You are on page 1of 106

The NORT SPEWS

News & Reviews

VOLUME I:
The Early Years, 2005-2007

Collected from the blog of the same name


by

Steve Donachie
Contents
A Word About the Nort Spews.............................3
Protesting the War in Iraq....................................7
Farewell to Robert Moog.....................................9
Katrina:No Such Thing as a Small Hurricane...13
The World of Wars.............................................17
Cosmic Perspectives, Part 1: Distant Light........20
Cosmic Perspectives, Part 2: Voyager................23
Another Space Race...........................................28
Let's All Evolve!................................................32
Takin' the A-Train..............................................38
Wilma: Hurricane No. 2.....................................40
Disasters are Good Practice...............................44
From Primordial Soup to Immemorial Nuts......46
My Father, the Veteran.......................................50
The Once and Future Draft................................55
A Day in the Life of the Book Fair....................61
Signs and Wonders.............................................70
Open Letter to My Representatives...................74
Unto Us a Child is Born.....................................79
Math and Magic.................................................82
Spiritual Machinery...........................................87
Time Capsule for the Real Millennium..............91
The NORT SPEWS
News & Reviews

Volume I: The Early Years 2005-2007

A Word About the Nort Spews ...


When I started The Nort Spews back in 2005 I had the
idea that producing a blog would encourage me to
explore more fully the river of ideas and impressions
that we are all immersed in (also knows as “life”), and
which all too often floats by and is gone before we have
had a chance to take it in.
Going against the popular wisdom that a blog must
focus on a narrow range of topics, such as writing or
technology or politics, I chose instead to give free reign
to all my varied interests, and to let them lead me where
they will. Accordingly, the topics quickly leaped from
peace protests to the battle between evolution and
creationism, from books and movies to philosophy and
religion, from the threat of robotics to the promise of a
better future. Over time the form has evolved from
shorter, more journal-like entries, to longer ones
resembling newspaper columns or essays.
Increasingly, I value the way in which I have come to
know myself better by taking the time to express fully
ideas that would otherwise get only a passing glance in
the course of the day's rush. Just because someone out
there might read what I'm writing – and at least a few do
on any given day – I have to take the time to explain
what I mean, and even to do research to check my facts.
(It's amazing how much you can learn by doing that – as
Yogi Berra said, “You can see a lot just by looking.”)
By now I think I can safely say that anyone who reads
these pages will come to know me better than many
people I have known and worked with for years. And I
hope it is equally true that the careful reflections of a
good reader will reveal as much richness within him- or
herself.
The repackaging of the blog into digital book form was
inspired by my friend Andrew, who said one day, “Your
blog is not like a blog, it's more like something you'd
read in a book.” Once I obtained an ebook reader and
appreciated how comfortable it can be to read a digital
text, it seemed a logical step to produce archives of the
Nort Spews and to distribute them in this new form.
Besides the page layout, the only difference from the
original posts is that most of the photos have been
removed to avoid copyright issues, and to produce a
more compact file. Hyperlinks in the text will work if
you are reading it on an Internet-connected device with a
web browser – as long as the links still point to valid
pages. Like all documents that live on the web, its
immediacy is balanced by transience.
Oh, and about the name … As the footnote at the bottom
of the blog page says: Fans of the comic strip “Tank
MacNamara” will recognize the fatal slip of the tongue
that forever stigmatized the hapless sportscaster with
the nickname, “Norts Pews.” I modified it as Nort
Spews to get across the idea of issuing a torrent of
words. The playful “spewing” elephant logo soon
followed.
Little did I realize when I began how long that torrent
would continue. Now I hope to put out new collections
like this every year or two. Meanwhile you can visit me
online at NortSpews.blogspot.com.
Steve Donachie (AKA “The Nort”)

Copyright © 2005-2007 Steve Donachie


This digital text may be freely duplicated and
redistributed in whole or in part by print, email,
Internet, or any other means. Thank you for sharing!
However, you may not sell it, or include it as content in
a larger body of work that is sold, without express
written permission from the author. Any duplication or
distribution must include this copyright notice and
credit the author as the source of the document.

This document was edited and exported to PDF form


with Open Office Writer.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Thursday, August 18, 2005

Protesting the War in Iraq

What a way to begin this journal--back to the barricades


in protest over the war. Talk about 60's flashbacks ...

Our local Friends Meeting (Quakers) has been


maintaining a weekly peace vigil in front of the meeting
house since before the invasion of Iraq began, back
when we still hoped it could be averted. A small
contingent, sometimes only two or three, have stood by
the road with their signs and waved patiently at
homeward bound motorists during the evening rush
hour. Having been present myself in this small
gathering, it was absolutely exhilarating to find
ourselves suddenly joined by close to a hundred fellow
activists organized through MoveOn to demonstrate in
sympathy with Cindy Sheehan, still camped out in
Crawford, Texas.

Motorist response, as always, was overwhelmingly


positive. For every shout of "you [bleeping] idiots!"
there were ten carloads of honking horns, waves, peace
signs, thumbs up, and other expressions of glee and
support. One young girl, of elementary school age,
interviewed people for a school project, with Dad
manning the videocam.

Channel 7 was on the scene, too, and taped scenes and


interviews for the late news. Typically, when we waited
up to see ourselves, the news led with a story about
animal cruelty and the usual litany of car accidents
before delivering 15 seconds of video (no sound) on the
protest.

Well, if you have to watch the news to find out what's


happening, then you just need to get out more.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Farewell to Robert Moog

The death of Robert Moog was announced today,


causing many of us to reflect on the size of the
contributions he made to electronic music.

It's easy to forget now how primitive the equipment was


and how difficult to work with prior to Moog's
development of the first "synthesizer." Composition in
those days (prior to 1967 or so) was a labor for lab
technicians using oscilloscopes to study wave forms
produced by oscillators, and modifying them with
amplifiers and filter circuits. Much was also done by
manipulating magnetic tape, physically splicing different
tones together and altering the speed and direction of
playback.

Moog's packaged system created new possibilities which


are still being explored today. By bundling an
assortment of oscillators, amplifiers and filters together,
and allowing them to be "patched" together in various
ways (using "patch cords" that plugged into the panel
like an old telephone switchboard), and finally by
allowing the whole thing to be controlled by a piano-
style keyboard, he created a truly playable instrument.

Wendy (née Walter) Carlos arranged and played Bach on


the thing, and the world was never the same. It's hard to
remember now, with all the electronic tones in the air,
what a revolution that "Switched-On Bach" sound was at
the beginning. You actually had to learn how to hear it.

One track in particular, the slow movement Carlos


improvised for the Brandenburg Concerto, sounded at
first like a bewildering mix of sound effects that had
nothing to do with traditional scales and notes. Then one
day when I was, shall we say, intoxicated (it was the
60's, after all!), I discovered that I could remember and
"play back" in my mind the whole thing, with all the
electronic bells and whistles. My brain had figured out
how to listen, and had recorded it for me. Afterwards,
when I played the record again, I could hear the
traditional baroque-styled notes that underlay the
sounds, and it seemed perfectly comprehensible.

Like every great invention, the Moog synthesizer was


rapidly imitated and improved upon by others. The
machines became easier to "patch," using knobs and
buttons instead of cords. They became polyphonic (the
early ones could only produce one note at a time, and
recordings had to be made of many tracks put down in
layers). The electronic modules that produced the sounds
kept shrinking, riding the parallel wave of computer
technology, until whole synthesizers were reduced to the
size of chips. Finally, they have become purely digital,
and hard to distinguish from computers themselves.
It's a wonderful footnote to Moog's life that his early
interest in electronic music dates back to his childhood
when he built a theremin from instructions in an
electronics magazine. The theremin, named after its
1919 inventor Leon Theremin, is a purely analog device
played with a pair of antennas that respond to proximity.
One antenna controls pitch while the other controls
volume. Though simple in principle, the thing is darn
hard to play. Anyone can make weird sci-fi UFO
whistles, but few have had the patience to learn the
control necessary to play real music, which is why it has
remained a curiosity rather than developing into a
mainstream instrument.

Late in his life* Moog saw to it that one of the few


theremin virtuosos, Clara Rockmore, was properly
recorded for posterity. Her album very simply has no
peer. In her hands (or maybe I should say, near her
hands) the instrument literally sings, sounding like a
cross between a viola and a contralto voice. Her
performance of the Rachmaninoff "Vocalise" deserves to
be legendary.

So in returning to the roots of his inspiration Moog left


us with yet another gift. Thanks for everything, Bob!

* Erratum -- I have discovered that the Clara Rockmore


recording actually dates back to 1977, and was later
reissued on CD.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Monday, August 29, 2005

Katrina: No Such Thing as a


"Small" Hurricane

As blasé Miamians, when we heard that a mere "tropical


storm" that might just barely turn into a category one
hurricane was approaching, and which furthermore
would be passing some 50 miles to the north of us, we
figured we were in for no more than a couple of rainy
evenings watching it all on TV.

Bzzt! Wrong. At the last minute Katrina intensified


further and made a sharp southerly turn, bringing the eye
right through the city of Hialeah, only about 15 miles
from our South Miami abode. Instead of the 30 to 50
mph winds that had been predicted we were getting
gusts above 80. Time to start wishing I'd put up the
shutters and bought more supplies.

Around 8:30 the lights went out. Nothing out of the


ordinary about that. But about an hour later came a
tremendous BOOM--sounded like thunder crashing right
overhead. This was followed by some strange noises that
led us to look around the house, carrying flashlights like
we were in an episode of the X-Files. In the back
bedroom we discovered a hole in the ceiling with about
six inches of wood sticking out. It was the end of a
branch of the rather large tree that had fallen on the roof,
punching its way through roof and ceiling. Luckily it
also pretty much sealed up the hole it had made so we
were able to catch the small amounts of water that ran
down it in a waste basket.

Around this time one of my cats, the least intelligent of


the three, who had disappeared prior to the storm,
decided to turn up and request admittance, so I had to go
out and carry her in to safety. While I was outside I went
to look at the tree. One of its two trunks, a good sixteen
to eighteen inches in diameter, had split right to the base
and was resting on top of the roof. No wonder it had
made a noise--the whole roof had acted like a soundbox
to amplify it.

The tree is still there, because so far we have failed to


get any tree trimming company to actually show up. The
morning after, we were able to patch the hole
temporarily by sawing the branch off at roof level--
leaving the rest of it inside--and covering it with
tarpaper and caulking. The predictable aftermath has
happened, with traffic lights out, stores closed, food and
water and batteries in short supply, and lots of yard work
to do. I now have a pile of debris the size of a small
truck out by the road, with more to come. But we're
more than grateful not to have worse damage or the kind
of flooding that occurred further south from us.

