Ken's Blog

Has it occurred to anyone other than me that the Web is built backwards?

When you read a web page, you generally have the option to click on what are generally referred to as “forward links”. Yet in what sense do those links move you “forward”? Clearly the author of the page you are currently reading could only have incorporated links to pages that had already existed, before the one you are reading.

So in reality the next page you jump to is, to a first approximation, older than the page you were just reading. From the time you did the Google search that got you started, you are almost always traveling back in time, from newer pages to older pages. And yet we all have the feeling, while engaged in this process, that we are somehow moving “forward” – looking through our virtual windshield at the cyber-landscape rushing past, as we drive bravely into the future, click by intrepid click.

Whereas the actual process is more akin to skipping to the reference section at the end of a book, looking up the source for something, then going back to the library shelf to pull down an older book, skipping to the reference section of that book, and so on. Or, to continue the vehicle metaphor, it’s as though we are driving furiously backwards, while knowledge of the future recedes ever further away with each passing moment.

What would an truly forward-linking web look like? Is such a thing even imaginable? Not since Ted Nelson’s Xanadu has there been a major push even to support such a thing. What comes to mind when I think about it is a hypothetical reverse use of the Google indexing engine: Every time you post a page, web crawlers scour your content, looking for something relevant, and remember what they find for later. Then as people add more pages, sometime in the day or decade to come, your page is modified – a helpful link is added, pointing to the future knowledge that later flowered from your humble seed of thought.

Such a structure might have a completely different sociology from the one we now know. People might get into the habit of following arguments from their beginnings to their conclusions. Perhaps people would become more motivated to plant their thoughts in the fertile loam of cyberspace, in hopes that something beautiful would emerge as their ideas were joined by the answering ideas of others, building into crystalline structures of evidence and inference that spiraled upward into cathedral spires of progressive thought, lasting monuments to a renaissance of shared intellectual enlightenment.

But of course it could never catch on. You have merely to look around you to realize that people are much happier when they can start an argument from its conclusion and work their way backward to whatever ideas they already had in their head. Perhaps, when all has been said and done, we got the Web we deserved.

Sigh.

I think that people are greatly underestimating Sarah Palin. She has been quite consistent in a very essential way: Since her selection, every time she has been asked by anyone about an issue of substance, she has looked the speaker straight in the eye and proceeded, rather dramatically, to act as though she did not understand the question.

I know a lot of people have been denigrating the Governor, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt here: She is, after all, the chief executive of a major American state, as well as a very active member of the political party that for the last seven years has defined its foreign policy around the Bush doctrine of preemptive invasion of overtly hostile nations.

Under the circumstances, Governor Palin would need to be a complete and blithering idiot in order to actually not know what the Bush doctrine is – or in fact be unaware of the concept of a “presidential doctrine” (as she recent implied in one non-answer). Worse, such ignorance on her part would suggest that John McCain and his advisors were extraordinarily incompetent in choosing her for the ticket.

Rather than insult the Governor with insinuations of utter witlessness, I think we can all agree, given the fact that she is on the Republican presidential ticket, that she in fact does know the basic ABC’s of the field of American foreign policy, but has simply been pretending, for strategic reasons, that she does not.

This is where we begin to catch a glimpse into the fascinating and brilliant mind of Sarah Palin. By making an explicit policy of rejecting any embrace of logic, experience, or even the rudimentary tenets of competency, she is flinging a gauntlet, issuing a challenge to the nation – making it crystal clear that she represents a new, post-millenial, order of things.

What Palin is clearly saying is that it is time to end the “tyranny of the competent”, that this insidious strain of elitist thinking has gone too far. She is fighting the elitist implication that people can actually be “good at things”, that to understand such complex concepts as multilateral international cooperation or the conflicts between mercantalism and expansionism, years of serious study and practice are preferable to, say, knowing how to shoot a moose.

Haven’t you ever been annoyed by that guy at the party who plays piano better than you, just because he’s been a concert pianist for the last fifteen years? You were doing fine impressing the gals with your rendition of Heart and Soul (with both hands!). But after he sat down and gave a flawless performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata in its entirety, that cute girl you’d been chatting up ended up going home with him. The bastard.

