Asilomar

My wife and I were burned out of a planned vacation in the hills above San Diego, so, as consolation, we rented a room for a couple of nights at Asilomar.

The Asilomar Conference Center is perched on the dunes at the end of the Monterey Peninsula. It is a beautiful and peaceful place. They will rent rooms non-conference visitors (they call us leisure guests) when space is available.



The grounds and several of the main buildings were designed by Julia Morgan early in the last century as a YWCA camp. Many of her buildings survive. Our room was in one of these. We have come to prefer these "historic" Arts and Craft-style buildings. The rooms are simple and spare often with board-and-batten paneling. The have been kept decorated compatibly with the Arts and Crafts architecture. They have no phones nor internet. Each of the buildings has a common room with a fireplace and comfortable chairs for reading. They are a perfect place to slow down. Unaccountably, the historic rooms are cheaper than "modern"ones.


We used to go to Asilomar once or twice a year but it has been seven years since we last visited. I can report that the grace of the architecture and the beauty of the coast are undiminished. There are many deer, probably more than is healthy. They have become quite tame. The fungus that was killing many of the Monterey Pines seven years ago has apparently been contained. There were many woodpeckers with their brilliant red caps.


Breakfasts are in the great hall at big round tables for ten. Conference guests are seated with their fellow conferees and leisure guests are seated with leisure guests. I happened to mention that we would bring the kids often when they were young. Another guest responded, "but what would they do?" I was a bit taken aback by the question, although looking around at a dining room full of serious adults I understood its origin. I answered, indicating the beach, the rocks, the tide pools, the rolling landscape, the ping pong and pool tables in the main building, and the proximity to the Monterey Aquarium. There is a small secluded, intermittently heated pool in one corner of the grounds that my daughter loved. I mean to verify this with my kids, but I like to think that my kids remember the place fondly.


- J

Notes on "Juliet of the Spirits"

This surreal Fellini movie was his first film in color. What color! Nothing was tentative or exploratory. It would be difficult to find a modern film with a more confident palette. I found the film difficult to understand. Juliet of the title was the only grounded element in the film. Were it not for her we would have been totally at sea.

- J

Global warming and "personal responsibility"

My last post referred indirectly to a recent trend in the response to global warming, the marketing of products that will help you fight global warming. Everything from compact florescent lights to hybrid vehicles, if you are concerned about global warming these can help. In this, marketers are reacting to global warming the same way they reacted to other environmental trends. Holes in the ozone, crisis in the electrical grid, the energy crisis, droughts, concerns about stuff in the water, concerns about stuff in the air: lets put out happy little advice books, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, pens, and bumperstickers telling you what you can do. Lets sell products that help you solve the problem.

The thing is, though, none of these "personal ethics" oriented tips, even if adopted by millions would even begin to address global warming. Take the big ticket item, buying a hybrid. Nowadays buying a hybrid is all about doing something about global warming. Hybrids are very popular, but suppose they became even more popular to the degree that the gas savings compared to conventional designs became significant relative to overall use. Would that mean that the overall carbon footprint for mankind was less? I doubt it. The hybrids people buy will replace some other car. Odds are good that the other car is an SUV. The gas guzzler doesn't go away. The personal responsibility for the damage to the environment is simply transfered to another in the exchange. It is like a medieval indulgence: absolution of sins with a simple purchase. And the gas not used? Well, gas is a market commodity. If there is less gas used the price will go down. The natural consequence of this would be revival of the flagging SUV market. Just because because one individual lowers their use does not mean the gas will not get used, and if it is cheaper it will be used more wastefully.

I say the above as a proud Prius owner. Why I bought a Prius, if I was aware of the futility of personal ethics will have to be the topic for another post.

