Call Me AI

Leave a comment

Okay, so the other day I tried it.  I’ve been resisting, immediately scrolling past the AI suggestions at the top of a Google search.  I don’t want some program pretending it’s human to provide me with information I need.  I had to find an expert on a topic.  It was an obscure topic, but if you’re reading this blog that’ll come as no surprise.  Tired of running into brick walls using other methods, I glanced toward Al.  Al said a certain Joe Doe is an expert on the topic.  I googled him only to learn he’d died over a century ago.  Al doesn’t understand death because it’s something a machine doesn’t experience.  Sure, we say “my car died,” but what we mean is that it ceased to function.  Death is the overlay we humans put on it to understand, succinctly, what happened.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Brains are not computers and computers do not “think” like biological entities do.  We have feelings in our thoughts.  I have been sad when a beloved appliance or vehicle “died.”  I know that for human beings that final terminus is kind of a non-negotiable about existence.  Animals often recognize death and react to it, but we have no way of knowing what they think about it.  Think they do, however.  That’s more than we can say about ones and zeroes.  They can be made to imitate some thought processes.  Some of us, however, won’t even let the grocery store runners choose our food for us.  We want to evaluate the quality ourselves.  And having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I have to wonder if “quality” is something a machine can “understand.”

Wisdom is something we grow into.  It only comes with biological existence, with all its limitations.  It is observation, reflection, evaluation, based on sensory and psychological input.  What psychological “profile” are we giving Al?  Is he neurotypical or neurodivergent?  Is he young or does his back hurt when he stands up too quickly?  Is he healthy or does he daily deal with a long-term disease?  Does he live to travel or would he prefer to stay home?  How cold is “too cold” for him to go outside?  These are things we can process while making breakfast.  Al, meanwhile, is simply gathering data from the internet—that always reliable source—and spewing it back at us after reconstructing it in a non-peer-reviewed way.  And Al can’t be of much help if he doesn’t understand that consulting a dead expert on a current issue is about as pointless as trying to replicate a human mind.

Remaining in Shadow

Leave a comment

Some people want to be found.  Others don’t.  Those of us who are curious shade into those who are frustrated when we can’t find someone.  People have been around for a relatively long time now, and we’ve been giving each other names because “hey you” only goes so far.  Even so, unique names are rare since, it seems, the majority of European-derived folk had something to do with smithies.  Nevertheless, the internet offers to help us find people.  I was searching for someone the other day but that person, despite publishing nearly daily on the interwebs, has a very common name.  And he styles himself without even a middle initial.  (He may not have one, I know.)  The point is, perhaps he doesn’t want to be found.  I run into authors like this—they assume their high-level monograph is sufficient fame.  You can’t find them online.

I recently joined Bluesky.  I’d like to leave Twitter, but I still have a large number of followers there (for me), although they seldom interact.  Publishers look at things like the number of X followers you have, so until Bluesky surpasses Twit, I’ll need to keep both going.  On Bluesky more people introduce themselves to you.  At least when you’re new.  Not a few are looking for relationships, sometimes of the sexual kind.  (I find that occasionally on what is called X, but mostly in the account under my fiction-writing pseudonym.)  These are people who want to be found.  The internet, strangely enough, has driven us further apart.

America has always been a polarized place, but the web has sharpened the border.  Indeed, it has militarized it.  I remember the days when meeting people actually meant going outside and stopping somewhere else.  Society had rules then.  Two topics of forbidden discussion were religion and politics.  It was easier to make friends with those rules in place.  Since I’ve chosen to put myself out there on the web, my choice of field of study does tend to come out.  And it’s one of those two forbidden topics.  Since my career goal has occasionally been ministry (still is from time to time), putting religion into the equation is inevitable, for those who really want to get to know me.  Social media is a strange country, however.  I tell new conversationalists on Bluesky that I have a blog, but it doesn’t seem to lead many people to my dusty corner of the interweb.  And it still gets me no closer to finding that guy with the tragically common sobriquet.  He may not want to be found. 

