Another note that surfaced, this one actually dated: 1/17/79. Apparently, for some reason, I was moved to jot down a personal definition of innocence (as opposed to incense, which is defined by smell rather than words).
“Innocence: Trusting first rather than mistrusting. Thinking someone is right first rather than wrong.”
Sadly, tragically, life has a way of destroying that trust and changing that thinking.
On the note’s flip side…
One retirement project of mine involves going through lots of boxes containing work stuff, hardware and software design stuff, and decades of writing stuff. It’s kind of amazing and weird how much stuff I’ve generated in well over 40 years of active stuff creation. Among all that stuff — the bulk of which turns out to be dead weight I can eject — are a few worth saving and recording here.
The writing stuff, especially, varies from short notes to, in a few cases, short stories or scripts written long ago. Here is a note that seems as relevant today as it was when I wrote it circa late 1980s.
It’s about violence…
1In the beginning was the plan. 2And then came the assumptions. 3And the assumptions were without form. 4And the plan was completely without substance. 5And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
6And they spake amongst themselves, saying “It is a crock of shit and it stinketh!” 7And the workers went to the planners and sayeth “It is a pile of dung and none may abide the odor thereof!” 8And the planners went to the supervisors and sayeth unto them “It is a container of excrement and it is very strong such that none may abide by it!” 9And the supervisors went to the managers saying “It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide its strength!” 10And the managers went to the directors and sayeth “It promoteth growth and it is very powerful!” 11And the Vice-President went to the President and sayeth unto him “This powerful new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of the department!”
12And the President looked upon the plan and saw that it was good.
13And the plan became policy.
Here endeth the lesson!
The other day I saw in a New York Times article that Alvin Toffler had died last month. The article wasn’t really an obituary so much as about Future Shock, the book Toffler wrote back in 1970. If you’re around my age, you may remember him and the book; both were a bit of a big deal.
I hadn’t thought about that book since back then, but as the Times writer points out, “it seems clear that his diagnosis has largely panned out, with local and global crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.” Truer words! Even in 1970, the technological pace was starting to affect people in bad ways, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any better since.
The article really struck a chord! I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately — and have written a few posts — about the growing disconnect between people and their grasp of the technological modern world.
Here’s something that caught my eye: Researchers at the University of Vermont, in the Computational Story Lab (!), did an interesting word content analysis on 1,700 stories downloaded from Gutenberg. Each story had been downloaded at least 150 times by readers.
The researchers used “sentiment analysis” that measures the positive or negative emotional impact of words. Using a sliding window, they attempted to characterize the “emotional arcs” of each story. Their goal was to see if there were common patterns.
Turns out, there are!
Not that there was any doubt, but CNN proved it is nothing but a cable whore by hiring Cory Lewandowski, the guy who man-handled reporter Michelle Fields on camera and nearly got charged with assault.
I urge you to join me in boycotting CNN, especially during the November election. Remember: these are the idiots who brought you reporter holograms in 2008!
They’re also the guys (definitely guys) who put Erin “Cleavage” Burnett on an elevated platform so the cameras can get a good shot of her legs.
While I’m in a meta mood, there’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for months. It’s particularly apropos as a follow-up to this year’s Blog Anniversary post, especially as it’s a follow-up about Followers.
Specifically, the 2,642 of you supposedly following this blog. Often the proper term might be lurkers, but in this case I lean more towards absent drive-bys. There would be more, over three-grand, but ever since WordPress gave bloggers the ability to delete Followers, I’ve been removing obvious spammers (meaning anyone selling anything).
I’ll give you the punchline so you can stop reading: I’m about to remove nearly all of you.
Five years. (And 602 posts.) Literally a handful of years. (And a heartful.) There is a theory that the Roman numeral V represents a human hand, and the numeral X symbolizes two V hands set point-to-point. It seems obvious that “prisoner’s hash marks” — counting the days in groups of five — owes much to our five-fingered hands.
Five is a human number. Small enough to seem fundamental; big enough to be interesting (two and three are so boring; four is kinda square). Five puts the prime in prime! It’s also part of an easy trick for making large right angles (for laying out fields and building pyramids), and it’s the first substantial anniversary gift (paper, cotton, leather, silk, wood).
Five years ago I started this blog…
My poor Minnesota Twins are having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad season of epic proportion. It famously ain’t over ’til it’s over, but here at the one-third mark, after 54 games, it ain’t lookin’ good.
Put it this way: If the Twins continue to play at the abysmal .296 rate they have for the first two months of the season, they’ll win only 48 games. Which means losing 114! Which beats their previous worst (102 in 1982) by a good long margin.
Suffice to say we Twins fans are all feeling a bit stunned.
In the last quarter of the 19th century — USA-centrically, call it 139 years ago — we began to experience having the sound of strangers’ voices in our lives, even in our homes. Not just voices, but music from concert halls and clubs. And other sounds, too: the clip-clop of horse feet, the slam of a door, a gunshot. Less than 100 years ago, those sounds went electric, and we never looked back.
At the beginning of the 20th century, we started another love affair — this one with moving images on rectangular screens, a dance of light and shadow, windows to imaginary worlds. Or windows to recorded memories or news of distant places. When sound went electric, those moving images took voice and spoke and sang. No one alive in our society today remembers a time when moving images weren’t woven into our lives.
Here, now, into the 21st century, in an age of streaming video and music, from cloud to your pocket device (with its high-resolution display and built-in video camera), I can’t help but be impressed by how far we’ve come.
A long way, indeed.
Posts pertaining to programming!
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