Dogs, etc.

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From Wikipedia

An incidental mention of jackals in a book made me curious.  Where did they come on the canine family tree?  I looked it up and was surprised at the results.  Based on DNA studies, they are further removed from the dog than the gray wolf is.  The lineage is quite ancient.  Quite clearly, this is a successful form of predator.  They’re actually omnivores, but they do hunt.  Just a few days ago I saw a red fox while out on my early morning jog.  As I watched it, and it watched me, I was thinking how like a dog it is.  Foxes are, however, still further from dogs on the family tree of life, falling into a separate phylum.  (I use that word advisedly, since since high school it seems that cladistics have become so complex—not that they were ever easy—that you need an electron microscope to tease similar creatures apart.)  When I see coyotes on the jog (quite rare), it seems they are a step further from dogs than wolves.

I grew up with dogs.  Our first lasting one was a good part beagle, and, in my opinion the best dog ever.  We don’t have pets now.  My wife tends to be allergic and pet care complicates travel (when we can afford it), but I often marvel at how well dogs have adapted to us.  And vice versa.  People now take their dogs into grocery stores and other shops.  While in an outdoor goods store recently, I was surprised to see a dog and its human pet stroll by.  The dog was as high as my chest.  (Or at least rib cage.)  And yet, in the wild, a jackal could well attack you.  And they’re biblical.  So biblical that they got picked up as the “father” of the Antichrist in The Omen.  Dogs, in the biblical world, were considered unclean.  I suspect people kept them as working pets anyway.  That’s why our species domesticated them.  The jackal, on the other hand, is a wild animal.

If I saw a jackal while jogging I’d probably mistake it for a dog.  Depending.  Only long hours of studying have taught me to distinguish coyotes (which I very rarely see) from dogs.  Since jackals aren’t native to the Americas, the coyote fills much the same ecological niche.  Since about 2016 they can be found in any area of the continental United States.  They even adapt to city life.  I guess the jackal is the country cousin.  Coyotes attack humans more than gray wolves do, probably because there are many more coyotes.  And they are just about everywhere.  And the reference to the jackal I was was, I assure you, truly only incidental.

Going Some Place?

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I recently had to drive to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off/pick up some folks.  Here in the Lehigh Valley I’m roughly an hour north of the city of brotherly love.  Like most sentient drivers, I’ve come to rely on GPS navigation.  Dropping off my parties turned into a nightmare of congestion.  The GPS solidly insisted that the turnpike, 476, was the “fastest” way.  One thing AI doesn’t understand is how people behave.  The flight required dropping off a couple hours before that known as “rush.”  476, once yet get near Philly has several pain points where traffic merges on from several ramps onto an already crawling stream of traffic.  That’s human behavior—never considering that the “longer time” route might actually be quicker.  Or at least a touch easier on the blood pressure.  Of these thousands and thousands of people, relatively few were going to the airport.  Once I got home from a journey that Al told me would be two-and-a-half hours, round trip (which was actually three-and-a-half), I began looking for alternate routes for pick up.

Pulling up the usual map app on my laptop, the only route shown was the turnpike, clearly not designed for this volume of traffic.  Not being native to Philadelphia, I don’t know my way around very well.  Then I began to lose trust in Al.  Interstate 95 also goes right by the airport.  I force-dragged the route over that way.  The estimate? Maybe fifteen minutes longer than the turnpike.  AI doesn’t understand that people who know the turnpike is a bad idea at this time of day will take it anyway.  It is the “fastest” way to where you’re going.  And who wants to waste time?

Me, I’d rather not shave off so many years of my life.  I’m not so foolish as to suppose I-95 would be much better, but with the “real-time” facts added in, it might very well save some time, and gray hairs, to go the somewhat longer, slower route.  Al didn’t even want to tell me that was an option.  Who could possibly want to go on at a slower pace, for mental health reasons?  Even en route it will try to reroute you back onto “the fastest” way that it clearly misunderstands.  I remember driving in Newark, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and, briefly, New York City.  Those who write algorithms are missing something basic.  Human psychology plays into this in a major way.  Al is not human nor does it “think.”  It calculates.  As for me, I calculate that the slower way may just be what the doctor ordered.

