jameswharris

What Happened to Fun and Educational Programming?

Back in the seventies I became addicted to computer magazines. In the early sevenities I had studied computers, working with keypunch machines, greenbar paper and mainframes like the IBM 360, but then the microcomputer revolution burst on the scene and I fell in love Atari, Apple, Commodore, TI, Sinclair, Radio Shack and all the other little computers. I haunted the newsstands for issues of Byte, Compute! (in all it’s various incarnations), Dr. Dobbs, InfoWorld, On Computing, A+, A.N.A.L.O.G., Popular Computing, ST-Log and my favorite Creative Computing. I was so addicted to computer magazines I’d read magazines devoted to computers I didn’t even own. A common feature to all of them was the type-in program, which encouraged readers to learn to program. At the start of this revolution it was assumed that everyone would eventually have to learn to program and most secondary schools and colleges started introducing computer literacy classes. Then the revolution was networked.

So what happened? I think most people learned that they hated to program. It’s a tedious activity that I took to. I made a career of programming. I’ve heard that interest in programming has fallen off so much that Bill Gates has to beg Congress to be allowed to hire foreign programming students. The big brouhaha is the claim that American kids aren’t smart enough, don’t know math and science, and would rather play video games than write them. That may be true, but I’m guessing there might be other reasons.

First, there is little incentive to custom program when there are so many free programs around. How fun can a 200 line type-in game be compared to some million line monster that was produced like a Hollywood movie? The open source crowd has made a virtue out of volunteer programming, so that tends to remove the greed incentive. It’s a strange era we live in where the richest man in the world is a geek who climbed to the top of his pile of money by programming and the young people of today revolt against Gate’s model of success by advocating a commie paradigm of programming. That’s like refusing to join a gold rush and taking up alchemy. When I was young I foolishly protested the draft and the Vietnam War, but who’d have imagined later generations would grow up to protest against making money.

There are other reasons why programming isn’t as popular as beer-can collecting or poetry writing. Home computers used to come with a programming interpreter built in, but now-a-days you have to have an IDE that takes the dedication of a Ph.D. student to learn, and to give away your masterpiece you have to convince your friends to install some massive runtime. Programming is no longer little. If kids put as much work into learning to play the guitar or singing as it would take to program they could be rock stars – that’s why there’s American Idol and not American Hacker on TV.

The real reason why kids don’t want to program, study math or science, or become engineers is because those careers have no sex appeal. Even lowly desk jockies in The Office, appear to lead more exciting lives than someone who sits in front of a screen all day typing in keywoods. When hot women are interviewed on reality shows about the men they’d like to meet you seldom hear one wishing to hook up with a programmer. Not only is programming a male profession, but it appears to be for omega males. It’s lucky I snagged a wife before I discovered microcomputers.

With the video game industry becoming bigger than the movie industry it’s a wonder that video game programmers aren’t as glamorous as movie directors or screenwriters. (Even I can’t picture them being compared to actors.) Since programs are now written by teams, why aren’t there programming cards like baseball cards, so kids could collect the Microsoft players, or the Apple players or the Linux players – hell the kids on Slashdot certainly argue over their favorite teams as much as any kid ever argued over football teams. Unfortunately, programming is about as exciting as plumbing so its doubtful we can ever make it into a skill that kids dream of making it big in. Sure there are millions of us who love to program and we can make more money than plumbers but the profession is just not going make kids want to study in school. I wonder how many kids would want to be rock stars or movie actors if it required calculus?

“The Star Pit” – The Limits of Limitations

Time was 1967 at Miami-Killian Senior High. Sitting at the freak table in the cafeteria during home room, while listening to complex improvised percussions of the black guys at their table pounding out Afro-identity-rhythms with their hands, elbows and feet, I read a small digest pulp magazine called Worlds of Tomorrow. I tried to concentrate on the story I was reading, “The Star Pit,” while the kid next to me was lecturing our table about his amazing discovery of shooting drops of wine. He normally shot speed but he and his buddies had a dry period and decided to experiment. Although I wasn’t as dumb as this kid, I wasn’t beyond using chemicals to gain altitude, but what I really wanted was to be an astronaut and fly aboard a Gemini space capsule atop a Titan II rocket.

“The Star Pit,” a novella by Samuel R. Delany, is one of my all-time favorite science fiction stories that I’ve reread every few years since 1967. It is thrilling, inventive and most of all philosophical – and it has a theme that I never tire of contemplating. It’s about barriers. I like the think of an aquarium full of fish as an analogy to this story. Some fish living in a tank swim around and accept their limited world, but there are always other fish that constantly patrol the glass looking for a way past the barriers. As human we don’t bump into glass walls, but we’re all confined by invisible barriers.

