Tonight, I am deeply troubled by the fact that Hershey’s Syrup with Genuine Chocolate Flavor contains no chocolate. And we wonder how and when the world became prone to believing alternative facts? I say it started a long time ago, when we were first fed chocolate syrup, that is not.
Rain in the desert is unlike rain in Pacific Northwest, the midlands or Florida. In Seattle it is anticipated so much so that it has become part of the folklore, the first thing someone mentions when you state you are visiting or live there. In Florida, the rains increasingly come not as a light afternoon shower, but as torrential downpours, the kind of storm that forces people to evacuate their homes.
In the desert, rain is a welcomed friend, the one that visits just a few times each year. Children rush out to meet her, the adults smile at the sound of her approach. The burden of the sun is temporarily pushed aside by cloud cover of her cloak.
When rain comes to the desert, it brings with it the generation of aromas that otherwise require the crushing of arid leaves between finger tips or stirring of debris underfoot. Sage, mesquite, and flowering ground cover entice human memories, stimulating something deeper than olfactory alone.
The emotions invoked are not unlike the embrace of a friend or caress of a lover, brought to life in the rapid transition from brown to green, dry to soaked. Yet they are fleeting, as quick to arrive as they are to depart. The aroma of the desert rain is diminished. We anticipate, but never expect.
This weekend we celebrated my grandmother’s 100th birthday in Glidden, Iowa. Leta Kruse was born January 6, 1919 she has lived a full century, always living within seven miles of where she was brought into this world. From horse ‘n buggy to self-driving cars, Leta Sophia Jennie Bushman married as Leta Kruse has seen one hundred incredible years of change.
In her life time has been the invention of the band aid, hearing aid, pop-up toaster, vacuum cleaner, penicillin, television, cellophane tape, Nylon, ball point pen, automatic clothes washer, color TV, nuclear weapons, microwave oven, cake mixes, automated coffee maker, polio vaccine, video tape recorder, jet liner, seat belts, smoke alarm, pop-top cans, pocket calculator, electronic mail, bar codes, personal computer, communications satellite and GPS, mobile phones, world wide web, text messages, DVD, smart phones, and hybrid and self-driving cars.
In sitting beside her I observe tireless, capable hands and fingers that have worked in fields, harvested from gardens, cooked, canned, and served countless meals to family, farm hands, neighbors, and friends. She has sewn, crocheted, and mended; raised three children and welcomed seven grand children and four great grand children into their home; and written more words than we ever could count, including her life’s story The Dash. At one hundred years Leta yet conducts her own accounting, writes her own checks, beats contestants on the Wheel of Fortune, and flies through word puzzles at the rate of a book every other day.
To look into her eyes and know what she has seen is to enter a portal to a century of invention, war, discovery, and transformation. A year after her birth women were given the right to vote and at age eight Lindberg flew across the Atlantic ocean. The Great Depression of the 1930s would have a lasting effect on her entire generation, and upon her children and grandchildren. I too am a product of that era, careful with my money, buying only what I can afford, and keeping old things running like new for as long as possible.
World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, and two Gulf wars filled the air waves and television screens. Seventeen U.S. presidents have sat in the oval office. Leta has witnessed humans walking on the Moon, the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity explorers and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
As Leta has said time and time again, “What will the future hold?”
More than what she has seen or experienced, her extended family enjoys what she and her husband Raymond have given. The Pride of the Valley family farm continues to provide each of her children, grand children, and great grand children the comfort of knowing they will always have a place to call home. No matter the financial state of the nation or condition of our families, we have more than four hundred acres of rich, productive farm land and beautiful, viable timber along the winding Racoon River.
For the third year in a row I have returned to our family farm in Iowa for the week of Thanksgiving. My grandmother of 99.9 years lives in town, at an assisted living center. Time with her is cherished, for while she will soon move into the start of a second century on this planet, we know intuitively that years past 100 are limited.
With each visit my mother and I engage my grandmother in story telling, recording each memory on our cell phones, camera, or audio recorder. She shares with us a blend of bitter, sweet, dismay, and wonder at all she has seen and experienced. In the century that has passed she has moved from moving between rented farm houses by means of horse and sled to the automobile, the first commercial airlines, jet engines, and Moon landings. She has seen communications evolve from installation of the first telephone lines to mobile phones, satellite, and the Internet.