Novelization

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I watched the sci-fi horror film Splice a few years ago.  Long enough that I don’t recall many details.  When Claire Donner, a friend of mine from Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, told me she’d written a novelization of Splice, I knew I had to read it.  If you’ve seen the movie then you know the story.  If you haven’t, you can read it in her book.  I don’t often read novelizations—I read the one for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and as a young person read the original three Star Wars novelizations.  Such books really only apply to movies not already based on a novel, of course.  They give the reader a path into the inner lives of the characters.  Naturally, now I have to watch Splice again to see it through Donner’s lens.  The basic idea, if you want some encouragement, is that a couple of scientists add some human DNA into a gene-spliced animal being lab grown for enzymes to fight disease.

In the rawest sense, this is the story of Frankenstein for a more technological crowd.  Like Frankenstein, it is a sad story.  And like said sad story, it involves reproduction without two human parents.  The real builder this time, however, is Elsa and Donner gives considerable development to her motivations and thought process.  (I’m very curious to know if I can see that in the movie or not.)  Clive, her partner, isn’t aware of the source of the human DNA.  The spliced creature grows into the passably human Dren, who finds herself asking the questions Frankenstein’s creature asked about his own existence.  Like said creature, Dren has to be hidden away, and controlled.  At the same time, she is evolutionarily superior to her maker.  There’s a lot to see here, folks!

Having written a fair bit of fiction in my time, I do wonder what it might be like to do a novelization.  I suspect most of us, if a movie is well made, decide on the motivations of characters but how often do we delve into their inner lives?  I’m not sure that I do that most of the time.  When I write fiction I do it all the time.  I want to know my characters and why they are the way they are.  Sometimes they remain mysteries to me, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying.  This novelization is deftly done, and approved by the screenwriter/director.  And the deep motivations make the scenario plausible.  If you haven’t seen Splice you might enjoy doing so.  And then read the novel.  Or the other way around.

Shocking Development

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With life being lived on the internet, electricity is now as important as food and shelter.  We bought our house going on eight years ago.  The former owner claimed to be an electrician and, based on his mail that we’re still receiving, has his own electrical business.  First-time buyers, we didn’t know to be skeptical.  It didn’t help that the home inspector we’d hired bowed out a week in advance of closing and we had to hire someone with no recommendation on the fly.  He said nothing about the electrical box (and many other flaws that should’ve been spotted and reported).  We started having some electrical issues soon after moving in.  We found a local electrician (not the former owner) who was friendly and once saved us by returning to the house as night was falling and hooking up the power so we could have heat (this was in a November).

Before picture

When the power went out completely in April, and the electric company said there were no issues on their end, we decided we’d better have the whole system checked out.  We hired from a larger, regional company.  These guys were good.  After being here for only half an hour they’d found the problem, and it was a big one.  The mast, or conduit, on the side of the house hadn’t been properly installed.  Water had been seeping into the breaker box and several of the breakers had rusted.  The repair cost was mighty, but it would be done correctly.  This led to a chilly April day without heat, but they did supply a line that let us work by powering the router, and kept the fridge cold.  They were here for ten hours.  For the first time since moving in, we have an uncompromised electrical system.

What makes all of this so strange is that we had been trusting of the seller that he knew what he was doing electrically.  As laypeople, we had no way to assess this, and the inspector apparently didn’t as well.  The good electricians (the most recent) suggested that our former electrician was afraid to tell us the real cost of doing the job right, and had decided to cut corners.  He may have been acting out of kindness.  Or he may not have been able to see the problem from a larger view.  So we’re poorer, but wiser.  And we have power.  As long as the electric company can be trusted to keep up its end of the deal, we shouldn’t run into internet access problems.  And that’s life itself.

