Month: December 2008

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is the 1959 Hugo award winning novel that was recently produced as an unabridged audio book by Audible Frontiers, the science fiction and fantasy publishing imprint from Audible.com.  The book is wonderfully narrated by Jay Snyder.  When I became addicted to audio books back in 2002 I constantly searched for classic science fiction books on audio.  There weren’t many available.  For about a year now Audible Frontiers has been cranking out far more SF audio books than I have time to listen to.  Even today, when I go through the audio sections at book stores, I seldom see many science fiction titles for sale.

You can buy A Case of Conscience as an audio book through Amazon, via a link back to Audible, or from the iTunes Store, for $17-19 dollars, but the cheapest way to get it is to join Audible.com.  To get those bargain prices requires committing to a 1 or 2 book-a-month plan.  I buy an annual 24-pack deal and get books for $9.56 each.  To get some idea of why you might want to join Audible.com, look at Hugo Winners on Audible and Heinlein on Audio.  The catch is you have to be tech savvy enough to listen to audio books on your iPod or MP3 digital player.  Audible.com does allow you to burn CDs, but that takes some tech know-how too.

Now, do I recommend you go buy A Case of Conscience?  I enjoyed the book, but I’ve got to warn modern readers about 1950s science fiction.  A Case of Conscience is a fix-up novel, combining the 1953 novella set on the distant planet Lithia, with newer material, with the same characters back on Earth continuing the story.  Many classic science fiction novels, like Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and City by Clifford Simak, were fix-up novels.  They feel like reading short stories rather than novels.  The second warning I have to give is about the nature of classic SF, especially books from the 1950s.  They are idea driven, rather than plot driven.  My guess is young people today who love action driven science fiction might grumble about these older cerebral stories.

James Blish does some excellent world-building with Lithia.  It’s a planet poor in heavy metals like iron, but the intelligent beings there have learned alternate routes to scientific discoveries and have engineered a technologically advance society.  The Lithians never discovered magnetism and electricity, but have created technology based on static electricity, and pushed the limits of biology further than we have.  Blish did a great job creating a fascinating planet and culture, but that’s only the setup for the real idea that’s central to the book.

A Case of Conscience combines science fiction and religion to make for a philosophical story.  A team of four scientists are sent to evaluate Lithia, but the biologist, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, is a member of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit, and he makes a startling claim about Lithia and the Lithians.  The Lithians have no concept of God, afterlife, sin, or even things like fiction or lies.  They are logical.  Their culture is an atheist’s utopia.  I love what Blish does with this, and I won’t spoil any of his story.  I’m very appreciative to Steve Feldberg and Audible.com for bringing this book to audio.  I tried to read A Case of Conscience twice before in my life and didn’t get into it either time.  This wonderful audio reading made it completely accessible to me.  Blish’s style was too dry for me to read, but lovely to listen to.  I don’t know why.

The real reason I want to recommend this book is because we should think about contact with alien culture and religion.  What if SETI makes first contact and our new friends have never even imagined the concept of God?  That is possible.  What will they do when we tell them about our spiritual theories?  What if they have theories about the origin of the universe that we never thought about?

Most fundamentalists cannot handle even minor variations in their own religion, much less deal with ecumenical diversity of world religions.  Their narrowly focused personally held concepts would probably be blown away by ancient ideas in the many dead religions in our history, so how would they react to a true alien spirituality?  So what happens if the nightly news programs are bombarded with religious ideas from light years away?  What if these alien missionaries have existed for millions of years and know a lot more about everything?  Will we form cargo cults in reaction to these superior wisdom, like primitive people in the 20th century when encountering modern westerners for the first time?

In the next ten thousand years we will probably never meet any aliens face to face, but there’s a good chance of finally having some success with SETI, and initiate interstellar texting sessions with dialog response times in the decades, centuries or even millennia.  Even if we detected an alien signal today, it could take so long to respond and develop a way to converse that it could be centuries before we get down to chatting about vague philosophical concepts.  The novelty of the alien existence will wear off before we know what they think.