- J

"Ten Things You Can Do To Stop Global Warming"

A refrigerator magnet appeared recently on the break room fridge at work: "Ten Things You Can Do To Stop Global Warming". I began to wonder, didn't the too-much-irony alarm bells ring anywhere in the process that brought this token of our times to this particular place. Weren't they ringing in the ears of the executive of the consumer goods manufacturer who conceived the idea, the writer who wrote the copy, or the designer that created the logo or graphics? The alarm bells were likely silent at the manufacturing plant where the plastic and magnetic fabric items were produced, encased in individual plastic sleeves, bundled in packets, boxed, shrink wrapped, cased, crated, palleted and again shrink wrapped. Wherever it was on the earth it is unlikely they spoke English and they are probably too busy dealing with the consequences of more immediate environmental catastrophes anyway. Probably they were inaudible in the din as the pallet was trucked from manufacturer to warehouse to ship to shipping warehouse to warehouse distributer where it was broken down, uncrated, shelved, then reassembled, reshrink wrapped, boxed, fedexed as a part of an order from my company. Certainly the too-much-irony bells would have been audible for the admin who received the packets and fedexed them out to all the other admins at all of our satellite offices throughout the world. I'd like to think, at least, that they were ringing like a case of tinnitus for my office's admin as she unwrapped the individual plastic sheath and took the elevator down to my floor to slap it on our single-use-plastic-water-bottle-ladened break room refrigerator.

- J

On pleasing one's self

Face it, this is a vanity blog. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that the only guide I have is to please myself. I try to find interesting things to say, but I can only judge "interesting" by what interests me.

This is not a blog with a well-defined mission. I do not have specialized information to convey or obsessions to feed. I am not a member of an identifiable subculture. So there it is.

I am not terribly comfortable with the idea of being my own assignment editor. I was not raised to think of myself as particularly interesting. So I have evolved strategies. For example, I record capsule summaries of some of the things we do -- movies, theater, books, and such -- on the grounds that it may jog my memory of it in the future. I document links of sites I like. I feel I might as well help someone's google rating while I am at this.

- J

Notes on "Whisper of the Heart"

It was quite clear that my wife and I are way outside the demographic for this Anime film. It is a teenage romance overlayed with a good deal of fantasy vocabulary and technique. I have only seen snatches of a few Anime (is that the correct syntax?), so I don't have much to compare to. I was surprised by the variability in style of the cel backgrounds. Some backgrounds were pure unicorn chic others were startlingly realistic.

- J

Notes on "Bread and Chocolate"

Humor, particularly as social commentary, tends to be particular to time and place. My wife and I saw Bread and Chocolate over the weekend, a 1973 Italian film directed by Franco Brusati that was a good example of this. It was about an earnest Italian man trying to make good as a guest worker in the German parts of Switzerland and the casual prejudice he encounters as he descends into lower and lower degradations. The title refers to the opening scene. The hero is sitting under a tree listening to a violin quartet in a public park. There is noise and activity all around, but when the hero takes a bite of a sandwich made from crusty bread and a chocolate bar, the quartet stops and glares at him. It is a comedy, but the humor must have had much more force then and for Italians. What does survive is the pathos of a man trying to hold to his identity in a world where that is a liability.

- J

Notes on "Old Man and the Sea"

I have recently "read" (listened to the audio book of) a good many Hemingway novels in the past year or so: To Have and Have Not, A Farewell To Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, so I thought it was only fair when I saw it at the library a few weeks ago that I ought to renew my acquaintance with The Old Man and the Sea. I read it last, as might be expected, in High School. I wondered if I might see something different in it now that I am better acquainted with the author. I have to say that I have never been a big Hemingway fan. The themes and subject matter, a sort of ethic built around an idea strangely calvanistic and borderline sadistic idea of masculinity, have never held a lot of interest to me. I do like the way he tells a story though. I like the spare prose style. The ball starts rolling on page 1 and from then on it is following the ball whereever it leads. As an engineer I like that Hemingway is careful to describe detail with precision. He doesn't just tell us that the old man ate the tuna, but he tells how it was done while keeping track of the fish; how it was laid out, what was done with the remains and where the knife was placed after. If one was sufficiently attentive one could have a fair chance of knowing exactly how to prepare a tuna in a skiff while being dragged through the sea by a mythological beast, should the circumstance arise.

