July 2014 – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

Manned Mission to Mars or Gigantic Space Telescopes?

Which would be more exciting to happen in your lifetime: humans landing on Mars, or discovering life on a planet in another star system? If we were willing to spend the money, and some big money at that, we could explore Mars, or we could build gigantic space-based telescopes to hunt for life on other planets orbiting nearby stars. In our lifetime the Hubble telescope greatly expanded our vision of reality. Then the Kepler telescope discovered thousands of exoplanets, letting us know that planets are common. Building a very large space telescope would allow us to detect what’s in the atmospheres of those planets, including chemicals that indicate life, or even intelligent life.

Growing up in the 1960s with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs I was crazy for manned space exploration, but over the course of the last several decades I’ve been more thrilled with the rewards of robotic missions to Mars, missions to the rest of the solar system, and especially by space telescopes. NASA has two upcoming spaced based telescopes that I’m trilled to see launched, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). And ESA has plans for CHEOPS.

If you pay attention to space news, you’ll know that there are many people out there with different goals for space exploration. Some want to go back to the Moon, others to Mars, some to asteroids, and many want to build fantastic space based observatories. You can divide them into two groups – those who want manned missions, and those who want robot missions. I’d prefer both, but what if we don’t have the money for both? What gets the most bang for our bucks?

Manned missions are exciting and let us feel like we’re progressing towards greater heights of civilization and accomplishment. Robot missions expand our awareness of reality at a much faster pace than we’ve ever imagined. However, I feel that manned missions without the goal of permanent colonization doesn’t offer that much for our money. If we went to Mars to build a new home for humans, to spread our eggs to another basket, then it would be worth all the money we could throw at the project. If we only send a few people there over a period of decades and then stop, then I’d rather put all our money into robotic missions, especially gigantic space based telescopes that hunt for life in other stellar systems, and giant SETI projects.

If I’m lucky I might live another quarter century and I’d really like to know that we’re not alone in this universe before I die. Sure, I’d love to know we could send people to Mars and back, but that’s not as exciting as knowing that life, and especially intelligent life exists somewhere besides Earth. As a lifelong science fiction reader I’ve always felt that to be true, but I’d like to have proof.

Now that the economy is improving, that so many billionaires are starting private space programs, and Thomas Piketty is creating a movement that proves higher taxes would improve capitalism, we might have more money for space exploration, both manned and robotic. Like I said, it would be great to finance both kinds of missions. However, if I got to vote, I’d campaign for building a gigantic space based telescope, something far bigger than anything on the drawing boards at the moment.

I have no idea how big will be big enough. Would building telescopes with kilometer size apertures on the far side of the Moon or out in L5 orbits do the job, or would it take building several large space telescopes positioned around the solar system to create a gigantic hyper-telescope interferometer array?

The trouble with all this is most citizens of the world do not care about science or spending such vast sums of money to learn more about reality. That’s a shame because spending big bucks gets us big knowledge. If we had spent the trillion dollars we spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on giant space telescopes we’d know if we were alone or not in the universe. Or we could have a K-12 and higher education school system that would have produced vast armies of scientists and dazzling inventors and make us far more richer. Money spent on science pays off more than money invested anywhere else. It’s a shame we’d rather invest so heavily in war, and other forms of self-destruction.

I wish our species was smarter.

JWH – 7/16/14

Did The First Movie You Ever See Haunt You For The Rest Of Your Life?

In 1947 MGM released High Barbaree, a film based on the 1945 novel High Barbaree by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The book is long out of print, mostly forgotten, and memorable because its authors wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. For decades the movie rarely showed up on TV. TCM eventually started showing it now and then. And finally, after 67 years I can own a copy on DVD. It’s also playing on Warner Archive, the great streaming alternative to TCM. One reviewer at Amazon.com said they had been looking for this movie for thirty years – well, I’ve been searching for it for over fifty years, ever since I saw it as a very young kid, the first movie I ever remember seeing.

