Table of Contents
Out-of-the-Box Thinking
He suggested that one small thing that could be done to help improve the situation was term limits. I replied that that would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is no small matter and takes many years.
I counter-suggested that fixing House and Senate rules wouldn’t take an amendment, wouldn’t even take a law, and could have an immediate effect. For instance, seniority impacts committee memberships and chairmanships and how daily business is conducted. Eliminate seniority and come up with an equitable non-party way of determining committee memberships and chairmanships, and much of the bartering of favors would go away, smashing long-estabished personal power bases, and weakening the power of party organizations.
After that conversation, I ruminated on the implications. Congress people could choose which committees they wanted to be on and membership could be decided among the candidates by lot. Then chairmen could be selected by lot and stay in the post no more than a year, or even less. As a result, incumbents would no longer have a huge advantage over new-comers in elections, which would lead to shorter terms. And with no clear centers of power to focus on, lobbyists would have to dilute their efforts, paying attention to far more individuals. They would no longer be motivated to direct vast sums of money toward particular races. By reducing the incentive for corruption, corruption would decline.
But how could we get from here to there? Congress would never do it. The President doesn’t have the authority to do it. A constitutional amendment could bring about such a change, but the likelihood of that is zero, since every state legistature has the same kind of rules, with the same kind of entrenched power structures.
But there is a practical solution.
The effect of seniority and related rules is that elected representatives have vastly unequal power. If my district has a freshman congressman, if my state has a freshman senator, if either my congressman or one of my senators is not a Democrat or a Republican, then, effectively, I am disenfranchised. I am not fully and equally represented in Congress. I have, to a large extent, lost my right to equal representation.
Hence a group of citizens from such a district
and such a state could bring a class-action suit against
Congress, challenging such rules. Then, eventually, the Supreme
Court could decide the issue.
It is important everybody (including rural customers) continue to be served and on equal terms (same price and same frequency of delivery).
Serving everyone is part of the cost of doing business for the Posal Service. So make it part of the cost of doing business for its competitors as well.
Require them to either serve everyone (at equal price — no surcharge for rural deliveries — and with equal frequency of deliveries) or to pay significant subsidies to the US Postal Service.
The size of such subsidies should be structured to cover the additional costs incurred by the Postal Service.
That should make the Postal Service more finanically viable, make the competitive playing field among delivery companies more even, and ensure equal delivery service for all citizens, regardless of where they live.
It’s easy to do, and results in a time-capsule-like keepsake, a snapshot of the extended family of a point in time.
I used one picture of one person per page and at least one page for each letter of the alphabet. But the number of pages per letter was unlimited, so no one was left out because a letter was “taken.”
The photos were taken with a digital camera. I used Word to make the pages. Starting with a blank page, I would insert the picture, then drag at the corner of the picture to expand it to fill the available space. Then I typed the text at the bottom of the page (headline 1, and centered). And I printed (in color) using my everyday HP printer on ordinary copy paper.
I put them all in a 3-ring binder. But instead of punching holes in the paper, I inserted each into an Avery Sheet Protector (see through plastic containers the same size as the paper, with 3 holes in the plastic). That makes the pages more durable and less likely to be ripped out in the hands of a two year old.
Give it a try.
It’s not just escape and fun. It’s also survival of the species.
Each of us has the potential for thousands of different personalities/lives. Some are stronger than others, but all are capable of growing and becoming dominant.
When a group of people faces a crisis together, the individuals by nature (like water finding its own level) take on roles (like “leader”) that are necessary for survival — with previously hidden potential coming to the fore.
In reading and writing stories, we exercise these potential lives within us, and vicariously acquire experience, which could, under unexpected crisis situations, prove important for the survival of the group or the species.
That’s also why it’s important to preserve and read thousands of old previously out-of-print and forgotten books.
We face the same limitation in everyday life We automatically filter what we sense based on what we expect to sense. Every time we direct our attention to what we see or hear, we are asking questions of the world around us, based on what we have experienced before; and anything seriously out of the range of expectation goes ignored.
Basically, if you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get the right answers. And as human beings, we are very limited in the range of hypotheses we can consider, in the kinds of questions we can ask. Intuition/thinking-out-of-the-box some times expands that range, but not by much.
Today, computer simulation is widely used in conjunction with physical experiments to test hypotheses/answer questions — but still within the limits of the hypotheses/questions that the human mind can generate.