Today, because of science fiction, I believe most of the world assumes that there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe.  We also assume we’ll share the same mathematics, physics and chemistry, but will probably diverge with biology.  But what kind of overlap will be possible for philosophy, religion, art and music?  Music has a relationship with mathematics and physics, so it is possible there could be strange alien music we could hear and think of as melody.  Art connects with vision which also connects with physics.  The idea of creating beautiful objects that nature didn’t could be common.

Alien religion and philosophy are harder to imagine.  James Blish essential creates an alien world and then forces a John Milton like Catholic interpretation upon it.  Mary Doria Russell explores the same ground in her magnificent novel, The Sparrow.  Is it possible to evaluate an alien religion without seeing it through our own glasses made from our religion?  Can we even see a religion without being religious?  Do dolphins and whales have religion?  They are the closest thing we have to alien intelligence and we know so little about them.

Is worship the defining characteristic of religion?  Is it possible to have religion without gods, either seen or unseen?  If all aliens have the same image in their homes, do we consider that a sign of religion?  Would aliens exploring our world think of religion when they count all the photos of Brittany Spears?

We often talk as if God is the same deity whether the Earthy believer is Christian, Muslim or Jew.  Would our alien friends see that?  Would they assume our God is their God?  For most of this planet’s history, our believers believed their God made this world, but they never knew it was just one of billions upon billions of worlds.  Does each world get their own creator?  Or is their one God that knows about every sparrow on this world, also know about every sparrow like creature on every other world?

In the end, we have to judge James Blish on how he handles his religious problem in A Case of Conscience.  Does the ending imply that Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez was right in his judgement of Lithia?  If that is true, then we have to believe that Blish does believe, at least for this story, that it’s possible that our God is supreme, that our Earth is the center of reality, and that all the rest of the universe is part of a lesson to teach us about God’s word.  Isn’t it rather strange that God would build such a big school-house just for us?

What would a universal religion be like that covered a universe fourteen billion light years across and was home to billions of intelligent life-forms and their planets.  Knowing as much astronomy as I do I find it hard not to be an atheist, but I could be wrong.  I believe religion is only practical at the tribal level, but again I could be wrong.  But if there is one God and his territory covers all of the cosmos, then I can’t help believe that mathematics, physics, chemistry and all the other sciences is the true Bible of this God.

JWH 12/21/8

Losing My Modesty

One thing about getting older is you go to the doctors more often.  Another thing about getting older is doctors want to examine places that you’ve tried to keep hidden all your life.  So far, I’ve been lucky, and all my surgeries have been out-patient procedures, but I’ve seen the generation ahead of me spend more and more of their dwindling time in hospitals, and I know a lot of painful and embarrassing adventures are in store for me.  I never worry about dying, but the thought of peeing, but especially dumping, in a bedpan gives me the willies.

Recent excursions with the medical profession are preparing me for what’s to come, and I’ve decided that getting used to things little by little is the way to go.  A few years back I had a hernia surgery.  Beforehand, I was all worried about getting naked in front of so many people, but when the time came, being a turkey on the dinner table surrounded by six masked men and women didn’t turn out to be as embarrassing as I thought.

I was also worried about being put under for the first time, but all I got was twilight sleep and it was a truly fun experience.  One moment I was the naked guy trying to joke with six strangers and BOOM, the surgeon was rolling a giant plastic band-aid over my belly-button area.  Literally, no time had passed.  The recovery room turned out to be a bummer with frightened people coming out of general anesthesia, crying, screaming, puking – leaving me afraid of getting more than twilight sleep in the future.  So that’s another big fear I have.  I’m afraid of intubation and heavy knock-out drugs.

Another anxiety is having my below the belt hair shaved.  I went in for a heart procedure last year where the plan was to snake some kind of roto-rooter up my leg vein and into my heart and zap it.  I thought for sure they wouldn’t need to shave me, but I was wrong.

I was lying on a gurney in a staging area when a cute young nurse came in carrying a toolkit that looked like her job was blood collecting.  I said, “You here to collect blood?”  And she said, “No,” and pulled out a little washcloth size towel, looked aside while throwing back my covers, slapped the towel over my genitals, grabbed on good, and then whipped out a plastic disposable razor with her other hand and quickly began shaving me.

“Wow!  You have quite a method for protecting my modesty,” I said.

“I don’t want to see anything, and I know you don’t want to show anything,” she said while dry scrapping the hair off my thigh and across the top of my crotch.