Most movie buffs will not know about this film, and would probably only consider it a slight piece of nostalgic fluff. For me, it’s burned into my deepest memories, one of the few important remembrances I have of my father, but it also has heavy psychological history for me, and I would eventually learn for James Normal Hall as well, who did all the writing for the novel. High Barbaree is important to me because when and how I saw it, and not because of the film itself, although there were events in the film that resonate with my own life. The film featured Van Johnson and June Allyson, and was one of six pictures they acted in together the 1940s and 1950s, all of them slight and mostly forgotten, except for folks like me, where the film got stuck in our memories of growing up. High Barbaree the book is about dying and aging memories of youth, especially last memories.

High Barbaree is a recursive art form for me, because it’s a story about memories that I use to think about remembering.

Can you remember the very first movie you ever seen? I think I can, but I’m not sure. Memory is a funny thing, especially when you remember something on the edge of that time between when you were too young to remember anything, and the time when you first start becoming a person. I have some vague memories when I think I was three, and quite a few more memories when I was four and five. When I first saw High Barbaree I must have been around four, but I can’t pinpoint my age for sure. We were living in South Carolina for the first time, out in the country. One night I got up in the middle of the night and walked out into the living room. My dad was up watching the all-night movies. He let me stay up with him, and I caught High Barbaree for the first time. That’s the earliest movie I remember ever seeing. I’m pretty sure as an even younger kid I must have sat with my parents watching movies on TV, but I don’t remember any of them.

I don’t remember much from when I saw High Barbaree the first time. I believe I remember four vivid scenes or images, but I can’t be sure because I confuse my first memories of seeing the movie with my second time seeing it, about 7-8 years later, when I was around 12. The four scenes that stuck in my mind were two small kids climbing an old wooden water tower, of the boy saying good-bye to the girl who is in the back of a truck driving away, a PBY amphibian plane floating on the water, and the old South Sea islander welcoming the grown up boy to the island. From seeing it the first time in 1955, I certainly didn’t learn the actors names, or even that it was about WWII. The story was about life-long friends, Alec and Nancy, who grew up as kids in Iowa, but were separated when Nancy’s parents moved the family to Montana. I’m sure I didn’t understand that at age four. Even at that young age I had moved enough to know the loss of friends, so that movie touched me emotionally even though my mind was extremely immature.

Around the summer of 1963 I caught the film again, also in the middle of the night. My sister and I loved old movies and in the summer time my mother would let us stay up all night watching them. It meant we slept during the day and didn’t drive her crazy. This is where I first memorized the actors and plot of the show. I probably don’t have any real film memories from 1955 other than the deep psychological impressions. In fact, I didn’t know I had seen the film before until we got to the scenes of the kids climbing the water tower. I also remember the scenes of the kids departing, the PB-Y floating on the ocean and the sequence with the island.

At my second viewing of High Barbaree I knew I had seen this film before and that it was from a powerful memory. It stuck with me and over the years as I grew up I ached to see the film again. My father died when I was 18, and I have very few memories of him, especially ones of us doing something together. He usually worked two or three jobs and was seldom home. Often he was stationed away from home. This memory of him letting me sit up with him and watch High Barbaree in the middle of the night is a special memory.

I didn’t catch High Barbaree again until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, after I had gotten married, and Susan and I caught it on cable TV, sometime before TCM. I was working at library then, and it was then that it first occurred to me that the movie might be based on a book. Indeed it was. This was back in the early 1980s, before we had a VCR. I would have loved to have owned a copy of the film, but couldn’t. So I went searching for the book. No luck. Years later, in the 1990s, I caught High Barbaree again on TV, on TCM this time, and I thought about finding the book again. This time I had the internet, and I was able to buy a copy through ABE Books.