Just yesterday afternoon, while decorating her apartment for Christmas I played a Putumayo album ‘Folk Playground’ which started with a fun version of ‘This Old Man’. My grandmother leaning just a bit forward on her walker, swung her hips left and right, tapped her feet, and rolled her shoulders to the lyrics and the beat. My mother quickly came ’round to my grandmother’s front and danced with her, both of them laughing.
The moment was just that, a few bars of a familiar song and a reminder of the countless thousands of evenings that my grandparents danced in Texas, Florida, and Arizona during their thirty years as Iowa Snowbirds. And then my grandmother asked, “Where is that music coming from?”
“From my little black box,” which is how she refers to my cell phone.
“Oh my,” shaking her head as she found her seat, “I just don’t understand how all of that works. All of that,” referring to phone calls, text messages, photographs and music, “in that little box?”
Once seated she concluded, “As I always say, what does the future hold? What … does … the future hold?”
She asks this with a certain degree of longing to know, and at the same time a need to let go. She seems content to know that it produced a song familiar to her, and in that moment she found joy. Moments are what matter most to her now, not the past nor the future. In some ways, she is living exactly how the wise have advised for millennia—in the moment.
Letter to the editor, New Scientist:
Concerning “Exclusive: Grave doubts over LIGO’s discovery of gravitational waves” —October, 31 2018
When I was CEO of the software development company that produced Yellow Dog Linux, I was frequently interviewed about our product launches and related support of Apple, IBM, and Sony computers. In one particular interview the “reporter” got it all wrong, so bad that for the first (and last) time I was forced to take action to have the article retracted, as colleagues, even close friends reached out to ask if it was true.
It occurred to me then that if people who knew me, who trusted me were swayed by the power of the printed word to question my integrity, when in fact nothing of the sort occurred, how many other articles had I read by this small-town publication, and many more by large format journals, were equally incorrect or intentionally slanted to sell copy?
In reading the New Scientist article Did we really find gravitational waves? I was blown away by the disinformation contained therein, intentional misuse of key facts and figures, a total lack of understanding of the means by which the LSC isolates signal from noise, and the blatant disregard for the 70+ EM follow-up confirmations (not just one). The article reads as a children’s storybook, a version taken to such simple explanation that it becomes wrong.
Now, as I did many years ago, I question the integrity of the publication as a whole. While I have for a half decade enjoyed NS’ snippets of information in a diversity of subjects, fully aware of the sensational cover stories, I am baffled by how this article could be called an “investigation”. An investigation requires the reporter to become something of an expert in the subject during his or her information gathering campaign. This was clearly not your agenda. Rather, you moved to publish cover story to capture the attention of the reader without concern for the integrity of the information contained therein.
It is one thing to give a scientist a platform on which to question a colleague’s work. That is the very reason we publish. But to call it an “investigative report” and feature it on the cover when the article doesn’t even begin to describe the methods by which the LSC conducts its research is a completely different ball game.
I am not an astrophysicist, yet I could give a half hour lecture on the points of this article that were intentionally slanted or simply wrong. I was proud to have my latest film LIGO Detection, launched by New Scientist but will not be renewing my subscription in 2019. Not because as a member of the LSC I am offended. No. Because I know enough to recognize the fallacy in what was published, begging the question how many more of your publications portray research in an equally incorrect manner. You have given in to the need to capture attention through conflict instead of good science in a world that needs more critical thinking, not polarized controversy.
Cheers,
Kai Staats, MSc
Read a more complete story at Ars Technica
I remember when I first engaged the Commodore 64’s voice synthesis software, a function built-in to what was truly an impressive BASIC foundation. With some clever, intentional misspellings and exaggerated grammatical misgivings, the voice synthesizer could be made to sounds fairly reasonable, and most certainly understandable. This was in the early 1980s.
While this was by no means anything resembling artificial intelligence and not even a precursor to machine learning, it was simply fun. I had disassembled a land line (the only kind of line at that time) hand receiver and wired the speaker jack of my C-64 directly into the phone. In this manner, I could both dial phone numbers (and generate pink noise, Tassie locking frequencies, and otherwise reserved operator functions) and then order take-out pizza by means of my keyboard. Assuming the person receiving the call was willing to send a pizza based upon an order by a voice that was something of a blend of the Terminator and Max Headroom without the stutter, the pizza arrived thirty minutes later.
It was good, clean fun. Admittedly, we all dreamed of a day when we really could talk to our computers and the myriad devices they would control. In the ’90s MIT’s Nicholas Negropante wrote and spoke of a magical future in which humans and machines cohabitate working and living spaces—cars, offices, kitchens, bedrooms, our homes. In those shared environments the machines are employed to relieve us of mundane tasks, to assist those who do not possess a full range of motion, and by the very nature of the interface, invoke joy for the capacity of human creativity to invent such profound assistants.
