Blink and you'll miss it

Someone from work was telling me about what makes a good camera good. Apparently it has to do with a lens having multiple points of focus. This allows there to be a very sharply defined section of a photo while the rest remains in the background out of focus. The example used was a bird perched on a tree in some jungle where the bird is in great relief and the rest is just a sea of green around it. There is an art, I'm told, to using a good camera like this. Just having one does not grant you a good shot. The skill is in seeing where the good subject is and more-so even being able to manipulate these points of focus to good effect. I immediately picture looking through the camera and pullout out and in as I turned the lens clock and counter. The image in my mind is when I use the zoom back and forth with my cam-corder. The key seems to be where to stop so the picture is just right.

The podcast I listened to on a plane to Rochester New York spoke about ants and the concept of emergence. Emergence is the idea, in this context, that order or intelligence seems to come out of chaos and disorder in some way that is not fully comprehended. It "emerges" from what seems to be nothing. The examples at work in the show were many, but it was the ants which caught me. Ants farm, have cattle, build bridges, dams and do other very human sounding things. I knew that. What I never thought much about was how they knew how to. Any given ant is dumb as a rock. This includes the queen. There also appears to be no means by which ants explicitly communicate. One ant does not tell another ant what it has learned, moreover it seems impossible that any ant learns anything at all. However, as a colony, they do all those human sounding things. How? Where does that knowledge and skill come from? Where does it emerge from? And, the question I have, where do you focus to see it? Is it the species? The colony? Some grouping or order of magnitude larger or smaller? All we know is that one ant can't, but the colony can. Where does the "can" come from?

Moments in history have a way of connecting to form chains. The expression "hind sight is 20/20" comes from the idea that the chains are easy to see when you have benefit of knowing the effects of the causes. Churchill has a Naval defeat in the Mediterranean, and decades later he shows an obvious prejudice that leads to Israel and Palestine being locked together for what seems like may be forever. Who could have said that it would be that way? Is there a hope that if there had been a dedicated and unblinking rational mind in the mix that they could have seen giving Churchill the kind of sway he had over the middle east was ill-advised? Ahmadinejad comes to Columbia and these learned folks forget the Persian traditions of hospitality. He walks away a winner where it counts in his Islamic world and we lose more points with the heats and minds we know we need to win.

Of course, there are other opinions here. Others think these events are very different. Even in hind sight, where does one focus? When does one break the chain of cause and effect to snap a photo? From what place does the meaning emerge to give history context and inform those who would not like to repeat it. That place of focus, that loci of wisdom is too fine for words to capture. Blink, and you will miss it.

To lament an old lament: even those who learn from history are surrounded by those doomed to repeat it.

in it and of it

Had a conversation with a good friend about consciousness. I said something that, after I wrote it, I had to back and read several times. I don't know if I've thought it before, but it feels very right. Consciousness is how we feel time. You run your finger across your hair and you know how your hair feels. You hear the train rush by and you know how that sound feels. You walk out of a building into summer air in the city and you know how the street feels. I think that we feel time passing as what we call consciousness. The difference, I feel, is that the feeling we call consciousness is as if we were running our hand through hair that goes on for all our waking hours. That sort of extended feeling is usually ignored. Are you aware of the clothing touching your shoulder? Likely not (maybe now that I've made you focus there). But that feeling is there the whole time the clothing is there. Our brain ignores it for us. Consciousness is the draping of time over our being like cloth, but we do not ignore it. We feel it.

We are in the world and of the world. The fact is that we often talk about how things "feel right" and I think there is a lot to that. I do think we can feel the world. We feel it and we lose grasp of that feeling not because we fall short of it in our experience but rather because the words fail us. The definitions are never nimble or supple enough. We can never make a word bend as a reed does in the wind. And I don't mean that is some abstract poetic way at all. I'm being as literal as I possibly can be. The wind blows, the reed bends and the two play with each other to form the actual reality of the world, the actuality of the world. Our words can't bend in the wind our mind blows. Our words are stiff, or, if not, ineffectual. What is a word if it doesn't mean the same thing said twice? As always, the exception proves the rule. Look at the way a poet must break words to make them be art.