Well, the Palin Doctrine will put an end to such nonsense! From now on, ordinary folks who have been humiliated – by those fiends who intimate through study, learning, and dutiful practice – will at last have their day.

Imagine the world that Palin is offering, a world free from the tyranny of competence! Your money will be in the hands of an accountant who refuses to embrace such arcane concepts as “interest” and “dividends”. Who cares whether your life savings increment or decrement? That’s just elitist talk. The important thing is that your accountant won’t be acting all superior, like he knows something you don’t.

Tired of going to a dentist who has a million ornery plaques and diplomas on the wall, and funny little instruments that look like they were made by martians? Once the Palin Doctrine becomes the law of the land, you can be sure your dentist won’t act like she knows any more than you do. Bring your own drill if you like – the same one you used to assemble that bookcase last summer. I mean, heck – if you’re going to let a stranger drill holes in your teeth, at least you’ll want to know where that drill bit has been.

Once you understand what Governor Palin is up to, then you can truly begin to appreciate her genius. This is a leader with the courage to promise no less than a radical rethinking of America, to hold forth the vision of a new world order that will end, once and for all, the reign of those pesky intellectual elites who have been making everyone else feel out of the loop.

There is an alternate possibility: That we have somehow managed to place somebody a heartbeat away from the presidency who sincerely does not know what a “presidential doctrine” is.

But that would be absurd.

At a time in our nation’s history when many are asking deep and often disturbing questions, I humbly add one more: Why is it that some of the best movie theme music has no lyrics?

TRON for example. I’ve searched high and low, but apparently Wendy Carlos’ brilliant and moving score for this groundbreaking 1982 film is purely orchestral; no lyrics were ever penned.

Today I correct this egregious omission:

There I was, playing some arcade game
Now I’m here, trapped inside the mainframe

All at once I fell,
OK, what the hell???
Guess it’s just as well
Um, I could stay a spell

Hey there’s TRON! He fights for the user
Master Control, you will be the loser

In the end we’ll see
Programs running free
From the evil M…C…P!

I encourage you to perform the same vital service for your favorite lyric-challenged movie theme. Though I must warn you that some of the best movie theme music has already been claimed. Witness, for example, this now classic film score interpretation by Bill Murray, performing as the inimitable lounge singer Nick Winters:

Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars
Give me those Star Wars
Don’t let them end…

I am humbled to be in the presence of such greatness. Aren’t you?

Still, many opportunities remain for you, my fellow poets of the cinematic arts, to contribute to this important service. I believe, for example, that the theme from Jaws is still fair game.

Feel free to jump in. 🙂

I’ve started reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, and so far I’m loving it. It’s aimed for a teen readership, and it pulls no punches. We’re treated to issues of government abuse of power, the individual versus the state, and personal empowerment through mastery of high technology. One thing that I am finding remarkable about it is the way that Doctorow weaves in accurate tidbits of high technology, tossed off in the casually breezy voice of his teenage protagonist. Here, for example, is a perfect explanation of Bayesian statistics:

“Thomas Bayes was an 18th century British mathematician that no one cared about until a couple hundred years after he died, when computer scientists realized that his technique for statistically analyzing mountains of data would be super-useful for the modern world’s info-Himalayas.

Here’s some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you’ve got a bunch of spam. You take every word that’s in the spam and count how many times it appears. This is called a “word frequency histogram” and it tells you what the probability is that any bag of words is likely to be spam. Now, take a ton of email that’s not spam — in the biz, they call that “ham” — and do the same.

Wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it. Then use the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to calculate the probability that it belongs in the “spam” pile or the “ham” pile. If it turns out to be spam, you adjust the “spam” histogram accordingly. There are lots of ways to refine the technique — looking at words in pairs, throwing away old data — but this is how it works at core. It’s one of those great, simple ideas that seems obvious after you hear about it.

