February 2014 – Auxiliary Memory

Reading: A Compulsion, An Addiction, Or Obsession?

Is it possible to read too much? Can words, like calories, be over consumed?

Like the little robot, Johnny Five, in the film Short Circuit, I constantly crave more input. I’m not as bad as Teddy Roosevelt, who would grab a few words while waiting for a person to walk across the room to meet him, but I’m close.

That anecdote I got from reading The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin, an epic volume where she profiles presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, their parents and wives, and the famous muck raking reporters from McClure’s Magazine they knew during the Progressive Era. It seems like in every case, for both men and women, they all credit books as the defining influence of their lives. Roosevelt was a very compulsive reader and claimed he read a book before breakfast each day.

We educate ourselves by reading. We evolve empathetically by reading. We nourish our souls by reading. So, can there be too much reading? I ask this because here are the books and magazines I’m currently reading, or trying to read.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. I got the Kindle and Audible edition on sale recently. I first read this book back in the 1970s, it’s about a young man, Gordon Comstock, in 1934 England, struggling to be a poet and refusing to worship the God of money. I’m at the six hour mark, out of nine, but switched over to The Bully Pulpit to get ready for the non-fiction book club discussion in February. I’m now 12 hours into its 35 hours. I keep meaning to jump back and finish those last three hours but The Bully Pulpit is absolutely captivating.

I saw Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark at the bookstore Sunday and just had to have it, so I ordered it from Amazon when I got home, and it was here Tuesday. I’ve only just started it, but wished I could give up everything else to read it. I’m on a physics kick at the moment, so I crave it’s words and charts.

I’m reading Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan for my local potluck supper book club. I’m just up to chapter 3.

Reading The New York Review of Books is like having a heroin pusher for a best friend. I’m on the third article, “A New Populism?” which reviews Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy, which would be a wonderful book to read after The Bully Pulpit, because Bully mentions 19th century populists as well as reformers and progressives. Instead I went to the library and got two books reviewed in the second article, “Beneath the Stars.”

I haven’t started either, but I’ve been itching to take the time to jump into both because I’ve been watching Gardner and Stanwyck movies on Warner Archive Instant lately. I have a thing for old movies, and even though it’s not as relevant as physics or history, it does obsess me.

Everything makes me want to read books. I saw the recent biofilm The Invisible Woman about Charles Dickens’ affair with actress Nelly Ternan, which made me go out and buy, Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Time and again I return to the 19th century. Growing up I was crazy in love with science fiction and the future, but now that I’m living in the 21st century, I spend a lot of time exploring the 19th century. But I still read a lot of science fiction. This week, I’ve been reading short stories, hoping they will inspire me to write short stories.

The Classic Science Fiction Book Club is reading one story a week from The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Of course, I also need to get started on the March book for them too, The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. Science fiction has always been fun and addictive to me, but as I’ve gotten older, reading non-fiction has become more addictive.

I’m also rereading and studying The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin to write a comprehensive review. I just finished it a few days ago, but it was so exciting that it’s thrown me into a science reading jag. I listened to it first, but now I’m reading the Kindle edition trying to outline all it’s points.

I keep How To Read Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster by my TV chair to read during commercials. Each chapter makes me want to read another classic book.

And this might be TMI, but I keep On Writing Well by William Zinsser on my oldest Kindle in the bathroom for study while I’m occupied.

I also read a lot of magazines, and these have came in the mail in just this past week. If halfway through the Scientific American, and read the short pieces in The Rolling Stone. As soon as I finish this essay I’m going to read more from these magazines as I listen to music. That’s become my late afternoon habit now that I’ve retired.

And this doesn’t count the dozens of magazines I try to keep up with at Next Issue. I pay $15 a month for 130 titles for tablet reading. Nor does this count the many books I’ve started last week and haven’t gotten back to yet. I try hard to get to The New Yorker, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Popular Science, Consumer’s Reports, Shutterbug, Popular Photography and Vanity Fair – but I’d like to read even more. I seldom finish any of them. I find most magazines, even the ones that I’d never buy like Vogue and Field and Stream often have one great article.

