Category: Uncategorized

I recommend Audible.com all the time, but I forget not everyone is a Geek like me that loves technology.  I figure I need a warning page to refer folks to if they are interested in trying Audible.com.  Most people think of CDs and cassettes when they think of audio books, and there are plenty of Amish like 20th century bookworms still needing something to hold when they purchase an audio book, but to really appreciate living in the 21st century you need to use a MP3 player, like an iPod, and get into buying invisible digital audio books.

If you are old fashion you can join Audible and burn CDs, but it takes a certain level of tech savvy to even do that, and it can be frustrating if the CD burning software doesn’t run well on your computer.  No, the real ease of use is in switching to digital files, and giving up physical media like CDs and cassettes.

Most books at Audible.com are $10-15 depending on the buying plan you sign up for, or $10-100 if you buy as you go, or get the same books from iTunes.  This can be considerable cheaper than buying 22 CD sets from your local bookstore or even Amazon.  I pay $9.56 a book because I buy 24 credits at a time that I take about a year to use.  The savings come from the publishers and sellers not having to manufacture a product to ship and warehouse.

Kids and cool oldsters who have iPods and buy digital music will have no trouble with getting audio books from Audible or iTunes.  I mention these two companies together because iTunes sells Audible.com books.  Audible.com is like a book club where you sign up for 1 or 2 books a month buying plans (or 12 or 24 packs).  You can go to iTunes and pay more and buy the same books one at a time with no commitments.

There are two skills involved with switching to digital audio books.  The first is getting a player that accepts Audible.com books, and most do, setting it up to buy and download books, and copying the books to your players.  Audible.com pretty much works with either iTunes for people with iPods, and Audible Manager or Windows Media Player 11 for all the other MP3 devices, and these include MP3 players, phones and PDAs that play MP3 songs, the Kindle and all the other odd digital devices that are Audible.com compatible.  If you wonder why the new ebook wonder, the Kindle is Audible compatible it might be because Amazon.com owns Audible.com.

The second skill, and often this is the harder one, is learning how to carry a player around and integrate listening to audio books into your everyday routines.  I’m afraid most people equate listening to audio books with playing CDs or cassettes in their cars on long trips, and that’s a great way to listen to audio books.  I carry my Zune in my shirt pocket all day long.  I’m never without it.  Having a small player like a Nano or Zune is better than having a heavier hard disk MP3 player because you want to learn to carry it everywhere.

When I see that the dishes need washing I think to myself, “Hey, it’s time to listen to my book.”  If I’m eating alone I listen to my book.  If I go for a walk or grocery shopping I listen to my book.  If you do anything physical that doesn’t involve words it’s possible to listen to audio books.  So filing bills doesn’t work, but my wife loves to cross-stitch and listen.  I can’t program computers and listen, but I can when I do software installs that involve a lot of tedious waiting.  You develop a knack for squeezing in reading.

The trick is to get past learning those new skills.  It is very futuristic to carry a 2 ounce device that can hold two dozen unabridged audio books.  Listening to audio books has transformed my reading habits too, because I’ll listen to books I’d never had the patience to read.  Who knew how much I’d love Edith Wharton’s fiction, or how intellectually stimulating it is to listen to the Bible, and I’m an atheist.  Philosophy and history books comes alive for me on audio books.  And listening to fiction with a great dramatic reader is like going from analog to high definition TV.

But, it can be a frustrating experience to get into.  Audible.com does have wonderful 1-800 support staff.  And there’s a Yahoo discussion group devoted to Audible that offers a lot of friendly help plus has great book chats.

Like I said, the easiest way to just try a digital audio listening is if you already have an iPod with iTunes set up is to just buy an audio book from the iTunes store to try out the concept.  It’s more expensive than Audible.com, but you don’t have to make a commitment.  I highly recommend that you listen to the sample audio passage before buying because some people do not take to all narrators.  And don’t give up if you have one bad experience.  Learning to listening to audio books takes practice like learning to read.

