May 18, 2006

Connecting - or why virtuality won’t work

Yesterday my barbershop quartet sang at a ‘senior care facility.” It’s one of those really expensive residential places that provides for old people who can’t or don’t want to live on their own any more, all the way up through nursing home care.

As almost always happens in these things, within a song or two, eyes brightened up, smiles formed all over the place, and people were mouthing the words or even singing along with us.

We’re a good quartet, but that isn’t what caused these things to happen. It was the live, person-to-person contact that did it. Yes, the singing was a better vehicle than other activities might be, but it was just being there for those folks that counted for more than anything.

The lesson here, in case it’s opaque, is that Woody Allen was right. Whatever percentage he put on it - 50%, 80%, 90% - he said something like “[your % here] of success is just showing up.” And it is. Sending a card, sending an e-mail, even a video or having a live chat with a video are none of them nearly as good as just showing up.

The further proof of it was in the hugs, the handshakes, and the eye-to-eye thank-yous and “Please come back” wishes we got after our performance.

Those folks made my day.

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May 13, 2006

Thanks to my Phone Companies

I just want to take this opportunity to thank my phone companies, Verizon and SBC/AT&T, for selling my phone records to the NSA. And I am very reassured by the president’s explanation: that they were simply looking for calling patterns, not data mining.

Um - pardonnez moi - but in my days as a data guy, when we went  “looking for patterns” in a dataset, we called it “data mining.” We were very excited about the possibilities. It was really cool to scrounge around in datasets to see what was happening. We looked at everything that turned up in the data.

I did a project in the late ‘80s that mined data I bought on insurance companies - not on their policyholders or any of that, but on their finances, claims experience, risk experience, etc. I looked at the data six ways to Sunday. That’s what you do with data

So I’m supposed to believe that the spooks, who are trained in and expected to do deep, detailed analysis, just looked for “patterns”?

What a bunch of horse shit.

Can’t imagine what they’re doing when we use Skype. Yipe.

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May 12, 2006

Making a Fortune

Correspondent Steve Zimmermann says of being an aviation magnate:

As the old saw goes: the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large fortune.

Which reminded me of friends who worked at Unisys, a company formed from the 1986 merger of Sperry and Burroughs, who thought the executives showed special genius in having combined two $5 billion companies into one $7.5 billion company.

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May 11, 2006

Putin: Get on with the Screwing! We’ll Pay!

According to reports, Russian President Putin has a new Ten Year Plan: Banging for Bucks. He and many population experts are concerned that the population of Russia, now about 143 million, is in decline because of emigration, death (including an increasing number due to HIV) and low birth rate and could be as low as 100 million by 2050. Among his proposals, as one report puts it, are “one-off cash grants to mothers on the birth of a second child, extended maternity leave benefits and a graded scale of cash and day-care subsidies as a woman has more children.”

According to another report,

His attention to this issue brought a rare moment of levity when Putin said, "Now, the main thing, what we see as the main thing ..." and he was interrupted by a call from the floor.

"Love!" the voice said.

"Right," Putin answered. "The Defense Ministry knows what the main thing is. Really, I am going to speak about love, women, children" -- there was applause from the assembled officials -- "family, and Russia's most acute problem today: demography.

To be fair, Russia is not the only country either proposing or actually offering incentives to have more children. Australia, France, Italy and Poland are among those that have such programs.

However, those countries are in far better shape than Russia is. Russia’s interrelated demographic problems are many: low life expectancy (58.9 years for males, 20 years under that for American men), poor economic prospects, and housing shortages. But it’s worse than that. According to a 2003 paper by Dr. Murray Feshbach, "Russia's Health and Demographic Crises," the situation is the result of "a constellation of occurrences that include not only infectious disease, but alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, trauma injuries, astounding levels of cardiovascular disease, male/female estrangement and loss of family cohesion, declining physiological fertility, ugly environmental pollution and micronutrient starvation."

It’s not quite clear how subsidies for free-range humping will help these problems, but maybe just having more people around will generate more ideas. Then again, maybe not.

New Feature: People Not Mentioned on the Blog This Week

This weekly feature is a short list of people about whom I will not be talking here in the blog, at least during the current week - possibly ever. Don’t ask why. That would require my talking about them.

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May 8, 2006

Cat Naming

Correspondent Doug Peel reports:

I have a friend who named his cat "Well Enough" so he could tell people to leave "Well Enough" alone.  He also had a kitten he named "Caboodles."

