jameswharris

Printed Book v. Audio Book

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, December 8, 2014

I am reading and listening to the same book, Timescape by Gregory Benford. This 1980 science fiction novel is about the year 1998, and the Earth suffering from an environmental collapse. The reason it’s science fiction is because the people in 1998 find a way to send a message back to people in 1962 to tell them to stop doing what they’re doing. I first read Timescape back in the early 1980s, just after it came out, and then listened to it in 2007. I’m reading it again this month for a book club, but as an experiment, I thought I’d listen to what I just read a week later. This has proved to be a fascinating experiment.

When I started routinely listening to audiobooks in 2002, I discovered just how bad a reader I was. Even though I was a lifelong bookworm, and thought myself a great reader, audiobooks revealed I wasn’t. My inner narrative was sketchy and wimpy compared to what I heard by professional narrators. This was true for a number of reasons, but mostly because I read too fast. I was skimming, rather than reading. There is more to reading than finding out what happens next. A great book will be rich in details, its scenes dramatic, and its characters full of distinctive voices. Speed reading tends to gloss over the details, flattens the drama and eliminates the voices.

A dozen year later, I now read much slower. I work very hard not to skim. I keep an eye out for the clues the author gives to imagine the dramatic interaction of the characters, and their personal voice. I’ve come a long way, but not far enough. I’m rereading Timescape because I’m leading a book discussion group, and I’m summarizing each chapter. I concentrate harder on the details of the prose and take notes.

Then a week later, I decided to listen again to the same story. As I progress over each chapter, I remember reading the words. I’m don’t think I skimmed much at all, but it’s still very obvious that I’m not getting the dramatic intent of the story. The book is narrated by Simon Prebble, and he brings so much more nuance to the story. Prebble is not making stuff up, the clues to how the characters should sound are in the narrative, I just don’t imagine the drama in my head when reading compared to what I hear in the audiobook.

Strangely, listening to an audiobook is like using a magnifying glass to examine the details of writing. Benford has created characters with distinctive voices and psychologies. He even gives his sister-in-law, Hilary Foister, credit for helping him with the British portion of the story. For instance, I’m always jarred when British people drop the definite article, like when they say, “go to hospital” or “go to university.” I don’t know why we want the definite when declaring generic places, but that’s how it is. When reading that kind of thing in Timescape I didn’t notice it, but I did when listening.

When Renfrew meets Patterson for the first time he experiences a number emotions. Renfrew grew up a working class kid that’s made it to Cambridge, to become a physicist, and meets the upper class Peterson, a politico who’s going to evaluate his budget for a highly theoretical experiment in times when many are starving. Renfrew is very tense, and class conscious.

“Good morning, Dr. Renfrew,” The smooth voice was just what he had expected.

“Good morning, Mr. Peterson,” he murmured, holding out a large square hand. “Please to meet you.” Damn, why had he said that? It might have been his father’s voice: “I’m reet please to meet ya, lad.” He was getting paranoid. There was nothing in Peterson’s face to indicate anything but seriousness about the job.”

Do you feel the paranoia from reading it? I did a little, but I felt it more when listening. Prebble even does the father’s voice with the accent and different tone, a tiny flashback. The two men sound different in the narration, sounding like what Benford tells us they sound.

This rather plain passage presents all the essential details, but when I listened to Prebble read it, I got the feeling we were decoding more of Benford’s intent. I even picture how Benford imagined the scene and wrote it. Charles Dickens was famous for acting out his characters and scenes as he wrote them. I think most good writers, even if they aren’t hammy would-be actors, at least mentally picture their scenes in a dramatic way, and hear the voices of their characters. If you read very fast all characters sound the same – your inner voice.

When readers decode fiction they can reconstruct the scene in an infinite number of ways. I tend to think most of us readers don’t do a lot of decoding, but merely grab the basic information to move the story forward and rush on to the next fact. I have met people who claimed to see novels acted out in their heads, but I don’t.

However, when I listen to an audio book read by a great narrator, I do. It’s like a book is a freeze-dried drama and the narrator is the water that reconstitutes the story. I think this is true because the audiobook goes at a very slow pace, the pace of speech. That gives my mind time to feel the words which triggers images. Finally, the professional reader colors the narration with a rich reading voice that adds addition textures.