Reading the book gave me a completely different spin on the story. James Norman Hall was nearing the end of his life – he would die in 1951, the year I was born. Even though High Barbaree was about a young Navy flier, it was autobiographical, about Hall’s own life growing up in Iowa at the beginning of the 20th century, remembering his mother and father, and his home town. I learned that after I discovered In Search of Paradise by Paul L. Briand, Jr., a biography of Nordhoff and Hall.

You might not want to read the next sentence because it contains a spoiler for both the movie and the book. In the movie Alec is rescued and lives, and his story is only a dream, but in the book, Alec dies, and his story is his dying thoughts. Hall had lived through two world worlds and was old enough to be thinking about death himself. He had a daughter named Nancy he knew he’d loose when he passed on, and I assumed that fear was the basis for his novel. High Barbaree is his fantasy of a mystical island where he might meet her again. The movie makers took his somber little tale with thoughts of dying and made it into a romantic war adventure with a happy ending.

As a four-year-old kid I picked up on the story of separation and dying, and the mysticism and hope of fantasies. I don’t know if High Barbaree caused this, but for my whole life I’ve been fascinated by stories of people stranded on islands or lost at sea. Years later when I caught Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable on the all-night movies I loved it. I also loved the Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson versions too.

In 1971 I started studying computer programming and I’ve often thought about how our brains are programmed by pop culture influences. I’ve seen High Barbaree six times over almost six decades. Each time I saw it, I saw something else because I was a different age and person, but the impact of seeing it at age four made some kind of life-long impression, some kind of deep programming sub-routine in my brain. I’ve seen thousands of movies, most of which I’ve completely forgotten. If anyone reading this finds a copy of High Barbaree to watch they will probably not find much in it. When I saw it again the other night it seemed very slight. However, it did trigger emotional waves deep within my own memories, and from my knowledge of James Norman Hall and why he wrote in the book, that I can see that the filmmakers meant it to be much more than what it became. I think the filmmakers also had an emotional response to the book and hoped to convey that in the movie.

I’m not sure the emotions are there unless you can bring your own deep experiences to the film. I wish I could see High Barbaree without all my psychological baggage that comes with me to know if there’s a deserved reason why the film has been forgotten. I wonder how many young kids happens to catch High Barbaree back in the 1950s and now feel nostalgic for it after all these years.

This makes me wonder if any film can truly stand alone, or requires the fertile minds of the audience to make them succeed?

JWH – 7/15/14

“Who Knows Where The Times Goes” at 4am

The older I get, the more I think about time. Maybe that’s because I’m running out of time, or maybe time is just how we link our memories.

Now that I’m retired my sleep patterns are changing. I guess work made me a solid sleeper. Now I sleep whenever I feel like it, and more and more I find myself waking up in the middle of the night. I’ve discovered 4am is a great time to listen to music on the headphones. This morning’s random play started with “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” sung by Judy Collins.

One reason 4am is a great time to listen to music is because my mind exists in a disassociated dream-state. Music and lyrics trigger images and thoughts that don’t surface during the daylight hours. Since I also have a bit of a cold, my mind was even more weird. Colds make me nostalgic, and listening to a song about where did the time go really pushed that button. I even played it twice.

I do not fear the time

Who knows how my love grows

Who knows where the time goes

Me and my friends are getting older and we often talk about where does the time go, and lament that time is running out. If I live an average lifetime, I only have about as many years as I did from 2000 till now. That’s both a lot of time, and not very much. I already know many from my generation that have passed on, and the people I spend time with are becoming old friends in both age and the length of time I’ve known them.

Getting old sucks, but what can you do about it? I have a philosophical bent that lets me enjoy my decay, but my friends think I’m morbid.

There’s a weird dichotomy between the people I knew before thirty, and those after forty. Some of my “new” friends I’ve known for twenty years, yet sometimes when I’m hanging out with them I feel like I’m with strangers. Maybe blood kinship only feel tighter because those are the people we’ve known since the beginning of our personal time, and everyone we met after we’ve adultified still feel like strangers.