“I am a little modest,” I admitted, “but I mostly don’t want to gross young people out with naked oldness.”

“Thank you,” she said with an appreciative smile.  “And oh my god,” she suddenly remembered, “I know what you’re talking!  The first woman I had to work with was old and wrinkly, and before I had a chance to glance away she just let it all hang out for me to see.  I sure wished she hadn’t shown me that future.”

“I don’t even want to imagine that,” I said think about all the old women I still wanted to see naked.  This cutey and I went on to have a very pleasant conversation about not seeing old naked body parts.  It was an entirely fun experience talking with this girl who was clutching my package with a little rag and chatting with me.  I realized then hospital adventures wouldn’t all be horrors.  I’m still scared of going in a bedpan, but who knows maybe it won’t be as bad as I imaged.

Like I said, I’m working my way up to the big stuff, like a heart bypass, or brain surgery, and the dreaded bedpans.  Each little adventure with doctors and nurses chip away at my modesty and fears.  Like a few weeks ago when I went to see my doctor about cholesterol drugs.  I timidly wanted to ask her about an annoying mole on my inner thigh but was going to chicken out and wait to see my lady skin doctor.  Then my doctor asked, “While you’re here, can I do a regular physical?”

A little while later, when my doctor had her finger up my exit hole, I started thinking maybe I should ask her about that mole.  Then she had me turn around and she began playing ball with mine trying to determine if I had a hernia, so I figured this was as good a time as any to ask her to look just a little closer at something I didn’t want her to see in the first place.

“Where?” she replied when I meekly brought up the topic.

I pointed behind the right sack she was holding to a place on my leg.

“Hey, I can slice that off in a jiffy.  Wait here,” and she pulls out a green paper robe and handed it to me.

Great I thought, now I won’t have to expose myself to my lady dermatologist.  I’ll get everything done today.  She leaves and I take off the rest of my clothes and put on the paper robe on backward so it feels like a dress, a mini-dress.  I figured my doctor went to get her scalpel.  Then a nurse comes in with a kit of stuff.

“Where are we cutting?” she asks with a nice friendly smile.

I’m trying to imagine what the etiquette of legally exposing oneself to a strange young woman is and all I can say is, “down there.”

“Show me.”

So I hike up a leg, hold my dress up like a little girl showing off her underwear and push aside my testicles.  She gets a needle out and sticks it into a little vial while giving me a casual look.  Then another woman comes in, the physician’s assistant, and I flop my dress down.  Just how many young women get to see me naked today?  When the door is opened I worry that some mother walking her kid to another exam room will see the big fat nude bearded man and traumatize their poor kid’s psyche and ruin any fantasies the mom might have about fun with older men.

“Let’s get you on the table,” the assistant says pushing me over as the doctor bustles in.  The room is about half the size of a tiny bedroom, and now there’s four of us in there.  Three women and a naked fat man with a paper dress that’s so short that it’s not much protection for my modesty at all.

So I climb on the table, and the nurse flips up my dress and grabs me around one leg, the physician’s assistant moves between my legs, and the doctor grabs my right leg.  I feel like my legs are in stirrups made of women.  The doctor tells her buds, “Move him around so I can see better.”

I’m thinking, dear god, and I don’t believe in god, by the way, don’t let me have an erection in front of these women.  The nurse and assistant both grab by genitals and try to shove them out of the way.  It’s not unpleasant  The doctor whips out the needle and looks at me in the eyes.  “Please, do not, and I mean, do not, kick me in the face when I stick you,” she says very seriously.

Needles don’t bother me, and so far in my life have never caused any real pain.  “Is this going to hurt enough that I will kick a woman in the face?”

“Some patients have,” she replies warily, still staring me down.

She stabs me quickly with the needle and I barely feel anything, but wonder where that inch of steel went.  Then I notice that the nurse isn’t wearing much of a bra.  In fact, I notice I’m getting an excellent sense of the shape of her breasts.  She rests them on my side and then pushes them against my back.  Then rests them on my side again.  My mind is creating wire-frame models of their shape on my inner computer screen.  I mentally plead with myself, “No wood, no wood. no wood.”