Facing Identity Crisis

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It was one of those periods when time fails to work properly to keep major events spaced out.  We had three major economic events hit us simultaneously and unexpectedly.  Two of them required financing and yet a third involved the government and trying to get our taxes filed.  In any case, I tend to need chronological space to keep these things discrete and make sure I can pay them.  After all of this was done I realized that “secure” information is being collected by all kinds of places these days.  The thing that really got me was that two of them, including the federal government, involved facial recognition software.  In order to confirm my identity I had to hold up my phone and smile pretty for the camera.  Since I can’t speak for the experience of others, I had to wonder if maybe this was because I filed a report of a major scam last year.

I don’t trust AI at all (sorry Al), and governments that collect facial recognition data scare me.  I couldn’t complete my taxes without doing it, though.  A few years ago when I was volunteering for an organization (I can’t recall which one) I had to have my fingerprints put on record.  I thought that was pretty invasive.  I’ve never committed a crime (at least that I’m aware of) and I’ve never been arrested.  Having your fingerprints on record, and your face imprinted in databases certainly makes it feel like it.  Especially since doppelgängers do exist.  On my first visit to Kentucky in the 1980s to help a friend move, the local people all insisted that I was John’s son, a spitting image.  Would Al know the difference?

Once, at Nashotah House, during an accrediting team visit, I was struck by the fact that one of the assessors was a near-perfect doppelgänger of myself.  So much so that when I showed my young daughter a picture I found of him on the nascent web and asked her “Who’s that?” she replied without hesitation “Daddy.”  The facial recognition capacity of kids is pretty keen.  I don’t put a ton of trust in technology.  Of course, the software is probably measuring things like pore depth and nostril hairs.  In neither case did I have the chance to comb my hair and make sure nothing green was stuck in my teeth.  Besides, my face is in a number of spots on this blog.  It doesn’t get as many hits as our finances took in that period when time broke down, but I guess my face is now officially recognized.

Things Lost

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Here’s an honest question, and if anyone can answer, please do. Why is it that software can’t keep track of the latest version of anything? Let me put some legs on that. I recently backed up my files to “the Cloud.” When I went to open one of them, the version that was backed up was several months old, not the one I’d worked on (and backed up) that very day.  I looked on my back-up hard drive, likewise backed up that day.  Both only showed files from several months ago.  This was for an app that doesn’t even have a “save” option because it saves automatically.  How can this happen?  I’m having trouble understanding.  Do I leave my files open too long?  (It takes quite some time to write a book.)

Then someone in my family used my laptop for a minute and closed my browser with all my tabs open.  No problem.  I went to “restore all tabs from last session.”  The tabs that appeared were over a month old.  No record anywhere of the tabs I’d kept open as reminders more recently.  What is it about software that makes this so very hard to do?  My laptop’s losing data like a sieve.  To make matters interesting, in a different context after all this, someone had moved and renamed a folder I’d created on a shared drive.  They didn’t bother telling me this, so to all appearances, the folder had been deleted.  I even did a windows search, and nothing showed up with the folder name at all.  I had to get IT involved.  While they were investigating someone finally (at my prompting) admitted that the file had been moved and renamed.  This, on top of my losing my own data at home was a lot for a single day.  (Of course, even bigger issues were about to show up that I had no idea were coming.  Expensive issues.)

Whatever my mental condition is (I don’t have an official label for it), I tend to get overwhelmed when I can’t find something.  My memory isn’t that of a thirty-year-old but I have excellent recall as to where I store important things (like my writing).  Not being able to find it drives me frantic.  I’m not wealthy and the only real asset I have is my mind and I write things down so that thoughts that mind has won’t get lost.  The Cloud seems pretty good at doing that for me.  I’m a believer in backing things up.  Data loss can be devastating.  I just wish I knew how to avoid it.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Access Denied

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We like to pride ourselves on our levels of knowledge obtained.  But access to it is limited to the club.  I’ve run into this several times since being booted from academia.  I still research and write books.  They sell like academic books (not well), but I am blocked from academic resources.  I was attempting to access an article in a book from an academic press, named here nevermore, only to find every path blocked.  I had to verify that I was human a time or two, but being human isn’t enough.  You need to be a wealthy human.  I went to Academia.edu.  The author hadn’t posted the chapter.  It was posted on Research Gate, but to request a PDF I had to have an institutional email, which I do not.  I tried Internet Archive, which has saved me many times.  They didn’t have a full view and the link to the book told me I could purchase for a mere $150.

