Auxiliary Memory

The Weight of Paper

Nanny, my grandmother on my mother’s side, was born in 1881 and grew up before the automobile, airplane, radio and silent film. She watched all the technology emerged that in my boyhood I took for granted, like electricity, the telephone, refrigerators, cloth washers and dryers, air conditioners, etc. She died a couple years after Neil and Buzz landed on the Moon.

My mother was born in 1916 and grew up with the radio, at a time when movies morphed from silent pictures into talkies, watched the television age emerge, drove across the country before the interstate highway system was built, and lived long enough to see computers become personal, phones stored in pockets and the world wired for computer networks, although she refused to own a cell phone or computer.

I was born in 1951, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen as much dramatic cultural change as those two women, but I grew up in front of a TV, watching the advent of the space age, the computer age and the digital age, and if I live long enough I might see far more dramatic transformations. They both lived to 91, and if I could live as long, I will see the world change as much as they did from 1881 and 1916 until 1951.

Computers are changing the way we all live, but have they changed us as much as the automobile, airplane, radio, movie and television? Current digital technology often makes me dislike the way I used to do things, even though I feel strong nostalgia for how things were. Take reading for instance, all aspects of my reading habits have changed in my lifetime. I now listen to books on an iPod, or read them printed on small digital screens like in Star Trek. For a more specific example, my wife is nagging me about my magazine collection, housed in two six foot high bookcases.

I love magazines, and spent six years working in a Periodicals department at a university library. My home library contains hundreds of issues from dozens of titles. Even Susan asks, “Can’t you get them on online?” I stopped reading newspapers years ago, and I might stop reading magazines soon. I prefer audio books now, even though I spent my whole life as a bookworm, and 99% of the words I read with my eyes each day come through my computer screen. I even listen to magazines, like The New Yorker, and prefer it to reading.

The weight of a single sheet of paper is almost unnoticeable, but the weight of twelve shelves of magazines is quite heavy. Since we had new flooring put in this month, I had to move four bookcases of books, and two bookcases of magazines and the weight of that paper was almost backbreaking. How many trees went into making all that paper? What was the impact on the environment?

Awhile back, to do my bit to fight global warming, I started going paperless, and cut my magazines subscriptions from over 20 to just 2 (Sky and Telescope and Rolling Stone – what an odd couple, huh?). But I kept all my old issues hoping to get the maximum reading value someday, and maybe even clip the best articles to scan into my computer. I’m at point in time when I’m shifting away from one kind of living, with paper, and moving into another way of life, without paper.

I still buy an occasional mag at the bookstore, but even that makes me feel guilty, because that means my pile of unfinished magazines keeps growing, and more trees were cut down. I tend to flip through a magazine and read the shorter pieces and tell myself that I’ve just got to find time for those great longer pieces someday, but I seldom do. The weight of paper can also be measured in time, and I have a huge amount of time theoretically reserved for that reading. Throwing all those magazines out will reduce the weight of possessions and free up a lot of imagined obligated hours, probably in the thousands.

I have nice long runs of Sky and Telescope, Astronomy Magazine, New Scientist, Scientific American, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Popular Photography and many others. I like to think of them as my reference library, but honestly, I rarely refer to them. Reading online has become my habitual way of info-gathering. And since I often read online articles about the dwindling subscriber base to newspapers and periodicals, I’m guessing there are many people like me. If only they made a Kindle-like reading device with a large full-colored screen, I’d probably do 100% my eye reading from online sources.

But I must also emphasize the shift from eye reading to ear reading has been very important to me. That’s another paradigm shift, and I think it scares people in the literacy profession.

Throwing away my magazine collection would be like throwing away the past. According to Wikipedia, general interest magazines started in 1731 with The Gentleman’s Magazine, so will we see the era of the printed magazine end before it’s 300th anniversary? When I was born the pulp magazine format was dying and the science fiction and fantasy digest magazine was beginning. Today those digests are disappearing and a new crop of online SF/F magazines are emerging. Read Jason Sanford’s recent survey of these new short story venues for emerging writers of fantastic fiction. Will getting published be as exciting? It will certainly be easier to send copies to your friends.

Today I read “Ten things mobiles have made, or will make, obsolete.” Among the ten items was paper, (also included were pay phones, landline home phones, MP3 players, netbooks, small digital cameras, handheld game consoles, wristwatches and alarm clocks). It’s quite easy to read on an iPhone, whether it’s a book, short story, magazine article or news item.