To move beyond this limitation, we need programs which automatically generate hypotheses that otherwise would not be considered; programs that come up with off-the-wall ideas and subject them to a preliminary check of plausibility, without ruling out possibilities that are complex and improbable. Such hypotheses could lead to experiments and inventions that record and help interpret potentially important data that would otherwise be ignored.
In the Middle Ages, the rule of thumb known as Occam’s Razor (”one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything”) was important in setting the stage for scientific advancement. That rule made sense in terms the limitations of the human brain. But computers can deal with far more variables than humans can; and can calculate trees of causation far further; and open up the possibility of identifying multiple explanations of the same event, all valid from different perspectives, but perhaps leading to different long-term consequences. Any automatic hypothesis generator should move beyond Occam’s Razor.
It is time to expand the range of what we
consider possible, to move beyond categories and conceptual
limitations of the human mind.
I had this dream after dozing off in the middle of reading “The Information” by James Gleick. And when I woke, I realized that what I had previously presumed was the weakness of language was, in fact, its strength.
It is the flexible, self-referential nature of language, its basic fuzziness and imprecision that makes the process of understanding and reconciliation work. There is no absolutely meaning of anything. Meaning comes from the conflict of two people who use words in different ways, each striving to communicate with one another. The fuzziness fosters the process of arriving at mutual understanding. And it all works so well not despite, but rather because of the anarchic creation of new words and new definitions of old words.
At the beginning of an attempt at serious communication, there can be no illusion of understanding because the fuzziness of the words that both parties use is so obvious. That problem initiates the dialouge through which by a repetitive, recursive process, using language to define language, understanding is reached.
In other words, language’s fuzziness leads to clarity and agreement. The fuzziness is not a weakness, not a mistake. It’s the essence and genius of language.
Two people from different regions or different disciplines or different walks of life or different ethnic backgrounds naturally use the same words in very different ways. When they meet and try to communicate, the self-referential nature of language — how we use words to define words, how we sometimes use the same words with different intended meanings — sets our expectations of conflict and provides the path toward reconciliation.
Hence the complexity and multiplicity of language (consisting of many different private languages within the massive overall language), the way language continuously grows and changes — that is the source of the mysterious power of language.
Language is not just a static tool that people use to communicate. Its apparent faults and weaknesses and ambiguities force dialogue, since only through the give and take of dialogue is it possible to communicate concepts of consequence.
Hence Plato’s dialgoues with definitions proposed, challenged, and refined.
Hence the precedents of case law enriching the understanding of laws.
They lived as they had vowed; and when they died, they were reborn. As a reward for his saintliness, he was born into a strictly Buddhist family. And as a reward for her saintliness, she was born into a strictly Taoist family. They fell in love again, and once again they could not marry. In frustration, they vowed to live lives of selfish dissapation, striving only for personal wealth and pleasure.
When they died, in punishment for their many sins, they were both reborn into Baptist families. They fell in love again. And this time they married and lived happily ever after.
"it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloon/Man whistles
far
and
wee"
High-school footnotes connected “goat-footed” with the Pan of Greek mythology. But for so spontaneous, so immediate a poem, that felt like a stretch.
Having recently seen Woody Allen’s new flick “Midnight in Paris” (great fun), I read several books about Americans in Paris in the 1920s, and reread “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Moveable Feast”. I was surprised to learn that e. e. cummings was in Paris when Hemingway was there. And in “A Moveable Feast” I stumbled upon the following evocation of spring:
“In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered. The goat-heard came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us cam out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sight-seers. The goatherd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and the the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.”
For me, that passage gives the cumming’s poem
a fresh tactile immediacy.
Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455400866
“[Saint Smith is] rich in thought and
peopled with intriguing characters (each soul exotic in its own
peculiar mix of angels and demons, reality and fantasy, order
and anarchy). The selected episodes of their lives are like
pieces in an interlocking jigsaw puzzle which, when assembled,
present another puzzle – the “What’s wrong with this picture?”
kind. Everyone and everything is in its appropriate place, all
is proper. Yet something is missing. Something isn’t right.