It’s got lots of applications — you can ask a computer to count the lines in a picture and see if it’s more like a “dog” line-frequency histogram or a “cat” line-frequency histogram. It can find porn, bank fraud, and flamewars. Useful stuff.”

    – Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

Isn’t that simply lovely?

I suppose I was being heavy-handed in yesterday’s post, but perhaps heavy hearts call for heavy hands. The positive way to say it is this: As soon as I went to the Page to contribute to the Obama Campaign, typed in my credit card number and sent off my $2300, it was as though a great weight had been lifted.

This way, should I wake up on November 5 to find (shudder) that the country has voted for four more years of this nonsense, I’ll know it won’t be because I couldn’t spare a little travel money for some kid volunteering to get the vote out in Ohio.

On the other hand, perhaps the world has bigger fish to fry (no, that “fish” reference was not a secret way of insulting John McCain). A friend sent around an email the other day pointing out that the universe had not, after all, fallen into a black hole when the CERN Large Hadron Collider went into operation near Geneva.

Trying to be objective about the whole thing, I chimed in with the following:

I would just like to add, for the record, that operation of the new Large Hadron Collider has not, as some have feared, induced the formation of a black hole, thereby swallowing up our solar system together with everything in it.

Of course I could be wrong. Since yesterday we might actually all be living in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, caught for the rest of our subjective lives between two successive moments in the “real” universe that surrounds the recent local region of collapse, reduced forever to the lowest quantum state of our external potential, only manifested on a macroscopic scale.

But this may always have been true anyway…

In response, several friends sent fun and exquisitely learned emails, in which they discussed the apparent impossibility of knowing for certain whether the universe you experience is real or merely an illusion.

But the link that somebody eventually sent around took first honors, hands down, for its sheer awesome coolness.

For obvious reasons, given what date it is, today I spent a lot of time thinking about the country I live in, a country I love quite dearly. And I realized that we are on the threshold to one of two very different futures. I thought about the people I care for, and I realized that each of us does have the power to make a difference.

If you live in a place like New York it might not seem as though much is happening – you don’t get any sense of where the candidates are spending their money. Obviously they aren’t spending it in New York, since the electoral vote here is already a foregone conclusion.

No, the money is all going, in various proportions, to the swing states: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. If you live in one of those states you are being inundated by campaign advertising.

The ability of each candidate to win each of those states is limited by his ability to get the word out – door-to-door canvassing, leaflets, TV ads, print ads, and so forth. All of which takes money.

If you are reading this blog, you probably favor Obama in November. You are saying no to another “hundred years” in Iraq, no to criminalizing the fourteen year old rape victim who isn’t ready to be a mom, no to bringing this beautiful nation a heartbeat away from becoming a theocracy.

If that is the case, and unless you are poor, if you haven’t already given the maximum of $2300 to the Obama campaign, shame on you. We’re talking thirteen swing states and less than two months to go. Your money is the only money available to pay for winning the raging battle in those states.

Ask yourself this: if McCain wins in November, what is that $2300 going to be worth to you? Do you really think it will continue to matter how much money you have in the bank, after four more years of Bush-style government? When the child of one of your friends dies in combat in yet another ill-conceived war? When those dollars themselves have become even more devalued through incompetent fiscal management driven by ideology?

I know quite a few of you personally, and yes, I’m thinking of you. Go to http://www.barackobama.com, put in your credit card number, and give them the damned $2300 already. It might very well be the soundest investment you will make in a very long time.

We were meeting today with some researchers who look at ways to help older people avoid falling. Most of us are too young to fully appreciate what a serious danger falling is to anyone over eighty years old. It’s a double whammy: Your balance and muscles are not what they used to be, and also your bones are much more fragile. So not only is it harder to keep from falling, it’s also far more dangerous if you do.

These researchers were meeting with us because we have some cool new technologies in our lab that should be able to help in two ways: (i) making it feasible to provide computer-controlled devices that give people continuous feedback to help them keep their balance, and (ii) helping to train people, if they do start going over, how to fall in a way that’s least likely to break something.