I know other academic presses that do this.  Limit the knowledge to those in institutions that can pay such high fees.  Academia is becoming more and more privileged all the time.  I get it.  You can’t just give the stuff away.  Whenever possible I post my articles for free on Academia.  I wrote them to be read, not to be tucked away and inaccessible as the world made love to the electronic revolution.  Not all scholars think that way.  And academic presses charge prices that can only be described as exploitative.  It’s as if they think we’re all paid like professors are.  Privileged.  And this pains me.  As a former professor I know that not all academics are paid well.  We’re in it for the knowledge.  But once you lose that academic email, it’s access denied for you.

Sadly, I’m not the only one in this category.  There’s an entire generation of us who’ve been thrown from the ivory tower.  Here’s the thing: your curiosity doesn’t die just because you’re not called “Professor” any more.  Maybe this is why I enjoy dark academia so much.  The truth is that there is something very wrong with our higher educational system.  University presses, stressed to make money when everyone just asks some AI that was never human and has no knowledge for an answer to a difficult question.  There used to be a way to find that answer through the hard work of research.  And when you were done you had the pride of accomplishment.  Now all that we have is access denied.

Note to Myself

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A note to myself (perhaps the best title for this blog) in a forgotten book.  Well, not exactly forgotten, else the post unwritten would remain.  In a book I’d been gifted at twenty-one.  I was working that summer as an intern in a church in Pittsburgh where my duties included visiting parishioners.  One of them was an elderly scientist that everyone mentioned with awe because he’d written a book.  In the eighties, writing a book still meant something.  He gave me a copy.  I could tell, even at that tender age, that the publisher was a vanity press.  Part of the satisfaction of “traditional” publishing is knowing that you’ve convinced at least a handful of people that your writing is worth publishing.  Vanity presses take your money and produce your words with wanton abandon.  Still, I read the book.

This was during those heady college years when I annotated everything.  So many books later, annotation is rare for me now.  Other people will want these books when I’m gone.  Then, I critiqued as well.  You see, the scientist (with a master’s degree) had undertaken a theological topic, trying to explain God with science.  I’m sure he died long ago and now knows more than I.  Still I had to express myself.  That’s what those of us who write do.  Here’s an image of my summary.  It took me a while to figure out the symbols the younger me made up.  One looks like a capital K with the lower diagonal ending in an arrow.  What did that mean four decades ago?  Context gave me the answer: “off the wall.”  Why not write it out?  Perhaps I was afraid someone would find the note to myself.  This is the danger of writing things down.

Another symbol gave me pause.  A circle with a stretched capital H in it within a cube.  Ah, a capital theta, my usual shorthand for God.  In a box.  I flipped through the pages.  Yes, some of his suggestions definitely put God in a box.  Did I ever discuss this book with anyone?  It occurs to me that since my teaching career tanked, I’ve discussed very few of the books I’ve read with anyone, except readers of this blog.  We who write know there’s always the danger that someone else will read our thoughts.  In my experience, putting them in book form is about the best way to ensure that nobody will.  Still, for anybody who’s written a book, if you google them, their tome will be the first thing that shows up.  That’s true of the scientist who died, I’m pretty sure, before the new millennium.  When, as it turned out, that writing a book would become as common as starting a website with a catchy title.

