Seat of Power

As 1945 was drawing to a close the world wide nightmare was ending - what was to believed - once and for all. The wave of Fascism had gripped Asia and Europe and had been in the subsequent wars been repelled, crushed under the mighty weight of people who demanded to be free. But as Berlin was crumbling and as the Red Army advanced a darkness fell upon the whole of East Europe. An adversary more powerful and more sinister that what lie dying in bunkers of Germany.

Evil never sleeps. When one host grows too weak for usefulness it abandons it in favor of a stronger host and as Hitler lay dead - with it the promise - or threat - of a new world order, in it's wake was the great red tide. A new war started seemlessly as the old was ended. Conflict never ceased as the guns had and in this silence battles raged on - not only across vast oceans but now also on the homefront and with the power of God in missle form behind each super power.

I stood now long ago in front of the Capitol Building in Washington DC, standing in awe of the magnificents of the history that took place inside. The halls were both great men of incredible courage and exemplarly vision and visionless cowards served at the will -and sometimes- discontent of the people through many trying times over the last 207 years. How many millions of lives were directly affected by the desisions made unbeknownst to those sitting in those hallowed halls - and in my mind even more troubling - how many people today walk by not realizing how much of an affect those desisions - both good and bad - have really had on the peoples of this earth. They walk by without thought to what an incredible achievement Jefferson, Madison, Jay, Payne, Franklin and Hamilton to take the ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes amonst many others and apply them to a real state - one that frees instead of enslaves in whcih I for one would like to believe has had a net positive effect on the state of man. And the building in which they casually walk by in the epicenter.

Race around the World

I want to do a race around the world.

Difficulty: No Airplanes.

Take the train from LA to New York Central Station.

Take the QM2 from New York to Southampton England

Train to London and then Paris to Istanbul

Take a ship from Istanbul to India or Bankok to Hong Kong to Hawaii back to LA.

That would be incredible.

I would really like to take the Transiberian railroad but I hear it's quite filthy

We could have teams: a team that stays on land and takes trains and automobiles and one that takes waterways.

Something to do when I retire as a captain of industry.

Oh! We need hot air balloons too.

Sinko de Mai-o

So yeah. Cinco de Mayo seems to be a bigger deal here in San Diego than in Pittsburgh.

Flock Upload Test

This is a test. I'm going to try using Flock to update our blog. It this works it may be easier to do this than using the website.

A Topic to consider

With Brians schedule hopefully becoming less crazy I have decided to come up with a few interesting ideas for conversation.

1) What is one aspect of our society you would like to see go away

2) What is one aspect of our society that you think is very good

3) What you had for breakfast and is oatmeal with raisins better than poptarts.

Think. Write. Respond.

old friends

I've been on this planet for 27 years at this point.

I have moved - at this point - 4 major times.

Each time I have moved I have left a significant number of friends behind.

I often times wonder if they ever stop to wonder what ever happened to that strange kid with the hair. I've tried a several times to find some of my good friends long since gone mostly to no avail. Every once in a while I'll find one of them to realize that the person I knew those many years ago is no longer but has evolved into someone I don't quite recognize. I suppose it's the same with me in that case. I suppose that's the way of life.

I am particularly looking for one friend from elementary school who I have not talked to since he moved to Canada in the 6th grade now well over a decade ago. I wonder what happened to him.

My friends from my first high school - few as they may have been and as much as I'm sure no one remembers my departure as a sad thing - I wonder still. So much has happened since then, we've grown up. We have started our adult lives and in the whirlwind of being human caught up in the excitement of new and wondrous things I have found myself an awful long way from home.

Airplanes

In college, freshman year, first semester sometime around thanksgiving we studied basic (very basic) fluid mechanics. We studied Bernoulli and everything that has meant in the last few hundred years. We studied the airfoil and how and why it works. 

It's all quite easy to understand.

Fast moving air exerts less pressure on a surface than slow moving. Fine. That makes sense. Get a big wing and it will exert enough force to lift whatever you need it to.

Not long ago I moved and I flew a very long ways.

I stood there at the airport watching planes take off. 

I understand the physics.

I appreciate how much engineering it took to make the Boeing 767.

It's still magic that it actually flies.

