Auxiliary Memory

Mind Over Matter In Old Age

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, October 24, 2014

My last day of work was 10/22/13, at a job I started in the previous century on 11/14/77. It’s been one year not working, and the time has flown by like Boeing jetliner. When I retired I had big plans to write a novel, but the urge has diminished. The fantasy of writing doesn’t completely go away, but my discipline to work mostly has. My days pass by so fast that I wonder how I ever found time for a forty-hour work week. And like a butterfly, my memories of being a caterpillar are fleeing fast. It’s really strange to live by flitting here and there, wherever my whims entice me. Maintaining a positive mental state while deteriorating physically is now my chosen career. The job requirements are learning to master mind over matter.

Being happy pursuing piddly activities is a great skill to acquire. I hang out with friends, read books, watch television, play music, write blogs, mess with my computers, shop for used books, cook food, do chores, and that seems to be enough. I now live in a different mental world where I work to maintain my health by not getting mentally old. The daily goal of getting old is to avoid being old. Luckily, I have a naturally happy nature, and I don’t get bored. I’m well suited for retired living.

I’m constantly learning new things, mainly because I love documentaries and nonfiction books, and I love browsing the Internet for fascinating news stories, like “What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?” from this week’s The New York Times Magazine.

The article starts off,

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.

Ultimately, what this experiment reveals is feeling younger means acting younger.

The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.

In the end, the men,

At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

The article goes on with more details about additional experiments, and they remind me of how I like to time travel by returning to things I loved back in the 1960s. I always thought when old people returned to the interests of their youth they were merely being nostalgic. Maybe we’re rejuvenating. Maybe wanting to write a novel is taking me back to when I was young and wanted to grow up to write a novel. I’ve often wondered if I’m too old to do something so young. If this research is right, writing a novel will make me young.

Although it doesn’t appear that I’ve done that much in my first year of retirement, I do feel like I’ve learned a lot. It’s a strange new life living without a job to define my days. I absolutely love being retired. It feels like I’m back in college preparing for an exciting career. This time of constant reflection reminds me of the 1970s and all the New Age philosophies I studied. The journey is the destination.

JWH

How Science Fiction’s Futures Changes For Every Generation

By James Wallace Harris, Thursday, October 23, 2014

If you are old, has the future you imagined in childhood unfolded during your life? If you’re young, what do you hope to see happen in your lifetime?

I grew up in the 1960s with my visions of the future inspired by 1950s science fiction. Flying cars were not what I hoped for, but evidently many people from my generation expected them and are disappointed we aren’t living in a Buck Rogers future. No, what I expected to see as I grew old was the colonization of the Moon and Mars, and the manned exploration of the solar system. I wasn’t optimistic enough to expect Star Trek like interstellar travel in my lifetime, but I assumed it would arrive after I died. It’s so disappointing to spend a lifetime watching humans never leave orbit. What are we waiting for?

I did expect large flat screen televisions, and they did come to pass. Didn’t see the internet coming even though I was majoring in computer programming in 1971, nor did I imagine smartphones. I guess I lacked the imagination, but so did everyone else it seems. I’m also disappointed we don’t have intelligent robots, or sentient AI machines. After space travel, robots were the biggest tech breakthrough that 1950s SF promised.

Although I hoped we’d have visitors from other star systems I never really thought it would actually happen. I did think we’d make SETI contact by now.

Contemporary science fiction often feels obsessed with apocalyptic visions of the future, and we had those too when I was growing up. But kids today seemed enchanted by future teens fighting oppressive dystopian governments. I can dig that, back in the sixties challenging authority was very popular. I guess blows against the empire never go out of vogue.

Which brings me to Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, a science fiction anthology of positive science fiction. It was inspired by the essay “Innovation Starvation” by Neal Stephenson, at the World Policy Institute, in which Stephenson proposes, The Hieroglyph Theory,

Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

The list of stories can be found here, with links to discussion and research.

The Hieroglyph anthology offers strangely different visions of the future than the ones I grew up with, and sadly, I don’t find these new futurist vistas all that appealing. Many of these futures seem to come out of Wired Magazine. In the introduction we’re told that young people today are all too often embracing a dystopian science fiction view of tomorrow, and that science fiction writers should offer a positive alternative. I think that’s missing the point of those YA stories, which are exciting adventure stories symbolizing growing up, and not visions of tomorrow.

Actually, the opposite of dystopian is utopian, and none of these tales in Hieroglyph are about perfect societies. I think everyone has gotten over the naive notion that the future will bring us peace and happiness. The real question is can the future always offer us more sense of wonder? This might reveal my jadedness, but this anthology doesn’t show me it will.