There is also talk that the United States Postal Service is failing. I can understand why, because only 1 piece of mail in 15 is something I actual need, and even that piece could be eliminated by electronic billing. Nearly everything I get in my mailbox goes right into the recycling bin. This is especially a shame for all those fancy full-color catalogs, resources terribly wasted because I don’t even flip through their pages.

The era of paper might be nearing its end. The more effort I put into recycling the more I realize that most paper trees die in vain, and their lives would be better spent absorbing carbon dioxide. I will agonize over all the people in paper related industries who will lose their jobs, but the history of the world is change, and nothing stays the same.

If I lived until 2042, to become 91 like my mother and grandmother, I might see the end of newspapers, magazines and books. I’ll probably see the passing of paper photographs, 8-16-35-70mm film formats, LPs, CDs, DVDs, BDs and any other form of audio-visual physical storage. Stranger still, I might see the end of libraries and bookstores. Everything will be digital, and the net will be a universal library. Newsstands are already disappearing fast. Bookstore business is still growing, but if the Kindle and its kin catch on, that will change too. And libraries aren’t what they used to be.

The age of wasting natural resources should end in our lifetimes, either from changing our lifestyles to avoid the worst of global warming, or by adapting to the new environments that global warming brings into existence. It is impossible to know the future. It is impossible to know what black swan changes are in store for us. The folks of 1881 could not picture 1916 much less 1951 and 2009 is beyond anything anyone could imagine from the 19th century, so I can’t really predict 2019 or 2042.

However, when was the last time you put a coin in a pay phone or a letter in a letter box? How many other things have you stopped doing in recent years that you haven’t even notice you stopped doing? It’s easy to be amazed by new inventions, but will we even notice when the weight of all that paper is gone?

JWH – 11/24/9

Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin

I’ve read other memoirs by the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon, most of whom wrote about their tremendous efforts to become space jocks and their stories always peaked with their lunar adventures. Buzz Aldrin second autobiographical book starts with the Apollo 11 landing and quickly wraps that adventure up, because his book is about the second half of his life, the forty years of life after being a famous man who landed on the Moon. Aldrin had an exciting first half of life before becoming the “second” man to walk on another world. He went to West Point, flew jet fighters in the Korean War, got a PhD at MIT, became a NASA astronaut and blasted into orbit on the Gemini 12 space mission, getting to do one of the early space walks.

So after coming home from the Moon and spending a year touring the world and being famous, Buzz Aldrin had a tough second act to follow his first. His book chronicles his decline into depression and alcoholism, and it’s not a pretty story. The real magic of his life appears to be recovering from his early success and starting over, especially his amazing luck of finding Lois Driggs Cannon, his third wife who helped him rediscover a purpose in life that has carried him forward these last twenty plus years. It’s the Buzz Aldrin 2.0 that I find the most fascinating.

Of all the Apollo astronauts, Buzz Aldrin is the only one that has stayed in the limelight making a career campaigning for space exploration. This is the tragic part of Magnificent Desolation, and maybe not one Buzz intended to portray. Aldrin is completely gung-ho on space travel – the trouble is the rest of the world isn’t ready to follow his lead. Why have we never left low-Earth orbit since 1972? It took less than 10 years to get to the Moon starting from scratch, but with all the fantastic technology we have today, we can’t seem to get back to the Moon, much less go further. Why? Well, it’s not for Buzz’s heroic effort in trying.

I believe the portion of the population who are space travel true believers is so small that they don’t have the political critical mass to make Aldrin’s dream come true. I’m not even sure 1/10th of 1 percent of the world’s population, or 7 million people are space advocates. The Planetary Society doesn’t state how many members it has, but I’m guessing it’s in the low hundred thousands range. The National Space Society, is even smaller. In other words, the core group of humanity that seriously wants for humans to live in space is probably another magnitude smaller, 1/100th of 1 percent, or 700,000, and probably much less.

Buzz Aldrin has a tremendous uphill battle to convince the world to spend the money on manned missions to the Moon and Mars when only .01 percent of the population really cares. Even if you add in all the the heavy duty science fiction fans, I doubt the number grows beyond .1 percent of the population.

Aldrin has hitched his star to the space tourism philosophy, which I have never bought. Magnificent Desolation is current through late 2008 or early 2009, so Buzz reports on all his friends in the private space exploration business, the people who keep the dream alive, but it’s like what Aldrin states in the book, it only takes a rocket going 2,000 mph to achieve sub-orbital success, but it would take a spacecraft going 17,000 mph to make orbit.