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The Plimsoll Mark

       Samuel Plimsoll

In the early ‘80s we were members of the Unitarian Church in Richmond, VA. When our minister went on sabbatical, the congregation assumed responsibility for each Sunday service. On one of those Sundays a substitute minister from Northern Virginia told story – a sort of parable – that remains with me today. Here it is, as I recall it, with help from the Internet about the history of Samuel Plimsoll. This is a recollection, not a direct quotation from a contemporary record.

In our town lives a pharmacist who is loved by everyone. He is one of those people who, in the public perception, helps everyone. He’s the guy you can always depend upon to pick up the slack, to fill a post, to jump in during a crisis. He is, however, also a man who is quite aware of his own boundaries, as he proved one day when someone asked him to join in yet another effort that would work only with his presence and prestige.

Upon receiving the request, he sent a note to the group that said:

I appreciate your asking me to join your task force. However, I find that with all my time commitments I have reached my Plimsoll mark and must respectfully decline. Please understand that I do support what you are doing and applaud your ongoing work. I simply cannot take on another responsibility without sinking under the burden.

The minister then spent the remainder of his time talking about how we all have our Plimsoll marks, but usually have difficulty in recognizing when we’ve let our lives become overloaded. Even when we do realize that we’ve reached our limits, we find it hard to refuse yet another request for a piece of our time. It’s essential that we learn both what our boundaries are, how to keep ourselves from exceeding them, and how to decline additional burdens when we’re at our limits. We would all hope to emulate the grace of the pharmacist’s refusal, of course, but for most of us just getting to the point of being able to decline would be a major triumph.

Samuel Plimsoll was a British coal shipper of the mid-19th century who became concerned that ships overloaded with coal and other commodities were capsizing regularly and that large numbers of sailors had been lost in those disasters. He became a Member of Parliament in 1868. In 1871 he was responsible for getting Parliament to pass the Merchant Shipping Act, which mandated marking a line on the side of a ship that would be pushed below the water line if the ship became overloaded. This line became known as – and is still known as - the Plimsoll mark.

More on Samuel Plimsoll.

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May 3, 2006

A Note on the Beer List

I got WAY behind on the beer pages. I’ve caught up again, as the 5/2 & 5/3 list to the left shows. There’s a whole lot of stuff to look at. Take that look when you get a chance.

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Some Random Notes from the News

1. Sara Lee is closing a plant. The way The Chicago Tribune reported the story makes one not want to eat certain processed meats:

“Sara Lee Corp. will close an aging luncheon meat plant in Ohio this fall. . . .A specific closing date was not announced for the 78-year-old E. Kahn's and Sons plant. The brand dates to 1883 . . .”

Maybe it’s just me. An aging meat plant. Oy.

2. Taking a Shot at “Commander in Chief.” Steve Johnson, the Tribune Internet Critic, discussing ABC’s new offering of fresh episodes of several of its shows on ABC.com and how the playbacks were truncated:

For “Commander in Chief,” of course, a limited play is a bonus: A quarter-hour is sufficient to answer the question of what “The West Wing” would be like if it were written in crayon.

3. On Language. In his weekly column written, Nathan Bierma notes, in pointing out words and phrases that have come from horse-racing, the derivations of across the board, also-ran, dark horse, front-runner, get one’s goat (well, not quite), hands down, hedge your bet, run roughshod and shoo-in. You can find this column in his linguistics blog (easier to get to than the Tribune’s columns). It’s the May 3 column.

4. The Return of the Corset.

Apparently (or should I say apparelently) corsets have come back, their supposed deleterious effect on health having been debunked. The fear of harm to women’s’ bodies, to say nothing of the rise (so to speak) of the bra, just about killed off the corset. Tara Swords’ article in The Tribune, “The Corset Steps Out,” says “Today the corset is a regular on runways and red carpets, sometimes as underwear and sometimes as outerwear.”

The corset was blamed for “hundreds of diseases, from curvature of the spine to cancer to nymphomania.”

But here’s the important info:

The term “loose woman,” for example, referred to a female who did not wear a corset or wore it loosely enough that she could remove it at a moment’s notice. The respectable girls were “tight-laced” or “strait-laced.”

You learn something every day. Maybe not something hugely useful, but something.

5. Air Guitar. All I want to report here is that there actually is an event called the “U.S. Air Guitar Championships.” I’m not kidding. You can find out everything you need to know (if one could actually term it a “need”) here. Then you can start asking why there might be such a web site.

6. Where is the Top of the World? You probably haven’t asked that question very much. But if you think about it, when you live in or are from Australia or Argentina or places in the Southern Hemisphere, isn’t the top of the world the South Pole? Brooke Donald of AP reported on an exhibit at the Boston Public Library that shows the evolution of world maps from the 15 century to today. It’s called “Journeys of the Imagination.” One of the display maps is called “What’s Up? South,” which depicts “the world with Australia, Africa and Brazil at the top of the page.”