So here we are, only a few days later, with our power


back on, A/C running again, no more cold showers or
lukewarm bottles of water or suffocating heat, just in
time to see what the same storm, vastly increased in size
and power, will do to poor old New Orleans. Having
been through that with Hurricane Andrew in 1992, I can
only wish them good luck. As low as we are, at least
Miami is above sea level.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Sunday, September 04, 2005

The World of Wars


War of the Worlds, Peace, Power and Disaster

Only about a dozen years ago news commentators were


speculating about the arrival of a Pax Americana--a
period of global peace and prosperity that would follow
the Cold War as the United States of America, at last the
only super-power, presided over a "new world order."
Such a hopeful phrase ... in the words of performance
artist Laurie Anderson, it may not have been very
specific, "but at least it promised to be something new,
and worldwide, and orderly."

The reality has turned out to be something less than


peaceful, all too familiar, and far from orderly, though
certainly worldwide. America has emerged as an empire,
and not a very nice one. Plagued like ancient Rome by
"barbarians" at home and abroad, it has lashed out and in
the process rediscovered the limits of military force.

Perhaps this sense of inadequacy is haunting us as a


nation. That could explain the compelling nature of
Steven Spielberg's remake of H. G. Wells' War of the
Worlds. Though shrill (someone should explain to the
Tom Cruise character that the best way to calm a
hysterical child is NOT to yell at her), it is nevertheless a
vivid portrayal of what happens when society breaks
down in the face of something it cannot control. The
aliens are as technologically superior to us as, let's say, a
cruise missile is to a cavalry charge on camel back. In
one stroke--a scientifically accurate electromagnetic
pulse--all communication and transportation is knocked
out, reducing us to the status of vermin ready to be
symbolically stepped on by the strides of the towering
alien machines. Instantly, it's everyone for themselves.

This is an interesting contrast to what happened only a


couple of years ago when our President visited
Hollywood to get them to help whip up some war fever.
There was a marked increase in the production of heroic
new films, and an immediate abundance of old ones
unearthed to be aired on television. A particular favorite
of mine was Paul Verhoeven's take on Robert Heinlein's
Starship Troopers, where the infantry heroes battle giant
insects (the perfectly dehumanized enemy) in a
landscape uncannily like that of Afghanistan. It didn't
seem to bother anyone that the world government on
earth had the militaristic trappings of the Third Reich, or
that citizenship was not universal but had to be earned
by things like, well, military service for example.
Legislation anyone?

But it doesn't take a war or a superior enemy to deliver


the nightmare of national impotence. Look what a
handful of terrorists were able to do by redirecting the
paths of a few airplanes. And see how we throw up our
hands in helplessness when confronted with the
wholesale destruction of a city by the natural forces of
wind and water. Pulling triggers is easy compared to
providing for the human needs of human beings. When
we stop taking aim and start taking time to tend to the
real needs of those at home and abroad, maybe then
historians will be able to identify the Pax that emerged
from this chaos, and to name a date when we finally
outgrew our need to be powerful.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Saturday, September 24, 2005

Cosmic Perspectives, Part 1:


Distant Light

During the course of my own brief lifetime, a mere half


century or so, the universe has aged quite a bit. Of
course, that is only in our perception of it, which has
also undergone quite a bit of revision in recent years.

When I was a kid, the age of the earth had been pegged
pretty accurately at around four billion years--quite a
difference from the Biblical estimates of four thousand
(only a small fraction of human history). The rest of the
universe was thought to be somewhat older, but perhaps
not more than double that figure, or around eight billion
years. Gradually, astronomers refined the figure upward
till it exceeded ten billion. But the aging process didn't
stop there. Current estimates range from eleven to as
high as twenty billion years. (To get some idea of how
the calculations are done, check this out, or Google the
age of the universe.) The estimates vary so widely
because there is still so much we don't know, such as
how much "dark" matter and energy is out there--the
existence of which was only recently discovered.

Normally most of us don't think about all this very


much, except while watching an episode of Nova on
PBS. But the other day something brought it all home to
me in a new way. It was reported that astronomers had
detected the explosion of a star twelve billion light-years
distant--meaning, of course, that the explosion happened
twelve billion years in the past, and the news of the
event, traveling at the speed of light, has only now
arrived.

It's one thing to consider millions of galaxies being that


far away, but there was something peculiarly nostalgic
and evocative about one particular individual star being
singled out over such a huge distance. I felt as if a
window to the past had suddenly opened, leaving me
gazing across this vast stretch of space and time the way
Gatsby stared across his lake at the dim beacon that
marked the home of his lost and unattainable love.

So, twelve billion years ... the place is at least that old--
older, because the star had already formed and burned
for at least some millions of years before it blew up. And
it is at least that large in all directions from here. Does
that mean it's twice twelve billion? Or even larger/older?
Or is that just a trick of perspective, due to space itself
being curved?

Maybe, in the fullness of time, we will have lifted our


heads high enough to see beyond the cosmic horizon,
and know the answer. Until then, let this lonely beacon
be a sign to us of all we have learned, and all we have
yet to learn.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Cosmic Perspectives, Part 2:


Voyager
The second thing that captured my imagination this
week was the report that Voyager 1 has entered the next
stage of its departure from our solar system by crossing
the "termination shock" that marks the beginning of the
"heliopause."

It's wonderful the way we find these new structures


wherever we look, and the edge of the solar system is no
exception. You might have thought that waving bye-bye
to Neptune and Pluto would mark the probe's entry into
empty interstellar space, but it turns out there is a
detectable bubble of particles blown out by the sun, and
a form of shock wave where the particles slow down
from millions of miles per hour to radically slower
speeds--maybe even reversing direction back toward the
sun like waves lapping on a cosmic beach. This fuzzy
line marks the region where the pressure of particles
blowing in from other stars becomes more powerful than
that of our own sun. Only when it travels beyond this
region, which will take another few years, will Voyager
enter true interstellar space and become our first probe
to the stars.

Voyager wasn't the first vehicle to officially leave the


solar system. In 1983 Pioneer 10 first passed the orbit of
Neptune while it was temporarily the most distant planet
from the sun due to Pluto's eccentric orbit. At the time
NASA broadcast its bleeping radio transmissions to
mark the event. There was even a toll-free number you
could call to hear it live, 24-hours a day. (Had there been
an Internet at the time, it would have been online as
well, but the Internet had yet to develop.) And yes, I
dialed that number and listened. But Voyager is moving
faster, and in 1998 it surpassed Pioneer 10 as the most
distant man-made object.

More years have passed, and Voyager is still in the


process of leaving. The boundary is that wide. The
mission is thirty years old, and the probe may continue
to function for another ten or fifteen years. It is now
over eight billion miles out--twice the distance to Pluto--
and by the time it expires it will be out over ten billion
miles. But that will be only two-tenths of one percent of
a light year, and the nearest star is over four light years
away, and in a different direction.

Even so, I find this more exciting than anything that has
happened in space exploration since the manned moon
landings. (More on them another time.) As someone
who has grown up through the era of rocketry, I have
followed it since I was a small child, when Werner Von
Braun and his team of German scientists founded the US
missile program, and later the space program. I used to
have a scrapbook filled with every photo I could find of
rockets and satellites. I even kept a log as each satellite
and space probe was launched, giving it up as hopeless
when the launches reached into the hundreds (now
thousands).

There have been many firsts over the years. Some of


them were significant: the first satellite in orbit, the first
human in space, first probes to the moon and other
planets, first people to visit the moon. Others were
merely of passing social interest, or of concern in the
"space race" between the USA and the USSR: the first
woman, first "space walk," first orbital rendezvous, or
the first [insert your nationality here] in space.

There will be other such firsts as we venture forth from


our planetary home. And there may be other "space
races" in our future--are you watching the Chinese? But
there will always be Voyager 1, this first tendril of
human construction, a mere bucket of bolts, drifting out
among the stars like a bottle in the ocean, bearing a
message in case it ever washes up on some far shore, a
message that says, "we were here," and which may be
read when the human race is no more than an
archaeological relic.

A footnote to this:

I once read a science fiction novel about a family of


colonists who traveled in the first spaceship to another
star. Realistically, they had to travel close to the speed of
light and also spend time in suspended animation in
order to get there within the span of a human life.

Somewhere near the end of the voyage they believed


they encountered an alien spacecraft passing them at
incredible speed. But when they arrived at their
destination they found a thriving human civilization
already in place. The ship that had passed them was one
of many developed later that could travel faster than the
speed of light. It was as if the Pilgrims had set out for
the New World in 1620 and sailed into New York harbor
in 1920, where they were dwarfed by mammoth
steamships and amazed by airplanes in the sky.

The speed of light may never be broken, but even if it


isn't we will certainly follow Voyager someday with
faster probes aimed at specific stars. Maybe someday the
people decoding Voyager's message will be our own far
descendants, scattered around the galaxy.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Friday, September 30, 2005

Another Space Race


So we're going back to the moon, maybe even Mars.
How come we're not excited about it?

Could be it
has something
to do with
NASA's
recently
unveiled
designs for the
vehicles that
will replace
the shuttle and be able to do all this. Not that they won't
work, or that they aren't a wonderful exercise in
practicality and utility. It's just that they're not, well ...
sexy.

To a public jaded by the racy designs of Star Wars and


other sci-fi epics, the new plans seem so pedestrian, with
a bit of a retro flare. The capsule on top--right, a
capsule--harks back to the original designs of the
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and those are up
to forty years old. The lunar landing arrangement is
merely a souped-up Apollo with LEM variation. And the
basic earth-to-orbit design, a pencil with an eraser on
top, most closely resembles the original
Mercury/Redstone sub-orbital hardware. Even the
landing method--parachutes and airbags--seems a let
down after watching those shuttle landings that can only
be termed, appropriately enough, "death defying."

On one hand, we should be glad to see our tax dollars


being spent in as economical a way as possible, given
the task. On the other hand, it is an admission that the
whole space-plane concept of the shuttle was a mistake,
or at least an idea ahead of its time. But it feels as if, at
the end of World War II, with the existence of buzz-
bombs and V-2 rockets well known, the government had
announced its plan to build a new and improved biplane
instead of trying to break the sound barrier.