Most libraries now offer their patrons Overdrive or NetLibrary digital audio books.  This is another good way to try reading with your ears and learning to use digital media players.  This is a case where iPods aren’t the King of the Hill.  A low-cost Sandisk Sansa or Creative Labs MP3 player can be a good starting device – but check with your library first for compatibility issues.  Some digital players will work with Audible, Overdrive, NetLibrary and even music subscription services like Rhapsody and Napster.  A Zune 3.0 will work with Audible and Overdrive.

Low cost players can be had for $30 on sale, but you need to make sure it’s compatible with the audio books you want to buy or get from your library, and I highly recommend you get a player with a screen.  There are low cost players without screens, like the iPod Shuffle, and they can be used for audio books, but they can be tricky to use.  Audio books come on multiple files and if you don’t know which file is playing it can be hard to find the one you want without seeing the filename on the display.  Some of my friends have recommended the Sansa Clip as a good starter player.  Make sure it has the latest firmware because older versions had some quirks.

Just work through the techphobia and go digital.

JWH – 6/11/9

The greatness of a novel depends on the reader.  Any novel you read that you heavily identify with increases its chance at being a gripping yarn.  The Naked Sun was a page turner for me because I have a touch of agoraphobia.  Asimov imagines a future Earth of 5022 AD of being so overcrowded that people live underground and this conditions our descendents to be afraid of open spaces.

  

The Naked Sun is a murder mystery about a detective from Earth, Elijah Baley, who fears open spaces, visiting the planet Solaria, where people fear contact with other people.  Solaria only has 20,000 inhabitants, each supported by thousands of robots.  Citizens of Solaria live on grand estates separate from each other by thousands of square miles.  Even marriage is traumatic to Solarians, with most spouses choosing to live apart in their large mansions, and they consider the topic of children to be vulgar.

To everyone on Solaria it is obvious that the only person that could have killed Rikaine Delmarre is his wife Gladia.  They all fear contact with each other so much that they know deep in their heart only a spouse could have gotten close enough to bludgeon Rikaine to death.  Baley can’t accept this.

Elijah Baley is once again partnered with R. Daneel Olivaw, an android from Aurora that he first met in the book The Caves of Steel.  The challenges that detective Baley face on a strange new world are many.  He must overcome his fear of the outdoors, find ways to to escape his overly protective robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, who may have different political motivations for working on the case, while most of all, convince the murder suspects that they need to meet with him in person, an act of perversion from their point of view.

Normally I don’t like mysteries, and I really had no interest in who  murdered Rikaine, but for three days I was always anxious to get back to this book.  The story grabbed me because of its psychological issues, and although their extremes were unbelievable, I found it very believable that humans could create such diverse cultures that would alter the thinking of their people.

Strangely enough, Asimov didn’t explore the psychology of his robots.  The only fear he gave to robots was of seeing humans come to harm.  And except for Daneel, I was never sure if the robots were intelligent, conscious and self-aware creatures, or just machines that talked.  Asimov has Elijah Baley call the robots “Boy” which is offensive to modern reader because of its racist connections.  Was he drawing parallels to their condition, implying the robots were slaves?  Was he suggesting that humans couldn’t deal with robots as equals, even though Daneel actions and thoughts were often superior to Baley.

In early Asimov robot stories, the role of the robot and their deeply programmed Three Laws of Robotics is usually just a plot device for creating a story gimmick.  Asimov doesn’t really explore the philosophical implications of intelligent machines.  Asimov, a writer of space travel stories, was afraid of flying, and so he used his knowledge of phobias to create the heart of The Naked Sun.  This story explores human nature rather than robot nature.

If Asimov would have studied the nature of his robots more, he probably wouldn’t have had a murder mystery.  Robots have perfect memories and robots in this story are all connected by radio, so in a society like that of Solaria, no human activity should have gone unrecorded.  Asimov shows us incidents of individual robots going insane from seeing a human harmed, but Asimov fails to explain why all robots don’t go bonkers when one robot sees a human murdered because of their instant communication would create a hive-like mind.

