Et alia

Some time ago, I read an item here or there that suggested maybe I (and a lot of other people) was tying my shoes the wrong way. At first I pshawed the idea, but in a little while I recalled some instances when my shoes had come untied for no apparent reason.

If you're like me, you learned to tie your shoes when you were about five or six, and nobody ever said you were doing it wrong. If you made a bow and got the ends of the laces more or less the same length, you were a pro. But as it turns out, most of us have been tying granny knots all along, and everyone knows a granny knot will work itself loose and come untied. Sailors don't use granny knots for just that reason. Why use them on your shoes?

So, the solution is to tie your shoes with square knots, i.e., to make that loop from the other direction (too hard to explain) than the one you've been using your entire life. It takes some practice, but I've found that I can't tie a granny now if I try. And my shoes don't come untied anymore.

All this at the age of 53.

Et alia

Recently I had a moment of weakness in my stand against electronic book readers and ordered a Barnes & Noble Nook when the price dropped. I paid $149 for the new Wi-Fi version, a damn sight cheaper than the original price of the Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Apple iPad. My opinion of these machines has changed.

The thing arrived the other day, and I’ve been playing around with it obsessively. Over the holiday weekend I was able to download a bunch of American classic literature for free at the Barnes & Noble site, a great way to familiarize myself with the Nook’s features and quirks. It does have a number of each.

First of all, the experience of reading on this little pad is quite different from reading a book. The screen is only 4” x 5”, smaller than the print width of the average hardback. Even smaller than a mass market paperback. Depending on the font size you choose, the text can look more like a newspaper column than a book page. I imagine this is something I’ll get used to.

Navigating the Nook’s menu system is a little tricky too. You can return to the main menu, which appears on the backlit touchscreen at the bottom of the unit, by tapping a touch-sensitive button just above it, yet I often find myself getting yanked out of the book I’m reading when I push a back-arrow on the touchscreen, thinking it will take me to a control panel instead. This is mainly due to my learning curve, but also partly to the software that controls the Nook. It isn’t all that user friendly, but this too shall pass. Users adapt.

B&N is touting the cover flow feature -- you can show the covers of your personal library or of books you might buy -- but I find the images to be so tiny that using them to I.D. books is almost laughable. It’s true that an image you select by touching it gets a little bigger, yet the type is still mighty small. Still, it gives you an idea of what the actual book looks like, if you were to hold it in your hands. You can imagine it while reading the electronic version, if that makes you happy.

I do appreciate the built-in dictionary and the ability to highlight passages and enter notes on the text. The control panel that handles these functions, though, along with the itty bitty touchscreen keyboard, are a bit sluggish and funky, since there’s a slight delay between your touch and the cursor’s movement. Even so, these are nice features that enhance the reading experience. If you’re the type to write marginalia in your books, this lets you do it without marring a perfectly pristine copy. You can also hide or delete any comments you’ve made.

Buying ebooks via B&N is a breeze using the on-board Wi-Fi, which communicates with your home network or any AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot (or even B&N’s in-store Wi-Fi). Once you tap the “Buy” button, the book is delivered electronically and you can start reading. Searching for books to buy is another story, though. If you know the specific title or author, you’ll have no trouble, but I tried a few searches that yielded either thousands of hits or none at all. Maybe I’m too used to the web-based approach, where I can change the search criteria more quickly.

One attraction of the Nook, or any ebook reader, is access to the hundreds of thousands of texts that have been digitized by Google. They’re all free, and they include most if not all of the Western canon going back to the ancient Greeks. I have a very hard time reading Google books online, so the Nook is a valuable tool for that purpose. The only problem is that sometimes the formatting can be odd, or special characters are misunderstood. This isn’t Nook’s fault; it’s the Google text-recognition software that reads, for instance, 1806 as 180G (in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.) You get what you pay for, ultimately, but at least you can stock up on the classics if you’re willing to overlook the tics.