Can private space programs launch that kind of leap in technology? We know the minimum required, an Atlas rocket like John Glenn road to fame. The minimum to get to the Moon is a Saturn 5 – can anyone really imagine a private company funding that kind of expense? If there’s a better way to space don’t you think someone would have found it in the last forty years? Rocket technology seems to be the sole technology for heaving people off Earth. Many space advocates campaign for the space elevator, but that technology is far more fantastic than real.

I grew up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts – they were my childhood heroes. I thought NASA was blazing a trail to a future where science fiction would become real, but that hasn’t happened. We have the technology to colonize the Moon and Mars now, and we have pioneers who are ready to go, we just don’t have the patrons to pay their way to the stars. Buzz Aldrin still dreams the dream, and so do I, and a lot of other space enthusiasts, but I don’t think there’s enough of us to make a political or financial difference.

The only force that inspires the tax payers of America to send missions beyond low-Earth orbit is international politics. We went to the Moon because of the Russians. I believe President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration and the plans for Project Constellation in 2005 because China, Japan and India were making their own plans to send their citizens to the Moon. However, President Bush’s vision didn’t impassion America like John F. Kennedy did in 1961.

I think most Americans feel “been there, done that” and don’t see the point of returning to the Moon. Even the majority of science fiction fans don’t pine for new missions to the final frontier. For forty years we’ve been great at planning new manned space exploration, but no country or company is willing to spend the big bucks. Space travel still excites and inspires legions of kids, but most somehow lose the dream as they get older because the political climate never seems to change.

Buzz Aldrin could have called his book Magnificent Ambitions, because space travel true believers feel that spawning a branch of humanity that lives off Earth and eventually colonizes other worlds in this system before moving on to other stellar systems is the ultimate purpose of our species. I think many of us space travel true believers have been depressed, like Buzz, since the success of the Apollo Moon landings because the United States didn’t go on to greater missions.

The phrase “to infinity and beyond” was the funny rallying cry of Buzz Lightyear, a cartoon character, but that’s how space travel believers feel. The fascinating question about the 21st century is whether or not the rest of humanity will take up the challenge. I don’t think the political leaders of China, India and Japan are space travel true believers. Since 1945 there have been two spectacular ways for a nation to prove they are great – exploding an atomic bomb or developing a space program. Nationalism isn’t a good force for long term space patronage because citizens eventually feel such wealth should be spent on programs closer to home.

JWH – 11/20/9

She Had a Mind Like an Intel Core i7

As I get older, I realize my mind is slowing down. I was never a quad-processor kind of thinker, but I’d like to believe my brain could chug along like a good ole AMD X2 chip. Now my thoughts feel like they are powered by the original Pentium. I’m starting to pay attention to the people around me, and realize we have unequal minds when it comes to gray matter CPU speeds. I’m also wondering if working with machines is pushing everyone to think faster.

In our culture, we mostly judge people by their covers, but when it comes to brain power we’re as diverse as our physical features, and we seldom take that into account when communicating. In a classroom of third graders or even a college calculus class, all the students are expected to learn the same material at the same pace. Is that fair? When I was a kid I had supercomputer ambitions. It took decades to accept my brain was just ordinary, like computers built to run Microsoft Office.

At work I’m a computer geek, and friends envy my tech knowledge. I’m thankful I’m good at something because I’m so bad at everything else. My brain struggles to remember the names of the people I already know, and it seldom remembers new names, but I’m surprised at how fast I learn technical tidbits. But even that ability is eroding with age.

The other day I was helping a young women who had asked me about putting words on photos in Microsoft Word – something I didn’t know how to do within Word. Her hands flew over the keys showing me her project and files, and I was amazed by how fast she could think, type and traverse folders with keyboard shortcuts. I pulled up Google and searched on her problem and found a good solution, but before I could tell her anything, she read over my shoulders what to and was ready to go. This girl had a mind like an Intel Core i7.

I could tell her young brain, about a third in age of my rusty noggin, could process input far snappier than I could. I admired and envied her fast thinking, wishing I was young again, because now is a fabulous time to be young working with computers. On the other hand, I have to worry about slower thinkers, and the fact that I’m slowing down myself.