When I first read “The Star Pit,” I did not know anything about the author. I later learned Delany was black, gay and very young, about 23, when he wrote “The Star Pit.” While I was in homeroom, Delany, nine years older than I, was already a big success in the science fiction world. By then he had already published five novels, including a trilogy. He grew up in Harlem, attended the Bronx High School of Science, married the poet Marilyn Hacker and started publishing novels by age 19. These are all clues to understanding this beautiful story. I could only imagine the ambitions that fueled Delany to write this story. It is also important to understand what was happening in the world of 1965-1967, the most important being the space race and the Vietnam War, but New York in the sixties was something special too.

If you can imagine a black, gay kid from Harlem wanting to be an astronaut with The Right Stuff, or even one of the guys who writes science fiction in 1965, you can begin to understand some of the barriers I am talking about. It goes deeper than that. All of Delany’s early work has reoccurring themes about being young and artistic – and especially about being original and always meeting other artists who were younger, more original and more artistic. My guess was Delany was a prodigy who achieved much too much success too early and hit lots of walls. I also expected he had lots of emotional trouble growing up.

We all want success when we’re young and few achieve their dreams. Most people settle down to accept life, swimming in the middle and never make a run at the glass anymore. Others continue to bash their heads, or like me, who constantly linger near the barrier thinking, “Jeez, how am I going to escape?” It’s now forty years later and I know I’m not going to be an astronaut. Like Dirty Harry said, a man must know his limitations, but if you test them enough you begin to wonder if the barrier will give just a little bit.

Living with confined desires changes your ambitions to adapt to the barriers. The conventional wisdom says if a person is going to be creative, they’re going to succeed when they are young. You might win a Nobel Prize when you’re old, but it’s for work your brain did when it was young. Most of our limits are related to brain function, genes and the health of our bodies. We know death is the ultimate barrier to ambition and that the odds are if we haven’t achieved success by thirty it won’t be at all, but some people refuse to ever throw in the towel despite all facts to the contrary.

I know I’ll never get to the Moon or Mars, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t write a sci-fi book about such adventures. Or is that being unrealistic? Even when you compromise you never know what the real limitations are. Take for instance a very tiny experiment I conducted. Scientists have discovered that the brain can still grow new neural pathways much later in life than previously thought and suggest that it’s never too late to learn new tricks. I decided to teach myself chess as a test. I didn’t get very far.

Like the Ratlit in “The Star Pit” who resents the Golden, those humans that can travel to other galaxies, I resent the young who can take up chess so easily while I butt my head against the 8×8 board. I wasn’t expecting to be a grandmaster, but had the lowly ambition of just beating the computer at the easiest level. I can’t even do that. Even now I like to pretend I could still succeed if I would only apply myself and study hard thirty minutes a day for a couple years. However, failing is teaching me something. I’m learning that there are a whole host of barriers that keep me back from succeeding, even at my unambitious ambition. Just to succeed at this tiny chess problem I suffer:

· Limits of concentration

· Limits of memory

· Limits of effort

· Limits of perception

· Limits of logic

· Limits of pattern recognition

· Limits of age

· Limits of ambition

· Limits of language

· Limits of knowledge

· Limits of talent

· Limits of skills

· Limits of health

· Limits of vitality

· Limits of analysis

· Limits of organization

· Limits of intellect

· Limits of overcoming limits

· Limits of time

That’s a lot of limits – and there are probably a lot more that I haven’t noticed since I’m so limited at observing my limits. I can’t just say I’m bad at chess because poor chess playing is only a symptom of my real disease. I could whine that I’m getting old, but I’m sure there are plenty of people decades older than me that can take up chess and beat the computer.

The real research question here is whether or not I can do anything about my limitations. Can I exercise my power of concentration and beat that limitation? If I studied chess books and improved my skills and knowledge about the game, might I push back some barriers? Yet, there are other barriers that keep me from doing that: energy, time, health, effort, etc. So why? Why don’t I just go swim in the middle of the aquarium and just watch television like the other fish? Why, I wonder myself.

You can read “The Star Pit” in Delany’s collection, aye, and gomorrah and other stories. Every evening writing this blog I pound against the barrier that keeps me from expressing in words the things that I see and think. “The Star Pit” haunts me with its frail characters fighting their hurricane force ambitions. I have no idea if the story will succeed with you like it has succeeded with me. It begins:

Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony.