Luckily, seeing a tall blonde with a razor in her hand struggling to get a good aim keeps me tiny.  Hey, not too tiny, I now worry.  The nurse and assistant keep losing their grip and struggle to keep my sensitive parts away from the blade.  I ask them if they want help.

“This sure is a lesson in modesty,” I say weakly and try to laugh and they all laugh good.

The doctor jokes about her brother-in-law getting ‘snipped’ with six women in the room.

“Do you know what I mean,” she asks grinning at me.

I said I did and felt my genitals wanting to retract like a turtle’s head.

“Open the bottle,” the doctor finally says and the assistant did, and my doctor dropped a small bloody clump of flesh inside.  It was all over.  Except, that night I had trouble with my wound bleeding and I had to come back the next day and expose myself to a fourth woman.

I was getting used to it by then.  She led me back to a little room and when the door was shut said, “What’s the problem?”  Again I was troubled by wondering what were the rules for politely exposing myself.  She seemed like she was in a hurry so I just dropped my pants and pulled out a bloody rag I had sandwiched between my right testicle and right thigh.  “It won’t stop bleeding.”

She pulled out what looked like a paper tablecloth and handed it to me.  “What’s this for?” I asked.  I wondered if I was supposed to cover the table with it before I sat down on it and got it bloody.

“It’s for your modesty,” she said like I was being silly.  I couldn’t see how it would help since I was standing clearly showing her what I normally hide from all other women but my wife, and I was even holding a bloody rag I had just removed from between my legs.  Tell me, what was I going to shelter from her eyes?

She quickly bandaged me up.  I felt no qualms of modesty.  I was just a car in for some work, is how I imagined she saw me.  Or maybe I was a dog on the vet’s table to her.  Either way, my modesty didn’t matter.  These four women probably saw hundreds if not thousands of naked people every year.  I doubt if I was the grossest or ugliest, or even the fattest.  I know I wasn’t the manliest – I just hoped they hadn’t seen very many potential porn star guys.

Getting old means losing control.  I don’t like that.  I know if I live long enough I’ll have to spend some real time in hospitals, and each time I’ll become more and more a hunk of body and less like a person.  My sister once made a clever observation about life.  She said we start out life spending most of our time in bed and we end up spending most of our time in bed.  I could elaborate on that.  We start out having people change our diapers and we end up having people change our diapers.  As we get older we get more freedom and we travel further and further, but then we get old and travel less and less, until we’re confined to a room again, sleeping in something very much like a crib.

Maybe I never was really all that modest.  Maybe what really bothers me is losing control and having to let other people treat me like a child.  We dress and undress kids like they have no modesty and never worry if they care about being naked.  Going to the doctors is like being a kid.  We have to do what the big people tell us.  We don’t get any say in the matter.  And crying doesn’t affect the outcome.

Can it be that modesty isn’t about being naked?  And rather it’s about losing control?  It’s like those dreams of being naked in a high school class.  Do we wake up afraid of being laughed at?  Or do we wake up afraid of getting into a situation beyond our control?

JWH 12/18/8

Biblical Documentaries

I’m not religious, but I’ve been watching a lot of TV about the Bible lately.  National Geographic Channel, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even PBS have been showing some fascinating shows about the Bible in recent years.  Last night I watched “Jesus’ Tomb” from the National Geographic Channel’s Mysteries of the Bible series.  Mysteries of the Bible is an entertaining series, but their episodes are no match compared to “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” that appeared on PBS’s NOVA a few weeks ago.  All these documentaries vary greatly in quality, and that’s what I want to talk about.

It’s hard to discuss shows about the Bible without ruffling religious feathers.  I love science and history shows, and these biblical documentaries combine archeology and anthropology with history, to explain the origins of western civilization.   So, when I analyze these programs, I’m not dealing with the related spiritual issues, and for the most part, that’s how the documentary makers work too.  They often try to compare what is written in the Bible with what we know from historical research and from scientific studies.

If you watch these shows you’ll learn a lot, but if you hold certain religious beliefs dear, some ideas presented might annoy you.  Don’t get me wrong, I think religious folk are the intended audience, because atheists who like Bible history, like me, are not that common.  But I’m guessing most of these shows try hard to walk the razor’s edge when it comes to controversial issues of faith.