Even though Asimov presents the world of Solaria as seriously flawed I have encountered a number of readers that would love to live on a world like Solaria.  At first this shocked me, but I’ve discovered to what extent some people really don’t like other people, at least hordes of other people, and they would find great comfort living on a pastoral world populated mostly by robots.  I don’t have that phobia, and I was surprised to find it in some of my friends.  Since writing The Implications of Sexbots, some people I know have expressed just how much they don’t like people, and how comforting they find the idea of robots.  I find this revealing and shocking.    

I have even heard from people that want to live as solitary as the Solarians, even to the point of avoiding sexual contact.  This makes me wonder if Asimov hasn’t tapped into a deep rooted psychological desire that makes this novel far more successful than just a simple murder mystery.  This is probably the real reason why the book is still in print fifty plus years after its original publication.

Most people fear AI and intelligent robots, and picture robots from movies like the Terminator series, or television shows like Battlestar Galactica.  These people especially worry about the coming technological singularity.  Other people love the idea of robots and expect them to be cute like WALL-E, or Number 5 from Short Circuit, or even the very human like Commander Data.  Read the Wikipedia entry on Robots to see just how complex and real robots are now, and read robots in fiction and literature to see how far ranging we’ve explored this topic.

I listened to the excellent audio production of The Naked Sun from Tantor Media, read with wonderful dramatic flair by William Dufris, and available through Audible.com, Amazon.com and iTunes.  I highly recommend the audio edition because I believe the subtleties of the story come through so much better with this fine reading that expresses so much emotion.

I also recommend reading the customer reviews at Amazon after you have finished the novel.  They show a kind of enthusiastic love that few novels get and reveal that The Naked Sun isn’t just a simple science fiction novel.  I read the book first as a kid and really didn’t get it, mainly because my bouts of agoraphobia were in the future.  And I’m curious if people without phobias will really get into this story.

JWH – 3/8/9

Our economy is a ship that’s hit an iceberg and we’re all passengers on its deck wondering if we’re going to sink.  Most of us are economic bystanders.  We’re not part of the crew manning the engines below decks nor are we officers on the bridge.  Few people are economists, so we have no idea of how to navigate.  Few people are bankers, so we have no idea if our ship is still seaworthy.  Most of us just clutch each other and pray we don’t drown.

I don’t like being a powerless bystander.  To me it feels like a horde of greed driven souls have hijacked our financial system and done far more damage than any terrorist.  The economic gurus and conservative politicians have preached that we should all be independent, and manage our own money and give up on ideas like social security.  We can only be independent if our economic system is sound and trustworthy.  I always expected banks to be conservative, to be the bedrock of our monetary world, but it seems that the conservatives have changed banking with liberal ideas about making money.

What I want from our banking system is what the New York Times reports about how the Canadian banking system works.  Why are so many Americans caught up with the glamour of being billionaires?  Why do time and again a small group of people seeking tremendous wealth lead millions of investor lemmings over the cliffs?  We can blame the CEOs flying in their corporate jets but they are only the leaders of vast armies who worship wealth.

Financial disasters teach us how important the science of economics is to our daily lives.  Religion and politics, which most people normally look to for guidance are of little importance.  Politicians will grab the helm in bad economic times, but their captaincy is illusory.  The real power is with us economic bystanders.  The economy is the hive of all human economic activity.

Economic well being is primary about jobs.  If everyone has a job we have a much better chance for political and social stability.  In the last hundred years, the secondary purpose of the economy is investments because people want to spend part of their lives not working, or they want to attain quick riches.

In a world of 7 billion people it’s very hard to create enough jobs for everyone who needs one.  By all of us consuming vast amounts of natural resources we put billions to work.  But there’s a new goal.  People want to be rich enough not to work.  Wealth is theoretically unlimited, but there seems to be limits to how many people can be wealthy.  Somebody has to wash toilets, drive trucks, fly airliners and sew shirts.  Everyone can’t succeed through gambling with stocks and commodities.

Our current economic catastrophe is due to greed on the part of a very small portion of the population that convinced so many of us we could have double-digit interest on our nest eggs.  We can’t just blame Wall Street and the big banks, because anyone who owned stocks or put their money in 401k plans loved seeing huge growth rates.  For the last twenty years Wall Street has convinced the financial world to buy into fantasy investment schemes that were not based on real world economics.