I don’t mean to be comprehensive in this little review, but despite the minor flaws I find the Nook strangely impossible to put down. Knowing that I already have fifteen or twenty books in it, I’m giddy to think that I can take a break from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and dip into Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations for a while. Or buy something new because I feel like it. (I have my eye on Mr. Peanut.) Gradually the reading experience itself will feel completely natural, and I can foresee spending a lot more money on books than I have over the last few years.

Ebooks won’t displace tangible books for a long time -- probably not till paper gets too expensive to use for all those schlocky thrillers and vampire novels -- and not everybody will come to appreciate them. But think about what a book really is: words painstakingly arranged to deliver information or art to the reader. The ebook is as capable of that as traditional ink-on-paper. We can romanticize the physical book, just like we romanticize the neighborhood book store, but both are slowly becoming obsolete the same way hand-copied books became irrelevant after Gutenberg. There was a time when people were nostalgic for the parchment scroll, after all.

Should we fight it? Or should we accept that this is a transitional age in which new technologies will actually make it easier for people to read what they want, when they want? Or simply to read more. This is good.

Et alia

If this isn't the craziest f&%$#*g thing I've ever heard. The Candwich. A sandwich in a can. You know -- for the kids!

Apparently it's not on store shelves yet, and might never be, since the creator is in some legal hot water, according to the Daily Mail. Still, I feel better just knowing a product like this might exist one day. Something to live for.

Et alia

How is future technology affecting us today?

Here and there you’ll read science fiction or speculative articles that wonder aloud about time travel and other technological advances that might come about one day. You can think yourself into dizzying loops over this stuff.

For instance, it’s conceivable, if you believe time travel will become possible in the future, that our present world -- the only one we have access to -- is being manipulated by time travelers. That would explain a lot, when you think about it (George Bush? President? Two terms?). Everyone knows, given our state of understanding, that you don’t go back in time and start changing things, because you can’t control the ripple effect that will carry forward to your own time. It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences at work, like nuclear fallout. But who’s to say that future engineers haven’t found a way around that trap? Maybe they’ve discovered how to isolate particular changes, like taking one puzzle piece out of a jigsaw and replacing it with another. The rest of the puzzle remains the same, with only the single element altered.

If this is the case and some of the weird wild stuff going on in the world today is caused by “chrononauts” (for want of a better term), all we can do is hope that their interests coincide with ours at some point, since there’s no way to engage them or negotiate if they don’t want to be detected. (Colbert and Michio Kaku went into this the other night. Invisibility cloaks!) Even if someone stood up and identified herself as a time traveler (let’s say women are the the dominant gender in the year 2525), we’d quickly have her certified and locked up in a mental hospital, no? One day, word of her escape would hit the news, but the truth is she’ll have vanished from a locked cell without a trace...

Another possibility I heard of a while back is that computing might become so advanced in the next thousand years or so that we can’t trust that we are “actual” human beings but rather avatars in a virtual reality constructed to test some theory or complex algorithm. Our behavior is being analyzed by a programmer (this would be God, one way of looking at it), who is trying to solve an existential problem in her own era.

Or we could be figures in some goofy teenager’s video game. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

I wish we could have faith that the people of the future will have their priorities straight, but if human nature doesn’t evolve much over the next millennium, I’m afraid these chrononauts and software engineers will be as blind and self-destructive as we are.

Et alia

So I took a two-year sabbatical. What of it? And in the interim other people seem to have pilfered my title for different bloggy endeavors, but I had it first so I’m going to keep it. I raised my flag back in 2006, with a whole ‘nother thought in mind about what this might be. It’s not that anymore, but I can’t say what it is either.

What brings me back now I’m not all that sure of. A certain restlessness that produces ideas I want to save or highlight? Maybe. A notion that if I keep everything I think to myself I might as well not think it? A narcissistic desire to claim a tiny bit of space on the interwebs as my own and decorate it however I want? That’s pretty close. All of the above, even closer.

Since January 2008, I’ve been every bit as observant, opinionated, and consterned as before, but I held back because I didn’t think anybody was listening. The difference is that now I don’t care if anybody’s listening.