When watching any documentary you have to analyze the producer’s motive.  Many filmmakers start with a cherish idea of their own and do all they can to document the proof of their belief.  Others pick an interesting mystery and try very hard to be impartial.  One way to judge a film is if it examines the obvious questions that come to your mind while watching.  Last night’s show, “Jesus’ Tomb” avoided several issues that popped into my head while watching.

Another way to measure the quality of these TV documentaries is track how often they repeat images or ideas.  These one-hour shows actually have about 45-50 minutes of show-time versus the remainder of an hour to fill with commercials.  Some shows are stretched by constantly repeating material both visually and verbally.  I don’t know if it’s because the show’s producers don’t have enough content, or they think we’re stupid and their viewers need constant reiteration to actually comprehend their discoveries, or they figure most viewers are channel surfing and they want to make sure those drive-by watchers get hooked with the high points.

If repetition is because of the channel flippers, I hope TV producers stop that practice quick.  It’s not fair for the serious viewers of their shows to have to be bombarded with sing-song phrases, and psychedelic video flashbacks.  I don’t mind shows repeating a complex concept in different ways to help people to understand, but to flat out say and show the same words and pictures over and over again is just damn annoying.  One reason PBS documentaries often seem head and shoulders above the documentaries on all the other channels is because they don’t have commercials to interrupt their flow, so PBS shows don’t do that say it five times song and dance crap.

Another thing commercial driven channels do is spend too much of their times before and after commercials presenting teases for what’s to come.  Last night’s one-hour show, “Jesus’ Tomb” could easily have been a nice 30-minute documentary.  If they had put in 20 more minutes of genuine content, it would have been a very good hour show even with commercials.  And all my criticisms could have been answered in those twenty minutes too.

One thing I love about these biblical documentaries is they show video of where historical events took place.  Seeing all the various kinds of tombs cut out of rock in last night’s show was a great way to illustrate the Bible.  The filmmakers interviewed scholars about Jewish burial practices of the time, checked with what archeologists were finding, quoted related biblical verses, and showed how various beliefs came down through history in stories, paintings, and religious beliefs.  Last night’s show did a pretty good job of exploring why and how Jesus might have been put in a nearby tomb, but I was left with a bunch of questions for the filmmakers, even at their simple level.

How common was it to put people in those small tombs cut into solid rock?  If it was very common, wouldn’t there be millions of them in Israel?  To the spiritually minded, the important issue is the resurrection of Jesus.  For that story to work a tomb is a good stage, but would a common criminal be buried in a tomb?  (That’s what the Romans and Jewish leaders thought of him.) The show spent a lot of time exploring how and why Jesus’ body could have been removed from the tomb, but they didn’t explain two ways that popped into my mind.

Could some his followers have removed him and buried him elsewhere, not telling the women who found the tomb empty the next day?  And were there no grave-robbers in that time, even Romans who wanted to get rid of a martyr’s body?  Of course, for the spiritual story to work, Jesus’ body had to disappear, so does it really matter how?

And here’s the part of the show that the filmmakers avoided, but I wanted explored.  In the early parts of the Bible the concept of afterlife is missing.  The show did interview one scholar that said Jews of the time believed in the resurrection, and wanted their bodies gathered in ossuaries, but they believed all people would be returned to their bodies at the end of time.  For centuries Christians believed something like this too.  So when did the idea of dying and immediately going to heaven come about?

The point of Jesus’ tomb story is about resurrection.  Why couldn’t the show’s filmmaker spend twenty minutes on the history of this idea rather than repeating so much of the other information.  At what point in the history of mankind did people start thinking about living after death?  And is the story of Jesus and his tomb the pivotal point in history when this idea was born?  I’m not asking the filmmaker to state whether resurrection is possible or not possible, I just want the history and archeology of that idea.

Many of the biblical documentaries are quite timid on exploring the depth of an idea.  They love to bring up startling ideas, like another show that dealt with apocryphal stories of Jesus, including one where Jesus killed a child when he was a child himself.  They are not afraid to have National Enquirer headlines, but they don’t want to have scholarly expositions because that might bore people.

On the whole I find these shows very entertaining because of they usually give me a good deal of history I haven’t known about before, along with some nice video of archeological digs, science labs pursing arcane mysteries of ancient evidence, and interviews with fascinating scholars.  However, sometimes I think they throw in some interviews with wild-eyed theorists and fanatics too.