It's no coincidence that the more complex society becomes the more rich our languages become. It's not just that you need new words to label new things, though of course that has a role. But there are also new modifiers, new tenses, new abstractions, new phrases and more. The words can not change. But the way we combine them, the new ones we make and the ways we find to contrast them gives huge leaps for the mind to take. And the space to jump from where we are to where we will be is why we need language to grow. We have learned to encounter and experience so much more. We have shifted and broken time, space, context and our bodies. Of course the old language would fail to meet the needs of the new reality. We feel new things and we need new words. We feel old things in the light of new things and we need new ways to use old words. How plastic is this lump of flesh in our skull? How much further can it leap and stretch? Will we know when we reach the precipice? Or will we think we're leaping long after we're left to stare over the edge wide eyed and dreaming of jumps we never really take?

This post was inspired by hearing Neruda's "Enigmas" quoted in the movie Mindwalk. Maybe I watch too many movies?

fluid thoughts

I've just been watching Akira because it happened to be on cable. For those who don't know and don't want to do any homework, the short story on Akira is that it's a movie dealing with the possibility humans may someday manipulate the most basic forces of the universe. Think of it as trying to be the ultimate "super hero" the hard way - by evolving into one.

The "ultimate" is what has me thinking now. What we consider ultimate at any time in history is so connected to where we are. If I appeared with my laptop or even a flashlight at the right time in human history I would be the world's most powerful wizard. Today, for those who stay tuned into what science is capable of delving into, it would take the power to move mountains to get noticed. One thing about the ultimate that has always been the same, though, is that people always advance their idea about what it is. It always leaps out ahead of us. We always imagine more with everything we learn and master. And as we advance and achieve the ultimate of the past we find it is vastly different in nature than our ideas and hardly as impressive.

In high school physics, I was taught that matter had four states and that the most energetic was a plasma. Fire is the image most draw on here when it comes to a plasma. Turns out current thinking is far beyond that four state idea. There are many states for matter and the continuum goes right on through energy and its forms. The ultimate state is no longer a plasma. The states used to progress nicely from more dense and less energetic to less dense and more energetic - fire is easier to pass through that wood, but passing through wood will not burn you. It is interesting that now the pattern does not hold. The highest energy states appear to be more like liquids and can be immensely dense and energetic at the same time. The stuff of the early universe was like a pool of water. It had flow like water.

No surprise that the highest energy states should be liquid like. Liquids are as flexible as anything can be and still very strong. Water is the creator and destroyer here on our planet - carving the Grand Canyon and cradling the very essence of life. Not too dense and not too energetic, water is the middle path. The middle path is closer to ultimate. Or so it seems for now.

Having just returned from a trip through the APAC region (stops in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne) I saw such a scale of ideas. People on the sides of the highway in Malaysia living on the little farms they have had for a very long time I imagine. A striking image of a teenage boy sitting in the mud next to a cow doing what appeared to be having a txt conversation on a little mobile phone that likely puts much of what we have in the US to shame. What would that boy think of as the ultimate? How different would it be from what I think? I wish I had had time to find out.

tibetan extremists should invade

From the borders of the USA, invaders start pouring in. Every one of them unarmed and marching quietly. They respond to no prompting. Eventually, one of them is shot for not responding. He does not even flinch. After his body jerks back with the force of the bullet in his shoulder, he rights himself and keeps marching. That image is played again and again on the news. Not one of his fellow marchers even looks his way. Our forces open fire and many of the invaders fall. Again, not one of those still moving even acknowledges the fallen or slow their pace. Those on the ground simply chant something unintelligible to those inspecting the fallen bodies. The tabloids rush to print that we've been invaded by zombies. The truth is we've been invaded by Buddhists. They are trying to live the words of their master. They don't come to convert. They are marching on Washington DC so they can sit on the lawns there and meditate. They will not leave until the USA has seen what the force of will set to peace can do.

The US rails on its news stations that it cannot allow them to simply march in like this. They will all be arrested. However, after dragging the 221st limp chanting body from the lawns of DC, the futility of putting them all in prison becomes clear. They go on chanting there and make the other inmates nervous. The President goes to the UN and demands sanctions against Tibet and other nations whose citizens have marched on US soil. The UN points out that they have done nothing but trespass and many US citizens have now joined them in their march and meditations.