In style, the Old Man and the Sea is most like For Whom the Bell Tolls. I think a lot of that is because when quoting the speach or thoughts of Spanish speakers, it is almost as if Hemingway is transcribing a babylfish translation. It is not the New York Yankees. It is the Yankees of New York.

There were many aspects of the story I am sure I missed, but it is sure that I failed to appreciate the running joke of the old man frequently comparing his own suffering unfavorably to the unimaginable suffering from bone spurs of the great Joe Dimaggio.

-- J

(The marlin image is from wikicommons and is in the public domain.)

Going out and coming back

It is a funny thing that, when walking, I will notice different things going out and coming back the same route. It is sometimes as if on the return trip I am seeing them as if for the first time. It surprises me that it is when walking, because, walking, one has a 360 degree view. I wonder if it does not have to do with attention. Going out is a different activity from coming back and it would not be surprising that the mind would tune to different things.

This afternoon I accompanied my wife K to Berkeley for her class and decided to walk up Claremont Blvd towards Grizzly Peak. Going out I saw the remains of a fawn by the side of the road. I saw evidence of several abandoned water projects in the creek bed that the road follows. I saw evidence of the Oakland Hills fire from a dozen years ago. Coming back I saw a jerry-rigged chute covered in black cloth for sending down construction debris from a building site high above the valley floor. The black cloth was obviously meant to disguise it. It looked like a gold rush scene. I would have seen none of these things driving the same route.

After this, I took some time to assay old haunts in Elmwood and upper Rockridge. The trio of South Berkeley bakeries, Bread Garden, Nabalom, and La Farine are all still there and appear to be doing well. Curiously, the smells of Bread Garden and Nabalom were as I remembered and as they were 25 years ago, they were quite distinct. The laundromat where we sent Best Man D on the eve of our wedding was still there and the same as ever (some bachelor party...). Armanino Court is just as it always was, except its sign has been changed to designate it as a "private street". Rockridge north of Claremont seemed thriving, but the hardware store in Elmwood is boarded up and gives the sense that the neighborhood is struggling.

- J

Final Thoughts on Darwin

I finally finished The Origin of Species. (See previous posts here, here, here, here, and here) It truely is an amazing intellectual feat. When one thinks about how few of the tools of modern biology were available to him or his peers it is incredible that he got so much right. Darwin had only the outwardly observable facts about variation to work with, those facts known to systematic breeders and horticulturalists. He had no way of knowing anything about its mechanisms; about DNA or the genome. The principals of statistics were only beginning to be worked out. Viruses could not even begin to be understood. The chemistry of biological processes was still a mystery.

If the case for evolution had to be made today, it would be made based on the mechanics of variation and a statistical analysis of the genome. It would make a very precise argument. Because Darwin wrote when he did, the argument is built on the relationship of natural selection to other similar observable systems all built on distributed selection: systematic breeding, unconcious breed selection, economics systems, and social systems. But, because of this limitation, the Darwin's observations are applicable to, and enrich our understanding of these other systems. If the tools of modern biology were used, it would be unlikely to shed light on other realms.

-- J

A Month of Blogging

As of today, I have been at this a month. Here are some thoughts in no particular order:

1. This is the 28th post, so almost one post a day.
2. According to my counter software, traffic has been miniscule. This is perfectly fine, and in line with the goals for the site.
3. I find I am using the blog differently than I expected. I have ended up doing little capsule summaries of books, plays, and such. I have done this more for selfish purposes than anything else. I have found it helpful to try to condense my thoughts into a paragraph. I hope it may help jog my memory of the event in later years.
4. A couple of posts have struck me, even as I wrote them, as pretty depressive. Writing them down, though, has lifted a weight. Blogging as therapy.

So, all in all, I think I'll continue this project for a bit and see where we go.