Benford is not a great literary writer, but Timescape is far more literary than most science fiction novels. Timescape won several awards and has been added to many best book lists. I think it succeeded because it stand outs among other science fiction novels as better written and more character driven. It also stands out because of its serious extrapolation and speculation – it’s not your typical sci-fi escapism. And I feel listening to Timescape magnifies its higher qualities beyond what I was able to perceive by just reading the book with my inner voice – which is quite plain.

As a person who’d love to write fiction, I hear in Benford’s story what I’m missing in my own writing. The details I notice under the magnification of audio narration reveal qualities in writing I aspire to acquire. I think listening to audio books can be a superior way of decoding fiction. I wonder how blind people running their fingers across the Braille page compare what they take in by touch to what they hear with their finally tuned ears. Thousands of years ago when humanity transitioned from an oral culture to a written culture, I wonder if they missed what went away when they started reading silently.

As a lifelong book worm I’ve been conditioned to seeing words, but now I’m learning what it means to hear them.

JWH

Would You Go To Mars?

By James Wallace Harris, Saturday, December 6, 2014

Have you ever wanted to go to Mars? Probably not, but if you have, have you ever wondered why? What’s the appeal of leaving Earth and traveling to another planet? Over 200,000 people signed up for Mars One, which hopes to start sending four people to Mars every two years starting in 2024, in one way missions. NASA is talking about manned missions to Mars in the 2030s. China also has its sights on Mars.

Why do so many people want to go to Mars? At National Geographic I found this short film, which interviews five people that are volunteering for the Mars One mission, even though it means not coming back.

Are these five people just unhappy with their life on Earth, and hope to find something new on Mars? I think that’s how I was in my teens, back in the 1960s, when I used to dream of going to Mars. I read a lot of science fiction, and I guess I was seduced by the romance of adventure and excitement. The trouble is my personality type isn’t suited for adventure and excitement. I recently wrote “When I Was A Martian” about growing up thinking like these people in the film.

I can’t imagine Mars One succeeding before NASA or China, but I guess it’s possible. If there were ten times as many volunteers for Mars One, two million people wanting to go, all willing to donate one hundred dollars a month to the cause, that would generate enough private money to fund such an ongoing space mission. But would the lucky four who got to go to Mars be just average people like in the film, or would Mars One pick the right stuff astronauts like NASA? What if Mars One astronauts were chosen by lottery? What if ordinary people could go to Mars – would you go? When I was a kid, I would have said yes. For most of my life now I would have said no.

NASA’s new space transport, the Orion, is designed for trips to the IIS, the Moon, asteroids and Mars, but somehow I can’t believe it’s big enough for trips further than the Moon. It only has 316 cubic feet of living space. A 10x10x8 foot room has 800 cubic feet, so can you imagine living over year with three other people in the space of a small bedroom? I can understand a spacecraft that size for a three day journey to the Moon, but not an 8 month journey to Mars, or similar length to an asteroid. Of course, it will be combined with other modules for longer trips, but I can’t imagine them being huge and roomy.

Russians and Americans have lived in space for over a year on space stations, but they have a good bit more room and variety of habitat modules. That makes me wonder, just how big does a mission to Mars spacecraft have to be to make it psychologically comfortable? What would be the most limited accommodations you could handle for a mission that could last 400-450 days.

Men and woman have sailed non-stop solo around the world in trips that were almost a year, living in cabins that about about the size of the Orion spacecraft. But only certain kinds of people have that kind of mental make-up for such solitary sailing. Which would you prefer, being a solo astronaut, or be crammed in a can with three other people for an eight month voyage to Mars? If I went with other people I’d need my own private living space, but then I doubt I have the right stuff.

I’m 63, so a one way trip to Mars doesn’t scare me. Sounds like a better way to die than getting cancer or Alzheimer’s. But the Mars One volunteers who are interviewed in the film are young people who have every reason to stay on Earth. I wonder if they would really go if they got the opportunity.

There’s a kind of Ponzi scheme to Mars One. They hope to send four people every two years, but after ten years they’d have twenty people on Mars. How many supply rockets will it take to keep those people alive? At what point could the colonists become self-sufficient? How many supply rockets will it take to build a self-sufficient infrastructure? When people aren’t selected to go, will they lose interest, stop donating money and strand the early settlers?