The US economy kicks in and now the meditators are being marketed. With no response from any of them about what kind of cut they would need, many tour firms and television shows are simply pumping out images of the fields filled with people in simple seated posture over every medium they can. Now the fields are also filled with camera wielding vacationers. Fat children start throwing things at the seated people to see if they will move. It is reported that there have been sexual acts committed on some of the women late at night right in the open as they sit and do not move. Not missing a beat, MTV's punked producers get a show on the air where contestants try and get meditators to flinch using whatever means they can concoct. Shirts, mugs, hats, trays and everything else that can be silk screened appear all over with images of the meditators. Slogans of support, derision, confusion and stupidity are slapped over, under, next to and on top of the images. PBS and NPR start airing a documentary about them. Not to be out done, the Science Channel and Discovery Channel band together to air studies being done on the flocks of people.

One night, they all begin to leave. The press rabidly questions them as they go. People are followed home and harassed for weeks. Homeland security bars every person who participated from a foreign nation from entering the US again. The unanswered questions bubble over in the media. Larry King practically dies screaming at people on his live coverage of the exodus. Preachers in the evangelical heartlands preach a triumph of the Christian ideals of the US over the godless. And when there are no more of them on the lawns and the images disappear from the televisions people start to think - "about what, I have no idea!" to quote the late Mr. Dangerfield.

Defending Religion, again...

I was speaking with some folks about religion over dinner this week. We got to talking about how religion is useful to people - or not. One person made the point that religion's truth can be seen in its power to explain those things reason and science can not. There comes a point, he explained, where god is the only explanation left.

I did not protest. But I did smile. The irony was so thick. It is exactly the same impulse for reasons, explanation and understanding that founded science. To seek out where the truth is in something until you find it and never surrendering to ignorance is the best of science.

Of course, as I see it, to leave the explanation in god's hands seems a bit silly. Religion plays the role of bad science when cast in that part. "Well I've tried everything I can think of... Must be god." I would rather say we do not know yet. Which means I betray the spirit of science more than my religious friend.

I'll settle for ignorance in some cases because I just don't feel like everything is within our grasp right now. I know that I do not know.

And, again laden with irony, I think religion loses part of its power when it's used as explanatory. Religion is meant to uplift the spirit. To give guidance is the power of religious doctrine. It's exactly because it deals with that which one can't explain that it is derived from inspiration - a word that almost literally says "letting spirit in". To bend religion so that it now is taken from the high perch of spiritual matters and is made to explain the mundane phenomena of this world is a crime against that spirit that inspires - wherever or whatever you feel that spirit derives from.

Why do I always end up defending the very thing these people say they hold dear from their own impulses to destroy it? In this case, I wisely only put these thoughts here. I've had enough of this conversation in real life...

A Slight Departure

This morning I watched a bit of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (hhgttg) movie with my 8-year-old daughter. I was surprised to see how much of it she both understood and appreciated. It inspired me to make a slight departure from my typical science, math, politics and religion related invectives and talk about my most prized (non-animate) possession (discussion of possession of animate things for another time).

I came upon hhgttg in much the same way I came upon all things from the UK. In my youth my mother and I lived in a valley. That valley had little to no TV reception. Only two channels were watchable. One was channel 9 (WWOR for those in the NYC metro), and I was mostly not allowed to watch that outside my mother's presence due to it's content. So I had public television. And in the late hours when my mother was out working 3rd shift somewhere (after working 1st and 2nd in other places for sure), I would be treated to the finest out of date entertainment the BBC saw fit to give away. Monty Python, Faulty Towers and Dr. Who were my most steady friends. For a very brief window, they aired the Hitchhiker's TV series. But it was gone long before concluding the story. My mother, seeing how disappointed I was hunted and found the books. And a lifetime love was born.