Is it me, or does the world feel like it’s speeding up? Aging has me feeling like a lethargic cold blooded lizard living among fast thinking mammals. My wife often gets impatient with my slow mental processing and tries to finish sentences for me. This is why I love blogging – I can take as much time as I want to put my thoughts together.

Speed of thought is relative though. Usually people complain that I go too fast when I help them with their computers, so I have to slow down. When helping most people I show them the routine, let them walk through it once on their own, and then they are usually good for solo flying. Some people I have to repeat the steps 2-3 times. Occasionally I get people who have no knack for computers and I can show them how six times, let them write the steps down exactly, watch them four more times and then they still call me back 15 minutes later. Often I have to learn on-the-spot how to solve the problem people want me to teach them, but few people notice how I do this. Google is the magic word, folks.

On one hand, I worry about these people who don’t seem to be adapting well to the machine age. I admire the ones who refuse to run at gigahertz speeds and reject interfacing with machines. I think I stand between two generations, the ones who lived without computers and didn’t need them, and the next generation of cyborgs that think like a CPU co-processor.

But computer literacy doesn’t always run along generational lines. Even though it seems we’re forcing everyone in our society to use a computer, not everyone is a PC or a Mac. My friend Laurie, who is a scholar of reading literacy, hates that other skills add the word “literacy” behind their noun to refer to their minimum standard of expressing knowledge, so we need to think of another term for people who work well with computers – cyberbiotic?

As much as I admire fast thinking, I also have to worry if speeding thoughts aren’t the best way to think. Has anyone notice how fast they edit TV shows and movies today, with the average length of film cut getting shorter and shorter over the years? This makes the action go faster and faster. I can’t watch The Amazing Race anymore because its quick edits are jarring to me. When I watch an old movie from the 1930s, the pace suggests their time had calmer thoughts, and the long meandering sentences in a 19th century novel implies even more leisurely thinking.

I think it’s unfair that practically everyone has to use a computer in their jobs in the 21st century. Computers do enhance creative pursuits, but does every task need to be computerized? It’s as if we’re all adapting to living inside a new digital reality. Will this cause us to breed humans with faster and faster minds to keep up with computer evolution?

I’m not sure the average person ever thinks about the speed of thought, but it’s obvious one of the inequalities of life that we suffer. And I’ve noticed not all young people are fast thinkers either. In the old days, when kids had learning disabilities they were called slow. When everything speeds up, will people with average ability be considered slow too?

Minds are not like computers, but there are many fascinating comparisons. Fast thinking can be compared to having a brain like the latest Intel chip, while old minds can be likened to the ancient 386 CPU. Human memory is a far cry from computer RAM, because computing would be impossible if machines had recall times and error rates of gray matter memory. Now that my memory is slipping away, I know that memory is often more important than processing speed. I can still think fairly fast, but it often takes me hours to recall specific words and names. The computers in the Apollo space capsule that went to the Moon were less powerful than the computers in today’s cheap telephones. Efficient programming and accurate memory can overcome major CPU limitations.

I’ll bet a person with a slow mind but good memory can beat out a fast mind with a poor memory in many job categories. But there are other factors, such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. A person with a mathematical mind can pursue careers that average Jacks and Jills can’t. Nor would gimpy math minds want to have to work with numbers. I wanted to be an astronomer when I was a kid, and got through high school physics, college calculus and several college physics courses before I ran out of mathematical momentum. I also wanted to follow in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, but I have zero point zero musical ability.

If I had been tested in the 7th grade and told about the limits of my brain, and informed that I could be an astronomer if I was willing to practice math two hours a day, would my life have been different? The mind is like a muscle, it can be improved with exercise – like I pointed out in “10,000 Hours to Greatness.” This really is a case of “If I knew then what I know now.”

We all hear about kids in other countries that must grind through hours of study to keep up with the standard. Now that everyone is competing with machines, will everyone have to run faster and faster? Maybe I could have pushed myself to work harder as a kid to become an astronomer, but will future kids compete with AI astronomers?

We all hear about how our educational system is in crisis, whether that’s true or news media chicken-littling, I think it’s a mistake to make an educational system that essentially tries to be one size to fit all. Would kids try harder if you customized their curriculum to fit their personal ambitions, matched to their brain speed and the amount of time they wish to practice?

Politically we like to think we live in an egalitarian society. And as growing adolescents we like to think we can be anything we want when we grow up. Socially we like to think we live in a classless society and can marry whomever we wish. Our churches teach us to believe that God created us all equal. Good or bad, I think we’re diversely unequal in our ambitions, the speed of our thoughts, and how much attention time we can apply to any task.