The economy works because people sell goods and services, or they invest in people who sell goods or services.  What we’re learning from these bad economic times is we can’t sell slight of hand goods and services.  As the economy slides downward and unemployment rises, we’re learning just how many jobs we have that are based on real production and actual services.  Because all of us economic bystanders are holding our breath in fear and slamming our bank accounts closed, we’re causing many jobs to be lost.  Until people feel safe and spend normally, we won’t see normal growth.

The history of the United States is also a history of periodic recessions.  In each one we learn something new about the science of money.  We oscillate between caution and greed.  Good times bring risky investments and that too many unwise people pursue.  As much as we loath men like Bernie Madoff, we have to question why people would believe in him?  Investing is like poker.  If you don’t lose some hands the game is rigged.  The desire for yachts and jets drove Madoff and his marks.

We live in a world where the extremes of wealth and poverty make the novels and the news, and the stories of average folk seldom appear in the movies.  The glamour of money will always warp economic sensibilities, which is why we always need regulations.  Most economic tsunamis are caused by the greedy bending the laws of investment gravity.  2008 was our 1929, so this year is 1930, but what will our 1932 be like?  Or will this recession be more like 1975 or 1980?  If it is, we’ll be damn lucky.  Why are all the pundits telling us those scary stories, and why is the government spending trillions to bail out the economy?  Are our leaders creating more fear or do they really know something?  I don’t know.

President Obama’s stimulus package might create real jobs or it might just prop up a false economy.  Everyone hates to pay taxes, but tax money really does make up a large chunk of our economy.  Everyone wants a smaller government, but our large government creates millions of jobs.  It appears, and this might be honest economics, that the government should grow when the private economy shrinks, and shrink when the the private economy grows.  Other than inventing a whole new economic system we don’t have any other way to steer the economy.

Or do we?  We classify jobs as a 40 hour a week standard.  In bad economic times we lay off a portion of the population when we can’t create enough jobs.  Instead of laying off people, why not just lower the number of hours in a work week.  So in bad economic times everyone earns less, and in good economic times everyone earns more.  Personally, I’d much rather have my salary cut to 30 hours of pay, than lose my whole job and get paid nothing.

In every worldwide economic crisis the rules of how the economy runs gets changed.  Is it really practical to retire and spend 20-40 years not working?  Was one of the impossible economic fantasies of the last quarter century the idea that private individuals can save enough to not work for a third of their lives?  That idea was based on investments with 10 percent annual growth.  Can economic reality really support that?  Is there a limit to the number of people who can live off the interest of their investments?  We know we can’t have 100% idle rich with no one working unless we create some kind of science fictional world run by robots.

Can you imagine what life would be like now without social security, medicare and unemployment insurance?  What if our retirement system had been shifted to private investments?  Thank God for social security – we better fixed it after all.  Our goal should be conservative banks and practical social systems.   Sure, we have to leave enough leeway for get-rich-quick believers to play with Wall Street, but we need to isolate their game so they don’t put the entire economy on roller coaster rides.

This crisis is occurring at the same time as when we need to restructure the economy to save the planet for ecological reasons.  In rebuilding our economy and creating a new one out of the ashes of the old, we need to rethink so much.  Should the work week be 40 hours.  Should people loaf for decades?  Should tax payers fund the medical bills of the elderly, or even all people?  How many jobs would be created by a universal healthcare system?  If a large portion of our population retires and spends less money, do they reduce total jobs, and if so, how does the remainder of the population support them?  Or, do retired people create enough jobs to support the concept of retirement?

Would it help the economy if people moving towards retirement age spend a length of time working part-time, with retiring becomes a long phase out process?  Or instead of having 10 percent unemployment, have everyone work 10 percent less and cut their paychecks by 10%?  Or would that cause a downward spiral of economic activity?