Studying the Bible is like studying the founding fathers of America, but the people of the Bible are the founding fathers of Western civilization.  So far these Bible documentary makers examine artifacts and compare them to Bible stories.  What I’d like to see is for them to examine the history of the mind of the people.  A history of psychological development.  Please show a history of the common ideas that arose during biblical times.  The NOVA show, “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” is a step in the right direction.

Understanding the early history of mankind is like researching our childhood to figure out how we came to be who we are.  Every age interprets the Bible anew, reinventing religion.  Most people ignore that or never knew that, and assume that current religious beliefs have always existed as they do now.  I want these biblical documentary historians to show how beliefs were different century by century and how the people were different because of their beliefs.  Some Christians hate the word evolution, but all the concepts we hold in our head are a product of evolution too.

God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, sin, redemption, charity, faith, etc., all started out as tiny one cell ideas in the mind of man and over the centuries have evolved into the dinosaur ideas they are today.  This season’s shows about Bible history barely touch on this, but I expect the biblical documentaries to evolve too.

JWH 12/17/8

Surviving Bad Times

I have lived through six previous recessions, but I only remember four of them.  Bad economic times are downers, for the economy and our state of minds.  Even knowing those six economic downturns only lasted 1-2 years each, it always feels like we’re on the brink of doom when we go into one.  It doesn’t help that the talking heads constantly bring up the Great Depression, which lasted 10 years, and peaked with 25 percent unemployment. 

I’m glad those commentators don’t know about the Long Depression, 1873-1896 that lasted 23 years.  I wonder how many people remember the survivalists back during the early 80s depression, when people bought land and guns thinking the end of civilization was around the corner.  It’s very easy for dark economic clouds to bring doom and gloom that make us all a little paranoid and crazy.  What we need is light therapy for our economic depression.

My favorite movies were those made during the ten years of the Great Depression, including both the gritty social ones focusing on the bad times, and the glittery ones that help people escape their daily woes.  Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation tells us how greatness came out of those bad times.  If we’re entering into long years of hard times it might help to study that decade.

If we’re lucky, times won’t get that bad.  And how bad are bad times anyway?  The worst is losing a job and your home – check out The Grapes of Wrath for insight into that kind of bad times.  I remember my parents and grandparents talking about the great depression and how bad it was, but they also had lots of fond memories from those years.

Things are much different now than back then.  We have social security, medicare, unemployment checks, food stamps, and all kinds of other social programs and charities to help people.  I don’t think we’ll see hobo jungles outside our large cities, or hordes of men riding the rails looking for work, or long bread lines.  We are going to see a lot of people out of work.  We’ll probably see a lot of people sharing apartments and homes, and a lot of two family incomes become one.  I expect a fair number twenty-somethings deciding it’s a good time to move in with their parents awhile and finish up that college degree.

Back during the depression the number of people in a household was much higher than it is today, sometimes including three or even four generations.  We live in times when everyone wants their own house or apartment and that’s an extravagance.  Bad times cause people to band together and share expenses, and everyone learns to be frugal.

Of course, everyone suddenly concentrating on the value of a buck only causes more layoffs and worsens the recession and makes people talk about depression.  Recessions are psychological as much as economic.  If you’re afraid for the future you won’t spend money, but consumer confidence and spending is how we get out of a recession.

A recession is when the economy pulls back from a boom, and business and families decide to cut the fat and go on a spending diet.  Recessions are a readjustment period where we excise the excesses and get practical.  I expect a lot of people to cancel their $100 a month cell phone plans, cut their Netflix plan from 5 discs to 2 out at a time, trim a lot of cable television options, stop buying toys they just have to have but only use for a week or two before thinking about new toys, or rethinking $50 dinners that are wolfed down like fast food.  People who used to brag about drinking $25 dollar bottles of wine will now brag about the $12 great discoveries they are making.

Folks shopping at Target who have been loyal brand users will suddenly notice store brands have the same chemical compositions for dollars less.  When people realize that $400,000 houses are really worth $150,000, they will start wondering about the value of a $50 video game or $10 movie tickets.  Women with husbands making six figures will strangely discover coupons and thrift shop clothing.

