quoting from Valery Larbaud's novel A. O. Barnabooth Bennett cites "... a phrase of deep wisdom about women: 'La femme est une grande réalité, comme la guerre.' It might be applied to the public. The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the artistic function." A successful artist with something important to say, in Bennett's judgment, will manage to get the message across even within the constraints of a "potboiler" novel written merely to pay the rent.

And speaking of which, Arnold Bennett (himself a financially successful author) argues next that a great writer must attend to the selling of a work once it is completed. "In other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant, for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him." Bennett tells horror stories of the exploitation of naïve authors by publishers: "The ordinary merchant deals with other merchants --- his equals in business skill. The publisher and the theatrical manager deal with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even archangels could not refrain from taking advantage." Hence, the need for literary agents.

Finally, Arnold Bennett concludes The Author's Craft with a call for the artist to live within the world --- not to repudiate life or to have contempt for reality. "Nobody has any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother? Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature is. And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work."

"The Author's Craft" (1913) is reprinted in "The Author's Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett", edited by Samuel Hynes, University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

- Tuesday, November 28, 2000 at 05:50:44 (EST)

A smart and diligent colleague, AP, had performed a "tool inventory" of information resources and computer programs used in various offices. She organized the material into a structured database, with fields for attributes such as tool name, category, date of development, cost, size, operating system, hardware requirements, etc. The challenge: how to make the tool inventory accessible to everyone, so people could easily look up what was available and avoid reinventing wheels?

In November 1998 the tool inventory was a remote island. It lived on an isolated server, reachable by only a few privileged souls, hidden behind the fog of a hostile user interface. AP and I needed to figure out a way to put it on the shared network in a simple enough format that anybody could find what they needed quickly. The "obvious" solution, according to the professional software developers who looked at the task, was to write routines to perform database queries and translate the results into web pages. The folks involved happened to be learning Java at the time, and so they proposed to spend some months building the interfaces in that language.

AP and I were skeptical. The developers, we felt, didn't understand what real end users wanted to do with the tools inventory. Worse, the dynamic interface that they proposed to build sounded likely to be slow, ugly, and limited in its capabilities. And we lacked confidence that they could actually deliver something on time that would work, even in a minimal fashion. Their learning experience, we feared, would teach them how hard their approach was without resulting in a functional product.

But what did we know? We knew that the tools inventory database was relatively static, with many hundreds but not thousands of entries and with a slow rate of growth, maybe a few percent per month. We also knew that most users, most of the time, would want to look up a tool by name (if they already knew what it was called and just needed a few details) or by category (if they wanted to browse and identify candidate solutions to their problems).

This sounded tailor-made for a simple flat structure of static HTML pages, one per tool, plus simple index pages with links to each tool page sorted alphabetically by name or category. By avoiding dynamic server-side fancy database interfaces, we thought we could get quick response and high reliability. We figured that a standard web search engine would be able to spider our pages and build a free-text retrieval system to find any of the words in the tool descriptions --- so we would get that feature for free. We knew we could build æsthetically pleasing pages that demanding users would enjoy the look and feel of. And we could see how to do all this by hand. The only remaining challenge was to automate the process, so that whenever the tools inventory database changed (every few weeks or so) we could painlessly rebuild the tool description pages and the cross-reference ("Xref") index pages.

In a sense, then, our solution was to take a snapshot of a slowly-changing database and then publish that photograph. We didn't get permission; we just did it, as a two-person mini-skunk-works, during odd chunks of time we found between other jobs. AP already knew how to export crude HTML from the database, so she took on the task of cleaning that process up and making nice web pages come out of it.

For my contribution, I wrote a tiny "compiler" --- a program to take a directory full of individual tool listing HTML files, scan through them, pull out tool names and categories, and then build index pages full of links sorted by those attributes. I wrote the "compiler" in JavaScript, an interpreted language with several critical advantages:

• it was free;
• it was available;
• it offered adequate performance; and
• it had excellent pattern-matching and string-manipulation features, which we needed to parse the tool pages and pull out tagged data.

But when we were done, in just a couple of weeks of part-time coding, AP and I had a prototype solution that really worked! It was simple, easy to understand, straightforward to maintain, and extensible to solve new problems or add new features. It was adequately fast: it indexed half a dozen tool pages per second, so a complete rebuild of the cross-reference pages took only a few minutes.

And the fancy solution that the professional software developers were attempting? Somehow it never got finished. They moved on to other tasks, and real people used our quick-and-dirty program.