We’re all economic bystanders on this economic ship, but what we do and think influences the whole of the economy.  If we all went out and made a major purchase this year, like buying a car, refrigerator, high definition television set, or remodeled a bathroom or built a garage, we could put a lot of people back to work.  Everyone suddenly becoming a penny pinching miser is bad.  You can kill two birds with one stone.  Last year I spent $9500 to replace my HVAC.  In some months I’m only using 1/3 the energy as the same month of the previous year.  And I can think of many goods and services to buy that would make my home more environmentally friendly and stimulate job growth

Even though we’re all economic bystanders, some of us are armed with dollars that could be spent.  Those people who live paycheck to paycheck need to spend these bad economic times getting their act together, but for those folks who have a few extra bucks, they should think about spending a bit to create economic bystander stimulus packages.

JWH 2/28/9

When does science fiction work even when it’s broken?  “The Veldt” is the opening short story in Ray Bradbury’s classic collection The Illustrated Man, and it’s a highly effective story that doesn’t make much sense if you try to take it apart.  “The Veldt” appears to be Bradbury’s reaction to the deployment of television in 1950.  Essentially, the tale is an allegory that says the new technology loved by the young will kill off the older generation.

“The Veldt” could be filmed today, modernizing the story, and the allegory would work with the Internet, computer games, or even iPods.  If you take the story apart looking for the science fictional technology that creates lions that dine on parents you won’t find it.  Bradbury hopes his slight of hand distraction will keep the reader from looking behind the curtain, but I think many hardcore SF readers get hung up on that and shout, “Cheat!”

Ray Bradbury is often a science fiction writer that non science fiction readers think of when they think of a science fiction writer.  Most readers don’t like science, not even the toy science of science fiction, so they readily respond to Bradbury allegories of anti-science.  If Bradbury’s goal was to fight off new technology and preserve the quaint minds of the 1940s he of course failed.

“The Veldt” is a shocking story for the time.  The children kill the parents.  And Bradbury was reacting to TV of the late 1940s, which was incredibly innocent.  Most TV at the time was local in production, featuring puppet shows for kids, gardening and cooking shows for moms, and wrestling for dads.  What television really killed was the short story, but I don’t know if Bradbury knew that at the time or even feared it.  The half-hour TV show killed the pulp magazines that filled the newsstands of the time with hundreds of titles.

Technology and change does kill off the culture of the previous generation, and I think Bradbury sensed that.  That’s why the story is so popular, getting made into a movie in 1969, and is scheduled for a remake in 2010.  This story gets the study guide treatment on many web sites that create literary summaries for kids needing to write school papers.  There are even sites that will write a paper about “The Veldt” for you.  This implies the story is studied in schools.  How many science fiction stories can claim that honor?

If the TV of the late 1940s scared Bradbury, what kind of story would he have written if we could time travel back to 1950 and spend an evening with young Ray and show him a high definition TV featuring episodes of True Blood and Dexter?  Or even show him the kind of porn children can easily get on their homework computers.  I love Dexter and True Blood, but I’ve got 50 years of television evolution to ready my mind for those shows.  Those TV programs would make Ray’s noggin explode.

Would 1950 Bradbury recognize the sophisticated art of Dexter, a show featuring an appealing serial killer, or recoil in horror at the kinky sex and violence of True Blood?  Even if we gave him kid friendly shows like Hanna Montana wouldn’t he still be shocked at the cultural changes?  I’m listening to The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein, a collection of short stories from the same time period.  The people in those stories don’t exist anymore.  The culture, slang, speech patterns, art, theories about life and science, and so on are long gone.

The mental and cultural life I grew up with in the 1960s is gone too.  My mind has evolved with television, but it hasn’t for popular music.  I’m still stuck back in 1965 with the Byrds, Barry McGuire, Petula Clark, and The Mamas and the Papas.  I’m sure the teenagers of today would be willing to symbolically feed my kind to the lions, just like my generation wanted to with our parents.

The children in “The Veldt” horrify the 1950 readers of Bradbury like my generation was horrified by the real-life Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold, the Columbine shooters, when we wanted to ban violent video games.  Whether the warning is allegorical or real life, the future keeps on rolling towards us and we never even bother to step out of the street.