I have been in love with the mind of Douglas Adams for as long as I can recall. From his typewriter (as he had stated his loathing of pens as instruments of serious writing) sprung gems that have both entertained my mind and educated me more than most serious tomes could ever hope to. From Mr. Adams I learned about human nature. He gave us the SEP Field (Somebody Else's Problem). You see scientists had found that when you surround anything with a force that gives an onlooker the impression that it is somebody else's problem they don't see it at all. I also learned about the questionably fruitful nature of human (and non-human) endeavors. In the first book pan-dimensional beings build a grand computer to calculate the secret (a question) to "life, the universe and everything" only to have it demolished to make way for a new hyper-space bypass moments before it would come to it's conclusions in an oversight of bureaucracy.

All this sets the stage for my mother's 18th birthday present to me. A leather-bound edition of the 4 book long "trilogy" of hhgttg called "The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide". I had already read all the books (though it contained a never before published short story I gobbled up before my party was through). The book came with me to Fordham and was there the day the 20 year old bull dyke, a friend of mine, came to me and said she was going downtown to have her new 5th book in the "trilogy" autographed (he always called it a trilogy regardless of the number of books he wrote - the 5th was the last). Now, I'm not one for autographs and hero-worship. However stories of Mr. Adams in person were the stuff of legend. He was just as cantankerous and obnoxious as one could imagine for a mind that birthed these books. So I decided I should see this for myself.

As if Mr. Adams had been briefed for what we were expecting, the spectacle of the day could not have been better. It was a particularly warm November day. The line to get into the B. Dalton's bookstore on West 8th was around the block. Being dressed for the cold and getting the hot we were all sweating in the sun and carrying heavy loads of discarded coats and gloves and such. So when I finally reached the doors of the store and entered I was very relieved to be immediately distracted from my misery by the play taking place before us all. The first thing I saw was a very irate man in a white shirt, little bow tie and glasses, wearing a B.Dalton's name tag. He was quietly but insistently pointing at something I could not see and trying to get past another man who was impeding him. "He can't do that in here. It's simply not allowed!" he whined. The man in his way was in a black blazer and looked less than entertained. Strangely, from his bearing, I could just tell he'd been through this before. "He's almost through. It's silly to stop it now." he said. Moments after hearing the the crowd parted just enough for me to see Douglas sitting at the table signing a book with a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Now being able to see him I could finally make out what he'd been muttering the whole time as he signed, "If he wants me to step outside to fucking smoke, I'll step outside and give the fucking books away instead of letting people buy them. I don't give a shit..." He continued in this way the whole time the little man from the store was standing there. I, and everyone around me, laughed as mutedly as we could for fear of being kicked out before getting our turn.

When I did make it up to the table, I handed over my leather-bound edition without a word. I had no idea what to say. I had it open to chapter 29 of "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish", which is the fourth book. Chapter 29 is interesting for being only one paragraph long. It is a flight announcement. If I had any idea how much I would end up hearing these in my life to come I may not have made that choice. But being so short it provided quite a bit of blank space on the page and struck me as a good place for the book to be signed. The book was signed in a flash and then he slammed it shut - a bit hard for my tastes. But then he saw the cover and looked surprised. "What the bloody hell is this?" he asked aloud. The man in the black blazer, his manager I had surmised, turned instantly and said "Don't worry Doug, you got paid on it." "Oh, OK." Douglas answered calmly and then looked at the book more gently. "The More Than Complete," he read aloud. "Well that's not true now is it?" With that he opened to the title page and crossed out the word "more" to replace it with "less". I was stunned. Everyone around me glared. I'm sure they were very unhappy they hadn't thought to bring their own.

I adored that book. Too much, in fact. I was obsessed for a long time with it's care. The the universe interceded and it was lost from our move to our last home. I was devastated for along time. I searched everywhere I could. After a few years, I gave up. Then, long after I thought it was gone for good, my wife found it when unpacking from our recent move into our new home in a box that had been in the garage and never opened form the apartment. I'm very happy to have it back. I intend to be more careful to apply the lessons I learned from the stories on its pages this time and not hold it too dear. I also hope to get another generation hooked. Bu that will have to wait a few years. After all, I don't intend to explain to an 8 year old why it's so funny that there is a male character who is said to have at least two known heads above his shoulders and an unknown number below. That is something left behind the SEP field for at least half a dozen more years.

Good luck, and always make sure you know where your towel is.