But once some of our four-to-six-year-olds built an ecologarium, with six-foot plastic panels and grooved aluminum bars to hold corners and top down. They put it out on the sand.

An ancient radio presentation of “The Star Pit” can be found here on MP3.

Guaranteed Classics – Music Just For You (To Buy)

If you searched the net you can find plenty of writers riled up over The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s The Definitive 200 list of CDs they want you to own. Since I’m a list maker myself, see The Classics of Science Fiction, I like to think about preparing a good list. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has essentially prepared a list of CDs that is based on sales from recent decades, rather than compiling a list based on artistic merit that I think most readers expected it to be. Of course, we could assume that hordes of buying fans represent good taste and the list does represent the best 200 albums any music lover should own. Maybe it’s like school where they make you read books that are good for you. The trouble is they recommend music from several musical genres that doesn’t necessarily match any single music lover’s taste.

Any list of all time great albums that leaves out Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan can’t be much of a list. (Supply your own missing album to make this paragraph more meaningful.) That’s my all-time favorite album, so I’d expect it to be on the list – it wasn’t. Do I have no taste in music? When I assembled the Classics of Science Fiction list I realized I couldn’t just tell people what I thought were the best science fiction books. I had to come up with a system that represented authority of opinion.

The Rolling Stone Greatest 500 Albums of All Time list is more to my taste, but then Blonde on Blonde was #9. Increasing the number of bests also helps to hit everyone’s favorite. However, the Rolling Stone list just feels more genuine to me. There is a lot of overlap with the R&R Hall of Fame list, especially near the top. You can spot the impact of sales on both lists by looking at the RIAA of Gold & Platinum Top 100 albums or Wikipedia’s List of Best-Selling Albums Worldwide. Studying these two lists shows how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame made up their list. Every album I went “Huh!” over with great puzzlement and head scratching sold enough CDs to wallpaper Florida.

If I was going to make a list, I’d do something like what Time did for their All-Time 100 Albums. First, I would not rank albums. That should stop a lot of fights. Second, I would arrange the list going back in time, year by year, and list alphabetically what I determined through careful research were the best albums for each year. I would do what the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame did and put in muliple genres – but I’d add even more genres including World, Folk, Classical, and others they left out. This would be a massive job and one I’ll probably never work on, but I wish someone else would. Like the R&R HoF listers, I’d use sales figures but I’d also use critical reviews, awards, fan polls, books on music history and the test of time to figure out what albums really were the best for each year. I’m sure there are books that have done this, and maybe even web sites.

Metacritic has done something like this for the years back to 2000, but the list I want needs to go back through the 1920s, and maybe earlier to cover the entire history of pop music and the history of albums.

Now that I have Rhapsody Music, and can listen to almost any album I desire at the touch of a mouse for $9.95 a month, I’ll take these lists and explore what all the fuss is about. Hopefully, I’ll find some albums that I’ve never listened that’ll blow me away. Just because I lived through all those years since the 1950s doesn’t mean I got to hear all the best albums. And it really is exciting to discover great artists you totally missed.

Making PC Users PC – The Green Computer

Ever since I saw An Inconvenient Truth I’ve been pondering ways to do my part to use less carbon. Since I work with computers the first idea I had was to stop leaving my computers on 24-hours a day. That isn’t easy since at work I manage four servers and have two computers for programming. The best I could do was turn off my test computer when I wasn’t using it. However, at home I discovered I could save about 20 hours of power a day. Between those two computers I’m saving maybe 280 hours a week.

It’s a shame that Microsoft promotes automatic upgrades at night. Microsoft should tell people to turn their computers off when they aren’t using them and then develop programs that analyze usage patterns and run updates during the day. Most business just let workers leave their computers on 24×7. What a waste. I work at a university and they leave all the lab machines and classroom machines on 24×7 so they can run patches, updates and changes at night. But that’s wasting 16+ hours of energy a day per machine. Even with power saving features these machines waste a lot of energy (as do TVs and other electronics that never shut off but go into a mode designed for a quick start).

Simple solution – don’t run computers if you aren’t using them. What about reducing the amount of power they consume while running. I started googling around and found this ultra low-powered PC at Tranquil PC. Tranquil claims it uses just 15-21 watts running Windows XP Home – about the power of a compact fluorescent bulb. However, it uses a strange chip, the VIA C7-M that might be computationally low powered too. Googling VIA C7-M I discovered a whole wealth of knowledge about Carbon Free Computing, a phrase that seemed new to me, which means the idea isn’t that popular since I read a lot of computer mags and websites. Evidently seekers of the green PC are also aligned with the seekers of a quiet PC and solar power advocates.