The very idea that we have not been back to the moon in
thirty years is enough to make you wonder what we've
been up to. If, instead of squandering all our money on
shuttle development and two space stations of dubious
utility (letting the first one, Skylab, burn up in the
atmosphere for lack of funding), suppose we had
continued to fund the existing Apollo program for all
that time. Plans had already been made to add an extra
stage to the Saturn V through orbital rendezvous, which
would have made it possible to land enormous payloads
on the moon. We might have had a thriving lunar colony
by the 1980's for a fraction of what it will cost us now.
Instead, as soon as the "moon race" was won, we lost
interest and shut the project down.

Maybe a new space race is what we need to spur the


technological development process. We already have
plenty of competition from Europe and Japan when it
comes to launching commercial satellites with
disposable rockets. And Burt Rutan is showing us what
private companies can do with a little financial
incentive. (When he builds a space plane, it looks like
one.)

All that's missing is the kind of rivalry that put national


prestige on the line during the Cold War, and it looks
like the Chinese are about to provide that. By calmly
following their own timetable, and pretty much ignoring
what the US, Europe and Russia are up to in space, it
won't be long before they provide us with the kind of
surprise that the first sputnik gave us. And if that gets us
moving again, so much the better.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Thursday, October 06, 2005

Let's All Evolve!


All right, I've had enough. I've just read one too many
news stories where the Christian myth of Creation is
being compared against the scientific theory of evolution
as if they are two competing products vying for market
share. In reality (I do believe in that) they are as
different as a ghost and a machine, spirit and flesh. One
requires faith and a belief system to create a subjective
experience of something immaterial, while the other
examines physical evidence and attempts to propose
logical and demonstrable explanations for what we see
around us.

The bullet points being hammered home by the


"intelligent design" proponents are (1) "evolution is not
a fact," (2) "life is too complex to be explained by
evolution," and (3) "evolution has unexplained gaps it
cannot account for."

I beg to differ. First of all, evolution is a well-


documented phenomenon which can be observed in the
species alive today, and inferred from studying the
remains of those now long extinct. I think what they
really mean, though, is not evolution the observed
phenomenon but the theory of evolution by natural
selection, which is the current state of understanding
how evolution happens.

Basically, as Darwin proposed, populations of every


species are composed of individuals with genetic variety
and differing traits. When the population is subjected to
stresses, such as the introduction of a new predator or
parasite, loss of food supply, or a change in climate,
some members of the population do better than others
due to the set of traits they have. These members are the
ones who survive and produce more offspring, so that
their traits become prevalent in succeeding generations.
The changes may be so minute they are unnoticeable, or
they may be sudden and dramatic. Genetic variations
may be as mild as the color of eyes or as drastic as
mutations that make it impossible for the individual to
survive. So over hundreds of millions of years since it
arose, life has taken infinitely varying forms. The forms
that didn't work or couldn't adapt died out, while others
survived ... and here we are, the living continuation of
this endless chain of flux.
While we can agree that a theory is not a fact (theories
exist to explain the observable facts), many theories
demonstrate their usefulness every day as we make use
of the technologies that have been based on them. We
can start our cars, turn on our lights, watch TV, and
detonate nuclear weapons without anyone disputing the
fact that they work. This is even true when the theories
have "unexplained gaps." We were already sending
telegrams and using electricity long before we knew
what electrons were, or how atoms were composed.
Theories take us as far as they can, then allow us to
proceed from there on the basis of new knowledge.

Complexity is certainly abundant in life, but there is no


reason why simple fundamental processes cannot give
rise to complexity. This can be demonstrated very
simply through mathematical exercises like fractals and
cellular automata, which can create "lifelike" forms from
extremely basic rules. In fact it is the complexity of a
population--its genetic diversity--that allows natural
selection to operate effectively. It could be argued that
the more complex life is, the better natural selection
works.

I assume the "gaps" they talk about in the theory of


evolution (let's make an acronym: the Theory of
Evolution by Natural Selection, or TENS) are (1) it
doesn't explain how life began in the first place, and (2)
it doesn't explain why there is a universe for us to live
in, or in other words answer the question of Why Are
We Here?

So in response to those issues:

(1) "TENS" is not about the origin of life. There are


other hypotheses (not theories yet) about how inanimate
matter may have formed the first cellular organisms, but
if Natural Selection played a part in it that would really
be a separate issue. However, if and when there is a
working theory that demonstrates how this transition can
happen, then it, too, like the theory of natural selection,
should obviously be included in the science curriculum
of our schools.

(2) Science is not about Why, it's about What and How.
There are other forms of human inquiry that address the
Why question. They are known as philosophy and
religion. Far from being antagonistic to one another, all
of these disciplines serve us best when they complement
each other, when what we know of the world informs
our speculation about what we do not know.
Personally, I believe that the universe around us is the
body of the supreme, self-existent being we call God,
and that our minds are tiny inklings of the vast
intelligence of which we are small parts. But I don't
believe that God sits on a cloud or in an office
somewhere and micromanages all of creation. The
divine power I imagine, glimpsed through the insights of
physicists and cosmic theorists, is one that sparked a
whole cosmos into being from a single point, that
established from the instant of its beginning all the laws
that would govern the behavior of everything from
atoms to stars and galaxies, that built these laws into
unimaginably small bits of energy (currently called
"strings") which make up everything we see and
everything we don't see. This is the power that made life
in such a universe an inevitable, "natural" development.
All we can do is study the details of how it has
happened, and to marvel at its wonder.

For me, science supports my religion, so I'm all the more


amazed when others feel their beliefs are threatened by
it. Relax, I want to tell them; we're all in this together.
By all means, read your Bible stories to your children,
teach them how to behave in moral ways, how to live
with one another in peace. But for God's sake don't deny
them their right to know as much as possible about the
world around them, even if--especially if--that
knowledge forces them to wonder about what they know
and how they know it.
nortspews.blogspot.com
October 12, 2005

Takin' the A-Train


I'm feeling the national energy shortage in my legs and
arms, and especially my feet and ankles.

Recently, in response to the rising cost of gasoline and


the earnest imprecations of our Commander in Chief,
I've begun taking the rapid transit system to and from
work at least a couple of days a week. I figure if I can
skip my car two days out of five I can save 40% of my
personal energy consumption and make the petroleum
available for those who need it more, like people on the
Gulf coast who have to drive 50 miles to, well, fill up
their tanks.

It works pretty well. I'm part of a fortunate minority in


our county who live and work within an easy walk of the
rail system. It takes only 15 minutes to get to the train,
about 15 minutes on the train, and another 10 or 15
minutes on the people mover and on foot to reach my
office in downtown Miami. It takes the same 45
minutes, or longer, if I drive.
On the upside, there is no lingering in bumper-to-
bumper traffic, waiting for drawbridges, or narrowly
avoiding collisions along the way. However, I do miss
the luxuries of listening to the morning news on NPR
while sipping coffee or tea as I wake up. Standing and
hanging onto a metal stanchion (no seats available
during the morning commute) is simply not the same.
I'm thinking of getting one of those mini-radios you can
plug into your ears to cover the NPR fix, but the coffee
will just have to wait till I get to work--no food or
beverages allowed on the train.

Financially, the two days of public transport cost me six


dollars. Even if I save only a third of the gas I would use
otherwise, which would be about twelve dollars worth (4
gallons), I still come out ahead. And that's without
factoring in the wear and tear on the car, which would be
another four or five dollars a day.

Then again, I wonder how much faster my shoes will


wear out?
nortspews.blogspot.com
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Wilma: Hurricane No. 2


The most amazing thing about our second hurricane in
less than eight weeks was that somehow we had gotten
from K for Katrina to W for Wilma in that brief time--
that there were another ten storms that had missed us.

In a way, Wilma was a mirror image of Katrina. It


crossed the Florida peninsula in the opposite direction,
as if it were completing a huge letter X that Katrina had
started. And this time it was a second-hand storm,
having done its worst already in Cancun, while Katrina
had gone on to destroy the region around New Orleans.

Nothing to do but put up the shutters (again) and wait it


out. When I went to bed on Sunday night the wind was
just gradually rising and the TV weather people were
telling us it wouldn't make landfall till the next morning.
I woke up around 5:00 hearing strong winds, watched
TV till the power went out an hour later, then went back
to bed. By the time I got up again it was daylight and the
worst damage had already happened, though I didn't
know it yet.
Looking out the front window I could see the tops of my
neighbor's mango trees lying on his lawn. Out the back I
saw several of my queen palms were down, one of them
having smashed the chain link fence as it uprooted, the
others having snapped in half like giant soda straws. The
entire yard was filled with major branches from some
other trees, but they seemed to be still standing. Luckily,
nothing had landed on the house this time. (And our
temporary roof patch, still there from Katrina, held up
with no leaks!) I wondered, if it wasn't here yet, how
much worse it was going to be.

With the power out, there was nothing to do but listen to


repetitions of the same information on the battery-
powered radio while going stir-crazy in the dark. I
decided to take advantage of the wind direction to get a
first-hand experience of the storm. Our screened porch,
facing east, was on the downwind side, so I could sit
there perfectly safe and dry to watch the show, with a
solid concrete house at my back.

Thus began my aesthetic experience of the storm. This


was much better than watching it on TV. A tall palm
across the street served as a weather vane. By the
flapping of its few remaining fronds I could track the
gradual shift in wind direction from west to southwest.
Phrases better than my own came to mind as I watched:
"Blow, winds! Crack your cheeks!" from King Lear. And
from Patrick O'Brien's Captain Aubrey, on the deck of
his tall-masted ship, this marvelous understatement in
the teeth of a gale: "It's coming on to blow!" (He also
said, "I love a good blow," a statement that will make us
smile, but I must say I enjoyed this one.)

My own observations tended toward the technical, the


details. I remembered how the day before the storm
arrived I had seen low clouds scudding overhead as if
the whole sky were turning. Now they were merely
shades of gray with no edges. The wind was not
sustained but "lumpy." Turbulent from going over so
many obstacles, it sometimes seemed to blow
downward, as if invisible waves were rolling overhead
and breaking on us. Sometimes in the lulls I could hear
the next gust coming through the trees with a roar before
it landed. Occasionally a really powerful one came
along, as if to show how much stronger it could get.

There was little rain, but when a squall came through it


fell as a penetrating mist, fine as an aerosol spray. I
didn't see any more trees come down. Once they had
fallen, they lay there like casualties of war. Gravity had
taken them to an equilibrium from which they could not
move.