Sherlock Holmes seeks someone without the internet. Image credit: Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908), Strand Magazine, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Asteroid

Leave a comment

So, that asteroid.  Good thing Trump won’t be in office in 2032.  Well, it’s only a three percent chance it’ll hit us, but chances are things can’t get much worse anyway.  It might be a good idea to make some plans now—but wait, we currently deny science is real and spend our time renaming bodies of water.  Hmm, quite a pickle.  If science were real it would tell us that an asteroid is not the same as a meteor, although it can become one.  Back in high school astronomy class—yes, our Sputnik-era high school had its own planetarium—I learned that the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite.  Want to go to school?  Here’s the quick version: a meteor is something in Earth’s atmosphere (thus, meteorology).  A meteoroid is a space rock, or even dust, in the solar system somewhere.  Once it enters our atmosphere it becomes a meteor.

Most meteors burn up as shooting stars and never hit the ground.  Yes, that atmosphere is a pretty good idea.  If a piece does make it to the ground, that piece is a meteorite.  Although your chances of being hit by a meteorite are minuscule, they can be impish.  Not far from here, a few years back, a meteor smashed through the backseat window of a car after a couple had just put their groceries inside.  The meteorite stopped inside a carton of ice cream.  The window had to be replaced, and I can just imagine the conversation with the insurance company.  Or take that meteorite heard on a recording for the first time.  In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, a doorbell camera caught a meteorite strike just outside someone’s house.  Both of these were tiny critters, though.

Our 2032 friend is quite a bit bigger.  Sometimes when large meteors heat up, they’ll explode in what is called a bolide.   In western Pennsylvania back in January of 1987 (if I recall correctly) my brother and I were working on a jigsaw puzzle during the holiday break when our house shook.  A loud bang had us worried—we lived in a refinery town, and explosions weren’t a welcome report.  We ran outside to find neighbors also outside looking around.  We later learned that a flaming fireball had gone overhead before exploding, a bolide.  The actual explosion took place quite a distance from us, but sound travels in our atmosphere.  So a possible near miss is scheduled eight years from now.  Let’s hope people show some sense at the polls before that happens. Or we could just rename it MAGA and hope that it hits somewhere else.

An asteroid. Image credit: NASA, public domain

In Praise of Paper

Leave a comment

I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

Staunching Stigma

Leave a comment

Independence Day is not a great movie.  As my readers know, that doesn’t stop me from watching.  I’ve seen it a few times.  Watching it post-UFO/AUP disclosure via the New York Times, I was struck by something.  Even in the diegesis of the movie, where alien craft, clearly visible, hover over major cities, when Russell Casse tells the military he’d been abducted, people roll their eyes.  Of all the stigmas our culture has invented that of the “crazy people” who see “flying saucers” is one of the deepest and most persistent.  Even after the Times, and the US Navy admitted they were real, and their tech is not of human origin, people refuse to believe.  I’ve followed this for some time.  I read a book by Donald Keyhoe before I was old enough to drive.  Like most thinking people on the topic, I kept quiet about it.  Stigma.

When I received Luis Elizondo’s Imminent for a Christmas present, I was secretly very pleased.  You see, the evidence has been in plain sight (Poe nods knowingly) for decades, for those who don’t accept ridicule as an immediate response.  The Keyhoe book I read was published in 1955.  It was my grandfather’s book.  For sure, the stories casting doubt on Elizondo’s reputation and sanity began almost immediately after he cooperated with journalists in 2017 when a fraction of the truth made the New York Times.  Between Keyhoe and Elizondo, many insider, “death bed” books had revealed that this was something we should pay attention to.  People laughed.  Oh, we love to laugh.  Imminent, however, is quite a sobering book.  I’m not sure full disclosure will ever happen, but it’s trickling out and a finger in the dam can’t hold forever.

Stigma as a means of social control is unfortunately effective.  I’ve always felt that mocking what you don’t understand is a poor way to get smarter.  Still, for those willing to consider the evidence over the years, there’s been plenty to study.  Either there’s something to this or our government and military are filled with pathological liars (outside the Oval Office, I mean).  It seems far more reasonable to examine the evidence, when it becomes available.  There are contractors in the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower warned us about this decades ago) who benefit from keeping secrets.  Imminent is an eye-opening book.  Hopefully it will be widely read and the implications taken seriously.  It’d be too bad if a catastrophe were necessary to stop the stigma, after it’s too late to do anything about it.