A Matter of Trust

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I used to write everything by hand.  We bought a used typewriter when I was in high school, and when I was in seminary I graduated to one of those strange devices that would print, like a typewriter, but had an LCD on the keyboard so that you could back up several characters before it printed.  This let you proofread while on the go.  I write a lot.  It may be a form of sickness, but I have hundreds of story ideas and little time to develop them.  Now I write on a computer but I’ve begun to lose trust.  It’s not just the whole AI debacle.  No, it’s that even with frequent backups, computers just lose things.  After having my hard drive wiped following a scam last year, I began work on some documents that I had to back up to the Cloud when the USB C ports on my laptop went bad.

After the repair was done I could download my files and pick up where I left off.  In theory.  I was working away on a new story and thought that I might be able to connect it to an earlier story I’d started.  Looking at the file, I remembered that the tale was much further along when I’d left off.  Where was it?  I looked on the Cloud version and it was the same as the one on my hard drive.  Then a larger project came along.  I went to start it again and discovered many, many pages missing.  Again, the Cloud shrugged its nebulus shoulders saying “I dunno…”. I pulled out my back-up disc.  (This was in April.)  I tried going back to January.  Same thing.  December.  Ditto.  Finally, my last backup in November had the full files.  Why these files didn’t backup to the Cloud, when done by a professional at the Apple Store, I can’t fathom.

What was especially disturbing is that one of the files (which I duplicated and put back on my hard drive, where they belong) showed that I’d completely reorganized things in a much clearer way.  After the laptop came home from the hospital, I’d forgotten (I’m not young and I’d been using a borrowed device for a few days).  I’d probably just picked up a story and, with my usual tunnel vision, began writing.  Not unrelatedly, I’ve been going through a spate of printing out any stories far enough along to warrant such treatment.  From what I’ve seen of the housekeeping on the Cloud, I’m glad I’ve been doing so.  I miss writing by hand.

Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

Paper Writer Back

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We need to push back against the technocrats a bit more.  A story in Publishers Weekly recently affirmed what many of us know—people prefer books in print.  Ebooks have been shoved at us for years now and in academic publishing there’s been a trend away from print to electrons.  It was cheering to see in the same issue of PW that some British publishers are actually listening to readers and starting to release paperbacks first.  Imagine that.  People will read if they can afford to do so, and they do buy books.  And when I say books, I mean objects made of paper.  I don’t have a paper phobia.  I enjoy holding and reading books.  The only ebooks I’ve ever read were those I couldn’t access in print.  When I sit down to write a book, I have an image of a specific object in mind.

Technocrats are fond of telling us what we should prefer.  I wonder who died and made them king.  Or God.  If I recall correctly the latter preferred to write on stone.  That might create a few storage issues, but at least it was physical.  Consciousness, which we’re still a long, long way from adequately defining, can’t be captured in electronic form.  AI can pretend to be human, but it isn’t.  Nuance, subtlety, and embodiment are all missing.  We need to say that they need to stop telling us what to do.  Even as I was writing this post my laptop showed signed of requiring replacement.  To me, five years is a bit young to consider something old aged, but that’s what our tech masters tell us.  Thinking back over my laptop history, my previous computer lasted, let’s see, about five years.  It happens that this is a bad time for an expensive, unplanned purchase.  The tech lords have made the alternative unthinkable.

By my count, I’ve purchased six laptops over the course of my life, all primarily in the service of writing.  And they average out, it seems, on about five years.  This blog was started three laptops ago.  And the years seem to be going faster and faster.  I do most of my writing in a room filled with printed books.  I spend a lot of time in this room reading said books.  Tech has me caught between two worlds.  I’m trying to reconcile myself to spending a large amount of money after being scammed (by people using tech) last year.  If only I had a book to help me decide what to do.

Eh Aye Jesus

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Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

A Day for Earth

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Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.