What were the secrets of our success? Perhaps:

• We understood the ultimate requirements --- since we were close enough to our customers to know what they really needed to do.
• We understood the inputs that we had to work with --- so we knew what were the big hurdles and what were the non-problems.
• We understood our development tools --- so we could gauge the size and duration of the programming task accurately.
• We factored our work efficiently --- so we minimized time spent on meetings, interpersonal communications, and redundant overlap of effort, but we maximized productive collaboration.
• We simplified, ruthlessly --- so we had fewer challenges to overcome and more reserves for unanticipated (but predictable!) surprises.
• We avoided bureaucracy --- by keeping the project small and using only what resources we could scrounge locally.
• We weren't proud --- so we were happy when our results were taken over and used by others, and we weren't surprised when neither of us got much recognition for what we did.

- Sunday, November 26, 2000 at 06:39:30 (EST)

Returning health and peace of mind gave a new interest to everything around me. I sought to diversify my time by as many enjoyments as lay within reach. Bathing in company with troops of girls formed one of my chief amusements. We sometimes enjoyed the recreation in the waters of a miniature lake, into which the central stream of the valley expanded. This lovely sheet of water was almost circular in figure, and about three hundred yards across. Its beauty was indescribable. All around its banks waved luxuriant masses of tropical foliage, soaring high above which were to be seen, here and there, the symmetrical shaft of the coconut tree, surmounted by its tuft of graceful branches, drooping in the air like so many waving ostrich plumes.

...

This lovely piece of water was the coolest spot in all the valley, and I now made it a place of continual resort during the hottest period of the day. One side of it lay near the termination of a long gradually expanding gorge, which mounted to the heights that environed the vale. The strong trade wind, met in its course by these elevations, circled and eddied about their summits, and was sometimes driven down the steep ravine and swept across the valley, ruffling in its passage the otherwise tranquil surface of the lake.

One day, after we had been paddling about for some time, I disembarked Kory-Kory, and paddled the canoe to the windward side of the lake. As I turned the canoe, Fayaway, who was with me, seemed all at once to be struck with some happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her person the ample robe of tapa which was knotted over her shoulder (for the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.

In a moment the tapa was distended by the breeze --- the long brown tresses of Fayaway streamed in the air --- and the canoe glided rapidly through the water, and shot towards the shore. Seated in the stern, I directed its course with my paddle until it dashed up the soft sloping bank, and Fayaway, with a light spring, alighted on the ground; whilst Kory-Kory, who had watched our maneuvers with admiration, now clapped his hands in transport, and shouted like a madman. Many a time afterwards was this feat repeated.

If the reader have not observed ere this that I was the declared admirer of Miss Fayaway, all I can say is that he is little conversant with affairs of the heart, and I certainly shall not trouble myself to enlighten him any farther....

- Thursday, November 23, 2000 at 08:46:07 (EST)

• problems --- interesting, important questions ... issues worth worrying about;
• data --- content, information, substance ... raw material to wrestle with;
• customers --- people who care about what the project is trying to do;
• tools --- from a quiet room and a pencil, all the way up to the most sophisticated technological equipment; and
• people --- smart, energetic, persistent individuals.

• fuzzy, ill-posed, or constantly changing questions;
• noisy, deceptive, missing, or excessive data;
• unreasonable or naïve customers;
• insufficient, incompatible, or unreliable tools; and
• incompetent, undertrained, or overloaded people.

- Tuesday, November 21, 2000 at 20:48:22 (EST)

- Sunday, November 19, 2000 at 13:48:11 (EST)

'Yes,' said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full meaning of his grief. 'I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.'

From Chapter 76 of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872). (See also "Remember Me?", ^zhurnal entry of 21 May 1999.)

- Friday, November 17, 2000 at 18:45:11 (EST)

- Tuesday, November 14, 2000 at 05:56:53 (EST)

The diamonds are ideas. Honest teachers are eager to share what they know with honest students. Libraries are full of worthwhile books. The more we learn the more we can learn, as new concepts build upon the foundations laid by earlier studies. But there's a twist: deep knowledge takes time, effort, and steadiness. Flitting from topic to topic doesn't pay off. Neither does a foolish pursuit of novelty. There aren't many short-cuts to discovery, though there are lots of dead-ends and by-roads that lead nowhere: pseudo-science, false revisionism, the latest mystic fads, ....

Far better to focus, persist, and grow in understanding of important subjects. That path is its own reward. It also offers the hope of making new contributions to human knowledge --- an enduring gift to the future. Few are fortunate enough to do that, but many more could try.

(See also a ^zhurnal entry of 30 April 1999, "What is my Life?", a poem by Richard Ropiquet.)

- Sunday, November 12, 2000 at 20:06:18 (EST)

But what of that unnoticed, obscure star?
It shines in peace, unchanging, stable, calm.
Around it orbit scraps of the dark cloud
From which it formed. Those negligible bits
Have since condensed into some balls of gas,
Too small to merit notice from afar.
And lesser still, a few scant leftovers ---
Poor remnants, near-invisible --- remain
Like dust motes in an ocean, eddying
About a bubble as it rides the waves.