Nor does this list of reading material cover the daily consumption of websites I visit.

Do you see why I’m wondering if I have a reading problem? If brains could get fat on words, I’d have a head the size of Texas.

When I write these blogs, I partly write them for writing practice. Each day I attempt to find a topic and make it interesting. But I also write because it’s therapeutic, like talking with an analyst. I’m thinking out loud, trying to put two and two together. This essay is my way of asking myself: Do I read too much. And if I read too much, what’s a reasonable amount of daily reading?

On one hand I feel I’m retired and should read as much as I want, or as little as I want. But on the other hand, I feel all this reading should go towards a purpose. While struggling to review The Trouble With Physics I realize how little I retain. It’s a damn shame that all this good information should go in one ear and out the other.

Doris Kearns Goodwin spent seven years writing The Bully Pulpit and it reflects a massive amount of reading for research. I wonder if I should focus my reading addiction on a single subject and try to write a nonfiction book? Before I retired I dreamed of writing a novel, but I just don’t have the daily urge to write fiction. I do love to write blogs and nonfiction essays. That’s why I’m experimenting with my review of The Trouble With Physics – I’m actually doing a lot of research to write a longer essay.

Right now my daily reading feels like I’m just gobbling down M&Ms – it’s a compulsive craving. And although I feel any reading is good for me, because new ideas provides fertilizer for my neurons, I can’t help but want all my data input to be put to some constructive use. I’d like to think of good reading as healthy food, and writing as healthy exercise, for my mind. If I just read books and didn’t blog, I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as happy as I am now. And I think I’d be happier if my reading was more focused.

JWH – 2/27/14

Will I Be Left in the Tech Dust If I Don’t Own A Smartphone?

I’ve been using computers since 1971. Mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers – labels that have long since disappeared. I got my first personal computer in 1979. I used FTP, Usenet, Gopher, email, years before the web, and remember being blown away when Mosaic came out in 1993. I spent a lot of money on computer and gadgets over the years, but for some reason I don’t want to buy a smartphone. Oh, I’d love to have a smartphone – I just don’t want the monthly bill. And since nearly everyone else is becoming a smartphone user, will this leave me in the tech dust?

I have a poor man’s smartphone, the iPod touch and a pay-as-you-go dumbphone. It essentially does most of what a smartphone does, and I only spend $50 every six months for 500 minutes. I also have an iPad 2 and a Nexus 5. I’m not totally out of it, but when I read Engadget I feel like I’m at a black tie party wearing a sports jacket and jeans, and even those are getting threadbare and moth eaten.

Now I’m reading about smart watches. Pass. Google glasses. Pass. Have I gotten too old to compute?

I am cheap, but then I’m retired. I now spend about 99% of my time at home, so mobile devices just don’t have a compelling sell to me. Yet, all the tech glamor is now in mobile devices. I do use mobile apps on my Nexus 7, but I’d much prefer using most of them on my 23” monitor.

Is the bleeding edge of tech savvy now limited to on-the-go computing? Am I joining the ranks of the cyber-Amish by not owning a smartphone. Am I less of a geek for not wanting the latest smartphone every year?

Getting old is getting old, so I must accept that young people are going to do and know things I don’t. BFD. I’m not whining, but since I’ve retired I realized, more and more, I’m cutting myself off from the mainstream of people. I’ve always done this. Being a gluten-free vegetarian atheist has a way of isolating me from normal life. Being a computer geek is something I’ve always identified with, so is choosing not to follow the cutting edge of tech another way to isolate myself? (I can hear my friend Annie growling at me, “Hell yes, you moron.”)

This reminds me of a friend who died about twenty years ago. He had become so negative about life that he only like two things, Duane Allman’s guitar playing, and Benny Goodman’s clarinet playing. Luckily I still love hundreds of things, but I’m starting to realize that list is shrinking. Is that another way of defining aging – that you list of likes shrinks?