It's so heavy and air is so thin.

Amazing.

times of revolution

I really encourage anyone interested in listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense show. I listened to it today and found it quite interesting. And it got me thinking:

What must it have been like to live through the 1960s. Granted my views of the decade are entirely romanticized due partially to my fascination of the cultural revolution during that decade but also in the reality that I know how the cold war and vietnam ended. I'm trying to envision what life must have been like fearing the Soviets and nuclear annihilation. 

A few days ago was the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. How would have the 60's unfolded if he had not been killed? Or JFK? What happens if he served out two terms?

What if Camelot never crumbled? or LBJ never been President?

The 1960's seems to have had so many powerful leaders (not all of which I agree with), so many monuments events, a time of great confusion and great anxiety. I'm all kind of wondering what is going to happen with this decade with little leadership, great confusion and great anxiety. I'm all hoping it will turn out good but the more time passes the less optimistic I am - not that there aren't good things happening, they just seem to be drowned out by the hideousness around us - China's human rights and Tibet, the rumblings of a reunified Soviet state and the nightmare that could become Iran and economic markets that look like their going to collapse at any moment that will usher in a new depression at best and new dark age at worst. (Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme - but still)

I became aware of the political world right around the time the Berlin Wall fell. I remember my mom being very emotional about it and me simply not understanding why this wall's dismantling was such a big deal. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in the early 90s I still didn't understand what was so big of a deal. How I wish I could go back and fully understand the events that I saw but didn't comprehend.

I just hope we're going to be ok with this whole thing.

medicine

I've always been almost healthy. I was nearly constantly ill when I was a kid with strep throat or whooping cough or the like. I spent many a good hour in the doctors office in dearborn and I always hated the unique architecture of the building. Every time I saw it I either was feeling HORRIBLE or was soon to be feeling horrible as they were going to do a procedure on me or experiment or what not.

But on the other hand going to the doctors made me feel better with that magic potion they gave me. Penicillin was the good stuff - it tasted like bubble gum and was pink. Amoxicillin on the other hand was dreadful. It was red and I think was suppose to taste like cherries. It didn't. At all.

But it wasn't until a most unfortunate incident in 7th grade when I - first hand - stumbled upon how incredible these drugs really were and how fortunate I am to be living today as I watched the IV slowly drip into my system.

Bacteria (particularly staph) is in the process of evolving - it's becoming stronger and resistant - and in some terrifying cases immune to our gambit of drugs. I'm just imaging a time maybe 100 years ago when looking back on this magical time where we as a species, if for only a few decades had the distinct upper hand in the biological war. For a few magical decades we were winning the fight against so many microbes. Imagine telling your great grandchildren about this time where all we needed to do to get over an illness is to take a pill and within days you're feeling all better.

I fear the sunset on our victory is approaching. It might be decades out it might be a century. It might never be - maybe we'll find another magic bullet that will keep up winning maybe the natural balance will never be restored but I somehow doubt that. We're facing off against another form of life and one things that biology has taught me: life is wants to keep living. Killing via environmental changes is very difficult. It's actually one of the reasons I find the whole "global warming" scare hilarious. Life will adapt and adapt quickly.

We're living in a magical time where a pill can cure most any common disease. You don't have to fear the fever anymore, you don't have to fear getting ill. We can fix you. For the time being.

Starting to Feel Like Fredo

We ordered Chinese food for lunch at work today.

I was handed a fortune cookie that had two cookies in the package. Then one of the cookies had two fortunes inside.

Three fortunes for one meal. That's gotta be the Chinese kiss of death. Remind me to not get into any boats with my brother any time soon.

On Books (Finished and Unfinished)

I know very little about the invention of the printing press or how it works, but that won’t stop from extolling it as one of the greatest machines ever created. The power to mass produce the printed word has been a never-ending gift to human kind.

I love books. I love their timelessness. Books persist as a medium of communication in the face of perpetually rapid technological achievement. Last month, Steve Jobs pronounced the death of reading. I’m a big fan of Apple. I use my MacBook a lot and love my new iPod, but Jobs couldn’t be more wrong about reading. Here’s a survey stating that 27% of Americans read more than 15 books a year. With the U.S. population over 300 million that number means that at least 1.2 billion books are read by a quarter of the world’s biggest consumer market. If the rest of nation reads an average of one book a year that ups the number of books read in American in a single year to 1.5 billion. That number dwarves the 3.7 million iPhones sold in 2007. Long story short, the publishing industry has nothing to worry about.