A few items that have come to mind along the way:

Conservatives really have a problem with their own suppressed homosexual tendencies. Most of their “values” are more in the category of self-loathing.

John Edwards goes down in history as one of our major douchebags. Then again, so does Mark. Sanford of SC.

Tiger Woods too.

3D technology will not be saving the movie business. Avatar was cool enough to watch, but the story was warmed over Little Big Man.

Enough with celebrity chefs. I happen to know one, or an aspiring one anyway. He’s a pompous ass with no redeeming qualities.

There will always be one natural (or man-made) disaster or another to amuse and entertain us. Quite a few came and went while I was away. Most of them are quickly forgotten, or at least displaced by the next one. I hate to think of what will displace the BP oil spill.

We can’t let the Tea Partiers off the hook so easily. They strike me as lazy thinkers who believe that having read the Constitution once or twice and a handful of the Federalist Papers makes them patriots. It doesn’t. I suspect my father is one of them.

One day we’ll be able to admit that there’s no point in going to the moon again. Not when we can’t even have an intercity bullet train, or true universal health care, or food that’s guaranteed free of E. coli. That day hasn’t yet arrived, though.

This vegetable garden craze -- sometimes I wonder. For the cost of seeds, soil and soil amendments, tools, water, fighting gophers and other annoying wildlife, and my time, I could buy all the produce we can possibly handle. Something tells me I’ve been had. Still, there’s no better way to get your hands on a tomato like you had when you were a kid.

We believe what we want to believe. I’ve read a lot of atheists vs. the faithful tracts these past two years, and it has finally sunk in: These two groups don’t live in the same universe. They live in parallel ones that overlap, so do yourself a favor. Whichever one you’re in, they don’t speak your language in the other one. Not worth it to try and convert the savages.

On that note, disce pati.

Et alia

You know you've turned the corner where aging is concerned when the annual lists of Best Music/CD/Performer/Band of the Year come out and you are unfamiliar with any of it. This is where I sit. Oh, sure, I used to keep up with the Cool Stuff, back when the B-52s were thought of as cutting edge, but somewhere along the way I just surrendered. I abandoned the hunt for the new.

Yesterday I received a CD from Amazon, though, and I was very excited. Go! by Dexter Gordon. It was recorded in 1962 or so.

Good stuff, and it will never grow stale.

Et alia

Here's something upbeat and useful for a change. (I know my tone's been skewing cantankerous lately). Turns out that if you subscribe to Harper's Magazine, you have access to its entire history -- 1850 to 2007 -- on the web. All you do is register, provide some kind of code from your latest copy's mailing label, and you're in.

Whatever your special area of interest, you'll find a wealth of material from any era of American history after Harper's was founded: writing by Mark Twain, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, and thousands of others. This stuff can be used for research or entertainment, and you can even download .pdf files of the articles and keep them in your hot little memory stick forever.

Right now I'm especially interested in the American labor movement, so I'm trolling through the early years of the 20th century looking for Big Bill Hayward et al.

Kill some time; feed your mind.

Et alia

I used to be inclined to write about the political scene much more than I am now. It struck me, as I followed things with a zealot's intensity, that the more voices there were raising the volume of outrage, the better off our cause would be. Turns out, no. Too many voices make noise, and who needs more of that? These days I pay close attention but understand that my e-pamphlets (would Thomas Paine have a blog today?) are for my own venting -- for good health -- and persuade nobody. Which is fine.

I'm leaving much more room in my head for the appreciation of things like ideas (rather than their bastard child, politics) and music. Case in point. Not long ago I bought a tube-driven amplifier, which has made my CD collection sound utterly new. Listening to everything from Haydn to Elvis Costello on it reveals surprising details and nuances I'd never heard before, and this is good. Music is uplifting and doesn't disappoint. Democratic congressmen disappoint.

By the way, the titles here at Disce Pati will always be among four: Opinatio (opinions), Consternatio (confusions), Observatio (observations), and Et alia (all the rest). That'll make it much easier for me. I'm all about simplifying.

Now to some music on a Sunday afternoon...