There another way of looking at though. One I feel is more positive! As we get older we juggle more balls, or spin more plates. Remember those guys on Ed Sullivan that would keep plates spinning on sticks? Back then, we called life “the 9 to 5 rat race.” As we grew up we learned to spin more plates. At some point in your life you realize that keeping all those plates spinning is a lot of damn work. Then you go all Zen dog and start spinning fewer plates. Retiring is moving into those years when you spin fewer and fewer plates. And the positive spin I mentioned? Well, you enjoy life more because you just keep the things you love most in motion.

JWH – 2/25/14

We Can See Far, But Can We See Forever?

Why is there something rather than nothing? The people who work hardest to answer that question are called physicists. Physics is the study of the very large and very small. The study of physics looks in four directions: expanding out to the large, shrinking in to the small, looking back in time, and looking forward in time.

We can see far, but can we ever see an end to any of these directions? Does time have a beginning, or end? What is the largest object in existence, what is the smallest? During our lifetimes, especially if you are older, how far we see in any of those directions has gotten further and further, and yet we see no sign of an end anywhere or anywhen. Whenever we detect smaller particles, theorists come out and suggest they might be composed of even smaller particles. Before 1929 the universe was the size of the Milky Way galaxy, now it’s billions of galaxies, and scientists are speculating about a multiverse – a reality of endless universes, each a bubble in a sea of infinity. When there was just one universe, many scientists wondered if the Big Bang was the beginning of time, and the final expansion or contraction, the end. If there are multiverses, time might have no beginning or end.

Scientists currently have instruments to see so far, and no further – telescopes and particle accelerators. Beyond those limits lies speculation and conjecture. Long ago, during the time of classical Greece, there were men who speculated that everything was made of atoms, and that the stars were suns. It took many centuries before we could prove those speculations. Today we live in a time when we speculate on strings and the multiverse, whether they will be proven to be true will take time and a lot of money. Building machines that see farther are very expensive.

The question is: Can we see forever? Can we know the ultimate truth? Can we ever answer: Why is there something rather than nothing? How can there be a creator if “creation” is infinite? To tell children that God created everything is like saying the Tooth Fairy left money under the pillow or that a man in a red suit left presents under the tree.

Back in the times we now think of mythic, people were told if they could see into the minds of gods they would go mad. That human minds would burn out with too much knowledge, too much truth. Is that why people prefer religion over physics? Recently Oprah Winfrey challenged swimmer Diana Nyad that a person can’t be in awe of existence and be an atheist. The trouble is no matter how much awe Winfrey can feel, it’s only the smallest fraction imaginable over what science can teach us. And what science can show is is tiny compared to the theoretical size of reality. But from where we can see, science owns awe, and the religious are blind and cannot see.

We can all see far, but we can’t see forever. The question you must ask yourself, do you want to see further? If you are happy living in the fantasy of a Santa Claus like answer, that’s fine, but don’t talk about the awe of existence. Learn some physics and math to understand how far you are looking before you claim too see far. The best tool for the average person to do this is The Power of Ten, the classic film from 1977.

A more modern and stunningly beautiful web site is Scale of the Universe.

This is just a start. Watching it once won’t do. You have to really study it. Powers of ten is a wonderful concept to understand the size and magnitude of reality. Powers of tens work both ways. Humans are at the 1 meter level, or 10⁰. 10¹ is ten meters, 10² is 100 meters. Just beyond 10⁷ gets to the level of the whole earth. But we can also go small with the negative powers of 10. At beyond 10^-9 we’re at the size of an atom. I’m going to borrow some images from “The Rise and Fall of Supersymmetry” at ScienceBlogs to help illustrate.

To “see” the very small requires what used to be called an atom smasher, but are now called particle accelerators. The most famous one at the moment is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It requires tremendous amounts of energy to see small. Here’s another graph using the powers of ten, but this time using energy, to show how much energy it takes to see small. You can click on both pictures to get larger versions.

If you haven’t studied much physics this might not make sense, but between these two tables it indicates how far small we can see, and how much energy it will take to see to the edge of what we’ve speculated about. About the middle of each chart is the edge of the known universe of the small. We know there’s much further to see, but we don’t have the tools to see further – at the moment. And when I say “see” we don’t see directly, but detect.