Some thirty years later, we are riding an evolutionary wave of improved computer and robotic assistants. Siri, Alexa, Erica, and other female facsimiles are available to do our bidding. For now, their range of functions are limited to digital media: phone calls, written messages, and playing music we didn’t even know was our favorite.
At the outset of this digital assistant revolution I was excited to see the fruition of my experiment as a teenager. But soon thereafter I recognized something more profound—the very thing we wanted was eluding us, more out of reach than when we started.
We are a social animal. We are a creature that has evolved to depend on other humans for our well being. Even when we crave time alone it is through direct, face-to-face, skin-to-skin contact that we find a sense of belonging.
When I was a kid and made my first phone call using my home computer (and the pizza arrived), I had unknowingly inserted a gap between myself and the person I would have come to know at the pizza delivery service. I missed an opportunity for connection, replacing human contact with a machine interface.
That simple function is now exacerbated to such a high degree that an entire generation has grown up without knowing how to communicate face-to-face, alienated by the very function of speaking to another human. What is it that invokes satisfaction when a machine does our work for us? What joy do we experience in not doing something for ourselves? And is the joy of employing a digital assistant greater than that of moving our own bodies, of the tactile feedback of physically engaging the world around us?
I recently received a text message from a friend that read, “Sounds good safe travels and is this who is this who is this who is this who is”. A bit perplexed by this repeating phrase, the next message clarified, “Sorry my Siri was on [and] I just realized it was taping [what] my radio was saying”.
An update for the Mt. Meru Astronomical Observatory (MMAO), “Since the last update on December 15, 2017, there is much to tell about the Mt. Meru Astronomical Observatory. Thank you for your patience and steadfast interest in this important project.
The observatory itself is nearly complete. The telescope pier was set with rebar and concrete nearly two meters deep, isolated from the observatory floor, then finished with four threaded rods ready to receive the 120 kg steel pedestal and telescope …”
Photos and more at Astronomers Without Borders …
We now have a dedicated website for the Arizona State University, Interplanetary Initiative SIMOC project. There you will find a continuation of the “Postcard from Mars – SIMOC updates”. Please visit www.simoc.space for more!
Thursday, August 30
It is a bit after 11:00 pm. The camp ground is completely silent, save the crackle and occasional pop of our campfire. Elk Meadow, one of the more than forty California State Parks designated to protect what remains of the redwood trees, is the kind of place where I would gladly make home for a while.
Everyone has complied with the Quite after 10 rule, in fact, Colleen and I were likely the ones making the most ruckus, our Toyota Prius engine kicking on every twenty minutes to compensate for my DC/AC inverter and laptop. I admit to confusion when I say that I should be able to run my laptop for a few days if it were providing power via the drive train battery pack rather than the starter. Wishing Toyota would provide a manual switch and digital readout to allow me to make that choice. For as much as I enjoy the mileage, there are myriad things I would change about this car, that rant saved for another essay.
Colleen and I roasted corn over the fire, and in aluminum foil a sauté of potatoes, zucchini, onion, crushed black pepper and garlic. The result, all three times we have prepared this meal in the past five weeks, was splendid. Everything tastes good outside, everything is appreciated more. Even the simplest of meals, boiled carrots, snap peas, and rehydrated Shitake mushrooms over Raman noodles is a welcomed delight.
Friday, August 31
It has been difficult for us to take it all in. When one walks from a valley to a mountain top, the transition unfolds in the count of hours, not minutes as in a vehicle. Even then, we find that just a few hundred meters on a trail took us from the dark, cool shade of a massive coniferous forest with dense undergrowth to a barren saddle and bold stacks topped with countless flowering heads. At the pace of our own feet, we were often caught breathless, not for the pace at which we hiked nor the elevation gained, but for the rapid transition from one magical wonderland to the next.
But now we again move at high velocities, those same valley to mountain transitions unfolding in a matter of minutes, entire ecosystems lost to the rear view mirror in the matter of an hour. It’s overwhelming in a whole new way, for what we experience from the air conditioned, closed cab of our earth-bound spaceship is via a single sense, our vision. No aroma of recently fallen pine needles or fresh scat left by a passing bear. No sound of the wind high in trees nor stream underfoot. No more breaking of fallen branches by a deer down slope. No longer do we taste the ash of too many fires in Washington and Canada to the north.