Weather Bugs

Leave a comment

In one part of my life (ahem) I’m compelled to use Microsoft Windows products.  (In my personal life I’ve used Macs since before 1990.)  On a recent update they’ve added little, frequently changing icons in the lower left end of the task bar.  It took me a few days to figure out how to stop it from sending distracting news and sports updates (I don’t need these, and they disrupt my concentration).  They also send weather updates.  I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the weather, so I let it stand.  Perhaps it’s a sop thrown to workers who now spend more hours a day on the job because commuting is becoming less of a thing, a bit of relief from staying on task.  Something to make you feel connected.  Fine and good.  But does it have to be so alarmist?

Some of us can’t ignore sudden changes on the screen (much of advertising relies on this).  When the weather icon shifts, which it does periodically, it draws my eye.  It uses the language that’s become typical to dramatize the weather.  Temperatures will “plummet” on Saturday, for example.  I looked at a more sober weather website.  The high would be ten degrees lower than it was for that day.  Hardly a “plummet.”  Or it will tell me, in rather heightened tones, that four inches of snow are coming on Wednesday.  The more sober site says possibly one inch.  An hour or so later, the icon humbly admits maybe it’ll just be one inch.  The question is, do we really need these constant updates?  With theatrical exaggeration?  I turned off news and sports, otherwise the work day would include an almost subliminal news feed that goes from boot-up to log-off.

I get through these difficult days by mostly ignoring the news.  I don’t ignore the weather—it seems more real than what’s happening in Washington.  Besides, I wrote a weather-oriented book once upon a time, and I haven’t lost the interest.  We’re going through the time of year when spring and winter are duking it out.  Every few days it snows or ices, and in-between I find wasps inside that think maybe it’s time we should just be getting on with this.  Meanwhile, each day, all day, I’m sent weather updates meant to shock and awe me.  Into what?  Yet more panic?  I’ve noted before that in some respects I have a monastic personality.  I prefer calm, most of the time, without too much extraneous stimulation.  I go for hours each day without even glancing at my phone.  And for the weather, I prefer just to look out the window.

Major Drum

Leave a comment

We don’t get out much.  Live shows can be expensive and these cold nights don’t exactly encourage going out after dark.  Living near a university, even if you can’t officially be part of it, has its benefits, though.  Over the weekend we went to see Yamato: The Drummers of Japan.  Our daughter introduced us to the concept while living in Ithaca, a town that has a college or two, I hear.  These drummer groups create what might be termed a sound bath, that is profoundly musical while featuring mainly percussion.  Now, I can’t keep a beat for too long—I’m one of those guys who overthinks clapping in time—but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate those who can.  The timing of the members of Yamato was incredibly precise, and moving.  At times even funny.  It’s a show I’d definitely recommend.

This particular tour is titled “Hito No Chikara: The Power of Human Strength.”  Now this isn’t advertising their impressively well-toned bodies, but is a celebration of human spirit under fire from AI.  The program notes point out some recurring themes of this blog: to be human is to experience emotion, and to know physical limitations, and to be truly creative.  Would a non-biological “intelligence” think to wrap dead animal skins around hollowed out tree trunks, pound them with sticks and encourage hundreds of others to experience the emotions that accompany such things?  I live in a workaday world that thinks AI is pretty cool.  Humans, on the other hand, can say “I don’t know” and still play drums until late in the night.  We know the joy of movement.  The exhilaration of community.  I think I can see why they titled their show the way they did.

Bowerbirds will create nests that can only be called intentionally artful.  Something in biological existence helps us appreciate what they’re doing and respond in wonder.  Theirs is an innate appreciation for art.  It spans the animal world.  Japan is one of many places I’ve never been.  I’ve never played in any kind of band and you don’t want me setting time for your pacemaker.  If a computer keeps such precise timing we think nothing of it.  It’s part of what humans created them to do.  When a group of people gets together, stretching their muscles and working in perfect synchronicity, we sit up and take notice.  We’ll even pay to watch and hear them do it.  Art, in all its forms, is purely and profoundly biological.  And it is something we know, at our best, to appreciate with our emotions and our minds.

Grown-up Jane

Leave a comment

Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror.  Some of the others remain remarkably effective today.  I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?;  I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid.  When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try.  I was pretty impressed.  It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good.  One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.