Upon one speck, a thousand million years
Of nothing happens: random jostlings
By atoms that link up and then dissolve
Into the brew that percolates the crust.
So meaningless millennia pass by.
At last, alignment clicks: a pattern gels,
Persists, and makes a template that now builds
Self-replicating molecule machines.
Wee engines harness energy to clone
Themselves, and thereby propagate their form.

This flurry of activity is yet
Unseen at any distance from the globe:
Mere rearrangements of the building blocks
Without a ghost of purpose or intent;
A thoughtless copy-cattish crystal growth.
But over time, the simple pattern spreads.
And as it does, it fails. Mistakes are made
Resulting in flawed copies, most of which
Are hopeless failures at the repro-game.
They wither and then die, that never lived.

But of the garbled versions, a few thrive:
Machines that out-compete their ancestors.
Efficient, accurate, precise, controlled,
They manage resources with thrift and grace.
Increasingly they spread, until they fall
Themselves as victims to still lustier foes,
Fortuitously optimized designs
Which somehow find the trick of partnership,
Alliances among the replicants,
Whereby more complex structures then emerge.

And after countless microscopic wars
Across the surface of a puny world
(Inconsequential flotsam circling
A sun entirely forgettable,
The suburbs of an average galaxy)
A change occurs: configurations bloom
That think, first crudely, then with greater power.
These patterns can manipulate themselves,
Communicate, discover, teach, and love.
--- So mind appears to shake the universe.

- Friday, November 10, 2000 at 15:48:41 (EST)

"My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible. I haven't replaced a metaphorical theory, the Cartesian Theater, with a nonmetaphorical ('literal, scientific') theory. All I have done, really, is to replace one family of metaphors with another, trading in the Theater, the Witness, the Central Meaner, the Figment, for Software, Virtual Machines, Multiple Drafts, a Pandemonium of Homunculi. It's just a war of metaphors, you say --- but metaphors are not 'just' metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them?"

- Wednesday, November 08, 2000 at 17:15:43 (EST)

'Oh, my life is very simple,' said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. 'I am always at Lowick.'

'That is a dreadful imprisonment,' said Will, impetuously.

'No, don't think that,' said Dorothea. 'I have no longings.'

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. 'I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.'

'What is that?' said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

'That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil --- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.'

'That is a beautiful mysticism --- it is a ---'

'Please not to call it by any name,' said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. 'You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much --- now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.'

'God bless you for telling me!' said Will, ardently, and rather wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.

'What is your religion?' said Dorothea. 'I mean --- not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?'

....

- Monday, November 06, 2000 at 17:06:43 (EST)

• See Isaiah Berlin's essay "What Do Politicians Know?" re the importance of rapid-fire synthesis plus ability to decide. Bismarck, Churchill, & FDR weren't "smart", but they had those abilities; the "smartest" Presidents have tended to be failures.
• Better communications --- such as corporate email --- increasingly gives visibility to individuals who help, who respond to questions, who solve problems. This highlights the contrast/conflict between managers (budget/resource people) and productive knowers who create value for the organization. It's like the situation in France ~1780; puzzlingly enough, pay scales have become increasingly unequal in recent years (between CEOs and workers), perhaps as part of a winner-take-all economy? "Culture trumps technology every time." The management model for most American firms is Stalin.
• See Ithiel de Solla Pool's The Social Impact of the Telephone; people sincerely thought that there would be no more wars once heads of state could call each other up and talk together. It's a similar myth that the Internet will bring about a Golden Age of anything. Instead, "People use technology to create the sort of world that they want." See also Scott's Seeing Like a State, an excellent book on organizational psychology and history.
• To understand a large institution, "The unit of analysis is the Group --- not the individual and not the organization." A group consists of at most 300-500 people, which is the maximum number that can really know one another. The group is where knowledge resides --- common themes, shared rhetoric and experiences, stories, etc. People who stay around don't necessarily like their organizations, but they do like their group. Groups can't be created; they self-organize. A shared belief in a mission defines a group.
• Human facilitators are key to group health: "connectors", "mavens", "gatekeepers", "boundary spanners", etc. See Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. There are about 12% of "nosy people" in any population, individuals who like to be aware of what goes on elsewhere in the outfit. They are extremely valuable.
• Groups need requisite variety --- a term from applied math, where it is known that one needs enough complex inputs in order to successfully model a complex system. If a group is too homogeneous it won't be able to recognize new emerging challenges and will fail to respond to them.
• To succeed, a group needs at least one person responsible for intelligence-gathering and sharing. A group also needs money, management, focus, and above all time and space. See Aristotle's Rhetoric; groups need room to tell stories together and learn together. Nobody learns much from written documents; people have to sit with experts to pick up their tacit knowledge. "It takes the same amount of time to learn French now as it did 500 years ago."
• Trust comes in several varieties. It usually develops from repeated interaction and proven reliability, but also one can have swift trust via a visceral reaction to somebody. And one can have functional trust in people to perform well in a narrow area, while still distrusting them otherwise.
• Face-time is needed for virtual teams to cohere; otherwise, entropy grows and the teams unravel, then die.
• "What makes a learning organization? Not the Information Technology budget or the training budget! A thought-experiment: "What would happen if you spent the day visibly reading a book at your desk? Most firms would tell you to do that on your own time. But if you spend the day responding to email, you're a hero." The cultural norms don't allow people to study at their desks. Everyone is overloaded with moment-by-moment scheduled activities; an individual becomes "a human transaction system".
• To learn, people need time for reflection. "Think --- it used to be an IBM slogan!"
• How can change come? Mainly when a senior person hears and champions new ideas. "I've never seen anything work in knowledge management from the bottom up. Middle up, maybe. Without real top-level support, no." (^z comment: as a devout believer in bottom-up revolution by the individual, I gently disagree!)
• How to sustain organizational change? "Have small successes and publicize them --- even if you have to lie a bit!"
• What's the biggest win? "I would strongly encourage talking. I can't emphasize it enough. Words fail me!" (^_^) "Hire smart people and let them talk to each other." Free and open discussion is essential in order to discover and correct errors.
• "We aren't just like animals --- we are animals!". (credited to Peter Senge) (^z comment: See also Mary Midgley's books, ^zhurnal entry of 6 July 2000 etc.)