Substitutes

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I discovered Mary Roach in a Borders store in Somerville, New Jersey.  Well, it might’ve been Raritan, technically, but it was right off the infamous Somerville Circle.  We were fairly new in town and I was looking for reading material.  I found Spook, her second book.  I enjoyed it so much I went back for her first book.  I introduced my wife to her third book and, starting with book number four, we’ve been reading them together.  (All of her books are at least mentioned on this blog; I rarely follow an author like that.) That brings us to Replaceable You, which published last year.  The subtitle, Adventures in Human Anatomy, gives you an idea of the content.  Roach is a charming science writer.  The two traits don’t often meet.  She peers at things that most of us shy away from, which, in a way, makes her a good potential horror writer.  Instead, she looks at her subjects with humor, often self-deprecating, and a sense of wonder.

Replaceable You isn’t my favorite of her books, but it’s not her fault.  Roach is about four years older than me and she too is facing aging.  This book is about parts of bodies that can be replaced, printed, or engineered.  Some of it is surprising and much of it almost incredible.  The reason that it isn’t my favorite is that it hits pretty close to home.  Two of my immediate family members have chronic health conditions.  (Life, of course, is a chronic health condition.)  I often think about the implications, but reading about them makes me uncomfortable.  As one reviewer once indicated, though, reading Mary Roach on any subject is enjoyable.

We are embodied creatures.  This is one reason that “artificial intelligence” will always retain the emphasis on the first word.  One of the surprising things I learned from this book was that organs/tissues are now starting to be 3-D printed.  Last time I looked, 3-D printing involved plastic, but in some places biological components are being used.  The tech isn’t far enough along to print actual organs yet, but there is incredible work being done.  It’s quite possible, and this is me, not Roach, that people born in a couple of decades (depending on whether we can get Republicans out of the White House, and science funding can be restored) may well be able to have biologically personalized health care that includes new organs made from their own cells.  That gets too close to eternity for my liking.  I enjoy living, but wouldn’t want to do it forever.  I’ll be okay along the way, however, as long as there are Mary Roach books to read.

Red Thread

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Theseus would never have survived the labyrinth without the help of Ariadne.  After escaping the minotaur, the two eloped and, according to some versions of the myth, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Naxos.  This story has been told and retold countless times, and even served as a source of inspiration for the movie Inception.  Back when I was thrashing about dark academia, trying to make a living as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Montclair State, I taught classical mythology at the latter.  These were in the days of PowerPoint lectures, and I knew a few things about doing them: slides shouldn’t be overly wordy, and they should have images.  People are visual learners.  During my three semesters at Montclair, I developed my PowerPoints peppered with images found online.  I recently remembered one of Ariadne on Naxos, and I really wanted to find it.

My Oshkosh slides were burned onto CDs, but now tech has moved beyond that and I have no readers for burned CDs.  My hopes of finding the name of the artist in the credits on the slide have not been fulfilled.  I turned to the all-wise internet.  Image search after image search brings up nothing close to that particular picture.  I thought it was a painting, but it might’ve been a pastel or colored pencil drawing (it was from a relatively contemporary artist).  I simply can’t find it.  I remember the subject, and the image, but neither its formal title nor its artist’s name.  The information exists, but on unreadable discs.  On those same discs rest the sermons I preached at Nashotah House.  I sometimes think of them and would like to look at them again, to refresh my memory.  I can’t, however, access them, although they are on discs in the closet just behind my back.

Not the image I was looking for (image: Bacchus and Ariadne. Guido Reni).

We let technology drive our lives.  It comes with costs.  I recently talked to a young person who was buying a nice journal and some writing implements to use in it.  They told me that although they’d grown up with computers, and the internet, they wanted the very human experience of writing by hand.  My default for taking notes is still by hand.  If only I had done that when adjunct teaching…. I remember well how frantic those days were.  I was teaching up to eleven classes in one year (a typical professor has three or four), driving between two campuses.  Eating in my car.  I didn’t really have much of a chance to note individual artworks in a notebook, figuring I’d be pining to remember them many years later.  I could use Ariadne to help me out of this labyrinth.  I know right where she is, but the isle of Naxos is inaccessible.