In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her.  Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades.  Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister.  Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister.  There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on.  There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.

One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help.  I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this.  How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out.  And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist.  Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times.  While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels.  The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments.  Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror.  Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues.  I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.

Finding the Source

Leave a comment

I need to know the origins of things.  Call it a sickness if you will, but I’m compelled to trace things to their source.  This is why I went on to earn a doctorate, and it’s a trait that hasn’t left, despite my career malfunction.  My interest in origins was recently reawakened by the citation, in a book, of a source that was incomplete.  I turned to the internet, of course.  I found the source, reprinted on a Tumblr page, for which I was grateful, but there was no proper citation there either.  Instead, a link to another webpage, which itself consists of yet another link.  Even after pages of googling, I was no closer to finding the source.  This is why I miss libraries.  You were there with books, some of them centuries old, looking at the source.  Outside the academy this rarely happens.  Particularly when you work 9-2-5.

The internet age is one of taking someone else’s word for it.  That’s why it’s important to establish credibility.  The website where I found the information—the top ranked site on both Ecosia and Google—had old books as the background, but no “about” page.  Who had put this information here and where did s/he get it?  The item I was looking for was from the 1700s.  I don’t have a print copy lying around and I was wondering what the source was—a book?  A journal article?  A newspaper?  An actual archive?  And why can’t Google find it in a library?  I know the source actually exists because I also found it referenced in a reputable print book, but one with inadequate citation.  Some of us were cut out for this kind of thing.  Constitutionally researchers.  But you have to work to live.

One of the greatest pieces of advice ever is to stay curious.  It helps keep a mind active, even a 9-2-5 one.  I’ll keep looking for this mysterious source.  I’ll check out likely references in the bibliography.  I’m sure that other people have the same compunction not to take someone else’s word for it.  Particularly not an anonymous poster on some website.  Especially in this day of AI lies.  One of my high school teachers once said that a reputation for being trusted is something you earn by lifelong cultivation.  If people know you are a reliable source, they will believe the things you say.  Anonymous information can be helpful from time to time, but without knowing the source I always remain skeptical.  And curious.

Steve or Stephanie

Leave a comment

I know gender is a construct, and all.  I even put my pronouns (he, him, his) on my work email signature.  I haven’t bothered on my personal email account since so few people email me that the effort seems superfluous.  But I’m wondering if the tech gods, aka AI, understand.  You see, with more and more autosuggests (which really miss the point much of the time), at work the Microsoft Outlook email system is all the time trying to fill things in for me.  Lately Al, which I call Al, has been trying to get me to sign my name with an “@“ so people can “text” me a response.  No.  No, no, no!  I write emails like letters; greeting, body, closing.  People who email like they’re texting sound constantly disgruntled and surly.  Take an extra second and ask “How are you?”  Was that so hard?  But I was talking about gender.

So Al is busy putting words in my fingers and every time I start typing my closing name it autosuggests “Stephanie” before I correct it.  It’s starting to make me a little paranoid.  It does seem that men and women differ biologically, and I identify with the gender assigned to me at birth.  I’m pretty sure Dr. Butter said “It’s a boy,” or something similar all those years ago.  Now I’m not sure if Al is deliberately taunting me or simply going through the alphabet as I type.  Stephanie comes before Stephen (which isn’t my name either) or Steve.  The thing is, I type fairly fast (I won’t say accurately, but fast) and Al has trouble keeping up.  But still Al is autosuggesting Stephanie for me every time.  I’ve been using computers since the 1980s; shouldn’t Al know who I am by now?

Of course, when Al takes over such human things as gender will only get in the way.  I guess we have that to look forward to.  Gender may be something socialized, I realize.  For those of us approaching ancient, we had gender differences drilled into our heads growing up.  I recently saw one of those cutesy novelty signs that resonated with me: “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 1900s.”  I’m not a sexist—I have supported feminism for as long as I can remember.  But I don’t like being called Stephanie.  What if my name was Stefan?  That isn’t autosuggested at all.  I know of others whose names are even earlier, alphabetically.  Maybe Al is overreaching.  Maybe it ought to leave names to humans.  At least for as long as we’re still here.