- Saturday, November 04, 2000 at 07:33:12 (EST)

• "My way or the highway!"(HB)
• "Marcus Aurelius says not to worry about things you can't do anything about --- but do something about the rest." (BD)
• "The dinosaurs didn't change their spots --- they got replaced by mammals." (BW)
• "Internet enterprises nowadays are like a bunch of ball bearings dumped on a table where's there's a tiny hole for a target. Most of the balls will roll off the table, but a few may make it into the goal. It's just like the canals and the railroads and the early days of radio." (BD, ^z, ...)
• "Aurelius used Stoicism to rise above; Epictetus taught submission." (BD) ... "like Hinduism (ahimsa?) or Islam?" (GdM, ^z, ...)
• "It's best to have lots of little groups, 'skunk works' --- like sending out pirate ships into the unknown. Most of them fail, but when one comes back with treasure you can send more out in that direction. This is much better than what we usually do: everybody chasing after the same soccer ball." (BD, ^z, ...)
• "Stoicism seems to exhibit a tension between values and not caring. Is there fanaticism lurking here? If everyone practiced Stoicism consistently, would society collapse?" (JB, BD, ...)
• "Much as it pains me to say it, meteorologists aren't always right." (CS) --- "That's hard to believe!" (JL)
• "Leadership is the quality of an interaction." (BH)
• "Weimar Russia? Maybe they'll have some great night clubs!" (GdM)
• "The 'forgetting time' on the Internet is much shorter than in the Real World." (BD)
• "Maybe patrons, rich guys who pay for the creative arts, actually have the most control in the long run over what is done and what will be remembered?" (BD, GdM, ^z, ...)
• "I am about to commit a rudeness." (BH)

- Friday, November 03, 2000 at 05:46:26 (EST)

If I may intrude a personal element here, one of the things which distinguishes imperative programming in C, Pascal, Fortran, or whatever from declarative programming in Prolog, Scheme, ML, or whatever for me is a big difference in feeling. When I code in C, I feel that I'm on a knife-edge of "state" --- I focus on statements and what they do. I'm worried about the behaviour of a machine. But when I'm writing Prolog, the predicates feel like geometric objects and the data flow between goals feels like lines of tension holding the goals together into an integrated whole, as if the program fragment I was working were a large Rubik's cube that I could handle and move from one configuration to another without destroying it. When I fix mistakes in a Prolog program, I look for flaws in the static "spatial" configuration of the program; a mistake feels like a snapped thread in a cobweb, and I feel regret for wounding the form. When I'm coding C, I worry about "register" declarations and pointer arithmetic. When I'm coding Prolog, I worry about getting the interface of each predicate just right so that it means something and has the visible perfection of a new leaf.

Lovely images, which bring to mind the lines of force which reputedly helped Maxwell derive his equations, or the subtle threads which form the essence of magical power in some fantasy stories. Perhaps O'Keefe has also fingered one of the key differences between art and mass production, between mathematics and mere computation, or between beauty and crass manipulation. It's all about caring: the importance of every detail combined with the overall rightness of a structure. In a word, meaning. And it applies not just to programming, but throughout life.

(See also "Resolution and Unification", ^zhurnal entry of 11 November 1999, for some other ^z musings on the theme of Prolog.)