- J

Notes on "The Legend of 1900"

There are movies where you can see that the director imagines that he/she is leading the audience by the hand and the audiences eyes are wide and mouth agape at the wonders of every turn. Its not a good sign when you are thinking about this in the middle of the movie. The Legend of 1900 is a fable about a man who is born on ocean liner and never leaves. It is beautifully shot and there are some quite evocative scenes, but I think you would have to want it very badly to find yourself falling under this movie's spell. It is very long.

- J

Notes on "After the Quake"

K and I saw "After the Quake" at Berkeley Rep last night, a play based on two stories by Haruki Murakami. It was structured as, and by all outwards appearances, a children's story, but was completely engaging for adults.

- J

"Men at the Gates"

Apropos of yesterday's post came this poem, "Men at the Gates" by Gary L Lark. Its about men waiting for a closed factory to open, men who see themselves as builders and cannot adjust to how the world now sees them. I am not sure how much of a poem comprises fair use, so I will only quote its ending:

They wait for the world
to make sense again,
where calluses grow on your hands
and the soreness in your back
means you're worth a damn.

Read the whole thing.

- J

Boosters and Builders

I think I have thought of the world of work as being populated by boosters and builders. Boosters sell, cajole, convince, promote, and coerce. Builders turn raw materials, whether physical commodities or data, into things of use. Boosters accomplish things by manipulating human emotions and social relationships. Builders do not encumber their human relationships with self-interest and are therefore are able to interact with others more honestly and freely. Sales and marketing departments are filled with boosters. Engineering, manufacturing, and accounting departments are filled with builders.

Obviously, in this, I favor the builders. Authenticity is on the side of builders. Artifice on the side of boosters. (Yes, I too noticed that artifice, as a word, relates to building.) Builders deal with solid things, boosters with spun threads of cotton candy. Engineering managers, usually coming from a technical background, inevitably turn more and more into boosters as they move up the corporate ladder. I think of this as their route to the dark side.

I realize this is a simplistic model, but it, I think it has informed a good many of the big and small choices I have made with respect to work, especially in recent years. Several times I have turned down management roles. I try to avoid meetings that involve marketing people. I have become more iconoclastic.

In my present company (and, in all likelihood, in many tech companies of a similar age) the divide between the boosters and builders is particularly well defined. The boosters, the marketing and sales types as well as the executive staff and most managers are freshfaced and white. They jog on their lunch hour. They talk about golf. The technical and accounting staff are almost always Asian and with young families.

I think, in part, that my view of the work world and my poor attitude towards big parts of it have led some social skills and sensitivities I may have once possessed to atrophy. I see marketing and sales types like they are spiders traversing with ease strands that are invisible to me. This may be the basis for the mistrust I feel. I do not understand how they move, why they do what they do, where they will go next. I become anxious among them.

I am not sure where these remarks lead. I have been living with this model of the work world for some time. It has become an unhealthy and self-limiting way to regard the world. In the abstract I can see its flaws. Yet, at this time, I am not entirely ready to throw it over. We shall see.

- J

(Image of bee hive is from wiki commons and is in the public domain.)

Ontogeny Recapitulates Philogeny

Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. This phrase, the idea that the development of the individual repeats in miniature the development of the race, has stuck in my mind since high school biology. This was the subject of the chapter of Origin of Species I listened to today. I don't know why the phrase stuck. I didn't understand what it meant, then. Today I have a better understanding. It means that evolution, like software development, is primarily additive. You can reduce and cut down parts that are no longer useful, but it is very hard to wipe the slate clean.

- J

On Washing Dishes

Our dishwasher is has been on the fritz. Our lives have been pretty complicated lately, so when it broke I suggested that we not deal with it right away. Here's the thing, though. Since the dishwasher broke, our kitchen has been noticeably cleaner. Counters are tidier. Dishes are put away faster. I am not sure why.

I will admit that I enjoy hand washing dishes. If I am alone it is a nice quiet meditative activity. If I am washing them with another the activity has a good pace that is conducive to conversation. Yet, I used the dishwasher the same as everyone else, when it was working.