Scrolling Along

Leave a comment

I’ve got a condition.  “Oh, we know!” I hear you say.  But I mean a specific one.  Fast moving images make me nauseous.  It can be debilitating.  I can lose an entire day because I’m stopped at a railroad crossing while boxcars speed past my eyes.  Or because some found-footage filmmaker can’t hold the camera still.  As the old moralizing children’s song goes, “Be careful little eyes what you see.”  The internet has thus cast me into a kind of personal Hell.  You see, it has to do with scrolling.  To find things you have to scroll.  And scrolling, if I’m not careful, can make me quite ill.  When I try to find an old post on this blog, where the keywords are too common, scrolling through old posts can make me ill.  “Ah,” I hear you say, “turnabout is fair play.”

But seriously, scrolling can really be an accessibility issue.  An unrecognized one, for sure, but still an issue.  I have very long lists.  Books I need to read.  Movies I need to see.  Stories I haven’t finished writing.  And to find things, I must scroll.  It’s worse with pictures.  With pure text you can sort of avert your eyes.  Of course, you might miss what you’re seeking.  A small price to pay for not spending the rest of the day with your head between your knees.  If you’ve been to this blog a time or two, you know that I consider myself a neo-Luddite.  I use technology but I am ambivalent about it.  It sure makes navigation easier (until you lose the signal, then you curse yourself for not having a paper map).  It helps physicians and makes book buying much quicker.  But it can also make you sick.

It is possible to create this kind of nausea on the printed page.  It’s also easier to catch the early eye-strain that warns an episode is coming and close the book.  Besides, most books don’t cause this to happen.  Increasingly, scrolling is triggering it.  Looking for an image in the thousands of posts I’ve published here to reuse to illustrate a point.  Trying to find that book I know I saw on my endless Amazon wish list.  And just how many movies do they have on Netflix anyway?  Merrily we scroll along.  It’s just that some of us have to pull over to the side of the road awhile, get out of the car, and breathe deeply for a bit.  Don’t worry about us.  Just speed on by.  There are places to go, and me, well, I’ve got a condition.

More my speed. Image credit: “Boekrol Esther 18de eeuw uit een sefardische synagoge in Sevilla” public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hungry Eyes

Leave a comment

They’re watching.  All the time.  I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof!  Who’s the “they”?  Technology nameless here forevermore.  So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can.  It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound.  Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor.  To those of you with experience, you know what that means.  At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song.  Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up.  I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom.  So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  (Now I remember!)  Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)

Incredible String Band: Image credit—Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

So how’s that proof?  Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily.  Are you surprised?  Really?  To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh.  I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls.  Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me.  You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes.  So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song.  Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.

Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply.  For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details.  That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls.  I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background.  But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit?  What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.”  For academic purposes, for instance.  Of course, they know, you can merch anything.  You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.

Science of Convenience

2 Comments

One thing I’ve noticed about employers is that they’re all for science, except when science contradicts capitalism.  Then they become all mystical.  I had a situation illustrate this particularly well with one of my many employers.  Touting everything to be “evidence based,” they liked to refer to the science behind their reasoning.  Then a study came out demonstrating, scientifically, that more breaks actually increase efficiency in learning and working.  Suddenly silence from management. Crickets chirped.  This observation was just as “evidence based” as daily operations, but it was ignored because, well, it would be giving too much to employees.  You see, science that benefits the upper levels of management is one thing, but by the time it trickles down, well, you know.

American culture is based on the premise that you need to drive people to work as hard as possible.  Perhaps anecdotally, the Covid-19 pandemic showed that workers at home were just as, if not more, productive than they were after enduring an often horrendous commute to get to the office.  Once pandemic strictures began to lift, however, it was all “we want you back in the office.”  Bosses like to look out over seas of employees in their cubicles and feel the surge of the galley master with his whip.  You need to keep workers in line, you understand.  That’s the way capitalism works.

I often wonder where the world would be if superpowers didn’t have cultures based on greed.  One of the seven deadly sins, or capital (!) vices, the worship of personal gain stands behind capitalism as we know it.  And we’ve seen the results.  A shrinking middle class as those with all the wealth make plutocracy out of what was intended to be a democracy.  (Of course, the wealthy founders of the country probably didn’t have a real grasp of what life was like for the poor, even at the start of things.)  Capitalism is good at using aspects of all human endeavors in order to increase its reach.  Science is one such tool.  Religion is another.  Science says more time off is good, and can increase productivity in our current world.  Religion says greed is evil.  These are the parts we’d like to ignore.  Even the Harvard Business Review suggests a four-day work week is beneficial.  Business leaders are skeptical, of course.  Skepticism is one of the elements of science.  And science can be very profitable, if it favors those who hold the reins of power.