At one point one of the researchers explained how difficult it is to train older people what to do, should they find themselves starting to fall. She explained: “The danger is that it’s all happening too fast, and they can’t react quickly enough.” We were all somewhat at a loss, realizing that the thing we were up against here was gravity itself. It’s hard to combat the forces of nature.

Then, all at once, I had an epiphany. Politely I cleared my throat, and when I had the attention of everyone I solemnly proclaimed: “Retirement colonies on the Moon.”

The room exploded in laughter, although afterward I could tell that some people were thinking about it.

But of course I didn’t really mean it – it was one of those things that pops into your head that you just know will get a good laugh. I mean, would you have had the will power to hold back a thought like that?

On a technical level the idea works: With only 1/6g of gravitational force pulling down on your body, you would indeed find it easier to remain upright. And if you did fall over, you’d have six times as long to figure out how to react properly. So yes, lives would be saved.

But of course, from the point of view of anyone over eighty, there is one large flaw in the plan that seriously diminishes its appeal.

Think about it: If your kids and grandkids don’t visit you now…

Have you ever found that you were out of sorts,
Feeling, with a particular keenness,
That sense of alienation, that sense
Of the space between you
And the human race?

And just at the moment when you thought
That all is empty
The phone rang, and sure enough
You heard the one voice
That you were hoping to hear.

And you both felt a giddy excitement
Because, it seems,
The feeling was quite
Quite
Mutual.

And no matter what you talked about
(and it doesn’t matter what you talked about)
The topic of conversation was really about
The way you both felt, at that moment
When the conversation began.

Have you ever found that?

Today I managed
To write one perfect haiku
(It wasn’t this one)

I could write some more
But none of them would capture
That sublime moment

When I felt the Muse,
Looking over my shoulder,
And words wrote themselves

I shall not tell you
What, in a moment of grace,
I was moved to write

But I will say this:
Sometimes love is just knowing
The right thing to say

It’s strange what lasts and what doesn’t. Today my friend Vivian and I went to Astroland at Coney Island, on its very last day of existence – ever. Astroland opened in 1962, with a flourish and a strong dose of forward-looking optimism. Its futuristic theme rode the high that the nation was feeling during those heady early years of the Space Age.

Over the years Astroland lost most of its lustre, and pretty much any sense of optimism or wonder. As often happens, its futuristic logo came to represent an opposite idea: A moment stuck in the past, caught in amber like Buck Roger’s 1936 Art Deco spaceship.

But the main attraction of Astroland today was not Astroland, but rather the Cyclone. To merely call the Cyclone a rollercoaster would be to demean it. It is, in a sense, the Ur-rollercoaster. Built in 1927, it quickly established itself as a work of genius – an amazing contraption of rattling wooden slats and impossible curves that was built for one purpose only: To create the ultimate fusion of fun and fear – a perfect product of the Freudian age.

To plunge down the Cyclone’s merciless 60 degree slope is to experience that moment of disaster, just before the speeding train goes over the trestle, just before your falling body strikes the ground, to witness your feral mind’s terrible knowledge that in a moment you will no longer exist – and then to walk away, laughing, face red, newly appreciative of just how wonderful is that next breath of air.

Here is an image from when the Cyclone was new. Since then it has remained unchanged, even as the world has changed around it:

After 35 years of wildly successful operation, the Cyclone was rebranded, made part of Astroland, and has remained so for an additional 46 years, until today – and only until today. Tomorrow – by the time you read this – Astroland will be no more, lost in that place where they keep Frontierland, Palisades Park and other fabled childhood places destined to fade from the collective memory of humankind.

But the Cyclone will live on.

Mere fantasies of the future like Astroland can fail, and be swept away by a real estate developer’s grasping hand. But such a fate will not befall the Cyclone, for the community realizes that it is a sacred thing. The Cyclone is no mere gimmick, no empty promise of the future, but a valuable instrument – a gift from long ago. Each time we ride it we are reminded, in a way we cannot ignore, of the preciousness of our lives.