Somehow it all has the quality of a dream. And yet it isn’t a
dream – it’s life. The theme of sandcastles, the building of
houses, the mansions in houses, the building of lives, the dream
of living, Charlie with his camera like waves sweeping over
fragile constructions at once real and make believe is all
brilliant, and challenging. It has a Barth, Vonnegut, even
Borges aspect to it, as do the rest of the pieces in the
collection, only without the surrealism, which may make it even
more effective as the impact settles in.”
– Rex Sexton, author of “Desert Flower”, “The Time Hotel”,
“Night Without Stars”, and “X Ray Eyes”
Reactions to “Saint Smith and Other Stories”
The following is a reaction to “Saint Smith and Other Stories” from a friend of mine in Russia:
“I’ve read your book with pleasure because I’ve found the reflection of my deepest thoughts, questions and doubts.
"We all (All? Several? Electus? Happiest from us? Unluckiest from us?) have a godlike spark in our soul. I’m sure that you feel yourself a little bit like God (Sometimes? Seldom? Always?) I would like to be ensured that I’m a goddess while I was a child as this Saint Smith was. I could create something very significant and important for people. Certainly Dante felt himself like God when he distributed sinners into cycles of Hell in his “Divine Comedy”. It’s interesting that he had inserted betrayers of spiritual into deepest ninth cycle. That means that in this cycle must be creators who don’t create.
"By the way G.Altshuller (the author of the theory of inventive decisions, see http://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/index.asp ) had studied the biographies of famous inventors and found their common rules and principles (Life Strategy of a Creative Person - LSCP). All inventors preferred to suffer and to be considered as crazy but not to refuse from development of their inventions.
"I see in your barracks the model of our life with its limits and conformity. And with our readiness to admire and envy to men who we consider as hero and who have not enough guts even to take a shower.
"While reading I had recalled the pantomime of
the famous French mime Marcel Marso. He showed a man in a cage
who tried to go out breaking iron rods of the cage and
threatening to heaven in epicene fury. At last he had done it –
he was free! What a blessing! And immediately he had found a new
cage, a little bit larger than previous one. And he (as we all)
realized that life is only a file of cages. And behind one bar
screen there are thousand bar screens. And behind one hope there
are thousand hopes…
This book shocked and delighted me. I stayed up all night and read it in a single gulp — I couldn’t go do anything else until I finished it.
You could say that this is the story of a woman’s first love at the age of 54. You could also say that this is a series of epiphanies, in the James Joyce sense (as Wikipedia puts it “his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.”) Or you could say that it is a series of essays on the essence of art and beauty and the meaning of life.
The perspective alternates between an intelligent self-educated 54-year-old concierge and a brilliant 12-year-old girl from a wealthy family who lives in the same building. The concierge, Madame Michel or Renee, pretends to be stupid, ignorant, and ordinary, and has so pretended her entire life. The young girl, Paloma, also disguises her brilliance, feels out of harmony with the world she lives in, and is toying with the idea of killing herself and burning the building down.
The third main character, Kakuro Ozu, is a wealthy retired Japanese gentleman. He moves into the building when Monsieur Arthens (the food critic on the sixth floor who is the central character in Barbery’s other novel “Gourmet Rhapsody”) dies. Kakuro buys the critic’s apartment and transforms it, and then transforms the lives of both Renee and Paloma. Despite their very different backgrounds, the three main characters act and think and speak in ways that resonate with one another.
Somewhat like a Virginia Woolf book, the story isn’t so much what happens as what is perceived. The three main characters all change/develop radically from their interaction with one another, but the other residents of the building see nothing.
pp. 144-145
We never look beyond our
assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet
others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize each other
because other people have become our permanent mirrors. if we
actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact
that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other
person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go
crazy… As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see
beyond myself and truly met someone.
p. 303
“They didn’t recognize me,” I say.
I came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, complete flabbergasted.
“They didn’t recognize me,” I repeat.
He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm.
“It is because they have never seen you,” he says. “I would recognize you anywhere.”
The title of the book is a description/analysis of Renee.
p. 143
Madame Michel [Renee] has the
elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in
quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the
inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a
deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary — and
terribly elegant.
That’s the perspective of Paloma, who deeply empathizes with the concierge and, in her own way is also a hedgehog.