- Thursday, November 02, 2000 at 05:58:55 (EST)

Grim odds --- and there are reasons to believe the model is plausible. Many diseases involve cumulative damage, a sequence of low-probability events. The body has systems designed to spot and fix snafus before they get serious. Over time, however, repair mechanisms themselves break down, and the integrated effect is an ever-more-rapidly increasing rate of problems. Things fall apart ....

- Monday, October 30, 2000 at 05:45:54 (EST)

- Saturday, October 28, 2000 at 15:08:13 (EDT)

^*(Connoisseur Society #CD4212, In Sync Labs, 2211 Broadway, NY, NY 10024)

- Friday, October 27, 2000 at 05:56:08 (EDT)

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was a British writer and humorist who described himself as one who "... stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow who charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dulness. A small eater, but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper-berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff...."

Some quotes from or about Lamb:

from a letter of Haydon to Wordsworth, October 16, 1842:

Coleridge's Monologue --- The story of Lamb, on his way to the India House, leaving Coleridge at 10 a.m. in a doorway talking with his eyes shut, and coming back at 4 p.m. to find Coleridge still there with his eyes shut, talking away, as he thought, to Lamb, I have heard my father declare, though only on Lamb's authority, to be strictly true; but then Lamb delighted in such fictions about his friends.

from Grace Before Meat:

On Saying Grace --- I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts --- a grace before Milton --- a grace before Shakespeare --- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?

from Witches and Other Night Fears:

Credulity --- Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

from Distant Correspondents:

Puns --- A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavor, than you can send a kiss. Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days' old newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merchandise above all requires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy?

from Imperfect Sympathies:

Lack of Humor in Scotchmen --- I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son --- when four of them started up at once to inform me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.

from First Fruits of Australian Poetry:

The First Pun in Otaheite [Tahiti?] --- We know a merry captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself upon having planted the first pun in Otaheite. It was in their own language, and the islanders first looked at him, then stared at one another, and all at once burst out into a genial laugh. It was a stranger, and as a stranger they gave it welcome. Many a quibble of their own growth, we doubt not, has since sprung from that well-timed exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be no inconsiderable advance in civilization.

from a letter to Wordsworth, April 9, 1816:

Borrowers of Books --- I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.

from a letter to Manning, February 26, 1808

Wordsworth and Shakespeare --- Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind. Even Coleridge was a little checked at this hardihood of assertion.

from The Superannuated Man:

Age Not Reckoned By Years --- I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied to me, threefold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty. 'T is a fair rule-of-three sum.

- Tuesday, October 24, 2000 at 20:22:30 (EDT)

• The Greeks had three words for different types of knowledge:
  • metis --- cunning, savvy, street-smarts ... like Odysseus
  • techne --- craft, art, principles ... as in our word "technology"
  • epistime --- science, universal rules
• Tacit knowledge can't be stated in words, and can't be learned except by experience, like how to ride a bicycle or hit a baseball. Tacit knowledge comes through heuristics. One acts, and then puts the results into a framework. (A flip side anecdote: "Peasants think that if you don't talk about something, it didn't happen.")
• What do groups know? For an organization, "It doesn't matter as much what individuals know." Individuals come and go. What counts are norms for behavior, shared values, a sense of mission.
• Organizations bend people. A single individual can only shape the thinking of an organization a tiny bit; but the organization has a huge effect on the individual.
• The exception: the Founder of an organization can shape it --- e.g., Edwin Land of Polaroid, Hewlett & Packard, Wang, etc. But what can go wrong? One risk: when the Founder is still around, a firm often doesn't question his choices enough. Consider Polaroid, Wang, Digital Equipment, etc.
• "The press has it wrong" when they credit a new CEO with quickly changing an organization's culture. See de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; there's an excellent new translation, and the book has much truth, still valid today.
• What gets carried on in a company? Practices, common ways of doing things, customs.
• "Never underestimate the power of inertia and practice in life." That underestimation was Marx's big mistake. Isaiah Berlin wrote that the greatest shock to all thinkers of the 20th Century is [the persistence of] nationalism.
• Artifacts and architecture are unrecognized storehouses of knowledge. Buildings carry messages of cultural feeling; so do office layouts. It's significant that more and more knowledge businesses are starting to look like university campuses.
• Knowledge capital is increasingly seen as the key competitive advantage for a nation. Look at Malaysia, Ireland, and India 30 years ago; their economies were all based on subsistence agriculture and extraction of natural resources, and they were all poor backwaters. Now they're thriving centers of hardware assembly, software development, etc.
• Literacy and its growth is a key underappreciated phenomenon in the world during recent decades.
• The "command & control" form of organizational management was developed by Ford and duPont based on three existing models: the military, the railroads, and the Church. We still run our large organizations on that basis, but it's increasingly inadequate.