Perhaps the strangest things were the small moments of


sudden calm, in which a single leaf might be seen falling
from the air. Also incredible was the quick appearance
of birds--the small green parrots that have gone native
here, and little wrens only a few inches long, using the
lulls to flit from one branch to another. It has always
amazed me that these tiny creatures can survive the
tremendous force of the winds.

By early afternoon the winds were falling. I could


release my cats again from captivity and join them in
exploring the wreckage of the yard. Time to start sawing
again, and piling up the debris.

It almost seemed like normal.


nortspews.blogspot.com
Thursday, October 27, 2005

Disasters are Good Practice


Seems like the last few years there have been plenty of
disasters to go around. Between earthquakes, tsunamis,
terrorist attacks, wars, and hurricanes we seem to be
always on the recovery from one calamity or another.

If there is an upside to all this I would suggest it might


be in teaching us the tolerance, cooperation, and charity
that we need if we are to continue prospering as a
species and as a civilization. World conquest and
destruction can be attempted unilaterally, but recovery
and rebuilding is a process we have to undertake as a
global community.

Even locally, I feel we are stronger for having gone


through a repetition of natural disasters. It's a good
exercise to have to share resources with our neighbors,
and to learn how to drive cooperatively instead of
competitively. Amazingly enough, even major
intersections with four lanes of traffic going both ways
can operate pretty smoothly as four-way stops. Despite
reports of the accidents that occur when dead traffic
lights are ignored, the rule is actually courtesy, with
most motorists cheerfully waving in acknowledgment as
they are granted the right of way by turns.

Consider these times to be dry runs for really serious


situations that could occur in the future. If, God forbid,
the big earthquake finally hits California, or nuclear
weapons are used again, or a large meteor suddenly
strikes from the depths of space, we will need all our
resources, both material and spiritual, to be able to cope
with the aftermath.

Practice, let's hope, makes perfect.


nortspews.blogspot.com
Wednesday, November 09, 2005

From Primordial Soup to


Immemorial Nuts
I just picked up a couple more fragments of information
on the "Intelligent Design" issue (is it only coincidence
that the initials are ID, as in "unconscious mind?") and
thought they deserve comment.

It seems those "gaps" they talk about are gaps in the


fossil record, as if the theory can be demonstrated only
by uncovering the remains of every version of every
animal that has ever existed--or at least enough of them
so a smooth progression of forms can be laid out in a
museum.

Of course, that is asking the impossible. The conditions


that produce good fossils are rare and random, and
finding them can be quite a task in itself. It's a miracle
we have found as many as we have and that careful
study of them has revealed as much as it has. Even so,
there is plenty of evidence from comparative anatomy of
both living and extinct animals to be able to chart their
development and their relations to one another.

That's not to say that we fully understand it all yet, or


that there may not be surprises in store. It was a recent
discovery that the dinosaurs may be more closely related
to modern birds than to modern reptiles--that they may
in fact have been warm blooded. But this is another
example of how our knowledge of the present can help
us shed light on the past. Rather than throwing up our
hands at the "complexity" of it all and falling back on
Divine powers to explain it, we are rewarded by
pursuing careful observation and logical analysis.

Another "gap" is the mystery of what happened in the


Cambrian period when a tremendous proliferation of
new forms of life appeared in the relatively short space
of about five million years. Was this God fanning the
flames? We don't have a definite answer yet, but there is
a fascinating solution put forward by Andrew Parker in
his book, In the Blink of an Eye (here's a review).

Observing that the eyeball originated during that time,


he proposes that it was the refinement of vision that
explains the surge of evolution. Suddenly, geologically
speaking, predators could see their prey better and prey
could see the predators coming. Mates could find mates
by appearance. So issues of coloring, locomotion, speed,
and reflexes all became dramatically more important
than they had been.

For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't even


matter if Parker is right. It's a wonderful and plausible
example of how we can figure things out.

The last "gap" is the supposed lack of evidence for the


"primordial soup" of organic chemical compounds in
which life, it is thought, first formed. This is admittedly
a big missing piece, but we are not without clues. We
know so much about the molecular structures of living
things that we can begin to make educated guesses about
what sort of conditions would be necessary for simpler
chemical compounds to link up into something that can
reproduce itself. One thought is that lightning may have
played a part--how's that for Divine intervention!
Dramatic enough for you?

But the eventual proof of this will probably only happen


if and when we can recreate it in a laboratory (wait till
you hear the screams of protest over that) or if we find it
taking place on another planet, which is far less likely to
happen. We won't see it here on Earth, of course,
because the conditions have changed. The atmosphere
we breathe has been created by living things, and is no
longer the harsh mix of gases that must have existed In
the Beginning.

Maybe if we could just find the Primordial Can that the


Primordial Soup came from ...
nortspews.blogspot.com
Friday, November 11, 2005

My Father, the Veteran


I tend to think of my dad at least once every Veteran's
Day.

He came of age after World War II had already started.


His mother decided her boys were not going to wait to
be drafted, so she drove him down to the recruiting
office to sign up. Thus, at the tender age of 18, a dreamy
student who wanted to be a classical pianist became part
of the US 4th Armored Infantry Division. Of above
average intelligence, he was offered a chance to go to
Officer's Candidate School after basic training. By the
time he came out as a new second lieutenant, the D-Day
invasion had already happened. He crossed the Atlantic
on a troop ship stuffed with soldiers. Years later he told
me how seasick he'd been from the pitching of the ship,
and how he finally found a perch high up where, hiding
behind a metal wall, he couldn't see anything but the
sky, which made it seem as if they weren't moving
around so much.

His unit went into France and Belgium, where they


ended up on the fringes of the famed Battle of the Bulge,
the last great German offensive of the war. He lived
through many horrible experiences during the short
space of a few months of intensive action. Once he was
nearly killed when an artillery shell landed right behind
him, knocking him flat on his face and sending a piece
of shrapnel through his backpack, belt, and overcoat,
and stopping just short of his skin.

Another time the convoy he was in, winding around hills


in the dark, came under fire. They shot back for half an
hour before discovering it was the head of their own
column that had mistaken them for the enemy.

Finally, one cold winter night while they were firing


blindly into the dark in a snowstorm, a single bullet
finally found him, punching him in the chest and
knocking him down. Men around him shouted "medic!"
and "the lieutenant's hit!" but all my dad said was, "Oh
my God, my forty-dollar coat!" As an officer, he had to
buy his own clothes, and he had just obtained a new
overcoat for the winter.

That was the end of his war. His lung had collapsed and
he lost a lot of blood, but he pulled through okay. The
rest of his time in Europe was spent convalescing. After
the war was over he even got to do some sightseeing on
leave, visiting Switzerland and Italy as well as France
and Germany. By the time I knew him, his wound was
an old scar--a small one on his chest near the right
shoulder, a larger one on his back from the exit.

But there were other wounds. His faith had been


shattered by seeing what supposedly Christian people
were doing to each other in war. Combined with his
study of philosophy when he went to college, the
experience led him to leave the Catholic church and to
become an agnostic, if not atheistic, seeker.

He was also politically disillusioned. Aware that the US


had committed atrocities every bit as abhorrent as those
of its enemies (the fire bombings of Dresden, most cities
in Japan, and the perhaps needless nuclear bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as prominent examples), he
wondered what the war had accomplished. Fascism may
have been defeated overseas, but he saw it rearing its
ugly head here at home in the form of the Goldberg
executions, the McCarthy hearings, and the increasing
imperialism of American foreign policy. If the aim of the
war had been to make our future safer, then it had failed.
Instead we were living under a permanent threat of
nuclear destruction more horrible than anything that had
gone before.

His college education had been postponed, and even


though he managed to pick up where he left off,
attending Columbia University and the Julliard music
school on the GI Bill, some degree of focus and drive
had left him. He married his wartime sweetheart, started
a family, and left New York to begin a new life in
Miami.

But the new life eluded him. It became a struggle of


survival as he moved from one menial job to the next ...
sales clerk, postal worker, milk delivery man, nurse's
aide at the Veterans Hospital. My mom went to work to
bring in more money. Things were always tough
between them. When I was twelve they separated, then
divorced.

Eventually Dad found a career in botany through


Fairchild Tropical Garden, where he worked until his
death in 1974. He even went back to college at the
University of Miami and got a degree in botany,
graduating cum laude at the age of 38. It was never a
lucrative thing to do, but he seemed to find some peace
and contentment there among the lush tropical
vegetation.
His old wound only hurt in certain kinds of weather, but
he suffered from chronic bronchial infections for the rest
of his life, and twice developed pneumonia. The second
time the disease refused to respond to treatment. He
died, you might say belatedly, from complications as a
result of military service. He was 52 years old.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Monday, November 14, 2005

The Once and Future Draft


Let's think about the draft for a moment. Not the annual
NFL draft, but the military one, and not the historical
draft that ended in the 1970's with the Vietnam War, but
the future draft, the one that may soon have to be
reinstated to support the military adventures of the
current administration in Washington.

The Founding Fathers were so anti-military that they


didn't want their new country to have a standing army at
all, only state militias consisting of volunteer citizen-
soldiers who would defend the nation but not make war
in the name of any king. The politicians who followed
them, however, soon found themselves at odds with
England again in the War of 1812 and with a need for a
stronger navy. Then, in expansion mode, the army was
used to annex Texas from Mexico (I don't think I've ever
used three X's in one sentence before—make that four)
and to virtually annihilate the Indians to make way for
westward migration. In only a generation or two, what
the Founding Fathers had tried to avoid had happened:
the United States had a powerful military arm that was
being used for aggressive purposes.

There was still a strong sentiment against military


conscription, however. It took the Civil War, with its
massive casualties, to make the first draft necessary. In
spite of all the “volunteer” regiments that were raised,
mandatory conscription was the only way to satisfy the
insatiable need of both armies, North and South, for
fresh “cannon fodder.”

Even at its inception the draft was far from universal or


egalitarian. It was possible to send someone to serve in
your place, so many who found it inconvenient and
could afford the option hired stand-ins for themselves.
The pattern of exceptions for the well-to-do was
established from the beginning.