Renee has a talent for discovering elegance and beauty in the everyday and ordinary. For instance, when she first visits Kakuro’s apartment, even the toilet paper dazzles her.
pp. 219-220
“The toilet paper, too, is a
candidate for sainthood. I find this sign of wealth far more
convincing than any Mazerati or Jaguar. What toilet paper does
for people’s derrieres contributes more to the abyss between
the classes than a good many external signs. The paper at
Monsieur Ozu’s abode — thick, soft, gentle and delicately
perfumed — is there to lavish respect upon a part of the body
that, more than any other, is partial to respect.”
When she flushes the toilet, Mozart’s “Requiem” booms forth — literally.
I found myself underlining and returning to savor one passage after another:
pp. 164-165
If you think about it at all
seriously, esthetics are really nothing more than an
initiation to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the
Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all
have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. it is this
knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend
quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when
everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the
apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of
beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art. Those who feel
inspired, as I do, by the greatness of small things will
pursue them too the very heart of the inessential where,
cloaked in everyday attire this greatness will emerge from
within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the
certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it
is fine this way.
p. 272
… beauty consists of its own
passing, just as we reach for it. it’s the ephemeral
configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both
their beauty and their death.
p. 250
… every painting by a Dutch master
is an incarnation of Beauty, a dazzling apparition that we can
only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a window
onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.
p. 204
… this still life incarnates the
quintessence of art, the certainty of timelessness. In the
scene before our eyes — silent, without life or motion — a
time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined
from duration and its weary greed — pleasure without desire,
beauty without will.
For art is emotion without desire.
p. 163
Perhaps the Japanese have learned
that you can only savor a pleasure when you know it is
ephemeral and unique: armed with this knowledge, they are yet
able to weave their lives.
And describing a Japanese movie:
pp. 100-101
True novelty is that which does not
grow old, despite the passage of time.
The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup — this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
The contemplation of eternity within the very moment of life.
The translator, Alison Anderson, did an amazing job. Not just the ideas, but the rhythm and the phrasing (even the punctuation — check the use of colons in these passages I’m quoting) are brilliant and memorable. And she did this with the work of an author who is obsessively in love with language in all its details.
p. 156
… grammar is an end in itself and
not simply a means: it provides access to the structure and
beauty of language…
p. 160
… pity the poor in spirit who know
neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
This book is a call to action. You don’t read it. The characters become your friends and neighbors. What happens to them happens to you. You too are changed. When I finished I had an urge to go on an extended excursion and visit dozens of old friends who I haven’t seen in many years. Maybe I will. I certainly should. I have lots I need to do, starting now.
pp. 128-129
We have to live with the certainly that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
At first, browsing at Barnes and Noble, I was
caught by the tone of the opening paragraphs. I enjoyed the
humor, the unfamiliar setting. Then I enjoyed getting to know
Daria, her unique style and wit, and how she coped in difficult
and bizarre circumstances. Then, as the tone grew more serious,
I got caught up in the details and problems of life in Odessa
today and also as an unmarried young woman. Then I was intrigued
by how well the book portrayed the mail-order marriage business
— providing the perspective of the hopeful brides-to-be and then
showing the problems and disappointments that came later. Your
portrayal of her various “loves” (all very different from
romantic love) created a unique emotional landscape — a blend of
self-deception and hope, of practicality and lust and
friendship, mixed with respect for self and for family, for past
and future, and desire for children — the likes of which I’ve
never encountered before in a novel. Reading this book was a
sheer delight. I hope she’ll be publishing more novels soon.
Perhaps this approach might work for others as
well.
As a reader, why should I care? If I build a library of ebooks, I want some assurance that I’m going to be able to read those books 10 or 20 years from now. I want the books that I buy to be portable from one device to another, and from one generation of device to another. I have half a dozen TVs in my house. And it’s likely that over time, we’ll have more than one kind of ebook reader as well, and I would like the books I buy to “play” in any and all of them.
So as a publisher, what should I and could I do to give my customers the kind of “portability” that I would like for myself?
I’m considering setting my own online store where customers could buy my books directly from me, for immediate download ( at 99 cents each, regardless of size — I can’t sell for less because of contracts with Sony and Barnes/Noble). And I’d like to set that up so when you buy a book, you get two downloads — the same book as a .prc file (that you can read on you Kindle) and also as an .epub file that you can read on the Sony Reader, the Barnes and Noble Nook, and other gadgets. Would you be interested in such a service? (I need to know if there’s serious demand before I can invest the time and money to set that up).