- Monday, October 23, 2000 at 05:57:10 (EDT)

- Saturday, October 21, 2000 at 18:07:34 (EDT)

Individuals are starting to emerge. Like tiny mammals, we hide in the cracks, under the ground, and behind the bushes. We don't fight the monsters --- we avoid them and ignore them. We find each other and work together, at a pace too fast for the big guys to follow. By the time they figure out where we're going and try to position themselves in front of us to make a profit, we're long gone. We don't play by their rules.

Mass markets are shrinking, then vanishing, as individuals choose for themselves. There is no "next big thing" --- there are billions of "next little things", every one unique. Don't believe the salesmen who claim to predict the coming wave; there isn't a coming wave. Don't waste time in fantasies of wealth, fame, power. Give them up; they never were important anyway. The classic-jurassic era is ending. Make friends. Be free. Think. Live.

- Thursday, October 19, 2000 at 21:47:52 (EDT)

Amb. Nolan discussed a number of geopolitical issues which have emerged over the past half century, and speculated on the issues which the graduates would be facing in decades to come. He talked about the collapse of Great Powers such as the USSR, and the legitimacy of intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.

But the key question which the Ambassador raised hit much closer to home. The ranks of the US military services are increasingly filled by young recruits from the poorest segments of American society, largely members of racial and ethnic minorities. Is this right? Should a nation deliberately delegate responsibility for its national defense to what is essentially an underclass? Is it moral to pay people to risk their lives doing jobs which the rich and well-educated avoid?

We all delegate some activities. Bosses assign tasks to subordinates. General practitioners, in medicine and every other endeavor, refer customers to specialists with appropriate expertise. Division of labor is essential to economic efficiency. At a more fundamental level, almost the entire animal kingdom uses sexual differentiation to maximize reproductive success; females and males tend to pursue distinct strategies, with goals that can harmonize or conflict. And diverse species occupy different ecological niches in the web of life.

But can a nation, dedicated to freedom and justice, remain thus dedicated while assigning its dirty work to an unprivileged subset of the population? Ambassador Nolan asked the graduates of St. Anselm's to think about that. Perhaps we all should.

- Tuesday, October 17, 2000 at 20:55:58 (EDT)

Why should a short list of names appear repeatedly as experts on fuzzy issues such as "The Internet and Society", "The Future of the Corporation", and so forth? Doubtless these pundits give good sound bites, pithy sayings to add flavor to a reporter's story --- but do they really know anything special? It's entertaining to look back at their writings from a decade ago (for those who have been active that long) and see how inaccurate their confidently-stated prognostications were. It's also fun to observe the interlocking web of cross-citations which futurati teammates give each other. Once you're a member of the club you get free referrals from your friends, and you in turn put pointers to their work in your writings. (Just like web sites trading ad banners with one another and counting that as revenue.) The wheel goes around, until external events cause the self-licking ice cream cone to melt down.

Mutual admiration communities of press-friendly quotesmiths aren't really dangerous in the long run. (How many can you remember from a generation ago?) But in the shorter term they narrow the spectrum of viewpoints that get public examination --- and thereby lower the overall quality of thinking. When you see the same people pontificating in three or more places, step back and ask: doesn't anybody else have something to say on this issue? Then look around, in the Library, on the Web, etc., for non-celebrity experts.

You'll discover persons who don't spend all their time seeking the limelight: multifaceted individuals who realize that complex problems don't have bumper-stickerizable solutions --- and who therefore can't in honesty give simplistic slogans in answer to reporters' questions. These are quiet, thoughtful people ... people who will give you new and important ideas ... good people worth knowing.

- Sunday, October 15, 2000 at 18:33:01 (EDT)