The draft was discontinued as soon as it was no longer


needed. We never had a so-called “peacetime” draft until
after the Second World War. Of course, calling that
period of the Cold War “peacetime” is begging the issue,
since it included two major undeclared wars—in Korea
and Vietnam—and coincided with the largest buildup of
weaponry in our history.
While it was no longer possible to send someone else in
your place, the wealthier members of society could find
other ways to exempt themselves when they chose to do
so. Doctors and lawyers could be employed to build
cases for medical deferments or to find other loopholes,
and local draft boards could be subject to persuasion by
powerful members of small communities. If nothing
else, easy duty could be obtained in the National Guard,
which fulfilled the service requirement with a minimum
sacrifice of time, and reduced active combat duty to a
remote possibility. Even for the middle class, simply
attending college could be enough to delay a draft notice
until the age of enlistment had safely passed.

Quite early, allowances were made for individuals who


objected to warfare on religious or moral grounds. This
made the unpopular system more palatable to some,
though in practice the “Conscientious Objector” status
was difficult to obtain and carried a stigma of anti-
patriotism which was undeserved and unjust.

The situation changed during the Vietnam War, however.


As the conflict became more obviously pointless and
wrong, public opinion turned draft resistance into a
mainstream option that was chosen by a large segment
of the population. Thousands who would never have
thought of themselves as Conscientious Objectors
participated in mass protests and draft card burnings.
Eventually the draft, and the war itself, became
untenable.

Interestingly, and unfortunately, when President Nixon


first instituted the draft lottery, which informed many
that they were unlikely to be called up, and then
abolished the draft altogether, it soon became apparent
that he had knocked the legs out from under the
resistance movement. The war had been forced to a
close, but the return to an all-volunteer army set the
stage for the eventual resurgence of militarism as a tool
of foreign policy. Clearly, the general public no longer
cared as much about what its army did as long as they
themselves were not required to do anything more than
pay for it.

The peace making initiatives of President Carter in the


middle east were soon replaced by Reagan's popular
invasion of Grenada, new “advisory” missions in
Central America, and vastly increased spending for new
ballistic missiles and a “Star Wars” defense system of
mythic proportions (and fictional capabilities). Then
George H.W. Bush followed suit by sending in the
troops to extract the intractable President Noriega (a
former CIA plant who had stopped playing ball), and
ultimately to engage in the first Gulf War, most likely
because his close family friends in Saudi Arabia were
getting uncomfortable about Iraq.

Even President Clinton was drawn into conducting


poorly targeted military reprisals against “possible”
terrorist targets in Africa, and an underfunded debacle of
intervention in Somalia. Such is the momentum of
militarism that it begins to make its own demands to be
put to use.

Now we are responding to the actions of terrorists by


invading and occupying entire countries full of mostly
innocent and law abiding citizens, and subjecting them
to wholesale bombing campaigns. We should be asking
many questions. Is this an appropriate or effective
response? Does it protect us from terrorism? Does it
make terrorist attacks less likely or more likely in the
future? Where does it all end? Is Iraq the last country we
will have to coerce into a “regime change,” or only the
next in a series?

Perhaps the best question of all is: how much longer can
we maintain a policy of global military offensive with an
army of volunteers? It seems clear from enlistment
statistics that the draft, so long abhorred by the country
and so recently set aside, will soon have to be
resurrected yet again.

There will be many repercussions from this, but


foremost among them will be that a new generation of
Americans will look with new eyes at our national
intentions. For better or worse, the prospect of war
seems entirely different when it is an event for which
your own participation is not requested, but required by
law.

By all means, let us look again. With luck and good


judgment, we may find that we have better things to do.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Monday, November 21, 2005

A Day in the Life of the Book


Fair
It's hard to believe, but I've been coming to the Miami
Book Fair for 22 years, since it first began. During that
time it rapidly matured from something that could have
been a flash in the pan into the premier such event in the
country.

Maybe it has something to do with publishers living in


New York, which is growing grayer and colder by mid-
November, while Miami is usually waiting for its first
cool spell of the fall. But if it were only the weather,
then surely mid-winter would be the time to insure the
biggest draw.

Instead, what has insured the Fair's success is the


maturing of community support. More than the
existence of financial grants, it is the dedication of those
who make it happen--people like Mitchell Kaplan,
owner of Books&Books, our favorite area book store--
and those who turn out in droves to attend the hundreds
of readings it produces, not only on the weekend of the
Street Fair but throughout the year.

The Book Fair plays no small part in supporting the


community of writers in the region. Writers, both
successful and aspiring, have an annual fountain of
inspiration in their midst, a chance to see and hear and
hang out with some of the most notable figures in print.

I long ago gave up trying to take it all in. It's not


possible. The readings take place simultaneously in
twelve different rooms ranging in size from the large
auditorium that seats up to a thousand down to intimate
classroom or gallery spaces--even, in the case of The
Spoken Word Cafe, a tent. And they last from 10 am to
past 5 pm. Even if you don't eat (and who can pass up
the opportunity to purchase overpriced fair food washed
down with a five-dollar lemonade?) and even if you try
to limit yourself to the things that interest you most,
there are still schedule conflicts that force you to make
tough choices, or to duck out of the question session at
the end of one reading and sneak into the middle of
another one already in progress. On top of that, you have
to find at least a little time to do some book shopping in
the stalls on the street.
But then, that's the fun of it. For a reader, the chance to
wallow in readings of this quality, so plentiful that you
can't do them all, amid heaps and stacks and racks full of
books, is a feast that naturally belongs where it is on the
calendar, right before Thanksgiving.

Just to give you a taste, here's how my own choices ran


this year:

Saturday

We arrived late but still caught the second of two


travelogues. Elliot Hester, a native Miamian who spent a
year making his way around the world, has written
Adventures of a Continental Drifter. He entertained us
with a tale about the night he was nearly beaten to a pulp
by the martial arts bouncers in a tourist trap in Bangkok,
saved only by his remote resemblance to boxer Mike
Tyson. A lot more fun to hear about than to live through!

11:30 found us basking in the warm rays of Caribbean


culture. Robert Antoni took us through an all-night
muddy bash during Carnival in Trinidad--enough to
make you want a shower by the time he was done.
Then Pablo Medina shifted gears to the complete
introspection of his cigar-maker invalid, a transplant
from Cuba to Ybor City (near Tampa) where he was
felled by a stroke and turned into a bed-ridden patient,
unable to move. I've never heard such material so
vividly portrayed since I read Dalton Trumbo's Johnny
Got His Gun, about a more horrifically afflicted veteran
of World War I.

Finally Marlon James captivated us with his gossiping


old Jamaican ladies and an account of how the "Rum
Preacher" came to a bad end. As they say in the islands,
"soon come, mon."

At 12:30 it was time to do politics. We sat in on George


Packer's presentation on The Assassin's Gate, his study
of how things are going in Iraq (the short version: not
well). Hard to believe there has been enough time for
him to research and write on this subject while it is still
unfolding daily, but his interviews with people "on the
ground," as opposed to those in high places, have
yielded rich fruit.

The other member of this panel (David Rieff had to


cancel) was Jonathan Ralston Reid, a Canadian who has
written The Collapse of Globalism. This is not
something he's predicting, but something which has
already happened, according to his interpretation. All the
promises of the "new world order" having failed, with
the opposite results all around us, does make it look as if
the emperor paid too much for those invisible clothes.

I'm pleased to be able to count some of the authors as


friends and mentors. After lunch we had poetry for
dessert at the reading of James Brock (friend), Michael
Hettich (maybe not quite friend but certainly
acquaintance), and Campbell McGrath (closer to the
mentor category since my workshop with him at the
Seaside Writer's Conference). It was good to note how
"friendly" these differing voices were with one another.
And always a pleasure to listen to.

[An example of schedule conflict here -- one of our


friends was notably absent because she just HAD to see
novelist Amy Tan, currently appearing in another
building.]

But we weren't done yet. At 4 pm. we heard Bruce Feiler


on Where God Was Born. Feiler is personally exploring
the historical landscape of the Bible, visiting such places
as the Garden of Eden (currently paved). His earlier
work, Walking the Bible, will soon make an appearance
as a Public TV documentary series. Consult your local
listings.

Also on this panel was former poet laureate Robert


Pinsky, who has written a scholarly Life of David. Most
memorable for me in his presentation was the
description of what happened to the Israelites after they
arrived in the Promised Land. Miffed at the way they
behaved, the vindictive God that they had back then
arranged for an army to come in and move them back
out. The lesson in this was that the important, essential
thing was not having a nation, or a temple, or even a
rabbi or priest, but that every person would have their
own relationship with God. It was a maturing of the
concept of religion, and emphasized that religious
experience was directly available to each individual.

Sherwin B. Nuland was the final participant in this


session, and introduced me to someone I was ignorant
of: Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher of the 13th
century who dared to correct the Talmud if it differed
from the opinions of science. Where is he when we need
him?

By now you catch the drift--we're only at the end of day


one, and worn out. Time to ride the people-mover down
to Pericone's Italian eatery, and to dine amid the outdoor
foliage.

Sunday

We launched into Sunday with John Dufresne (both


friend and mentor) who regaled us with more samples
from Johnny Too Bad (which might have been titled The
Further Adventures of Spot the Dog). I confess I have
not yet finished this book, though I already own an
autographed copy. The way things are going, John may
have read it to me by then. He also gave us a new
"found" story ("I no longer make things up, I just write
them down.") about a green-card wedding and its
aftermath.

John's partner for this session was Richard McCann, a


new discovery for me. McCann's careful, intimate prose
cuts close to the emotional bone. And I was delighted to
hear him relate how long he labors compulsively over
his revisions.

Interestingly, both authors had photographs to back up


their tales, prompting me to think we should all have to
prove the veracity of our fiction by presenting the
evidence.
On the advice of my sister-in-law we hastened over to
the auditorium at 1:00 to catch Jonathan Safran Foer
reading from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Mr.
Foer is entirely too well poised and assured for someone
of his tender years and has no right to be able to write as
he does, with wonderful inventiveness and killingly
accurate insight. Media hype has not obscured the scale
of this talent which, if we're lucky, will be with us for
quite awhile. Our time was well spent.

At 3:00 we attended Science Matters, which was


broadcast live on CSPAN. It seems a new publisher,
Atlas Books, is bringing out a continuing series of
science books written by novelists for the lay reader. The
idea is to come up with eminently readable and
interesting treatments on the lives and works of
scientists.

Judging by the three examples, the project is off to a


great start. In The Discoveries, Alan Lightman has
documented a number of scientific breakthroughs during
the 20th century, ranging from Einstein's first theory to
the discovery of the structure of DNA to measurements
of the distance to the stars.
Rebecca Goldstein, a former mathematician herself, has
written The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel--a proof,
she insists, which is accessible in its outline to the lay
reader, with little math or symbols required. I'll let you
know after I read it. I took a class in statistics once, and
a year later I could no longer read my own crib notes for
the final exam.