As I make my to-do list of projects I want to pursue in my waning years, I think I’m far more realistic because of this knowledge about my limitations than when I was young daydreamer planning what I could do with my life.

Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself and my slowing mind. Maybe it’s the way of the world for every new generation to speed past their elders, and for the elders to crab about the speeding youngsters. I turn 58 in eleven days, which is still pretty young, but I’m already looking forward to living in a retirement community where things move at a slower pace. Hell, if I move to the land of the ancient, they’ll think I have an Intel Core i7 mind, at least for awhile.

JWH – 11/14/9

Pale Blue Dot

I discovered over at Mike Brotherton’s blog that today, 11/7/9, is Carl Sagan Day, and Mike makes some interesting observations about Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the public’s attitude towards their atheism. For awhile, Carl Sagan was the face of science to the general public, sort of like Stephen Hawking is today. Any second rate pop/rock/movie/sports star is more famous than these scientists, but they have great influence on millions of Earthlings. I think Sagan’s Cosmos book and TV documentary series introduced cosmology and science to a generation of people and it’s impossible to judge his impact.

Mike Brotherton’s blog is a favorite of mine because he and I share a similar fascination with science and constantly wonder why science isn’t more widely accepted by the public. Read his recent essay “Smarts, Spontaneity, Science, and Science Fiction.” It explores just how hard it is to teach science, or even just express scientific ideas. That’s why Carl Sagan was so admired, he could communicate scientific ideas. And I agree with Mike, Sagan wasn’t as successful as his popularity, too often Carl Sagan was ridiculed on SNL other LCD comedy shows as being a geeky guy, too overly enthusiastic about billions of stars.

The people of our planet focus too narrowly on their own personal immediate reality, and all too often they believe silly theories about ontology. Carl Sagan tried to show people we live in a vast Cosmos and reality can’t be explained by just what we see in front of our noses. Look at this photo:

If you look close you’ll see a little pale blue dot in the center, a bit bigger than all the other dots in this grainy photograph. That’s Earth as seen from Voyager 1 on the way out of the solar system. By astronomy standards, this is an extreme close-up. We’re use to seeing high-powered electron-microscope photos of our planet in comparison. If a photograph could be taken of the universe as a whole, our galaxy wouldn’t even be visible. It’s hard to take our silly ideas about the meaning of life seriously when we see the relative perspective of our existence in relationship to all of space and time.

That’s why I call existence the foam of reality. From most perspectives, whether 10 to the +25 or 10 to the -25 magnitude vantage points, reality looks like a homogenous foam or fuzzy collection of points of reflected light. We only see details at magnitude 0.

The universe is so vast in scope and dimensions, that it’s hard to imagine a deity even noticing us. One of the major lessons that Carl Sagan taught us, is we are insignificant in relation to the rest of the universe. That little dot is home to seven billion people, and from their perspective their lives are the center of the universe, but we must remember that’s an illusion.

Carl Sagan is most famous for his book Cosmos, but he wrote a sequel that is less famous, based on this photograph, and also called, The Pale Blue Dot. Any philosophy or theology that tries to explain the meaning of reality must incorporate our true position in the universe, anything less will be delusional. Science is hard to teach because you have to get little minds to think big, and Carl Sagan could do that.

JWH – 11/7/9

NOVA – Becoming Human

The PBS show NOVA began a three part series called Becoming Human that is an excellent roundup on the science exploring the evolution of humans. The show aired on Tuesday night but most PBS stations repeats NOVA throughout the week, and you can also watch the episode online.

Evolution is a controversial topic in this country, and a good portion of the population refuse to accept the concept, especially regarding the ascent of man from earlier species. From the time of Darwin through the Scopes trial, attackers of evolution have claimed that anthropologists have never found the missing link between man and monkey. Well this show covers a range of fossils that provide a succession of missing links. Not only that, but the show covers many new theories that go well beyond anything Darwin imagined in the 19th century. The time range and scope of human evolution is expanding as we gain more evidence. This is a very rich in ideas documentary.

I doubt this show will change anybody’s mind about evolution, but it does summarize the current knowledge in an excellent manner and provides terrific graphics to help imagine the immensity of the topic. I do believe that most of the people who refuse to believe in evolution do so because of their religion. I also believe those religions will die off in the future if they refuse to incorporate scientific knowledge and evolve.

JWH – 11/5/9