• Knowledge Management is a misnomer. One can't "manage" knowledge in anything like the same sense in which one can manage budgets or other resources. One can, however, manage data and information.
• Data are records of state changes --- movements of items in the world, for instance. "You need data to make large organizations work, but it's just 'stuff'; it doesn't [fundamentally] change things. Information is different."
• "Information is a message --- it has a sender and a receiver." The linguistic root of the word is significant: information changes the form of something. Beethoven's 9th conveys information, as do Picasso's Guernica, Emily Dickinson's poems, etc.
• Shannon et al. called their work "information theory", but it was really the study of bandwidth, the low-level machinery of data transfer --- not content, not "information" in the meaningful sense.
• Stories are the only thing people remember; it's how we learn. Chief Executives get paid big bucks to tell stories to Wall Street and raise stock prices. Stories put information into context.
• "Knowledge is what a knower knows." It's not just what's in a book; you could read all the books that an expert has read and still not be knowledgeable. As the Koran says, "The ox that goes to Mecca is still an ox." You need experience to gain knowledge. Herbert Simon has said that it takes 20 years of doing something to get knowledgeable on a subject.
• Wisdom is the poetic realm of unbounded subjects, like life and love.
• Can one have knowledge without information? Perhaps yes: "You can just know!" in the fashion of chess or music prodigies. (^z comment: I disagree! Prodigies tap into the same information wellsprings as do conscious experts --- but the prodigies have fortuitously discovered deep sources of power too early in life to verbalize them, in the same way that most of us can't find words to explain how we walk, see, talk, etc. No magic is needed.)
• We remember maybe one part in 10**14 of what we have experienced. Memory comes by placing things into cognitive frames --- narratives or stories --- which are related to what we feel is important. Everybody who is old enough remembers where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked, when JFK was shot, when the Challenger exploded, etc. Most of us don't remember much about the first lunar landing; whether or not it was more important, it lacked an emotional resonance.
• The key to success is a combination of mental energy and analytic skills. Being "smart", beyond a certain point, is less important in most cases than having drive and determination. We value knowledge not for its own sake, but because it leads to new insights and better judgments.
• See the Dorothy Leonard book When Sparks Fly, and the Damasio book Descartes' Error, re the lack of difference between thinking and feeling. "Distance learning" tends to fail because of the poor connection between teacher and student; teleconferencing faces similar difficulties. "Emotional Intelligence" (Howard Gardner) is important. See Diane Vaughn's The Challenger Disaster re communication failure leading to catastrophe.
• 28% of the GNP comes from persuasion --- marketing, public relations, lawyers, marriage counselors, ministers.

- Friday, October 13, 2000 at 21:11:28 (EDT)

- Wednesday, October 11, 2000 at 05:46:38 (EDT)

Bird spreads broad its wings while swift it flies along
Gathers solar beams to pay for its soft song
  In coin of captured light.

What it will not use it scatters off its sides
Gifting fairy glints to all who scan the skies
  In envy of its flight.

When its course is run the crystal bird dives down
Into ocean air where with a flash it drowns ---
  And dark returns to night.

- Sunday, October 08, 2000 at 19:56:37 (EDT)

• "What do we know? We can't answer that question!" (JC)
• Death was omnipresent until early this century, the early 1900's. Everybody saw infants and parents die, at home. Now we're much more hung up on death than people used to be. (BD + ^z)
• "Fortunately they ran out of time --- or they would have had my guts for garters!" (MF)
• Emotion is an underappreciated facet of corporate culture. People aren't simply thinking machines. We have feelings, irrational or pre-rational, that form a basis for our social behavior: loyalty; honesty, even when it hurts; working hard, even when nobody's watching. And emotions aren't strictly outside one's control --- not in the long run. People can cultivate worthy emotional reactions, like pre-programming an autopilot to correctly handle crisis situations when there's no time to think things through. (JB + ^z + ...)
• "The human mouth has only 5 kilobits bandwidth." (PD)
• When we think we have a measure of control over something, then we begin to blame people for not doing anything about it. Folks with crooked teeth used to just have to live with them; now we ask why they don't get braces. Given modern psychochemicals, will we soon wonder why somebody isn't happy all the time? Shades of Brave New World! (BW + ^z + ...)
• "Connect, Cooperate, Collaborate --- if you fail, you die." (CH)
• "Conspiracy is a form of collaboration!" (LM)

- Friday, October 06, 2000 at 05:37:31 (EDT)

So consider Principia Principia: the fundamental principles of how to build principles! What might such principles look like? Certainly they must be assertive; nobody wants wishy-washy foundations of "probably" this or "perhaps" that. (But are there times when uncertainty is essential?) Deep principles also had better be general, abstract, and cross-cutting --- not narrow specific factoids. (But aren't facts necessary too?) And good principles should be efficient --- both necessary and sufficient --- as small a set of elements as is needed to build the superstructure, but no smaller. (On the other hand, a little redundancy adds resilience to a system, eh?)

What are some other aspects of a good Principia Principia?

- Thursday, October 05, 2000 at 05:56:17 (EDT)

After spending the summer of 1972 at home, working part-time in his Father's small business (building pick-up truck covers and campers in Pflugerville, a little town north of Austin), ^z returned to Rice University for his Junior year. He stayed in an efficiency apartment for a month or two before a vacancy in a dorm room opened up and he was able to move onto campus. A little 50cc Honda motorcycle let him putter back and forth. As proof, he still has the scars on his knee from a spill, rounding a corner on a gravel road.

Rice was loosely modeled after Cambridge: student houses were called colleges, and no fraternities were allowed. ^z was assigned to Hanszen, "The Gentleman's College". Hanszen members (all male, then) were at one time obliged to wear a tie to dinner. Many met this requirement by putting a piece of string around their necks, on top of their t-shirts. The evening meal in the early 1970s was often a hasty affair, since the original Star Trek TV series happened to air at dinner time. In that pre-VCR era, many student-fans bolted their food and raced back to their rooms to watch. Other evenings there were food fights, "Viking Table" (no utensils!), or similar sophisticated academic activities. A sign labeled the knife/fork/spoon bins, "Alphabetized by second letter of each word".