Since my playlist was on random, it was rather serendipitous that the next song was “Old Friends” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was a song written back in the 1960s imagining being old at seventy I realized that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are now in their seventies.

Can you imagine us years from today

Sharing a park bench quietly

How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends

There are damn few people I knew growing up that I’m still in contact with now. What’s funny is I used to wonder back in the 1960s what all those rock stars I admired then would be like in their seventies. Now I know. It’s so fucking weird to see Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones on TV. I’m still playing albums those guys made back when, picturing them from their classic covers, but seeing wrinkled old coots on my TV screen.

In the darkness, half asleep, I think about how Susan and I are getting old, and so are all our friends, and how we’re all worrying about becoming feeble or demented. I seem to worry about different things things than my lady friends. They hate so much not being young, but they seem to have their health. My friend Connell and I, worry more about our failing bodies. We don’t mind the wrinkles, but know our bodies aren’t going to hold out like the ladies, who will probably all last until their nineties. Connell and I think we’ll fade away before our eighties. I’ve known Connell since 1966, so we’ll be old friends in our seventies. Some of my lady friends might have as many years ahead as they’ve had since 1980.

While listening to “Old Friends” in a dreamy state, half in, and half out, of consciousness, I had many revelations about time, things that seemed so insightful in the four o’clock hour of the morning, but now lost in the light of day. I wish I could recapture the brilliance of my visions, but I can’t. I live a strange life now by not working, spending most of my time processing the past. I still do things in the now with friends, but my nine-to-five time is mostly spent in the profession of studying the relics of time. I am a temporal archeologist.

I graze on time. I study science that chronicles billions of years. I read histories that span thousands of years. I read novels from the past three centuries. I watch movies that span nine decades. I listen to popular music that span the same nine decades. I read biographies that take me up and down the past. I study 3,000 year old religions and philosophy that are distilled from 300,000 years of ancient thoughts. I graze on time while my own dwindling 4D space is being consumed.

The next song that came on was “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis.

Hello stranger

It seems so good to see you back again

How long has it been

Seems like a mighty long time

How very strange, because it feels like I’m constantly reacquainting myself with old friends.

Wow, three songs in a row about time, what a coincidence. Maybe fate is telling me something. Or maybe time is very essential to song writing. I wonder if I went through my playlist of All Time Favorites at Spotify, how many songs will I find about time?

Laying in the 4:14 am dark, with my eyes closed, in a serene state of floating consciousness, listening to my Spotify playlist through an old pair of Sony Walkman headphones attached to my iPod touch, I realized just how much time I spend consuming the past. I study cosmology about things billions of years old, and evolution about things millions of years old, and history of things thousands of years old, and pop culture that spans hundreds of years, and my parent’s life since 1916, and old movies of the 1930s and 1940s, and my life since 1951, and rock music and science fiction since the 1960s, and computers since the 1970s, and computer networks since the 1980s, and the internet since the 1990s, and all the great TV shows since the turn of the century.

I could restate that list over and over again with different examples.

I now like to think of my memory as a timeline, and my life in retirement is about moving up and down that timeline learning new stuff to fill in the ticks of time. Laying in the dark I think of all the people I’ve known, many of which are dead, or I’ve lost contact with, who exist along my timeline since 1951. Interspersed between the memory of people on the timeline are songs, and next to the songs are books I read while listening to music. Or maybe television shows I watched with different people, or places I visited with other people. It does seem like a mighty long time.

Time is the thread that ties everything together, and who knows where it goes.

JWH – 7/13/14

Whatever Happened To The Beatles?

When I was growing up, back in the 1960s, there was a band called The Beatles that was more famous than any other band. From 1964 to 1969 they were always in the news, always on the radio, often seen on television, setting the pace for sixties pop culture. You heard their songs everywhere, either ordinary folks just singing, or professionals covering their tunes. I bought all their albums as they came out, with each new release a big occasion. Then The Beatles broke up and everyone was sad.