Finally, David Leavitt has written a new account of Alan


Turing's invention of the computer. Titled The Man Who
Knew Too Much, the book focuses equally on Turing's
famous contribution to the breaking of the German
Enigma code, his invention of all the key concepts used
in computer design long before they could be built, and
his persecution as a "security risk" due to his
homosexuality. Having read the other Turing bio, Alan
Turing, the Enigma, I look forward to this new insight
into his life and work.

Finally, it was 4:30 and time for poetic dessert again.


Philip F. Deaver, Andrew Glaze (who I met while
hosting the Butterfly Lightning readings), Jesse Milner
(friend), and Susan Wheeler collaborated to bring a
perfect end to a perfect weekend.

Only 363 days until the next one. Book your rooms now.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Thursday, December 08, 2005

Signs and Wonders


I've just had my spiritual inspiration for the week from
an unexpected source: Harper's Magazine. The
December issue contains two articles I can highly
recommend.

First is the cover story, "Jesus Without the Miracles," in


which Eric Reese draws a fascinating parallel between
Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the recently unearthed
Gospel According to Thomas.

Jefferson, as a private amusement, literally took a pair of


scissors to the Bible and over the course of "a few
evenings" (amazing what there was time for before TV)
extracted the actual teachings of Jesus from the
encrustations of story and myth that grew up around
them in later centuries. The result was something similar
to the legendary source for the Gospels that was thought
to have been lost. In it, according to Reese, "Jesus never
performs a miracle and never claims that he will have to
die for the sins of humankind." Instead we are left with
the record of his teaching, a stream of exhortations for
us to love one another, to do no harm, to "become as
passers-by," to live gently on the earth.

Amazingly, even as Jefferson was working on his piece


of clip-art, the actual source material was sleeping
soundly in a clay jar beneath the sands of Egypt. When it
was literally unearthed in the 20th century, after two
thousand years, and the fragile scraps of papyrus were
deciphered, the document revealed a remarkably similar
teaching, full of parables and Zen koan-like puzzles, and
equally devoid of any talk of miracles or salvation.

Right off the bat, for example, one of the first of these
"sayings of Jesus" goes like this: "Let him who seeks
continue seeking until he finds, and when he finds he
will be troubled, and when he has been troubled he will
marvel, and he will reign over the All." Heady stuff,
seeming to describe the feelings of a modern reader
trying to make sense of all this, as well as the condition
of spiritual seekers of all ages, and pointing the way
toward the eternal.

The companion piece in the same issue of Harper's is a


wonderful memoir by Scott Korb titled "All That I Have
is Yours," which is what his stepfather told him on his
death bed, and also a quotation from the story of the
prodigal son. That story is so well known it is easy to
overlook its significance, but something about the
immediacy of Korb's retelling brought it home to me in
a new way.

As you may recall, the whole thing began with the


younger son insisting on having his share of the
inheritance right away, so his father obliged by dividing
the estate and giving him half, which he promptly went
away to squander. When he reappears later, destitute, the
father not only welcomes him in great joy but throws
him a big party and even kills the fatted calf in his
honor. Seeing this, the elder brother says, "Um, excuse
me, but I'm still here, I've never asked for anything, I've
stayed by your side as a dutiful son, and now he comes
back and you kill the fatted calf for him?"

The father replies that they have to celebrate their joy,


that their son and brother who was as if dead has
returned to them. But more than that, he reminds him,
"everything I have is yours." In other words, you already
have everything there is, what more could you want? In
the larger context of the parable, in which God is the
father, we are reminded that we already have everything
there is, that we inherited it at birth--an entire world, a
whole universe that grows in size and richness the more
we learn of it--and that all we have to do in return is to
share it with one another. What more could we want
than everything there is?

The personal nature of this great gift appeals to the


Quaker in me. It is something we all share simply by
virtue of our humanity, with no need for salvation or the
mediation of saints and priests on our behalf. Jesus was
trying his best to tell us, "you're already saved, you
already live in heaven, what more could you possibly
want?" But, as he is also reported to have said, ruefully I
suspect, "unless you see signs and wonders, you will not
believe."

Personally, I think the survival of these words and the


record of them is plenty in the way of miracles. And I'll
be happy to take this day, this world, this one universe,
as the plenty that it is, and say, "Thank you, thank you
very much, this will do nicely."
nortspews.blogspot.com
Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Open Letter to My
Representatives
To: Senators Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez,
Representative Illeana Ros-Lehtinen

I am writing to express my concern over the recent news


that some members of a Quaker meeting in South
Florida have been listed as a "threat" as a result of a
domestic investigation by the military. (Story online at
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/.)

For several years now I have attended the Quaker


meeting in Miami. During that time I have met and got
to know many Quakers. I can tell you that it would be
hard to find, and almost impossible to imagine, any
group whose members are more honest, kind, well
intentioned, and --above all--open about their activities.

These are people who make a point of opening all their


proceedings to the general public. The sign on the door
always says, "All Are Welcome." Ironically, I am sure
that even government investigators, had their identities
been made known, would have been equally welcome to
attend, listen, and participate in whatever discussions
took place regarding military enlistment or other topics.

If there is any "threat" from such people, it is nothing


other than the threat that truth always poses to lies and
deceit. To subject any American citizens to covert
investigation, and to stigmatize them for doing no more
than exercising their Constitutional freedoms, would be
shameful enough; but to do so to such a group of
exemplary citizens, of exemplary human beings, goes
beyond questions of legality, and should cause us to
question the motives and intentions of those perpetrating
the investigation.

I sincerely hope that, as our elected representative in


Congress, you will investigate what has taken place and
make every effort to see to it that our freedoms are not
infringed by the ill-advised and overreaching actions of
any governmental agency, and especially of the military,
which has no Constitutional jurisdiction in domestic law
enforcement.

We look to you to make the laws we live by, and


likewise to see that they are upheld.
In accordance with the open nature of Quaker meetings,
this letter is being published online at
nortspews.blogspot.com so that nothing in it can be
considered to be concealed. I would welcome the
opportunity to publish your reply in the same spirit.

I received the following response from Senator Bill


Nelson [D] on January 17:

“Thank you for contacting me regarding the recent


reports of domestic surveillance activity by the U.S.
Government. The challenge of balancing America's
national security needs with personal privacy rights has
been made more complicated in recent years as
technology has become more advanced and more
intimately involved in American life. At the same time,
our military and law enforcement agencies must have
the tools they need to protect the country.

“The Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence


Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 and created a special
court, which operates in closed session, to consider
government wiretap requests in national security cases.
Two Supreme Court cases had previously established
that domestic wiretaps for national security purposes do
not inherently violate the fourth amendment's protection
against unreasonable searches, but do require judicial
approval. Congress passed FISA to bring the law into
conformity with those decisions. I am concerned about
recent reports of potentially unlawful domestic
surveillance activity without approval by the FISA court.
There will be congressional hearings on this topic this
year, and I will be looking very carefully at the
circumstances of this program.

“Please know that I take the security and privacy needs


of the American people extremely seriously. I will keep
your concerns in mind as this issue comes before the
Senate.”
This is apparently a prepackaged position statement, not
specifically about the Quakers in question, but at least it
relates to the wider issue of surveillance.
Senator Martinez [R] belatedly sent a form letter that
was not specific to the issue at all, just thanking me for
writing. He also added me to his email list for periodic
newsletters on all subjects.
I received no reply from Representative.Ros-Lehtinen
[R], but I was also added to her email list for
newsletters.
nortspews.blogspot.com

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Unto Us a Child is Born


At each holiday season for the past few years I've found
myself thinking of the words, "for unto us a child is
born," and of the wonderful musical setting given to
them by Handel in his Messiah.

First, the words lead me to muse on how this particular


holiday has become a celebration of the child. Even
though we adults give things to one another, we know
it's really about that shower of presents we rain on our
children (and in my case, grandchildren). And even
though there was one particular child in the past whose
birth this is meant to commemorate, we give our
attention, appropriately, to those who are among us now.

With wisdom, the birth of each child should be taken as


the great gift that it is, the miraculous appearance on
earth of a new being, a new consciousness. Each one is a
new blank slate on which a future may be written, each
one a new hope that the future will be an improvement
on the past as we grow toward a state of perfection that
we glimpse as possible.

It's as if any child might be our savior--or maybe all of


them, maybe each one born is one six-billionth of a
savior, each contributing to the construction of the new
year, the new beginning, that is always upon us. And
why not? If, as Quakers believe, "there is that of God in
everyone," why should we not celebrate this universal
divinity by worshiping our own children?

In light of all this, the joy expressed in Handel's music,


particularly in that one chorus, seems even more
meaningful. I've been listening to the excellent recording
of it by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of
Ancient Music, who, despite the antique aura of their
name, manage to make each note breathe with fresh life.

And if that one isn't exciting enough for you, try to find
the Roche Sisters Christmas album, We Three Kings.
Their version has all the vitality of their legendary a
capella performance of the Halleluia Chorus, and adds
the contemporary touch of tasteful electric bass and
synthesizers, with voice doubling effects to sweeten
their angelic sound even further. On top of that, they
came up with an inspired concluding sequence of
descending tones that nails down the message with
magnificent finality.

Each time they arrive at the part that says, "His name
shall be called," it gives me chills as they seem to add
the exclamation points that the text cries out for. Let me
leave you with this:

And his name shall be called ...


Wonderful!
Counselor!
The mighty God!
The everlasting Father!
The Prince of Peace.
nortspews.blogspot.com

Monday, December 26, 2005

Math and Magic


In my earlier blog on this year's Miami Book Fair, I
promised to report back after I read Rebecca Goldstein's
book, Incompleteness: the Proof and Paradox of Kurt
Gödel, and let you know if it could actually be
comprehended by a non-mathematician. Well, I've read
it, and the answer is ... kind of.

Even though my mind rebelled at the limited amount of


logical notation that was included, I did grasp at least the
general outline of what Gödel did. And even that was
enough to amaze me with its wizardry, and to give me
some small appreciation of the import of his
accomplishment.

The best way for me to present my take on it is to start


with another author and another interesting mind. In his
book, Hackers--Heroes of the Computer Revolution,
Steven Levy quotes the early MIT pioneer of computer
programming, Bill Gosper, as saying, "Data is just a
dumb kind of programming."