After we see people living on Mars, and what life would be like there, will people change their minds? I can’t believe the reality of life on Mars will be that appealing. Once a one-way program for colonizing Mars is started, ending the program means a death sentence to all the colonists. The ethical thing to do is build a self-sufficient colony first, with robots, and when it’s obvious that a human viable colony on Mars could survive, then ship the volunteers.

I bet if you wait until 2024 and asked these five people in the film if they still wanted to go to Mars they’d say no. People who are really willing to be astronauts are also willing to work their whole life towards that goal with an almost single-minded devotion. And even among professional astronauts, I’m not sure how many would even commit to a 2-3 year mission. The failure rate of unmanned Mars missions is around fifty percent.

I’m not sure how many people actually would give up their Earthly lives for living in space. Mars, the Moon, asteroids, the outer moons, they are all just rocks, with lots of radiation and intense cold. I think science fiction has oversold space travel. I think we will travel to the other planets, and maybe even colonize the Moon and Mars, but only very unique individuals are going to go, and even rarer folks will stay. I don’t think people who dream of traveling into space really understand what it means to leave Earth for good.

JWH

Why Do Millions of Americans Side with Capital Against Labor When It’s Not In Their Best Interest?

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, December 5, 2014

I just finished The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr, about automation. I had an insight in the middle of the night. We are political polarized by defining everything in terms of Republican and Democrat, or conservative and liberal, but the real division is still between capital and labor. Capital is the population that make their money my manipulating wealth. Labor is the population that make their money by working. There is a gray area, the portion of the population that labor by managing capital’s wealth. Even though we claim to live in a democracy, we actually live in a plutocracy. Most everything in our society is determined by money.

Sometimes I think people pick their political parties like they pick their football teams – emotionally. They stick by them thick on thin, right or wrong, always the loyal fan. However, politics is more than just one team against another. Politics defines how we live, and it seems strange to me that so many Americans are Republicans even though that party’s goals don’t line up with their economic lifestyles.

We essentially have a strict two party system, even though independent parties show up from time to time. We divide ourselves into conservatives and liberals, but those really aren’t apt descriptions. It’s really capital versus labor. Economics is the driving force of our society. There are societies that are shaped by other forces, like religion, but in the 21st century, most societies are shaped by money.

Even before the Industrial Revolution, we had the wealthy, usually the aristocratic, governing the poor, usually peasants. With the coming of machines, we had the rise of the middle class – merchants, skilled trades, academics, clergy, etc. As industry transformed society it broke down into essentially two driving forces: capital and labor. Some people had the money to do things, and other people had the skills to do things. People with money always assumed they were in charge because they financed the doing of things, but without the skills and labor of workers, nothing would have gotten done.

Because of automation, capital is now in the position of undermining the inherent leverage of labor. Capital is no longer dependent on hiring people to work, they can buy machines instead. Because of this, we’ve been seeing the erosion of labor power. Politically though, why are we seeing so many millions of people who should be siding with labor siding with capital? I find this psychological conundrum very interesting.

Capital is those who invest. Labor is those who work. Except for their 401k savings, most people in America have little capital to invest. So why do they side with capital politically? Right now capital is on a role to crush labor by lowering wages in every sector it can, and to reduce the size of the government. This adds to capital’s total wealth on two fronts. It’s understandable why they want to do this, except it’s destroying the middle class, which is the main generator of their capital.

So why are the laborers of America backing capital in their own self destruction? The plutocracy of America actually works through both parties, Republicans and Democrats, but they favor the Republican party as their main tool. However, there’s not enough true capitalists in America to give the Republican party the numbers to survive in the democratic process, so capital started working on coalitions. Divide and conquer. They have broken labor up into different social groups and pitted them against each other.

By backing hot button emotional issues like fundamental religion, race, xenophobia, and hatred of freeloading, they have gained millions fans for their team. What makes me wonder is why those people side with capital when it’s obvious they should side with labor. Is it a kind of denial of reality? Or is it a kind of wish, that they hope one day to be rich too, so they side with the rich now?

Capital is working extremely hard to squeeze every last penny from the system. They want workers to earn the bare minimum, and they want to pay the least possible in benefits. Conversely, they don’t want to pay taxes that help labor survive the shortfall. If people can’t make a living from capitalism, and they can’t make a living from socialism, where does capital expect labor to earn its bread?