I love the physicality of books. I love the way the paper feels in my hands. I love the smell of the ink. I love the way books look on my shelves. The closest one can measure a person by possessions is by browsing his or her home library.

As someone who has professed a love of movies over all things, rare is it that I find a movie adaptation better than its source. I was so floored by Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men that I felt underwhelmed after seeing the movie adaptation made by two of my favorite filmmakers. The pictures in my own head born out of great writing feel more vivid than anything on a screen. What a great feeling is to be so enrapt with a book that you can’t physically let go.

Beloved books feel like home. White Noise, The End of the Affair, Mother Night, A Scanner Darkly, Survivor, The Left Hand of Darkness, Tumble Home. I can live in these books.

I write about books because I’m currently experiencing a new phenomenon with a great book. That book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I started reading the book two years ago and I have yet to finish it. Usually when I take forever to read a single book it’s because I generally dislike it. I read Moby Dick over the course of a year and hated every page of it. However, I love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’ll pick it up, get engrossed in it and then put it down for months. I’ll pick it up again later and repeat the cycle, not missing a beat. The book is long compared to most modern novels, but not excessively so. It’s a breeze to read, fascinating and an endlessly beautiful work of art. I’m just taking forever to finish it. I’m almost done. It will be a bittersweet finish. I’ll feel glad to finally have finished it, but I’ll miss living inside the book.

Has this ever happened to anybody? Has anybody else out there had problems finishing a book they loved? How did your story end?

And what comes after?

Does anyone wonder what will come after this civilization?

Much like the Roman Empire and the Greek Empire that preceded it one day the Western Civilization will come to a crashing end. And then what?

What's going to happen to the cities?

What's going to happen to all of the infrastructure we've put in place?

How long will it take for the human population to re-associate into collections of peoples?

What will be left of this place in 1000 years?

I'm just curious.

Intro

So: blogging. Again. This is the first time I've done this in a long time, my last blog died after fading away. I got busy and with few people reading what I wrote it didn't make sense to spend so much time on it.

But I love writing. Pen to paper, words on the screen: communication that transcends both time and space - all with simple arbitrary lines in the form of characters and words.

When I was in 7th grade I went to an art museum in Ann Arbor Michigan with my art class and perhaps one of the best teachers I had ever had. She was our Art teacher, (Greek my nationality and we called her Katie since her last name was darn near unpronounceable) and was a professor at the University. There she took us into the exhibits and showed us this small chard of pottery with writing on it. Most of us didn't care, it was broken and old - not majestic like some of the art on display, the beautiful marble sculptures or the paintings. She said it dated from the 2nd or so century A.D. and - as she explained - since paper wasn't invented yet - or at least very rare and expensive, people would use broken pieces of pottery or what not to write whatever they needed to much like what we use scrap paper for now.

The writing on the chard was that of a shopping list. Katie then read off what it said.

I then had an epiphany.  While standing there I realized for the first time how powerful writing was. How one can take information and encode it in some physical medium - engrave the very thoughts into a piece of material where it then will remain for centuries independent of the writer who has long since died. Writing gives a sense of immortality.

Kind of.

The real problem standing in our way of communication immortality is that of formats. If you doubt this, talk to my friend who has all of his college documents on zip drives. How do I know that the format (or the medium in which I'm storing the data) will be accessible in 50 years? How can I be guaranteed that in 100 years I will be able to read this hard drive (assuming it hasn't gone bad in the meantime) and read the data? In photography we're facing the same problem. 

The only solution I have found thus far is the same solution the ancient Egyptians found: paper.

Until electronics can be as fail safe as paper we're going to be running into this problem. Paper still is permanent.

In 50 years all of the stuff I have posted to flickr and other places most likely won't be here. In 500 years when our civilization is being excavated by archeologists all of my digital accomplishments will be lost forever.

But that which I have committed to paper will be able to be read.

after all, the broken piece of pottery still speaks.