This computer I’m typing on is over three years old and I’ve been thinking about getting a new more powerful model. The first decision I have to make is whether I should buy a new computer at all. One quote I can’t locate the source says 80% of the energy related to the lifetime of a PC comes from manufacturing. If that’s true then it has all kinds of major implications. To gain the most energy savings means using a computer for as long as possible. Second, if we want to further reduce that 80% factor, we have to convince manufacturers of PCs to work on lowering energy spent on making computers. Third, succeeding at this endeavor will adversely impact the computer makers economically and indirectly hurt the economy. Which is why you don’t see the President campaigning for the U.S. to become the international leader at reducing carbon production.

Every economic decision becomes an ethical decision. I have always noticed that the success of our economic system is based on a lot of inefficiency. If everyone was honest and law abiding untold thousands of policemen and related professions would be out of work. If everyone spent their money wisely how many people in the credit card industry would be out of work? And it’s all interrelated. The microcomputer has created millions of jobs since the 1970s. Computer use has vastly increased energy needs creating more jobs in the power business and that impacts mining and manufacturing. Becoming green and reducing carbon emissions means a new kind of economy. Environmentalists have always countered this problem by saying new jobs and industries will be created, and that overall the economy will succeed.

Will the world become green? I don’t know. I tend to think we will all continue on the same path because people don’t change until they are made to change. This means our society will continue until it collapses and a new system will form out of the chaos. To picture this just watch the news about Iraq – even there some kind of new order will eventually emerge. Students of history know that civilizations come and go. Personally, I’d rather make the hard choices now and remodel our current civilization so it survives. However, I’m probably fooling myself. I can’t even make myself lose weight when I know I’m approaching a health crisis. Statistics show only one person in twenty, or five percent can lose weight and keep it off. Does that mean only one person in twenty can make themselves into green people?

Dieting makes a good analogy to going green. To succeed we’d all need to watch our calories and carbon for the rest of our lives. This will require discipline, attention to detail and dedication. Which brings us back to the question: Which is better for the environment – keeping my current PC or buying a new Green PC? The same question applies to cars. Which helps the Earth more, keeping my 6-cylinder Toyota Tundra or buying a Toyota Prius? I don’t know. If 80% of the carbon cost of a PC comes from manufacturing and the figure is similar for a car, then whatever we buy needs to be used efficiently for a long time. The three year replacement cycle for cars and computers is carbon wasteful.

Recently PC Magazine ran an article about building a green PC. The whole focus was to reduce the amount of watts used. The end results were nowhere near the efficiency of the Tranquil PC mentioned above. And I have read elsewhere complaints about Microsoft causing increase energy use by pushing its new Vista operating system. Most reviewers say Vista needs a discrete video card, a feature that often consumes more watts than the motherboard or CPU. This brings up the idea of whether Linux, Windows or Macintosh operating systems are the best for the environment.

To be fair, we have to consider use. A gamer with a high powered rig using 650 watts will hate the Tranquil PC using 15 watts. We can’t just say gaming is bad for the environment, so give it up. Like the idea of carbon management and carbon credits, we have to give every individual the chance to save energy in their own way so they can spend it in whatever way they like. For example, gamers could walk or ride bicycles for transportation so they can spend their energy credits on high-powered games.

For such energy/carbon credit systems to work we’d have to know what our energy allowance is. I don’t know if anyone knows the answer yet. Dieting only works when you know your daily calorie target and so we need to know how much energy we use now and how much less we need to use to save the world. Each person on Earth causes X number of carbon molecules to be released in the atmosphere. We could count up the total, divide by six billion and have the answer. Then we decide what our diet should be and know how many carbon units we can use each day. The trouble is that won’t work because people in Africa create far less carbon than someone living in the U.S.

While the Chinese are speeding along towards using energy like Americans, Americans should be working to use energy like the Chinese used to. That’s not happening.

Cynical minded people will just say buy whatever kind of computer you want because nothing you do will matter. Henry David Thoreau sat in his cabin by Walden Pond and saw progress barrelling down the track and knew it was going to crash into Concord. Walden was the book he wrote warning the people of the time about the future. No one stepped out of the way of progress. Thoreau observed that we all have choices we can make in how we eat, where we live, how we dress, the work that we choose, and explained that these choices meant something. Our times require that we all become Thoreaus, but I tend to doubt this will happen.