Years later, when CDs came out, I bought all The Beatles albums again, but this time the albums were different from when their songs came out on LPs in the 1960s. The CD albums were repackaged like they had been first released in England as LPs. For a while, this brought The Beatles back into my life. For decades when I listened to music it was by listening to CDs, and now and then I’d play The Beatles. I still thought of them as the most famous band on Earth.

Starting many years ago I switched to Rhapsody subscription music, and after a few years to Rdio, and after another few years to Spotify. I listen to streaming music at my computer, or when walking around with my iPod touch, or on my big stereo through my Roku connected to my receiver. The Beatles have never been on streaming music. As I slowly stopped playing CDs, The Beatles were forgotten. Then they released their albums again on remastered CDs. I bought them all except Yellow Submarine. However, I didn’t even play all these new CDs because I’ve gotten out of the habit of playing CDs. Some of those remastered CDS are still in the shrink wrap. Maybe I’ll get around to them eventually, but streaming music is my habit.

I’ve gotten so used to listening to streaming music that if I can’t add a song to my playlists, or call the album up when I think about it, it doesn’t get played. So I don’t’ hear The Beatles anymore. This year when they had all the 50th anniversary stuff it was fascinating to watch on TV. That would have triggered memories and gotten me to add some of their songs to my playlists, if they had been available on Spotify, but since they weren’t, I haven’t.

I said to my wife, “I wonder what Beatles songs I’d add to my playlist if they were available?” I never found out, because they still aren’t on streaming.

I have two sets Beatles CDs, plus all their songs ripped to my computer, and even uploaded to my Amazon Music and Google Music accounts. Rhapsody/Rdio/Spotify has ruined me. I now think of music as what I hear everyday from Spotify. I sometimes get out my favorite albums I play on Spotify and play them on CD just to hear their better sound quality, but I don’t play The Beatles because I don’t remember them anymore. My music world has become Spotify, and The Beatles are not part of that world.

I know people who still play The Beatles, not their CDs, but digital songs they’ve stolen or bought as singles. Those folk are still stuck in the past of owning music. Statistics show streaming music is catching on, and even the number of illegal downloads are down. Sales of purchased digital songs are down too. If stolen and bought songs are in decline, and renting is on the increase, when are people going to play The Beatles?

I wonder if other people are like me, and have forgotten The Beatles because their songs aren’t available via streaming music? Well, new people who never knew The Beatles don’t even know what they are missing. But for us old farts, it’s, “Whatever happened to The Beatles?” It’s a new world out there when it comes to discovering and playing music. Some bands are bucking the trend because of the money. And I can understand that. But music seems to be in two places now, either live or streamed. Who plays albums anymore? Or the radio?

Hey, whatever happened to The Beatles?

JWH – 7/10/14

Can I Defrag My Brain?

Conventional wisdom says we only use ten percent of our brains. Well, that’s been debunked by scientists in various ways. There are plenty of articles on the net that explain why this meme is an urban legend. We don’t have a lot of extra capacity idling under the hood, especially as we get older. At sixty-two I feel my brain is so chock full of facts that to learn a new phone number requires forgetting another number. It’s like my brain is a computer hard drive at 99.9% usage. I need to delete files to make room. With computer hardware we can defrag ours drives, putting all the fragmented files into continuous order, thus speeding up access to our data, freeing up space, and even discovering bad sectors.

Is it possible to defrag our wetware too?

I need to speed up access to my stored thoughts, fix links to lost facts, delete old memories to have space to learn new things, and make my old brain run more efficiently. Is that possible? I’m not sure if our wetware uses linked lists, but it sure does feel like it. It seems like I recall information by association to related information. And nowadays I often can’t remember particular tidbits of data because my links are broken. What I need is to defrag my mind.