To understand this better I recommend reading The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. It’s a rigorous attack on string theory, but it’s also an explanation of how science works, and about the limits of what we can see now via detection, and what we speculate is beyond the edge of the known universe. Smolin worries that we’re in an era of mostly speculation and not enough actual detection. And here is where the title of this essay comes into play.

We can see far, and hopefully we can see further, but it will be expensive. But ultimately, how far can we see? Is there a limit to science and what it can detect? The LHC is huge and costs a lot of money. The LHC was supposed to be a big step up from the Fermilab collider, but if you look at the energy chart, it’s just one magnitude.

The thing is people inhabit a level of perception of around 10^-3 to 10³. Astronomers might be concerned with 10⁷ through 10²⁷, but few other people. Many scientists, including medical researchers are concerned with the range of 10^-3 to 10^-9, only particle physicists want to explore smaller. For people who live in the 10⁰ to 10³ range, religion is an easy answer, but not a correct one. If you want to know the whole truth, you have to study the known universe, roughly 10^-24 to 10²⁷, and beyond, as we speculate and explore further. That’s a lot of territory.

Maybe next century we’ll be speculating that reality is 10^-100 to 10¹⁰⁰ in scope, but at some point, being just humans on Earth, we’ll come to an end of how far we can see. We might be getting close to that limit now, and just don’t know it, or it might be we’re getting to the limit of what we can afford to see. Our lives are limited in scope. Our lives do have a beginning of time and an end. It’s amazing that humans can see so far, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty, our well known living space is 10^-7 to 10⁷meters in scale. That’s our environment, which offers an almost unlimited possibilities, which could last for billions of years. It’s a damn shame we’re using it all up so fast, and trashing everything. Now that’s something to be in awe of Miss Winfrey.

JWH – 2/24/14

Professions and Fame

Our society loves the famous, and the glamour of being famous, yet I think we have a rather narrow range of professions in which people become famous. Quite naturally, the most famous in our society are the people who work in front of cameras: movie stars, television stars, sports stars. Musicians are less famous because they aren’t on television as much, and the more famous of rock stars seem to be due to media exposure rather than just musical ability. If you want your song to become a hit, you have to make yourself famous.

With the Internet, people are gaining fame through online exposure, but more often than not, it’s because of video hijinks. YouTube now allows anyone to produce themselves as their own star. See “The Impact of the Like Button.”

Fame drives ambition, so kids want to grow up and become the kind of people we see on screens – television screens, movie theater screens, computer screens, tablet screens and smart phone screens. This limits what professions kids will think about when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’m thinking we need to make more types of professionals famous.

Take for instance architects. PBS has a new series Super Skyscrapers that is about building monstrous structures that would make the Tower of Babel dinky. Their episode on the Shanghai Tower, about a 121 floor “vertical city” was mind boggling. The feat of designing such a building is so tremendous that I have to wonder why such a person isn’t more famous than any movie or pop star on the planet. Of course, Shanghai Tower wasn’t designed by one man, but a firm, Gensler, but even still, they should be as famous as any rock band. But I can’t name them.

How many professions out there are so cool, so important, so dazzling, that their best practitioners should be famous? Shouldn’t doctors who develop new techniques to cure cancer be more famous Justin Bieber? Shouldn’t the creators of the Mars rovers or space telescopes be more famous than Miley Cyrus? Shouldn’t the top philanthropists get as much attention as Olympic athletes? Would two weeks of fame every four years inspire more people to change the world for the better? Hell, I think there should be a weekly show devoted to such people.

Since people love CSI shows so much, why don’t we have weekly shows about real criminal investigators? Our cities are plagued by crime, so why not focus on real crimes being solve by real people?

Why do we need so many reality shows about faked reality when we have so much far out real reality to film?

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became famous, but why aren’t the programmers of all the apps and games we use today not famous? Things do change, because chefs have gotten famous lately. And I assume because of that, more kids want to take up the culinary profession.