This opaque proclamation, seeming to make pretensions


of being deep, is really just a concise way of saying that
there is no difference in a computer between a byte of
program code or a byte of data, except for the context.

A computer that attempts to "run" data, executing it as a


series of instructions, will certainly "crash," since the
data will not conform to the precise requirements of the
codes and sequences which are the syntax of the logical
language of the program. Equally, a program trying to
read a stream of data will likely reach the same impasse
if it suddenly encounters program codes instead--the
codes would not conform to the expected type of data.

Programmers know that both of these situations occur


frequently as a result of logical glitches that cause the
program to look in the wrong memory location for its
next instruction or next piece of data.

But now imagine a computer in which data is also


programming, and vice versa. This analogy is as close as
I can come to understanding the method that Kurt Gödel
used in his proof of "incompleteness." He devised an
ingenious system of formal logic in which the
statements are simultaneously logical and arithmetical--
they have logical meanings and also numerical
identities.

Using this system, he proceeded to show how any


logically provable statement in it had a certain
mathematical characteristic. So he could mathematically
analyze any statement and determine if it was provable
or not.

Finally, he was able to show that certain statements


which are demonstrably true (because their arithmetic
works) can also be proven to be unprovable (because
they don't have that telltale mathematic signature of the
provable ones).

If this isn't enough to bend your mind, you must already


have a mind with a mathematical bent (!) and be able to
imagine this with greater perfection than I can. In fact,
you may have studied Gödel himself, in which case you
should write to explain how I have got it all wrong. But I
think, because of what Gosper said about data and
programming, that I can get a glimpse of how this would
work.

What it means is that Gödel created a logical system in


which numbers are simultaneously logic. Code and data
are one and the same, and function together to measure
what is true and what is provable.

Note that truth and provability are two separate issues


here. That is both the nature of the tool that Gödel used
in his proof, and also what he set about to prove: that
truths will always exist that we cannot logically prove.
Like Plato, he believed that Truth exists quite apart from
whether we can prove it, or whether we even know
about it. Truth is a priori, before experience.

Most amazing about all this is that the implications of


his proof (which, not being mathematicians, we will
have to take on their word) reach beyond the "sandbox"
of the formal system he created, beyond mathematics
and logic itself, into the realm of philosophy and
metaphysics. It says, provably and conclusively, that no
matter what we do there will always be truths that we
cannot prove are true. This cuts to our most fundamental
experience as living, conscious beings--the abundant
obviousness that Something exists, that we are part of it,
somehow identical with it, though we will be forever
unable to prove the What and Why of it, or even that we
did not imagine the whole thing.
Some trick, huh? The idea that mathematics can have
something so profound to tell us about our lives is
incredible and almost unprecedented.

Near the end of the book, in a wonderful sidelight on


Gödel's personality, Goldstein relates what happened as
he was preparing for his U.S. citizenship examination.
Ever the diligent student, Gödel made a thorough study
of the Constitution and was startled to discover a logical
flaw in it which, it seemed to him, would allow the
democracy to degenerate into tyranny!

Alas, the details of this insight, like the legendary


Fermat's Proof, were never recorded even by the people
who told the story, and so it has been lost to posterity.
Since we will be unable to patch the error with
legislation, it remains for us to live out the proof. Only
time will tell if Gödel left us with one more evidence of
his genius.
nortspews.blogspot.com

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Spiritual Machinery
I've just read Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of
Spiritual Machines. This follow-up to his earlier
volume, The Age of Intelligent Machines, attempts to
predict what will happen if current technological trends
continue for at least another century. Even though I'm
predisposed to look favorably on the prospects, I found
his conclusions challenging, not to say breathtaking.
And he's worth paying attention to. As an inventor who
did seminal work on computer speech recognition, he
knows what he's talking about. Many of his earlier
predictions for the decade of the 1990's have turned out
to be right on target.

He begins by presenting his theory of accelerating


returns. The gist of this is that, having taken a long time
to evolve, life took a much shorter time to develop
intelligence; in less time than that, intelligent humans
developed technology; and in less time than that the
technology developed into computation. He makes a
convincing case that evolution applies equally to social
forms and to technology, and that once these things are
set in motion they are destined to continue their
development at ever increasing speed.

But you don't have to accept that there will never be a


slowdown in technological development. If the current
exponential rate of progress continues for only another
few decades, computers will have vastly exceeded the
storage capacity and computational ability of not only
the human mind, but of ALL human minds put together.
By this time they will be designing and building their
own successors, and their role in our interdependent
world will be so critical that it will no longer matter if
they take over the world from us or not--we will be
unable to live in it without them.

Those who doubt this have only to consider what would


happen even now if all the computers in the world were
suddenly absent or nonfunctional. Transportation,
business, communication, government, weaponry,
appliances, even the monetary system that supports our
civilization in all its forms, all would collapse instantly.
This was not true only 25 years ago; it will be vastly
more true 25 years in the future.
Yet the picture Kurzweil paints is not bleak. Quite the
contrary, the upside to this revolution/evolution could
well be unprecedented prosperity, increased longevity
and quality of life for all members of the human race, as
well as their manufactured progeny.

But perhaps the most interesting part of all this is the


question of what constitutes a "human being." When you
look at our physical forms, it seems clear that we are not
the stuff of which we are made. Our cells, and the atoms
that comprise them, are constantly churning, constantly
replacing and remaking themselves. The "us" in there is
just a pattern, like the shape of our faces, passing
through the world like a wave across the ocean.

How can we say that the pattern of consciousness must


be limited to atoms arranged in a biological form and
not a "manufactured" one? As we watch RNA molecules
"manufacture" a new strand of DNA in our bodies, and
as we contemplate building new structures at the
molecular scale of nanotechnology, how can we define
the difference, if there is one?

How we will feel when confronted by "manufactured"


beings who claim to be equally conscious, and how we
will define our own "humanity" in that situation, is a
philosophical exercise we may as well start right now. It
won't be long before we will need the answers.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Monday, December 31, 2007

Time Capsule for the Real


Millennium
On the last day of 1999 I "planted" a time capsule on
the Internet by emailing it to a bunch of people in my
address book. That one has already gotten lost -- maybe
if you have a copy you could dig it up and send it back
to me. But a year later I did it again, and I'm unearthing
it here for the first time.

Even though it's only been seven years, it's already


interesting to look back on. And if any of it seems too
fantastic, you should check out what Chris Phoenix and
his cohorts are up to at the Center for Responsible
Nanotechnology.

December 31, 2000. Last year (1999) I planted a time


capsule to celebrate the millennium. But all year I've
been nagged by that argument about when the
millennium actually ends. Everyone who was just
waiting for the big odometer to roll over has had all their
fun by now, but the purists insist that centuries and
millenia end with zero and start with one, so it's only
happening now, at the end of 2000. (People are already
abandoning the habit of calling it "the year 2000,"
because when someone says "two thousand" we know
what they mean by now.)

This counting business is nonsense to many people, who


know that zero comes before one, but the purists remind
us there was never a year called "zero," only "one" CE
(formerly Anno Domine, but now Common Era) and
"one" BCE, or plus and minus one starting from the
uncertain zero point of Christianity. It does no good to
tell the purists that no one ever counted their dates
backwards, nor did they count down with
foreknowledge of when the big birthday would come.
We all know the calendar is just an arbitrary construct
laid on top of history like a piece of tracing paper with
grids on it. Nevertheless, celebrating the end of
something as it rolls over from zero to one rubs us the
wrong way.

My personal preference to resolving this debate is to go


back and invent a year Zero, the year before Jesus is said
to have been born, and to move all the BCE dates back
one year. The beauty of this is that none of the CE dates
need to be revised in history books and newspapers, and
we won't get confused when going through fifty years of
back issues of Life magazine. As for the BCE dates,
does anyone really care if the Trojan War started a year
earlier than it is usually recorded? Let's face it, there's a
reason they call this "ancient history." With this system
in place, we could celebrate the next century and
millennium at the moment they reach zero with a clear
conscience, and the purists would have nothing to be
pure about anymore.

However, no one in a position of power has asked my


opinion, so for now we're stuck with the current system,
flawed though it may be. The only thing left to do is
bury another time capsule so as to cover my bets. So
here it is, in this box you've unearthed after a hundred or
a thousand years.

The first item is this newspaper clipping that inspired


my time capsule last year. It tells how in 1995 they dug
up a time capsule from 1895 that was buried by the
ordinary people of a Midwestern town that was
celebrating its centennial that year (coincidentally, the
year before my own city of Miami was founded). What
captured my attention was the letter inside that was
addressed by one of the town's women to the people of
the miraculous future. She crowed a bit first, as you can
see, about the marvels of her own century -- the
invention of the steam engine, the transcontinental
railroad, telegraph, telephone, electric light and the
Victrola. But what got me was that last line: "And what
have you done?" she asked. "Have you perhaps invented
a flying machine?"

See what I mean? That was the farthest her imagination


could reach. But only eight years later, just three years
into the twentieth century, the Wright brothers took off.
The flying machine was the FIRST thing we did. Could
she have imagined -- or indeed could anyone else, even
the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells -- that within
twelve years after that airplanes would be used in
warfare for the first time, that in another ten years
Lindberg could fly across the Atlantic, that in another
ten airline passengers would fly around the world with
onboard meals and berths to sleep in, that in another ten
massive air forces and bombardments would largely
determine the course of all wars to come, that new
propulsion systems would first break the sound barrier
and then take pilots above the atmosphere into space,
that in less than eighty years people would walk on the
moon and contemplate the permanent colonization of
other planets?
And of course, there are all those other questions she
could not even have formulated. "Have you, perhaps,
split the atom?" she might have inquired. Ten years later
Einstein published his paper on relativity, and in another
forty the desert lit up in Alamogordo with a force that is
still beyond our comprehension. By century's end, the
waste products of decades of cold war bomb production
and ill-advised nuclear power plants have accumulated
into a problem that we can only bequeath to you poor
people of the future. Sorry! That one kind of got away
from us.

Or she might have said, "Have you invented a


computing machine able to solve difficult mathematical
problems?" Ha! Got you there, lady. You didn't even
notice old man Hollerith and his punch cards right in
your midst, nor could you imagine how these things
could be coupled with electronics to do everything from
code breaking to analyzing the weather. Not to mention
the rest: that the machines would have no moving parts,
that they would shrink to the size of dandruff flakes, that
they would become part of nearly everything else we
make, that our children would play with them as toys
and grow bored. In the early years of computers even the
people who worked with them doubted they would ever
do certain kinds of abstract thinking, such as playing
chess. Now only Grand Masters of the game can hope to
beat the best computers, and little ones make great
stocking stuffers for kids at Christmas. It is thought to be
only a matter of time before a computer can pass the
Turing Test -- proving itself indistinguishable from a
human in written conversation.