We have over 330 million people in this country, and the number of jobs is shrinking. Capital is embracing automation with a passion, which means even fewer jobs for the future. Capital is close to destroying all unions and collective bargaining by labor. But they are also working hard to undermine professional workers too. K-12 teachers are on a rout, but capital, through state legislatures are now finding ways to attack higher education. Capital is also trying to find ways to pay professionals in medicine and law less too. And once glamorous high paying jobs like airline pilots are seeing their average salaries in decline because of automation. If capital could replace all the fast food workers with robots, they would. And if the service economy goes, where will labor be?

Capital is so greedy they ignore the fact that a fat middle class generates the most capital for them, yet their goal is to kill the golden goose. Nor will they allow socialism to take up the slack. Were will that leave labor?

Thomas Piketty, who wrote Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century suggests there will be social revolution. That’s a nasty fix to the problem. There is a growing underground economy, but I don’t know if a capital-free economy can ever become large enough to sustain the growing unemployment of labor. The system is self-correcting. If capital gets all the marbles, things will fall apart, and our society will reset like a video game. But who wants that?

I think the solution is limitations on capital, supplemented with limited socialism. That’s what we’ve been doing since the 1930s, but capital has been fighting tooth and claw to undo it. Capital should allow a higher minimum wage, and support universal health care. In other words, if capital bought off labor to a degree they could avoid a revolution. I don’t think they will. Capital is too single minded. That’s why they are against immigration reform, Obamacare, social security, Medicare, education, and any other pile of money they can’t control. Capital wants every last penny.

The people behind capital make their living by piling up money – that’s why they resent government handouts and welfare – why should anyone live without capital or laboring? Yet, they are rigging the system so socialism is the only humane solution. If the 1% get all the pennies, the system will collapse. I don’t know why they don’t see that, in the same way I wonder why labor votes with capital.

The 99% need to survive somehow. They have to divvy up a portion of the pie. How small that portion gets before the next American revolution begins is yet to be determined. The last recession got us close enough to see the whites of their eyes. Nations all over the world are coming apart. Capital needs to take notice. Just because you can replace labor with machines doesn’t mean those people go away.

JWH

What Are The Limits of Individual Knowledge?

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, December 2, 2014

This week I watched my favorite nature documentary, My Life as a Turkey for the third and fourth time – and never gets old. Joe Hutto was given 16 wild turkey eggs which he hatched with an incubator and then let the chicks imprint on him. Hutto spent a year alone with his brood in the Flatwoods of Florida, being their mother, and becoming a turkey. The more time Hutto spent with his turkeys, the more his mind adapted to the natural world. Hutto, a naturalist, had already spent much his life in nature, but at one point he said that normally he saw three rattlesnakes a year, but when he was with the turkeys he saw that many or more a day. He eventually learn over thirty vocalizations the turkeys used to communicate with each other. While he was with the turkeys reality revealed itself to him at a level he had never known before.

Now my point is not to talk turkey, but explore the capacity of the human mind. Hutto, by living with wild turkeys was able to see their minds were vaster than anyone ever imagined. He learned that animals live in the moment and see so much more of reality than we do, because our minds can’t stay focused on the present, and spend too much time dwelling on the past, or anticipating the future, places that don’t actually exist.

I am using examples from the natural world to think about thinking. The Inuit, the native people of the North American Arctic, were hunters who could traverse great expanses of frozen land and sea without maps or other navigational aids until they started using GPSes. The method of navigation by brainpower alone is called wayfinding, and the Inuit were highly skilled at it. I’m sure they also understood their prey like Joe Hutto understood his turkeys. Now that the Intuit use GPSes they have lost the capacity to live on the ice like their ancestors.

My guess is the maximum capacity of human brainpower is close to what humans experienced when living in nature and at the edge of survival. Becoming farmers, and then industrialized urban dwellers, provided us with ways to slack off. It’s only when we push ourselves to the extremes, in science, sports, mathematics, war, academia, business, do we get close to our operating maximum. Most people never push themselves in their day-to-day jobs, and watching television hardly taxes our abilities. It’s no wonder that video games are so popular, because they do push our minds to work harder.