Although I’m embarrassed to admit this, I’m nostalgic for my old futures. Hieroglyph seems more inspired by 3D printers, the internet, giant towers that climb into space, mining the asteroids, social media possibilities, smartphone apps that make us empathetic, etc. Many of the stories are quite engaging as stories, but they aren’t inspiring like the science fiction I grew up with. Now that will be an unfair criticism if young readers do find a sense of wonder in them.

It might be because I’m 62, and these stories lack a sense of wonder to someone with so little future. Yet, even if I don’t have much of a future, I’m not sure I’d want to live to see these futures come to be? I’d love to know if kids 12 or 22 reading these tales do find them wondrous?

There are millions of people around the world still hoping to build interplanetary colonies and conquer the final frontier, but there are billions of people on Earth that don’t see that future anymore, or maybe never did. Anyone who has embraced science more than science fiction knows faster-than-light travel is about as realistic as time travel, and that living on the Moon or Mars will be closer to cruel and unusual punishment than finding greener pastures to homestead.

Many of the stories in Hieroglyph did capture the struggle of humans surviving. They are more grown-up than the fictional adventures I took in my teens. I did love Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement.” It was about technology being used to increase empathy. So does “Elephant Angels” by Brenda Cooper. “By the Time We Get to Arizona” by Madeline Ashby seems far more savvy about the grit of the future, and the misuse of technology. And Karl Schroeder’s story, “Degrees of Freedom” suggests that there are new frontiers of democracy for us to explore. The stories of billionaires conquering outer space didn’t impress me. And although I loved the character development of Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon” a great deal, 3D printing leaves me limp. Bruce Sterling’s story about a man and his horse got me until it became science fiction.

All to often the best science fiction is about being human, and not spacemen, even when the characters live in outer space.

Overall, I’m left with the impression that the women writers in Hieroglyph have thought more about how technology could be good for us than the men. Now that I’m living in my childhood future, I imagine a much different future that might come to be after I ceased to be. It’s not about space adventures but solving our problems, both as individuals and as a species. It’s like an old man I saw in a documentary when he said, “If you’re the problem, and you go somewhere else, you’re still the problem.”

JWH

Finding The Top Albums By Year From 1948 to the Present

By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, October 21, 2014

The 33 1/3 LP came out in 1948, and even by 1958 had only garnered 25% of the total record market. At first, 78s continued to dominate, and then 45 rpm singles. It took a while for what we know as an album to become a major art form. Even the term album is a holdover from 78 rpm records, which could only contain up to five minutes to a side, and required many discs to make a collection of songs, which was called an album. LP discs can contain twenty or so minutes a side, and 10-12 songs per disc, and so they were an album of songs, not an album of discs. The modern concept of the album, first the LP, then the CD, seems to be fading. It’s apparent reign was about half a century.

Using Wikipedia’s excellent Timeline of Musical Events, it’s possible to drill down to a decade, and then year, to follow popular album releases over time. For example, here’s 1951, the year of my birth. If you look at the 1951 album releases and then try to find them on Spotify, you won’t, most likely. Nearly all of the early LPs of the 1950s aren’t reprinted. It’s not until the later 1950s do some albums become famous enough to be remembered, reprinted, and even stay in print. For example, Blue Train by John Coltrane in 1957.

Now this is the point of this essay. If you subscribe to a subscription music service like Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, you can musically stroll down memory lane, year by year, and listen to the albums of the time.

Another great site that helps is Best Ever Albums, and here’s how they present 1957. In 1957, they list 107 top albums. By 1967 that jumps to 312, then 453 by 1977, 704 in 1987, to a 1,000 in 1997. Best Ever Albums quits tracking after a thousand albums each year. There’s no telling how many albums come out each year today. People still make albums, but listeners don’t buy them. They’re on Spotify waiting to be played. Unless you find a method to search for albums other than popularity, you won’t go looking for them. My time tracking method is one such alternative method of discovering albums.

My point is you probably missed a tremendous number of great albums. The average music fan bonds with a relatively small number of albums they discover in their teens and twenties, and then pretty much stick with their favorites for the rest of their life. They might add a few new songs to their playlists each year, but not many. Subscription music services offer you access to millions of songs and albums. What mind blowing tunes have you missed?

Using Wikipedia, Best Albums Ever and Spotify, it’s possible to attain a magical music education. I wished Spotify would let us browse by year, or even better yet, but release date. I love tracking things by time. I wished Billboard put all its charts online, but it doesn’t. It is possible to go to Tropicalglen.com and play songs by year. You can then follow the links to Cash Box charts. For example, here’s the weekly charts for 1967.

I don’t know why I like to remember things by time. Maybe I’m trying to time travel.