Photo by Alex Kondratiev on Unsplash

Slow and Spry

Leave a comment

Businesses seem to want to move at light speed.  At least some do.  When I see that happening I think, “their strategy must be to make a fortune quickly so that when the unthought-through idea collapses they can move on to the next thing.  When I hear words like “agile” being tossed around I translate “reckless.”  Just over a century ago my ancestors were scraping out a living farming, and they got along okay.  Our acquisitiveness has outstripped our sense.  I read quite a bit about being satisfied with little.  Of course, I work in the “business world” where such ideas are anathema.  Even universities have decided to jump on the Titanic.  What could possibly go wrong?  My experience at Nashotah House was decidedly mixed.  One thing I always appreciated was the contemplative (i.e. slow) pace of things.  I may not be orthodox but I’m hardly reckless.

Perhaps buying the farm isn’t such a bad idea.  I’m afraid that I don’t have enough practical knowledge to raise my own food, even though I’m a vegan.  You see, for the things you can’t raise in the soil you need to sell surplus so that you can buy things.  Or rent movies.  And that takes business sense.  And businesses want to move at the speed of light.  I may be neurodiverse, but it takes me a while to process things.  I watch older movies.  I read slowly.  I think things through.  I do believe that businesses that last a long time have survived by moving a bit more slowly.  Like a tree.  By thinking things through.  The Vatican has been in business for a couple thousand years and they seem to be doing okay.  I could be Catholic were it not for doctrine.

I’m not the smartest guy around—not by a long shot—but I am a strategic thinker.  Strategic thought can be deep.  And counterintuitive.  And it doesn’t always lead to the desired results.  (I don’t even have a small college post, so that much is obvious.)  I’m content to let people pass me on the highway.  I don’t have to be first to market, as the saying goes.  I’m more in it for the long haul.  It hasn’t landed me wealth or fame, but I can spend a little time writing every day.  I get to watch movies that make me feel good.  I even get a book or two out the door.  Being agile is fine, but only, imho, if you think it through.

Finding Poe

1 Comment

A gift a friend gave me started me on an adventure.  The gift was a nice edition of Poe stories.  It’s divided up according to different collections, one being Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  This was originally the title of a collection of 25 stories selected by Poe himself in 1840.  I realized that much of my exposure to Poe was through collections selected by others such as Tales of Mystery and Terror, never published by Poe in that form.  I was curious to see what Poe himself saw as belonging together.  I write short stories and I’ve sent collections off several times, but with no success at getting them published.  I know, however, what it feels like to compile my own work and the impact that I hope it might have (if it ever gets published).  Now finding a complete edition of  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Amazon has copies, of course.  They are apparently all printed from a master PDF somewhere since they’re all missing one of the stories.  The second-to-last tale, “The Visionary,” is missing.  I searched many editions, using the “read sample” feature on Amazon.  They all default to the Kindle edition with the missing tale.  I even looked elsewhere (gasp!) and found that an edition published in 1980 contained all the stories.  I put its ISBN in Amazon’s system and the “read sample” button pulled up the same faulty PDF.  Considerable searching led me to a website that actually listed the full contents of the 1980 edition I’d searched out, and I discovered that, contrary to Amazon, the missing piece was there.  I tried to use ratiocination to figure it out.

I suspect that someone, back when ebooks became easy to make, hurried put together a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  They missed a piece, never stopping to count because Poe’s preface says “25” tales are included, but there were only 24.  Other hawkers (anyone may print and sell material in the public domain, and even AI can do it) simply made copies of the original faulty file and sold their own editions.  Amazon, assuming that the same title by the same author will have the same contents, and wishing to drive everyone to ebooks (specifically Kindle), offers its own version of what it thinks is the full content of the book.  This is more than buyer beware.  This is a snapshot of what our future looks like when AI takes over.  I ordered a used print copy of the original edition with the missing story.  At least when the AI apocalypse takes place I’ll have something to read.