We use machines and technology to make our lives easier, and even though we think we’re much smarter than those that have come before us, that might be an illusion. Our collective knowledge is greater, but probably not our individual knowledge. Just because I live in an era of computers and robots on Mars doesn’t mean I know how to create them, or even describe the science used in their creation.

We live in a time when everyone thinks they know everything, and the people who act with the most certainty seem to know the least. This is why I doubt the human race is smart enough to avoid extinction. I’m not being cynical about people, just trying to guess their real potential. I love computers, but I’m starting to think we’d be smarter without them. But I don’t think we should give them up either. It’s obvious the next stage of evolution is machine beings.

I think we need to invent ways to push our own brain capacity, and learn to amplify our individual knowledge by working together in new forms of social knowledge acquisition. We see this in teams of inventors or entrepreneurs who apply their collective knowledge towards a common goal. We revere and praise the individual, but we might need to start recognizing great teams, and study how they work. Or how and why collaborative systems like open source software and Wikipedia succeed.

One example of that is climate science. Climate deniers tend to be individuals, but they are arguing against an army of scientists working together with billions of dollars worth of cybernetic minds and scientific tools. It strange how often average citizens side with the deniers. Can any one individual ever understand enough to explain anything thoroughly about reality? We need to recognize the limitations of our minds, and how collective knowledge works.

JWH

Faith in Science

I am reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, an overview of the men and women who brought about the age of computers. At other times during the day I’m listening to The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr, a book about how automation is making humans dumber. Isaacson gives the history of computers starting when they were first imagined as mechanical devices, but really came into being as electronic devices using vacuum tubes, and finally evolving into solid state devices we know today after the invention of the transistor.

Here’s my problem. I can sort of visualize how a mechanical calculator works, at least for adding and subtraction, but beyond that my brain explodes. I especially can’t conceive of how vacuum tubes were used to make a digital computer. I started taking computer programming classes in 1971, and even passed two semesters of assembly language. I used to be pretty good at binary and hexadecimal arithmetic. But it’s extremely hard for me to imagine how a computer actually works. Essentially, it’s all magic, and I just accept that it’s possible to build a computer according to the laws of science – but my acceptance is really faith in science.

Nicholas Carr believes the more work we give to computers the dumber humans will become. Watch these two videos, and tell me if you understand them. The first is from 1943 and is about the basics of a vacuum tube, obviously a device essential to most of industrial progress at the time, but a forgotten tech today.

This is the technology that scientists used to build the first electronic programmable computers. Can you in any way conceive of how they get from vacuum tube to data processing? How much would I have to know to understand how the first computers were assembled? I keep reading about vacuum tubes, and even though I get a slight glimpse into their nature, I cannot for the life of me imagine how they were used to create a machine to do arithmetic, and show the results – much less understand the commands of a programming language, no matter how primitive that language.

I then thought maybe I’d understand vacuum tubes better if I could understand how they were made. I found this film.

This film makes me mightily impressed with scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century. If civilization collapsed it would be a very long time before we could ever reinvent the vacuum tube, much less a computer.

What these two short films show me is human knowledge is divvied up so everyone learns extremely tiny pieces of total knowledge, but collectively we can create magical machines like an iPhone 6. A smartphone represents countless forms of expertise I will never understand, or even fathom with any kind of analogous modeling. An iPhone 6 probably has the equivalent of billions of vacuum tubes as transistors shrunk down into a solid state that are only individually visible with an electron microscope. It’s fucking magic. There’s no way around it. I know it’s science, but to my mind any mumbo jumbo I come up with to explain the miracle of a smartphone is no better than the incantations in a Harry Potter novel.

Wouldn’t it be great if we all were Renaissance beings that knew everything the entire human race had learned up to this point? Would we all have more respect for science if our K-12 education had been about recreating how we got to our current level of technology? What kind of curriculum would be required so that each graduating class had to build an ENIAC to earn their high school diplomas? That would only put them 70 years behind the times.

I don’t want to live by faith in science, I want my brain to comprehend science.

I think Carr might be right. I think we’re passing our knowledge off to machines and slacking off ourselves. One day we’ll have intelligent machines that can actually do anything any scientist in history has every done. And all we’ll know how to do is double-tap an app icon to get it started.

JWH