My advice is if you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck, now is the time to learn how to manage money.  But if you’ve always managed your money well and have savings, now is the time to be patriotic and go shopping. 

If you’ve got money to spend, it’s a great time to do green remodeling.  Read Hot, Flat and Crowded to get an idea of what Thomas Friedman calls ET economics.  Friedman predicts America could get out of this economic slump and create a world-wide boom by focusing on environmental technology, ET, that will rival the IT boom, caused by information technology.

I hope Barack Obama uses the recession to redesign the growth economy into a green steady-state economy.  The NY Times is reporting that bad economic times is pushing global climate problems out of the news.  Reengineering our society to be green, will cost jobs and create them.  Now is the time to remember that.

What I hate about recessions are the funding cuts to big science as if the quest to understanding reality is one of our most wasteful extravagances.  How many jobs and spin-off technologies would be created if Congress took that $34 billion they are thinking of giving to the Detroit Big 3 and put it into the colonization of the Moon and Mars?  Or at least starting a renewable energy industry.

I don’t know why I write these essays about economics.  They get no hits.  I think they are therapeutic.  We really could be on the brink of a terrible economic collapse and my writing Pollyannaish blog posts of hope help me get through the chills of economic ghost stories.

JWH 12/7/8  

My Poor Man’s Sonos

Sonos is considered the Mercedes of the music media servers, but I have had to make do with my Toyota-like SoundBridge.  What makes the Sonos system so deluxe is it’s $400 hand controller, which has a LCD screen to aid in locating songs.  The Roku Soundbridge has a tiny handheld remote which controls the SoundBridge device that has a 280×16 pixel LED display for selecting songs.  For this to work I need to stand in front of the SoundBridge because the remote may work across the room but I can only see the LED display if I’m right in front of it.

In my La-Z-boy laziness, I wanted to kick back in my recliner and play  songs with fat-butt staying-in-chair ease, which the Sonos controller was designed for I’m sure.  Now I’ve discovered RokuRemote, a iPhone/iPod touch app.  My iPod touch is now my Sonos-like controller to my SoundBridge, bringing me to near nerdvana.

I say near, because complete bliss would only be achieved by voice command to a house controlled computer.  I would say telepathy song control was the absolute ultimate, but I have to be realistic sometimes.  Voice control is possible, but it would be far more expensive than even buying into a Sonos system, and so I make do with my $2.99 RokuRemote app.

For those people who only listen to music via white ear-buds, you will never understand the nature of my problem.  I have a computer in my man-room with 18,000 mp3 songs on it.  I have a stereo receiver with floor standing Infinity speakers in my den.  My computer also has access to Rhapsody music, with a library of millions of songs.  Any album I own, or one that I tell Rhapsody to save in my library, can be played on my den stereo system through the SoundBridge.

The X-Prize problem is to sit in my den chair and tell my computer what to play on the stereo with the least amount of hassle.  Now you can understand why I wish I could just say, “Computer, play ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ off of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.”  Since that isn’t possible, I launch RokuRemote on my iPod touch, and pick my SoundBridge, and then say I want to search by albums, and type in “Everybody” and hit search, and then punch on the title of the album, and the poke the song and it plays.  Pretty damn easy.

When you connect to the SoundBridge you have the choice of searching by artist, album, song or playlist.  Since my collection is large, there a good size pause before seeing whichever listing I choose.  This is probably due to the limitations of the SoundBridge, and not the RokuRemote program.  If the SoundBridge had some memory and extra CPU processing power, it could maintain the information about my music collection and periodically talk to the computer for updates.

In the old days you have to find the LP, decide which side to play, and then place the stylus on the particular track you wanted to hear.  CDs were a big step forward.  Only one side, and you used a remote to select the cut number.  We are living in the 21st century now when all the music is in a database and it’s only a matter of retrieving it.  The song access time has gotten very short, but wouldn’t it be living a dream to be able to say a song’s name and album and hear it instantly?

If you own a SoundBridge and an iPhone or iPod touch, just go to the AppStore on your device and search on Roku.  It’s $2.99 well spent.  If you don’t own a SoundBridge but want a media server, Sonos now works with a free iPhone/touch app, so all you have to buy is the $349 Zone player.

JWH 12/2/8