Or how about this one: "Have you discovered the secrets


of life itself?" (Now, don't get metaphysical on me, we
know what she would have meant.) In 1895 "genetics"
was no more than the statistical study of the results of
cross-breeding experiments, and "medicine" meant
primitive surgery with rudimentary anesthetics. Sixty-
odd years later, after the elimination of most common
childhood diseases and many adult ones, like polio and
smallpox, the double helix of DNA stood revealed, that
inner monument of ourselves that lives in every cell.
Forty more years and we have organ transplants, birth
control pills, cloning, human fertilization in lab
equipment, and we've almost finished mapping what
every gene is responsible for, with who knows what
applications of this knowledge to follow. (I'm leaving
out an interesting subplot here involving recreational
drugs. Like the Dupont company used to say, "Better
living through chemistry.")
At this point I'm going to stop making fun of that 1890's
woman and praise her for her courage in trying to
imagine what would come next. It's a daunting task even
for people who make it their business. Think of how
many science fiction writers imagined the first trip to the
moon before it happened, and they all got one thing
wrong: no one ever dared to imagine there would be live
TV coverage of the event all over the world. Nor did any
of them predict the advent of the personal computer or
how ubiquitous microprocessors would change
everything we do. No wonder people working in this
field now tend to write about futures so far away that
their predictions will never be matched to a reality, or
about hypothetical "what-if" worlds other than our own,
or about post-apocalyptic times in which things become
more primitive.

Not to be outdone, however, I'm going to venture a few


guesses in the hopes that it might interest you in the
future to know what we could or could not imagine, just
as I found it interesting to measure the foresight of that
19th century mind.

1) Politics. I'm not going to bother you about our recent


election, because you know the details, including the
next four years and their aftermath, better than I. No
doubt our fiasco is no more than a historical footnote,
illuminating how arcane our voting methods were.
Enclosed is a photocopy of one of our ballots so you can
see how it looked, and a sample punch card -- that's
right, the same kind Hollerith was using in 1895. Some
things change more slowly than others.

So never mind about us. How about you? I assume that


by a hundred years from now, not to mention a thousand,
the USA will be on the wane. They called the twentieth
century the American one, but it's over now. It's hard to
imagine how six percent of the world's population can
continue to hog most of its resources. Even though we're
a polite empire -- allowing everyone to keep their own
popularly elected governments, languages and cultures if
they want to -- we're still an empire, wielding power in
complex and subtle ways, and the thing about empires is
they don't last forever. You don't have to look back as far
as the Romans for evidence of this, or even Napoleon.
Just ask the Russians. Or consider that in 1895 Britannia
still ruled the waves, the sun never set on its empire, and
Victoria was "Queen of England and Empress of India,"
a title that would seem funny now if it weren't so sad.
Now the independent nation of India is a nuclear power
and on track to become the most populous country on
earth. Good luck to little old England if they ever have a
quarrel. Everything in my house -- and I mean
everything -- is manufactured in China. Isn't this some
writing on the wall? There's an old prophecy about what
happens when they awaken over there.

The only questions remaining are: a) How long have we


got? and b) How will we handle it? I hope the answers
are: A long time yet, and Gracefully. Thinking about this
makes me want to go back and read more about the
decline of Rome. There were a few interesting centuries
when they shrank back from the barbarians and turned
into the Holy Roman Empire before they became
completely irrelevant. Even then, it was Italy that lit the
fuse of the Renaissance, so you could say they had a
good long run. Britain was at the top of the heap for at
least a couple of centuries before its decline, and left a
lot of good civilization behind all the way from the
Magna Carta to ourselves. True, there have been empires
with shorter runs -- take the Third Reich, for instance.
But I've got to think we'll still have a role to play for
quite a while. For one thing, we've still got a lot of
money. I see us becoming a kind of gigantic Switzerland
with banks and technology companies spinning off lots
of trade. Maybe if we mellow out we could become
decent diplomats in mediating the disputes of others --
something we're doing rather ham-handedly at the
moment. Perhaps like Britain we will leave behind some
social gifts to the rest of the world. Certain principles of
individual freedom and basic human rights seem to have
taken root. And our legacy of art, music, drama,
literature and film is already enough to keep historians
happy for a long time.

Oh, one more thing: the future belongs to socialism. At


the moment this seems crazy, right when capitalism and
what we call "democracy" seem to have carried the day.
But in the era of increasing population and dwindling
resources it will not be possible to allow free enterprise
to run amok. Governments will have to exert more
restraining influence over the redistribution of wealth
from the poor to the rich, and to do a better job of
providing social services. Otherwise the political and
economic system will collapse on a level that will make
the Great Depression look like just another down day on
Wall Street. Some people will see this as a loss of
freedom, but it will be a necessary one and hopefully
benign. I'm watching the newly unified Europeans, who
already believe this and are managing to expand their
economy without letting so many people sleep in the
streets as we do here, or starve, or die from lack of
medical attention. Then there's China again ...
2) Technology. My friends who are science fiction fans
would never forgive me if I didn't say anything about the
future of space exploration. Here's a photo I took myself
at the Kennedy Space Center of one of our space station
modules being prepared for launch. If you look carefully
you can see me reflected in the glass, holding the
camera. (I hope you remember that support for the space
program in our time was spurred by tourism.) So, here
goes, even though I think this is as predictable as the
question about the flying machine.

It seems obvious that space exploration is at the stage


that world exploration was in about 500 years ago. Even
after Columbus blundered into the New World, having
mistaken the size of the globe, many years passed before
the Europeans figured out that the real value of the place
lay in colonization and the looting of resources -- not
gold, but crops and timber. They didn't guess that the
colonies would ever erupt into a world-changing social
experiment and ultimately out pace them to become the
dominant nation on the earth.

So history will repeat itself, as it does so well. We may


have gone to the moon prematurely and for the wrong
reason -- to demonstrate publicly our technological
superiority to our adversary in the Cold War -- but we'll
be back as soon as we figure out how to make money
there. Our visionaries are already talking about habitats
the size of small cities anchored in little gravitational
balance points in translunar space, major colonies with
mining and manufacturing operations on the moon and
Mars, bringing asteroids to earth orbit as a source of raw
materials, and eventually giant projects to alter the
climates of Mars and Venus to make them amenable to
human colonists. Having seen what's possible, given
time, how can we doubt that ALL of these things will
eventually come to pass? Not in a hundred years, but
certainly within the five hundred that gave rise to
ourselves, the population off the planet may surpass that
still on it, and the more vital culture of the frontier will
have plenty of time to grow to empire proportions, even
time to decline, before the next millennium arrives.
Eventually, probably sooner than we dare to think, we'll
move on to some other star's planets. If we stay alive,
you can't stop us.

But space won't be the major story. The woman in 1895


bragged about railroads, little realizing how they would
suffer economic collapse and become mere industrial
commodities before another half-century had gone by.
She bragged about the telegraph, but where was Western
Union when the fax machine and e-mail came along?

I'm guessing that biotechnology is in a similar stage of


its development now as electricity was in 1895. Back
then, electricity was just beginning to be put to some
interesting and far-reaching uses, but it would have been
hard to imagine what was to come in the next century --
first radio, then television ... from Victrola to hi-fi and
stereo, tape recorders, VCR's, CD's and DVD's ...
computers, automation, wireless communication
networks, satellite links ... electricity everywhere, doing
everything, impossible to live without. And more than
the simple fact of these technological artifacts is the
impact they have had on our way of life. Consider
television alone and what it has done to us, for good or
ill, irretrievably.

So I figure biotech will go like that. We've got no idea


where it leads yet, but it seems clear that we're about to
start tinkering with those genes in a big way. It will
probably take less time than we think before we're able
to design organisms to do anything we can dream up.
They've already got microbes that excrete the drugs we
want, but that's just a beginning. If you live in the South,
how about a variety of koala bear that lives exclusively
on kudzu? Keep a few as pets and get rid of the
obnoxious weed forever. Plus, they'll be cute,
domesticated and housebroken.

The system of raising animals as food and slaughtering


them will become a thing of the past. It will be possible
to create "meat" protein, perfectly formulated for human
needs, either hydroponically or as a crop in the fields. A
few eccentric gourmets will still insist on real beef or
lamb, but most people will feel it's abhorrent to eat a
dead animal -- tantamount to cannibalism -- and will
welcome the alternative. Look for it first on a bun in a
fast food restaurant. What will it taste like? Chicken, of
course! No, seriously, it will taste like anything you
want. Words like "beef," "veal," "goat," and "turkey"
will come to indicate flavors just as cherry, lemon, lime
and grape have been applied to candy without any fruit
being used.

The irony of this is that by the time it comes to pass


relatively few of the species of animal life on the planet
will still exist. Public debates will take place about the
feasibility and desirability of reconstituting extinct
species for environmental and aesthetic purposes. Once
these projects are under way, it will be a short step to
making improvements on the animal being recreated: a
toothless vegetarian alligator, a skunk that doesn't stink,
a crow with the voice of a canary. Design your own pets!
Even long extinct examples like mammoths and
dinosaurs would be possible, though the dangers and
expenses of such large projects will make them unlikely.
Anyway, it would be more fun to make something from
a Dr. Seuss book.

The big question, of course, is what we will do with


ourselves. Certainly we'll grow replacement organs,
either in our own bodies or outside, making donors
unnecessary and eliminating the shortage. We'll do
anything that becomes possible for medical reasons. But
it seems clear that the ability to redesign ourselves will
be an irresistible temptation. Sooner or later someone,
somewhere will do it. This makes me think that whoever
you are in the future you must look back on us as
something rather different and primitive compared to
yourselves. I only hope you have made wise choices.
Admittedly, most of us could be improved upon when it
comes to appearance, intelligence and behavior. I
imagine you more handsome and beautiful, able to use
more of your brains than the paltry percentage they say
we use now, and manufactured to be kinder and more
cooperative so you don't destroy yourselves the way we
are nearly doing.
Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all this. But
I'll make you a promise. If medical science is able to
increase my life span to 153 years (certainly a paltry
increase by your loftier standards), I'll revise this and
plant another time capsule on the last day of 2099.
Or is it the last day of 2100?

You might also like