Part of the reason things are cleaner, I think, is because of the threat of disorder. Things have no where to go and can get out of hand pretty quickly. A few weeks ago there was built in slack. Sure things could get bad, but you can just gather the dishes and cutlery and shove it in the coated wire slots and you are done. The knowledge that you could do that lessens the necessity of doing it.

Another aspect is personal velocity. If you have an expectation that a task will need a minute then you are going to rush the task and you won't have time for distractions and annoyances you might encounter. If you expect to be spending twenty or so minutes in the kitchen and you spot a spice bottle out of place its not a bother to set it right.

I am sure we will eventually repair the dishwasher and resume our proper relation to domestic work. We are after all modern people. We are not heathens.

-- J

(Image is of a painting by Jean-Baptist Simeon Chardin. I found it here. It is in the public domain.)

Yet more on Darwin

Continuing my posts here, here, and here, on The Origin of Species, I have been thinking about how Darwin is misunderstood. Social Darwinism -- alive and well -- is the theory that social and economic mechanisms follow Darwinian processes and that, to improve the race, one must leave unconstrained those seeking to control wealth. This theory misunderstands Darwin in many ways, including: (a) a culturally self centered idea of "improve the race", (b) a confusion of being highest on the food chain, with most successful, and (c) ignorance of the fact that, in many species collaboration rather than indivual-to-individual competion that gives one group the edge. But, one thing I learned from my current listen is that explaining social and economic behavior in Darwinian terms is circular reasoning. Darwin's theory is, more than anything, an attempt to explain certain difficult aspects of the Natural world by analogy to the human social and economic world. Social Darwinism is circular reasoning that somehow manages to distort and pervert the cocial world as it comes back around.

On the other side of the coin, eco-activists defend Darwin with zeal, but don't appear to understand his theory, either. The necessity and importance of protecting endangered species may be real for social and moral reasons, but it cannot find a home in Darwinism. Darwin recognized that extinction and supplantation of one species in a region by another were quite natural events and important for the development of new species.

- J

Berkeley Public Library

My wife, K, has a class in Berkeley every other Saturday. Yesterday, I accompanied her. While she was in class I did a few errands and walked around old haunts. I walked up to the Rose Garden, a little shabby this time of year, but nice. I got a cookie at the Virginia Bakery. It is amazing to find it still in business, substantially the same as thirty years ago.

When I tired of walking I grabbed my computer from my car and headed over to the Berkeley Public Library on Shattuck. I remembered this place as a sanctuary, but I knew it had undergone some serious renovation work. I found it better than ever. It was busy but quiet. Many of the public libraries I have visited in recent years are always busy, but not quiet. They are multimedia community centers. This is a natural evolution and BPL, in the lee of the University is probably a bit behind the times. This is still a book-oriented place and has the rhythm of reading.

The main reference room is large and open with a lot of light. I sat down, opened my Ibook, and a dialog box said "You are not in range of your preferred wireless network. Would you like to join the BPL network". I clicked "yes" and was in.

- J

Notes on "Antonia's Line"

My wife, K, and I watched Antonia's Line on Saturday night. I am not sure how I feel about this Dutch film. The plot moved along confidently and at an enjoyable pace, always taking us on unexpected turns. It was well enough acted and it was interesting to see the Dutch countryside. At times the movie evoked in tone Jonah, Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, at other times The World According to Garp or the Hotel New Hampshire.

On the other hand there was the narrator. The movie employed the same technique that seems now ubuiquitous on television comic soaps like Desperate Housewives. The narrator not only does most of the work of exposition, but has a knowing, ironic, amused (snarky?) tone that tells you how to feel about everything and everyone. I don't know whether this technique originated with Antonia's Line or with American televison, but I think it is distracting and a bit too easy.

- J

Human Clock

One web site I really like is humanclock.com. It is a simple idea. It displays every minute a photo that has the current time in it somewhere. People all over the world have submitted pictures. Often the pictures are creative and surprising. It is just a very humane site.