Science fiction can present scary stories but do we ever really listen to them?  “The Veldt” is even taught in schools.  But will a young generation ever exclaim they’ve had enough change and draw their own line in the sand?  Despite all the protests of conservatives, liberal thought keeps on evolving.  On one hand many science fiction stories are cautionary tales warning us about the future, but on the other hand, the other tales of science fiction are thrilling adventures of living in a new world.

How many kids reading “The Veldt” secretly wanted their own version of that high-tech nursery?

JWH – 2/26/9

We like to think we all have unlimited potential.  And there is a common myth that we only use five percent of our brains.  Sadly, neither of these beliefs are true.  Most people are of average intelligence by definition, and few brains tear up reality like Einstein.  Brain capacity is limited, so why shouldn’t intelligence.  That’s why I’m asking about robots.  If the brains of AI computers and robots can be larger, and their density limited only to the laws of physics, then obviously artificial intelligence can grow to astoundingly high levels of IQ.

There are many many kinds of intelligence.  Some people think Ken Jennings, who won so many Jeopardy games represents a major kind of intelligence.  AI machines will be able to memorize whole university bookstores and beat any human at Trivial Pursuit.  But can an AI machine study all the books and journals on economics and tell Barack Obama how to solve the current economic crisis?  Memorizing facts is one kind of intelligence, but synthesizing knowledge is another.  The human mind can only juggle so many ideas at once, and even if a robot can juggle more, will that mean AI can solve all problems, or big problems?  We throw a lot of supercomputing power at trying to understand the weather but only get so far at predicting it.

Rocket scientists and physicists who talk to each other in mathematical symbols represent what many people consider the big brains on the planet.  Can you imagine a robot with vision that overlays tiny formulas of mathematical analysis onto everything it sees?  Will robots just be able to visualize the grand unification theory (GUT) of physics in their idle thoughts? 

Will giant AI astronomers have their minds hooked up to every telescope in the world and every satellite in the sky and just daydream in cosmology?  Will scientists of the future just read the journals that AI specialists write that explain everything in human terms?  Once you start thinking about the limits of robotic minds, you realize how far they can take things.  But even then, there will be limits.  At some point, even robots will preface their conversations with, “With what we know today we can only say so much about exoplanets.”

I’ve always thought it’s a good thing that God doesn’t just hang out on Earth with us because he’d be such a pain in the ass know it all.  Is that how we’ll feel about uber-geek robots?  Or will it really matter?  There’s plenty of superbrain dude and dudettes walking the planet and the average Earthling has no trouble ignoring their brilliance while pursuing their dumb-ass beliefs.  If some AI the size of Utah tells the world there is absolutely no evidence of God in reality I doubt the entire human population of Earth will become atheists.  If tomorrow’s newspaper printed the most eloquent equation for GUT discovered by Stephen Hawking and confirmed by legions of physicists I doubt it would make much of an impact with 99.9999% of the Earth’s population.

I have a feeling that in the future, with a world full of AI thinkers, many of them will sit around and lament how much they don’t know and write blog essays about inventing even more powerful artificial minds.  Can you imagine the put-downs the smartest of the AIs will use to burn the dumbest of their bunch?  “You’re no smarter than a human.”  Ouch.

Most of the people who commented on my last essay about robots worried that smart machines would get together and decide that the best way to solve the problems of the planet Earth is to stamp out those pesky humans.  That really is a potential worry we must face, but for some reason I naively believe we needn’t worry, although most science fiction ends up predicting the same thing that Jack Williamson did in his classic novel The Humanoids.  I guess I should worry about AI tyrants who seek fascist solutions to their theories about how Earthly reality should be run. 

I guess I believe we’ll build the AIs first, and if they get uppity we’ll just quickly pull the plug.  Many people do not want to open Pandora’s box even once.  They may be right, but I think we can isolate AIs easy enough.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an AI Economic Guru to get us through this current crisis?  If we assemble such a machine and then ask it how to create an economy with maximum jobs for all and steady sustainable growth, do you think any AI mind could ever tell us the answer?  Or what if AI doctors could tell us how to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s?  What if you could watch a movie directed by an AI auteur that magnificently comments on the human condition?  Or listen to AI music?  The temptations are too great.

JWH – 1/26/9