Now we have mapism to fight.

7. Dakotah Scrabble. The Dakotah language, spoken by the three tribes of Sioux at one time, is very much in danger of extinction as soon as the generation that still speaks it (about 100 individuals) dies off. Tammy DeCoteau, director of the Native Language Program for the Association on American Indian Affairs, has spearheaded development of a form of Scrabble in the Dakotah language. It took some doing. “The Dakotah language has no E, L, Q, R or V, but it has six dotted letters and one N-with-a-tail, resulting in 28 letters.” The game has 100 tiles, but players draw 10 instead of the usual 7.

She was able to make a total of 30 games with limited funds, and they’ve been distributed to reservation schools to help students learn this dying language while it’s still possible to do so.

You can find more on this issue here

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May 2, 2006

Back on the Street Again . . .

Been away too long. Now I’m back and glad of it. Spending all too much time on web sites for other people. Not that I don’t enjoy that. It’s just that it keeps me from this one.

As I’ve said all too often, I’ll try to keep up. I’ll try.

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Politics and the English Language (again)

   George Orwell

Correspondent Ric Clancy sent me a piece by Brooke Allen from the LA Times, “What Orwell Saw.” She says, in part:

IT HAS LONG BEEN recognized that political language forms a linguistic category of its own, one in which words serve not as exact descriptive symbols but as empty formulae designed to push specific emotional buttons in the guileless listener.

The best description of this process is still George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language," written 60 years ago, in which he argued that any number of words used with easy profligacy by politicians had become essentially meaningless. . . .

As Orwell pointed out, language corrupts thought. The "invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain." . . .

Certainly the loose use of the words "liberal" and "conservative" have anaesthetized the collective American brain and rendered it incapable of clear judgment. . . .

Today, just as in Orwell's day, the political chaos "is connected with the decay of language," and we can "probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." Let us start, then, by rejecting the treacherous, deceptive, worn-out terms "liberal" and "conservative" — words that are useless to everyone except the cynical politicians who exploit them in order to manipulate our worst instincts and prejudices.

If we are unable to omit these words from our vocabularies, we should at least use them only after careful reflection, so that they might once again begin to accrue some real significance.

My response was this (recast for this blog).

Thanks for this. "Politics and the English Language" is one of my favorite essays (another, worth the reading any time, is Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," by the way).

 I am aware of the hollowness of lots of apparently loaded words and the harmfulness of apparently hollow words.

We tend to look at the hollowing of words and the blurring of meaning as indications of the debasement of language or, as Orwell put it, "the decay of language." I used to think that, but have come to see such phenomena as more indicative of a debasement in thinking, or, better put, a lack of care in thinking. We are too often willing to echo the thinking of others as that thinking is conveyed, willy-nilly, in language that we use without having any idea of its actual denotations or connotations. We become literally unwitting myna birds, repeating words and phrases - even corrupting them - without a moment's reflection on what it is that is exiting our mouths.

Not all misused language comes from the unthinking. The cynics among us wittingly use "scare" words to arouse  desired reactions in their audiences. Just listen to "conservative" talk radio or "progressive" talk radio and you'll hear large amounts of overheated rhetoric that actually is at best pandering for purposes of gaining a larger audience (and, therefore, advertising revenue) and at worst demagoguery of a truly nasty sort.

Language does not "decay." It evolves. Those who decry the "decay" of language are too often viewing language through a narrow aperture, one that allows them to "prove" the decay. But language accompanies and describes, in greater and greater detail, the experiences of its speakers, however differently those speakers might inflect the language within their cohort, and however different the core of those experiences might be from that of another cohort. So, for example, sociologists have their own vocabulary and even special syntax, as do particular ethnic groups, clubs, and industries. Some such specialized vocabulary inevitably spills into the general parlance, though not necessarily with full understanding, and becomes at least common for a short while or a standard part of language.

Where politics come in is not just in the language of politicians, and it's important to see that the word "politics" itself is a loaded, but ultimately hollow, word that only dimly suggests how language so often is used and abused. Better to say that the language that is used to persuade is too often intentionally vague, loaded with code words, emotionally loaded phrases, innuendo (social, sexual, and political), and escape hatches. The language of persuasion can be powerful by reason of its contribution to the argument at hand and to the logic of the argument, and it can be eloquent. Most often it is none of these things. That's not because of the disintegration, decay, or debasement of the language. It's because of the carelessness or calculated obscurantism of its speakers and writers.

That’s my thought for today - my long thought for today. Send me an e-mail if you care to.

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