JWH

The Tiny House Movement—What’s The Practical Size for Living Space?

Last night I watched Tiny: A Story About Living Small, a documentary by Merete Mueller and Christopher Smith, about Smith’s year building a tiny house. I’ve seen several news stories about tiny houses in the past few years, read some articles, and even met a handful of people who told me they’d love to build and live in their own tiny house. There is a certain appeal to them. Most tiny houses are personal works of art that reflect their owner’s philosophy about living simply. The tiny house movement counters the extravagant big house trend that has existed for decades. Most tiny houses are mobile homes so they appeal to people who want to travel. And they are a cheaper way to live.

Like the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, I don’t think the tiny house movement is sustainable, or will appeal to most people. However, it is very appealing to a lot of people. And it brings up some very important philosophical questions. How much space does a person need to live comfortably? How much space should a person use to be environmentally ethical? How can we maximize the efficiency of the space we use? What’s the minimum space needed for optimal psychological existence for one person? How does the psychological living space change when there are two people? What about a family with children?

I live in a house that’s about 1,700 square feet. I’ve lived in larger and smaller homes. My wife lives out-of-town during the week in a one bedroom apartment, so for most of the week that 1,700 square feet is all mine. I’m currently using every room of the house, but I’m pretty sure I could do with less, much less. We have a living room and den. We have a dining room that seats six, and a breakfast area that can seat another six. I use the living room for reading, and the dining room for my Raspberry Pi computer setup. At a guess, I’m pretty sure I could keep all my stuff I use and consolidate it into a comfortable living space of 800 square feet. This isn’t counting what my wife might want. If I had to, I could give up a lot of stuff, and probably still be happy with 400-500 square feet. Still much bigger than the average tiny home.

In the film they profile tiny houses that ranged from 84 square feet to about 250 square feet. Most were in the 150-200 range. This is way smaller than what I’d ever want to live in. Of course, if everyone lived like tiny house people there certainly would be a lot more land for wildlife, and cities and towns would shrink dramatically.

I wonder if our population explosion is inspiring people to live with less, both as a financial necessity, and because we’re all being pushed together. I can’t help but think many of the people profiled want to get away from normal society.

Most of the tiny house people interviewed were people living by themselves, and I wonder if they are modern day Henry David Thoreaus? Tiny houses have the look of Thoreau’s Walden cabin. It’s not for everyone. Even in in the film Tiny, the girlfriend wanted to move to New York City, because that was here dream. Most of the tiny house people interviewed seemed happy to live with their books and cat. I didn’t see any large screen TVs and video game consoles in the tiny houses.

Nor do we see washers and dryers, large refrigerators and stoves, dishwashers, bathtubs, and I never spotted an air conditioner or hot water heater. Tiny houses are like living on a sailboat, travel trailer or RV. They are much smaller than even your typical double-wide. It would be a sacrifice for most people to live in one, so they convey a kind of spiritual living, and probably appeal to people who think a monkish lifestyle is good for their soul.

It appears that the common practice is to park tiny houses on other people’s land, often in backyards. I don’t know about the legality of this. Nor do I understand the requirements for water and sewage. In the film they did show power coming from a heavy-duty extension cord, and from solar panels. I just read it’s common to depend on a toilet in a nearby house, or use composting or incinerator toilets. All of which sound like a hassle. So does going to the laundry.

I’m not against tiny living, but I think I’d prefer a tiny apartment that did have flush toilets. If we’re truly going to be environmental, I think the future will be in apartment living, and planned communities. Most people hate apartments because of the sound of other people. If they were soundproof, they might be more appealing. What would give them more hippie appeal is if the apartment building was integrated into a park, and car parking was away from the living areas, or the site located near good public transportation. If apartment buildings were designed as planned communities, targeted to specific kinds of people, they’d probably be even more appealing.

I think we do need to work at being less wasteful, more efficient, and far less polluting. The human race’s impact on Earth is becoming very close to be a cancer, if it hasn’t already. We’ve stolen so much animal habitat territory that humans have become another mass-extinction event in Earth’s history. I don’t think tiny houses are the answer though, not directly. My guess is most people will live in a tiny house no longer than Henry David Thoreau lived in the woods alone. And living in a tiny house for a year would probably teach all of us many valuable lessons. I can imagine a spiritual movement of people choosing to live in a tiny house for a period of time to learn what they truly need in life.

I found another documentary about the movement, We the Tiny House People. And Google says there are even more of them.

Here’s another short film about a very elegant tiny house.