Change

Just a quote for the day to mull over:

And change is a semi with smoking wheels filling the rear view mirror.

-- from Small Dark Movie, a song by Greg Brown on the album Further In

- J

Surf

Many years ago I worked for a big Asian electronics company in their Silicon Valley plant. A fellow, I don't recall his name, so we'll call him Jim, had the cube next to mine. He was a shortish balding guy with an active smile. He was devoted to bluegrass. He was an old line assembly language programmer, and I suppose I was the young blood. At that time the embedded software world was moving from assembly language on raw iron to C programs written with the benefit of real-time operating systems.

Every now and again I would look over at him staring at his screen or (the were still in use then, a printout.) I could see in his eyes no comprehension. It was just a field of random characters for him. I could not tell whether he was trying to make sense of it or whether his mind was elsewhere and he was just waiting for it to end.

Jim did not have to wait very long. He was layed off within a couple of months of my arrival. I never saw him again. My boss, when I asked, said he had been suspected of sneeking off to a closet during the workday for a drink. I did not and do not believe it.

After that I have seen the same blank look on compatriots and the same ambigous affect. There have been times when an observer would have seen the same look in me. I came to think of the software business as like swimming in the surf. If you hold yourself steady you can keep your head above water and at times command a good clear view. But inevitably you will tire and your attention will wander for a spell and you will find yourself tumbling in wild surf. It is difficult to resist the pull downward.

I have been underwater a number of times. I thought my career was dead. So far, I have arighted myself, usually by change of circumstances.

- J

Yet more ...

The foregoing remarks speculate on why rural America tends is a seat of mistrust of Darwinism in spite of rural Americans being in a better position to directly witness the workings of selection. Then, too, of course, there is race. Those trying to preserve the racial order of the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century argued for it on religious grounds (Those in the North did the same thing, perhaps more successfully, on other grounds). Natural Selection opposed and replaced the theory that all the species that ever existed had existed in the time of Eden and had been preserved on Noah's Ark. Southern religious leaders argued that if God created the species then He must have created the races and must have meant for them to remain separate and distinct and for separate purposes. The theory of Natural Selection made even the idea of species and variety mere intellectual constructs. It must have been especially threatening that Darwin frequently observes that crossing varieties usually gives the offspring health and vigor.

I don't know whether or how much modern controversy over Natural Selection is a veiled discussion of race, but it was certainly so in prior times.

- J

More on Darwin

I have been listening to the Librivox recording of The Origin of the Species. I blogged about it earlier. Here are further impressions.

The argument for natural selection is primarily agrarian. This is to be expected since the most closely observed animals and plants were and are those that we live closely with and depend upon. The term "natural selection" is, itself, an analogy and alignment with man-made selection, which would have been a familiar topic to anyone making a living on a farm in Darwin's day. The variability of stock was an observable fact as was the inheritance of traits. Farmers made practical use of these facts every day. Breeders and horticulturalists made systematic use of selection of small improvements to create new varieties of animals and plants. All Darwin did (not that this wasn't an achievement) is to recognize tha the common truths of rural life could operate without human intervention. The stuff of this argument must have been most manifestly plain to those who lived and made their living in the country.

Thinking about this, it is strange that in America in our time, Creationism and Intelligent Design have the strongest hold in the rural South and Midwest. Why would this be? After all, the results of man-initiated selection are everywhere to be seen. There are whole industries bent on giving the farmer the better yield from their corn or cow. The livestock auctions at every county fair are an exercise in man initiated selection. I have two theories:

1. People will believe what they need to believe to survive and the evangelical churches are so important a part of rural society that it makes people disbelieve their lying eyes.
2. Rural America has become industrialized to the degree that knowledge is no longer distributed among the millions of individual farmers, but is rather stolen from the farmer and locked up in labs and protected by patents.
   

I don't know enough about rural America to take this topic much further, but I think #2 could lead to #1.

- J