Now, we hear only the tires on the road covered by audio books and music, the smell of unburnt diesel as trucks pass, and the taste of whatever we ate last, a return to food less invocative as that which we enjoyed on the trail.
In our travel down the coast of the Pacific Northwest, we are listening to an audio version of the book “The Lost City of Z” by David Grann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_of_Z). This engaging, compelling narrative simultaneously tells the stories of three adventurers: Englishman Fawcett, Brazilian banker Lloyd, and the American reporter and author Grann. The early twentieth century, English explorer Percy Fawcett repeatedly journeyed into the heart of the Amazon in an attempt to discover a rumored, ancient civilization now succumb to the relentless onslaught of what Fawcett described as the green hell.
Far be it from me to summarize the chapters of this book in any manner as to even come close to its effect on the reader, for it is, in a single word–riveting.
Grann captures the essence of the mindset and determination of that era of explorer. The Royal Geographic Society was then filled with men (and later women) of this caliber, people capable of enduring hardship in overland exploration that give the modern day outdoors enthusiast cause to shudder, if not turn away from the thought alone for the onset of nausea.
The journals of Fawcett and his small crew describe pressing through a jungle so thick that a full day’s effort, at times, saw the gain of just 100 yards. The were attacked by mosquitoes without remorse, vampire bats while they slept, bees that nested in the liquid of their pupils, and maggots that infested their open wounds, occasionally pushing through the surrounding skin, as though to come up for air before diving back in. Despite swollen limbs, muscles far too lean to carry the packs on their backs, and the dark brood of malaria, they continued. They built rafts which they pulled up-stream, wading in waters infested with piranha and candiru, the famous “dick fish” of the Amazon river (which I have since learned, is not at all capable nor even interested in swimming into the male reproductive organs (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160104-does-the-candiru-fish-really-eat-human-penises)).
I have not cringed so many times in reading a book as I have in these several hours as we drove from Powell’s book seller in Portland to Redding California. I have not so many times been reminded of how much our relationship to the world outside of the land we occupy as cities has changed.
For centuries Europeans dominated the natural and discovered world through a system of brutal oppression and control. This was accompanied by a determination that anything and anyone outside of the geographic regions described by the Christian bible were automatically uncivilized, heathen, even inhuman. Grann recounts this paradigm in his retelling of some of the Spanish entries into the Amazon with not a handful of men, but hundreds in full metal uniform and thousands of natives forced to accompany as slaves.
We have in the twenty first century entered the age of data collection. Mountains that were once held as impassible, sacred, or simply unnecessary to conquer are now scaled as a matter of recreation. Treks across inhospitable terrains in temperatures that never climb above freezing required years of preparation, massive ships to safeguard rations, and a risk to all who were encumbered.
The same trek across the South Pole are now conducted by individuals with a faction the gear, in far less time. The Pacific Crest Trail is walked, Mexico to Canada, 2600 miles without ever checking a compass, a topographical map, or the stars overhead. Our digital devices can tell us exactly where we are, at any given second, and yet we have no clue as to where we reside.
Colleen and I journeyed forty miles over the source of four days and three nights in the Washington Cascades, carrying packs roughly half the weight of those shouldered by Fawcett and his men. We hiked on trails so well worn that without a map, without compass or GPS we could cross the entire Glacier Peak Wilderness and not lose our bearing. Yet in those four days we were reminded how it feels to carry one’s own weight, to have all that we needed, to “discover” land in which many have gone before us, but they remain preserved enough that we felt as though we could be the first to set foot on those boulders, mountain shoulders, and snow fields.
In Fawcett’s two decades of exploration he adapted, evolved, and improved. He traveled lighter with each entry into the midnight canopy, and learned from the wisdom of the natives. He was perhaps one of the first ethnobotanists, replacing the brutal English attempts at curing wounds with heated irons to using local plant leaves, roots, and applications that for thousands of years had allowed the South Americans to survive, even prosper.
As my own gear has become lighter over three decades of excursions into the wilderness (clearly, a very different wilderness than that of the Amazon), I have moved from 65 pound packs to roughly 20 on most occasions. Now, I am motivated to take this farther, to learn what plants are available along the trail of the Sonoran Southwest, the Colorado Rockies, and the Washington Cascades and Olympic Peninsula such that my pack is even lighter, and I am able to travel longer without resupply.
Yet in comparison to the journeys of Fawcett, Shackleton, and Livingston, I recognize that I will never push my body as they once did. No one does. We have, I am certain, lost that kind of adventure.