If you want to see more, just follow this link to YouTube which offers many more films. It’s amazing how popular this movement is. Notice the other links. There seems to be part of a larger movement to build cheaper houses, which is also part of the DIY movement. Tiny houses might appeal to a large variety of people for many different reasons. Just look at this Google page for images of tiny houses. Here’s one screen shot to give you an idea – click to make larger.

Notice how creative an artistic these little houses are. Building a tiny house is much easier than building a full-size house, so part of the movement might be about just building a house of your own design. I wonder if parks for tiny houses will become popular like RV parks and mobile home subdivisions?

There’s quite a few websites devoted to tiny houses:

If I’m ever in Portland, Oregon, I’d like to stay in the Tiny House Hotel just to see what living in one is like. Other than that, I think in general, I’ll admire them from afar, although I wouldn’t mind visiting Tiny House Show if one came to town. However, the real life effect on me is to think about all the junk I live with now. This film makes me want to catalog all my possession and think about how many I really need. I have four computers, two tablets, two Kindles, and an iPod touch. Do I need so many? Of course not. Yet, I want more – an iMac and Chromebook. My Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer.

Watching these people live in tiny houses makes me realize how big my living habits are. It makes me want to clean our closets and drawers, and get rid of junk that I don’t need. It makes me want to do more with less. I just don’t want to live that small – but I would be willing to go smaller.

JWH

Discoverying 1950s Music with Spotify

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, June 21, 2017

I was born in 1951 but didn’t really get into popular music until 1962. The 1950s is mostly a mysterious world of unknown music to me. As a little kid, I remember hearing some 1950s music while riding with my dad in his 1955 Pontiac. Then in 1962 when I got my first radio they played “Oldie Goldies” from the 1950s on the weekends, but those were mostly early rock and roll hits. When I discovered Bob Dylan in 1965 I jumped back into the folk music revival that started in the late 1950s. In my twenties, I got interested in jazz and dipped into the 1950s via some famous jazz albums. But for the most part, the 1950s is an undiscovered territory.

The web has become an amazing place for virtual time travelers. There are many sites devoted to identifying the most popular music of the past. The World’s Music Charts (Tsort) has collected 225 music charting services and put them all into a database that spits out wonderful reports. I particularly like this graph of theirs showing the coverage of all those charts.

aentry_years

As you can see the 1950s are the sprinkles before the deluge. The LP was introduced in 1948, and most of the chart tracking services started after the 1950s, so information about that decade is sparse. Discogs references 161,954 records for the 1950s. Compared to 552,784 (1960s), 952,231 (1970s) … 2,148,365 (2000s). I figure I might own/heard 25-50 albums from the 1950s, so this is a potentially rich territory to explore.

Spotify has much of this old music. You don’t know that it’s there until you know what to go looking for – that’s where all the top album lists sites come in. I recently took a list of the top jazz albums of the 1950s off the web and converted it to a Spotify playlist, Best Jazz 1950s. I’d say about 90% of the albums were there. Of the albums not there, most of the songs from the original recordings are now in compilations of the artist’s work.

Here’s the thing, when I was growing up in the 1960s I hated the music my parents listened to, and they hated the music I and my sister loved. They resonated with the 1940s and 1950s music. What I’m now trying to do is get into the music headspace of my parents. I don’t think I could have done that when I was younger. It’s taken me until my sixties to start liking that kind of music, and it’s growing on me. My parents were in their forties when I was in my teens, so I don’t know why it’s taken me to me sixties to like their kind of music. But I now find it easier to move backward in time to find new music I like than searching the present.

There are many ways to measure time besides the ticking of a clock. Some folks mark periods of their lives by the houses they have lived in, or the fashions they wore, or the television shows they loved. One way that amuses me is to measure the years by the beat of popular music. By using Best Albums Ever and Spotify I can recall a specific year in music. We hear old music today in hit song compilations albums or the radio, but it’s another thing altogether to listen to the albums those hits came from.

Now that the past is being digitized, I can pick a year and then read the books, watch the movies, listen to the music, view the television shows, and sometimes even read the newspapers and magazines from that year. Wikipedia is a fabulous tool for remembering the past, suggestion artifacts of a pop culture past to consume.

I’ve been a subscription music subscriber for years, so I no longer buy albums. I have access to millions of albums online. Creating this collection of 1950s hit lists is a way to organize my memory of music and help me to discover songs to play on Spotify.

I’m going to link to a Spotify album for each year, and if you’re a subscriber or even have a free account, you should be able to play them. Make sure you’re logged in to your Spotify account.

Each year contains a hyperlink to Discogs, Best Ever Albums, List Challenges, Top Songs, and Tsort sites for that year’s list of top album or songs. I’ve also added the Wikipedia page to read a quick history of that year in music.

1950

1951

1952

1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

JWH