Junior year was pleasant and productive for ^z. His roommate was a prototypical petroleum engineer, Andy Arismendi --- compatibly studious and quiet. Physics and math classes were challenging but fun; work in the school library was relaxing and offered many opportunities to discover new authors worth reading. Reshelving books brought ^z's first encounters with Knuth's Art of Computer Programming and with the Horatio Hornblower series of sea stories, for instance. ^z read ravenously.

Undergraduate social life? Next to none ... no dates, though much admiration of local feminine pulchritude from afar. In spite of its participation in Southwest Conference football, Rice was a serious school. The acronym TRG = "Typical Rice Girl" was frequently used to suggest that the brainy women there lacked normal beauty. This was unfair.

But on the techno-social side, the amateur radio club had equipment which was free to use for hams. ^z got his license, advanced to Extra class (WB5CMQ, later N6WX), exchanged telegraphic messages with his Brother in Austin, and took the graveyard shift for on-the-air contests which the club participated in.

Rice's excellent computer facilities were the major source of nerdy entertainment. The main campus CPU was a monster IBM mainframe, programmed in FORTRAN on punch-cards and in BASIC or APL via hard-wired paper teletypes, Decwriters, and Selectric typeball printers. Processor time was expensive, a tightly budgeted commodity. But between midnight and dawn the machines were under-utilized, and some genius in the computer center declared free access during those dark hours --- the "Night-Owls" service. (An Athenian owl was Rice's mascot.) It became a local geekish tradition to get to bed early, set the alarm, and then hike in the darkness across campus to get a few hours of computer time for experiments in recreational programming before breakfast.

For his Senior year at Rice, ^z joined a small consortium with fellow physics majors Ed Biegert and Bert Wallace plus a younger student named Dean Coleman to capture a prime suite of rooms in Hanszen College: the top floor of the Tower. (Rooms were allocated by seniority in a bidding system.) Bert was a short West Texan with big boots and a bold personality --- scrupulously honest, wealthy but modest. (He returned home after graduation to run the family ranch.) Ed was loud and funny, hard working and hard playing, a natural ringleader. When ^z first encountered him Ed was telling a joke: "The car companies have a conspiracy ... they know perfectly well how to build tires that last forever, but they choose not to. The secret? Make tires out of steel!" (^_^) Well, perhaps one had to hear Ed tell it, from two rows back before math class started, in order to appreciate the humor. (Ed got his Ph.D. in physics at Rice, married a TRG, and has been working in and around the geophysical side of the petroleum industry in the Houston area.)

The Hanszen dorm Tower was five storeys tall, with no elevator --- which made the penthouse suite nicely isolated from frivolous visitors. The top floor that Ed, Bert, Dean, and ^z took over consisted of a pair of bedrooms, a shared living/study space, and a bathroom/shower. The crew soon had moved all the bunks into one bedroom, the desks into the other, and had the place quite liveable. Dean build the first digital clock that ^z had ever seen, a Heathkit with bright red LED display. Everybody stayed up until 11:11:11 the first night it was plugged in, to marvel at the symmetry of the time. Dean also wired a neon bulb to the phone line, so he and his friends could see it flicker and answer the phone before the first ring, often much to the consternation of the calling party.

The Hanszen penthouse team had a singular close call: they were on the sun-deck outside their tower suite when a Houston thunderstorm approached. No rain, just gusts of wind and distant rumblings. Then suddenly --- blinding flash and tingle of corona discharge! The gang was terrified and ran inside to cower. Moments later, friends from the floors below raced up the stairs to ask what had happened; they had seen the lightning and heard an almost-simultaneous boom of thunder. Neither ^z nor his roommates remembered any sound whatsoever. Apparently the thunderbolt had passed nearby; the building and foolish balcony occupants were protected by a lightning rod on the roof a few feet above them.

The senior year went smoothly for ^z; he missed getting a double major in math + physics by a couple of credits, but no matter. He studied hard, got good grades, and graduated summa cum laude, albeit in absentia --- he went home to Austin instead of hanging around for the final ceremony. He had been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa the previous year, since his excess transfer credits from UT/Austin put him over the threshold then. None of these honors meant much to him, however. He continued to practice the quasi-stoic oblivious-to-externals attitude that he had slid into in his youth. Zen? Mr. Spock? Or just indifference? Life was good, learning was fun, and other more complex things could wait.

^z applied to Caltech and was admitted to graduate study in physics there. He flew to California for the first time in his life in late August of 1974.

( ... to be continued ... )

- Tuesday, October 03, 2000 at 06:03:43 (EDT)