For other Kindle-related tips and thoughts,
please check my Kindle web page at http://www.samizdat.com/kindle/
Frequently, randomly, regardless of what browser I used and even on a new out-of-the-box computer, much less one just scanned for viruses, to would be redirected to pages of major corporations, as if I had clicked on a ad of theirs. At the bottom of my browser window, I would see a reference to google-analytics as the redirect happened. I’d also often see references to epoclick and clicksor. Sometimes second and third advertising windows would open up. Sometimes in the background, and sometimes kicking me off the page I was trying to read. The Google forum I’m talking about is located at
Finally someone in the forum pointed me to “ghostery” which has a browser add-on (for IE, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari; and which seems to work on Seamonkey too), which can block scripts. In particular it can block google-analytics code.
Using that add-on on both FireFox and Seamonkey, for me the problem is greatly diminished. It doesn’t completely go away. One of those unwanted/unaskedfor pages occasionally appears in the background, but I can go about my business.
If you are experiencing similar problems, you should give this a try.
And, of course, Google should wake up and do
what it can to stop this, since otherwise millions of people
might well choose to block google-analytics code, which
certainly would not be good for their business model.
They would not replace the defective machine. They did offer to fix it. But they had no service agreements with local computer service companies. Rather they would send a box to me (2-3 business days). Then they would work onthe machine (7-10 business days). Then they would ship it back to me (2-3 business days).
Note that they speak in the archaic terms of “business days”. I and most other people who have Internet-based businesses, work seven days a week and at all kinds of odd hours of the night. But HP shuts down nights and weekends.
In other words, I would be without a computer for about three weeks. And in the process of “fixing” the machine, they would erase everything on my hard drive.
Fortunately I had backed up nearly all my data on an external drive. But it would take me days to reinstall software and change default settings to the point that I could do real work. And if they were going to erase everything, there was no advantage whatever to having them fix the machine. I’d be better off with a new one, which they would not provide.
I talked to the manager and the manager of the manager. They could have shipped me a new computer or a refurbished one over night. But they wouldn’t.
From the excuses I heard, it appears that HP evaluates their service department separately and based on revenue goals. They have to keep repair/replacement costs low, and warrantee fees high for their numbers to look good.
Sounds like a formula for corporate disaster. They should have corporate-wide goals that put the focus on pleasing and retaining customers, instead of the service department cutting corners and infuriating current customers, while the marketing department spends millions to attract new customers.
I will certainly never buy another HP product, nor would I ever consider investing in HP stock. (Even though I worked for DEC for 19 years, and a good-size chunk of today’s HP comes from their having bought Compaq, which bought DEC).
After having wasted an hour (after the 3-hour tech marathon) talking to managers who wouldn’t listen, I went to bed.
The next morning, I took a close look at the Costco receipt I got when I bought that computer there. There I saw they have a 90-day no questions asked returns policy on all computers. I called Costco at 8 AM on Saturday (5 AM where the Costco customer service people sit.) In one minute, they confirmed their policy and gave me the number of my local store. Those folks also answered immediately and confirmed that all I had to do was bring all the pieces to the store — I did not need the original packaging. I did so. They immediately paid me back in cash (because I had made the purchase using a debit card). Then I walked over to the product side of the store and bought another computer.
Lessons learned:
1) PCs today are a volume consumer business that requires customer-oriented, no-hassle, fast and convenient customer service — which Costco has and HP doesn’t. Whenever I need new computer-related gear, I’ll go to Costco first.
2) Computer manufacturers, like HP should
reevaluate their service policies. Customers, not cost-cutting
should come first. They also should realize that the
hardware they sell is of very little significance to the
customer. Customers value 1) their personal/business data,
2) their installed software with all its setting and 3) their
own time. They should modify their designs to insure that
data is preserved (that standard repair procedures don’t require
wiping the hard drive). That could be simply achieved that
including two hard drives, one for the software and one for the
data. Beyond that, they should strive to create consistent
reproducible systems. The manufacturer should be able to
install a new motherboard and have it automatically able to
communicate with the other manufacturer-supplied parts,
including the hard drive, complete with all the
already-installed software. Then a customer with a problem
like mine should be given a choice of waiting a couple of weeks
to get back a working system with all the data and software and
settings as they were before; or getting a new or refurbished
system within a day (either shipped overnight or to be picked up
at a local store).