I think I’ll hang onto my present computer for awhile and continue to run Windows XP. I’m going to study the Green PC and maybe build one in the future. When I do, I think I’ll design it so it will last as long as possible and allow me to swap out parts, or even recycle parts from my present computer. I’d also like to explore other energy saving ideas. Is it better to play MP3 music through the computer or CDs through my stereo system? Can I digitize all my paper using habits? Are printers really needed? Besides being green, these are interesting intellectual challenges.

Communicating Across Time

I just finished reading Timescape by Gregory Benford and Walden by Henry David Thoreau and the two books strike me as a perfect set for a meditation on time travel. I doubt Henry David Thoreau ever thought about time travel, but any writer that produces a classic book is communicating across time, sending messages centuries into the future. Imagine if Thoreau had some kind of magical book and we could send messages back to him sitting in his little shack by Walden Pond. What would you tell him about life in the future and reading his book? Timescape by Gregory Benford is about sending messages backwards in time, allowing the future to talk to the past. Unfortunately, Benford tries to stick closely to a theoretical idea in physics which has limited application. His story is timid by science fictional standards, but wonderfully ambitious by defying the traditions of the genre.

I often want to communicate with the past. I’m currently reading The Scarlet Letter and figure it would be great fun to show the Puritans an hour of MTV. On the surface that sounds cruel, but I keep thinking if we could talk across the ages we’d realize new philosophical dimensions. Of course we know about the tyrannical nature of religious societies just by watching the nightly news, but it helps to remember that Americans once wore funny religious clothes and treated women like Islamic fundamentalists. The real test would be to have a time traveler show up today and let us know about the future and how our beliefs and actions are embarrassing to them. Are the liberated women on MTV a step forward in women’s expression as individuals or are they freed women to act out men’s fantasies?

The eight hundred pound gorilla in this essay is global warming. Will the people of the future all lie in the beds at night wishing they could talk to us? Benford’s story written in the 1970s and published in 1980 isn’t about global warming but another ecological catastrophe caused by the people of the 1950s and 1960s but which kills the people of 1998. Yes, his future is now our past but that doesn’t make the book dated. Timescape is #41 on The Classics of Science Fiction list – but it deserves to be higher. The idea of sending messages to the past is just as original as any of H. G. Wells’ great primal science fictional ideas.

If you read the reader reviews on Amazon you will find most readers giving Timescape five stars but many giving it one star. It’s a polarizing science fiction novel because it’s not a gee-whiz action story, but a quiet story about science and scientists. Critics loved it but many fans didn’t. I assume most adolescent readers would prefer a story about time travelers going back to hunt dinosaurs rather than read about a clever plot based on a theoretical sub-atomic particle called the tachyon. I can also infer that most page turning readers don’t want to be burden by bad tidings from the future.

In Timescape a few 1998 people desperately try to get a message to a few scientists in 1963 hoping to save their world. If the people of 1963 had listened to Thoreau message from 1854 the people in 1998 might not have ever needed to send a message backwards in time. Walden is a timeless essay about paying attention to details and questioning the status quo. Thoreau might be considered America’s original hippie, but he was a brilliant thinker, as was his friend Nathan Hawthorne who peered with nineteenth century eyes into the seventeenth century with A Scarlett Letter. There are still puritanical threads woven into our twenty-first century philosophy. The lessons of history have always been one way – think how dynamically philosophic history would be if we could tune in the future with tachyon radios.

I’m not shunning the Puritans when I mention them, they may have valid messages to send us too, points that we’re missing, and yes we’re still receiving their messages, for example, the current fad of Purity Balls. The key is to study Thoreau and learn to discern the ecology of our thoughts like he studied the ecology of Walden Pond. Are the Puritans four centuries away, or merely a few thousand miles? Scattered across this earth are people living in situations that mirror all the times of history. Every society might represent a different expression of innate programming to comprehend right and wrong – it may even be hardwired in our genes as Moral Minds suggests. Classic books may be classic because they show characters at the cutting edge of ethical dramas.

Global warming will be the ethical issue of our times. To overcome this obstacle we will all have to live life with the spiritual observational skills of Henry David Thoreau. Science fictional books like Timescape illustrates that every casual decision we make today affects the people of tomorrow. The emotional dynamics of how we judge our fellow passengers on spaceship Earth is portrayed in The Scarlet Letter. For years I have contemplated why some books become classics and others don’t. I’m never sure how to define a classic, but I know if you are reading books that don’t make you think, that you can’t interconnect with the communications across time, then more than likely you are only reading for escapism and that book isn’t a classic.