I love The Big Bang Theory, but why not have a weekly show about real scientists and engineers and what they really do? Would a weekly show about particle physicists around the world encourage more kids to study math and science harder in school?

I can’t help but believe if we made more smart people famous then kids might choose to become smarter.

JWH – 2/21/14

Is Addiction to the Internet Permanent?

Has Internet usage become a permanent part of our lives, or is there still a chance it could be a fad?

Isn’t there always a possibility we could reject using the Internet, or that something bigger and better might come along? Or is networking everyone and everything, to everyone and everything else, just too good of an idea to give up? Can anything bigger and better come along, other than an ESP hive mind?

Over the recent centuries, there have been many back to nature movements. None ever caught on with the public at large, but these movements have been big enough for thousands of people to retreat to living in the country hoping to find a more fulfilling life. Both the 19th and the 20th century had fairly large communal living movements, and Henry David Thoreau is still very appealing to people today.

I guess the question to ask is: Does the Internet make people happier? Billions certainly have flocked to it. And it certainly gives the illusion that the world is much smaller, and it’s possible to know far more people. I assume people are happier, because most net users spend hours each day on the web, and billions of smart phones have been sold.

I guess the next question to ask is: How would you live without the Internet? (Just, in case it went away.)

My immediate answer is I’d read books and magazines, watch TV, and listen to CDs. That’s what I did before the Internet came along. And I think that answers the title question. Everything we liked before the Internet was internet like. We cherished technology that brought us news from around the world, that let us keep up with other groups of people, to share ideas, to feel part of a bigger world. Retreating to living on a commune in the woods sounds very isolating and lonely, but I could probably do it if I at least had a nice selection of books.

I really can’t imagine people rejecting the Internet, other than maybe religious extremists. Sooner or later, fundamentalists may reject the Internet because it’s like the teaching of evolution, something that will undermine their beliefs. I can picture some fundamentalists giving up the Internet like the Amish gave up modern technology.

I guess it might be possible for some people, Internet addiction could be so bad that they will reject it completely, because it will be an all or nothing affair for them.

And finally, there might be some people, like those who have given up television, because they are so focused on their work, art, sport, hobby, etc. that the Internet will seem like wasting time.

For most people, I think our addiction to the net will only grow. I get a lot of my television from the net now, and nearly all my music, and I subscribe to a service for magazines over the net. I download audiobooks and ebooks, and read them on Internet connected mobile devices. I participate mildly in social media, mainly the old fashion kind like Yahoogroups for book clubs, and blogging. I keep my photos online, and my documents, and all my ripped CDs. When I want to learn something new I turn to the Internet. For example, when I wanted to peel a mango I studied it on YouTube. When I check out a library book, I look it up online and put it on hold. When I shop for clothes or new gadgets, I shop online. Now that I’m retired I spend a fair amount of my social time online, rather in person.

Damn, I’m addicted. Maybe I should give it up. Why should I? I don’ think there’s a real reason. But could I? Know what’s funny, the hardest thing I’d have trouble giving up is Audible.com. I’d painfully miss Rdio.com, but I could go back to CDs. And my pocketbook would miss Amazon.com, but the only way to get audiobooks cheap is via Audible.com.

If I could walk more I might do more “real” things. One reason I don’t feel my spinal stenosis as a burden is I love living on the net. I can’t walk for exercise, but I could bike. I could go see more people. I could get some dogs and cats. I could garden. I could take up guitar playing, or chess, or wood working. There’s endless amount of things to do off the net. I’m just as addicted as all those kids who live and breath social media lives.

For me, if I had to live without the Internet, I’d spend my days writing like I do now, but I’d write essays or stories to submit to magazines. I think periodicals were the Victorian age’s Internet.

I’ve got to assume the Internet is here to stay, and its where I’ll live until I die. I asked my wife just now if she could give up the Internet, and she snapped back, “Are you crazy?” She freaks out if she gets out of reach of her iPhone. She watches television with her laptop on her lap.

I do wonder if the Internet could become any more addictive? What features are left to add that will fill up the rest of our real lives? No, the Internet is not a fad, it’s become a way of life.

JWH – 2/19/14