This little TED film is very enlightening. It explains why multitasking is wasteful, and why I can’t think when I’m tired and hungry. If I’m theorizing I can defrag my brain, I’ll have take energy use into consideration. This DNews flick below shoots down the ten percent idea too, but it does claim we could do more with our brains if we worked harder. I’m thinking I need to work more efficiently with the remaining capacity I have, especially since my mental abilities are obviously in decline, and I can’t add new capacity. I’m not being a defeatist, but accepting the reality that aging involves decay. I really wished I did have an auxiliary memory though.

One thing that really helps me defrag my brain is blogging. Struggling to put my thoughts into a coherent essay is almost exactly like taking widely disperse file fragments on a hard drive and putting them in one continuous file. Not only does writing help me organize my thoughts, but making them coalesce into a unified structure seems to delete smaller thoughts from my brain. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it feels that way. Each time I write a good essay I feel like I’ve deleted a bunch of aborted drafts and stacks of 3×5 cards.

Many scientists have describe dreaming as a way the brain cleans up each day’s experiences and throws out the unneeded memories. This sounds like a kind of defragging of files too. Often during the day when I’m too tired to write, I’ll take a nap and when I wake up my brain is clear again. I think partly this is recharging the brain, like recharging a battery, and partly sleep must clean out chemical waste that clogs my neural pathways, but it also feels like my unconscious mind has been processing my thoughts too, like organizing paper files into folders for my conscious mind, because when I wake up my thoughts feel more orderly.

The first film takes exception with multitasking, and I think they’re right. I find that my brain feels more efficient if I try to do fewer things. Now that I’m retired I my brain seems freed up to think about new things. I worry about less crap now, which makes me think the old adage, “Use or lose it” is a kind of mental defragging tool. Want to erase memories? Avoid thinking, worrying and studying a subject.

One of my life-long models of behavior comes from the 1950 science fiction film Destination Moon. When making their initial lunar landing, our fictional astronauts use too much fuel, so they don’t have enough rocket juice to return to Earth. The solution is to jettison as much mass as possible from the spaceship so the fuel they do have is enough to make it back home. Many self-help books promote the idea that if you want to succeed with your ambitions its best to have only one goal. I never could do that, and I’ve never been great at anything in my life. Now that I’m old I realize the same principle applies to coping with aging. The older I get, the more I realize I’ve got less fuel to get me through the day. The key to fighting this problem is to jettison tasks that don’t matter so I have to fuel to to do what matters most.

But I’m learning to do things that the astronauts in Destination Moon didn’t know how to do – make more fuel. Eating better, exercising, and sleep either give me more fuel, or makes my old brain run more efficiently so I can do more with less. I’m still on a downward spiral towards an eventual heat death of my universe, but every little bit of order I gather now seems to fight personal entropy.

One thing I’m learning lately is being a news addict is counter productive. More news means less news remembered. I love reading the “news” on the internet about all kinds of subjects, watching news shows and documentaries on television, and reading as many books as I can, but I’m discovering it’s better to take in fewer stories and concentrate more on one idea at a time. This is very hard to do, because so much is going on in the world and it feels like I’m missing out if I don’t pay attention to everything. Not watching the NBC Nightly News feels like I missed out on what went on around the world that day. But you know what? I’ve watched thousands of episodes of the nightly news and I can’t remember 99.9999% of what I’ve seen. I record the news on my computer’s DVR, and I’m learning to skip through certain kinds of stories. This has a defragging effect on my brain. Eventually I might stop watching the news altogether, but right now I can’t break that habit.

I’m finding it more satisfying to read a whole bunch about one interesting topic than learn a little about a hundred different of subjects. I think either way I’m going to forget most everything I learn, but it’s more satisfying to gorge on one subject than graze on a thousand. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll retain a little more of that one subject.

This is analogous to a computer’s CPUs and multitasking. Our brain’s main loop can time slice many subprograms, but the more we have going, the slower our brain runs. Having fewer interests and worries speeds up processing on the functions we do keep running.

I don’t know if it’s scientifically possible to defrag my brain, but I sure am trying.

JWH – 7/9/14