My fourth digest linking to what I’ve recently been reading online. First, the customary now-playing and now-reading: Computer Love by Kraftwerk, and actually, I’m between books at the moment; wifely Kate put Gone with the Wind on a reading list for me, so I think I’ll take up that one next.

• A Japanese paper says the hikikomori, or shut-ins, are a problem that has reached the stage of crisis.

  There are approximately 230,000 people [in Japan] who almost constantly shut themselves in their rooms except to go to nearby convenience stores, according to a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office. [...] the statistics have raised questions about the future of Japan.

  Hikikomori are defined as those who shut themselves in their homes for at least six months but are not involved in child care or housework even though they are not sick.

  Problems involving shut-ins have been pointed out over the past 15 years, but only experts and nonprofit organizations have worked on the issue, with little public support.

  I’ve heard good things about Michael Zielenziger‘s book on the subject.

• Requisite rightwing lunacy: former Republican Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, once a Republican presidential candidate who’s now stated his intention to run as the Constitution Party’s Colorado gubernatorial candidate, has advocated the impeachment of President Obama for “wanting to destroy the Constitution,” calling him “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” — that’s from his op-ed in the Washington Times, where he says:

  [Obama's goals constitute] the utopian, or rather dystopian, reverie of a dedicated Marxist — a dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House.

  Because of the power he wields over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and even health care, his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.

• “On the other side of the aisle,” as the phrase goes, Van Jones, former White House green jobs special advisor, tells the netroots — pretty much the progressive blogosphere — to quit beating up on Obama.

  “I can’t stand it. President Obama volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg,” Jones said at Netroots Nation [...]

  “This is harder than it looks. Having spent six months in the White House, it’s a totally different experience when you’re sitting there and the missiles are coming over the horizon at you,” he said. [...]

  Jones said the netroots need to realize they are up against an “epic” force with the conservative media movement, which is trying to “bury everything you fought for everything you believe in,” and comparing it to the Lord of the Rings.

  Much as I wish for more progressive results, I have total sympathy for Van Jones’s view: it’s easy to backseat quarterback and complain when you don’t have the full view of entrenched interests and whatever other enemies Obama faces. On the other hand, acknowledging that can slippery-slope to a “just trust the President you like” position, and since that isn’t viable overall, government should be more transparent. And really, if you aren’t activist-ing in some way (e.g., How to Call Congress, How to Snailmail Congess), your cynicism probably isn’t getting anyone anywhere.

• For his part, the President asked Netroots Nation via a video address to seriously credit his Administration for its accomplishments so far:

• No? You don’t want to do anything for the mid-term elections because they’re not as dramatic as the Presidential ones? Here, read this CBS piece about Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann, who “said yesterday that if Republicans [win] the House in November, ‘all we should do’ is subpoena and investigate the Obama administration.” She’s also called for “100 percent repeal of ObamaCare” and the “big mother of all repeal bills.”

• To me, anything regarding the Apollo space program is automatically interesting. For instance, recently a customs officer was charged with stealing Neil Armstrong’s signature. Bidding for the recent signature rose over $1000 before the auction was halted.

• A College Board study ranks Texas as one of least educated states, with only 27% of Texans holding university degrees. Actually, that’s a higher figure than I would’ve guessed. No disrespect.

• Something less depressing, please? Wallpaper made from newspaper, a Boing Boing find.

• Better: super zoomed-in, short, silent video, also found on Boing Boing (initially via Nothing to Do with Arbroath), an ant drinking from a rain drop. It might take a moment to download before you can play it.

  Amazing how the rain drop doesn’t just collapse instantly.

• If you want to spy on the Wall Street Journal, here’s their take on Netroots Nation:

  How nervous are liberals about the November election and how angry are they at conservatives? Plenty, to judge from this year’s Netroots Nation gathering of 2,000 liberal bloggers and activists.

• The great Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, which I attended in 2008, has announced its set of six instructors for 2011. (For another 36 hours or so, you can donate to the workshop by sponsoring me; $5 through PayPal, quick!)

  We’re pleased to announce that our instructors for the 2011 Clarion West Writers Workshop will be Paul Park, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, Minister Faust, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Charles Stross, the 2011 Susan C. Petrey Fellow.

  General background on the Clarion West Writers Workshop can be found here. Check back with us in September for more information on next year’s instructors and on applying to attend the 2011 session.

• An account of a military contractor’s corruption has made many rounds already, but it’s so offensive it bears linkage (NYT) and excerpting:

  more than $6 million in personal expenses [were paid out] on behalf of [contractor] Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.

  Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.

• The Wall Street Journal discovers there are languages other than English. Actually — this feature piece about how various languages influence perspective seems good:

  many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

  In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. [...]

  if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. [...] if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically.

• Boing Boing once more brings us teh happy, picking up a post from Lowering the Bar about muggers accidentally encountering, in the course of their crime, a real-life team of avenging ninjas.

• Oprah Magazine mentions The Alexander Technique, a bodywork method of which I’m a fan; see AlexanderTechnique.com for more, including an instructor finder.

  Research published in the British Medical Journal found that patients trained in Alexander technique, which teaches proper posture and everyday movement habits to reduce strain, experienced an average of 18 fewer days of back pain over four weeks

• A WSJ article reports that the United Arab Emirates called the Blackberry smartphone a “security risk.” And Blackberries have very powerful encryption built-in.

  BlackBerry was operating “beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation,” the U.A.E.’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said in a statementi ssued on Sunday.

  “As a result of how BlackBerry data is managed and stored, in their current form, Certain BlackBerry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions.”

  India jumped in, too, according to the India Times:

  The home ministry, which has time and again shared with DoT its concerns over the security agencies’ inability to de-crypt messages shared over BlackBerry, has now asked DoT to sound out Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm that makes the BlackBerry device, that its services in India will face shutdown if its e-mail and other data services do not comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.

  Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother uses phone encryption in its plot a great deal.

• NYT reports on Britain’s debate over decentralizing their health care system. Meanwhile, the US Department of Health and Human Services announces the opening of the national Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (see more at HealthCare.gov):

  The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, which will be administered either by a state or by the Department of Health and Human Services, will provide a new health coverage option for Americans who have been uninsured for at least six months, have been unable to get health coverage because of a health condition, and are a U.S. citizen or are residing in the United States legally.

  Created under the Affordable Care Act, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan is a transitional program until 2014, when insurers will be banned from discriminating against adults with pre-existing conditions, and individuals and small businesses will have access to more affordable private insurance choices through new competitive Exchanges. [...]

  In order to give states the flexibility to best meet their needs, HHS provided states with the option of running the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan themselves or having HHS run the plan. Twenty-one states have elected to have HHS administer the plans, while 29 states and the District of Columbia have chosen to run their own programs.

  Starting today, the national Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will be open to applicants in the 21 states where HHS is operating the program. [...]

  The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will cover a broad range of health benefits, including primary and specialty care, hospital care, and prescription drugs. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan does not base eligibility on income and does not charge a higher premium because of a medical condition. Participants will pay a premium that is not more than the standard individual health insurance premium in their state for insurance that covers major medical and prescription drug expenses with some cost-sharing.

• The Federal Register website gets an upgrade.

• Business Insider discusses the destruction of the American middle class; the article has an anti-global perspective I don’t like (because building walls around yourself isn’t a long-term answer), but the article’s worth the scary read:

  no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. [...] the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool. [...]

  The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. [...]

  36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings. [...]

  Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975. [...]

  For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. [...]

  More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying. [...]

  The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

• Yikes, time for the funny papers. TV Barn posts about cartoons displayed at Comic Con 2010 that Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) sent to Berkeley Breathed, creator of my favorite comic strip, Bloom County from the 1980s. In other comics news, the great cartoonist John Callahan, another favorite of mine, died today.

That’s all I can manage for today; for the news I’m a few days behind, but hopefully this digest will let you catch up on some good items you might have missed. Tschuss for now!

Gone with the What?

In the first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes (in the midst of an infinitely long sentence):

and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege

I think that multi-adjective noun phrase — “grim haggard amazed voice” — and his millions like it are not supposed to convey an auditory percept to readers; they’re not supposed to convey sound data to readers’ perceptual faculties. After all, try to vocalize “William Faulkner” in all of the following configurations:

• a grim, haggard, amazed voice
• a grim, haggard, and not amazed voice
• a grim, amazed, and not haggard voice
• an amazed and haggard, but not grim voice

William venn Faulkner

I can’t do it, and if you can, you should post audio clips of the four on your blog. Until you do that, take my point as proven: the noun phrase “grim haggard amazed voice” isn’t supposed to convey an auditory percept. You’re not supposed to hear a specifically grim haggard amazed voice in your head (as opposed to a …). So, what is the phrase supposed to convey?

I think it’s intended to create for the cerebral mind the equivalent of a perceptual feeling-tone.

So far as I know, “feeling-tone” is a vague term out of physiology used to indicate a mood allegedly bundled up with a percept. On the feeling-tone view, you see a snake and you experience a feeling-tone of fright because there’s some fright tied up in the snake percept (perhaps even before it impinges on your awareness).

When you read “grim haggard amazed voice” there isn’t any resulting auditory percept, but there’s a feeling-tone you experience, right, a certain bleak mood? The interesting part is: the noun phrase is not plucking your emotions through your perceptual faculty, as the phrase “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens” does. Rather, the noun phrase is plucking your emotions through your conceptual one — yeah, percepts and concepts can’t be demarcated cleanly and all that, okay fine, anyway — which in one sense isn’t surprising because of course we have emotional reactions to very abstract words (“freedom” for example), but in another sense is definitely surprising to me as a reader because “grim haggard amazed voice” is so abstract that it feels as though Faulkner is doing a card trick with a tall deck, each wheeling card an emotion-causing abstraction in my left brain … and not many books work that way.

This explication is totally lacking something, and surely some Modernist poetics somewhere explains it in a lot of boring detail, probably written by a poet who needed funding. If you have a better explication than I, leave it in the comments.

P.S. I think William Gibson‘s Neuromancer (written, significantly, as far back as 1984) works similarly in many spots, and some readers who walk away from the book are expecting too many of the noun phrases to be translatable back into percepts. But they’re not; for instance:

He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix

Team KACDAL (our initials)

This is what to do with the remnants of vines you chop out of crepe myrtles. Those vines were so overgrown, by the way, that they effectively destroyed my hedge clippers — by the end of the afternoon, I’d wound up swinging the clippers like an axe.

July 20th, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the day when the only life we so far know to exist, having left its home planet and having focused for a moment into the form of a human being named Neil Armstrong, first strode across the soil of another celestial body. When life stepped off the ladder of the frail little Apollo 11 spacecraft called the Eagle and onto the surface of the Earth’s Moon. The 55-second video clip embedded below replays Armstrong’s first step and first lunar words as at least 600 million people on Earth experienced them televised live in 1969.

If you’ve been frantically calculating the angular momentum and the who’s torquing whom of current-events soundbyte spin — take a break. You can return to the various expectorations about the empathy of a “wise Latina” later, you can compare her empathy to the peculiar sentiments of Joe the Plumber later. But right now — do yourself a favor. Quest for no-spun reality by decoding a message which instead points toward the widest horizon, where empathy springs not just from considering gender and race, but from reverencing all life, reverencing all the universe.

Hubble Deep Field: Wherein magnification of just 0000000.7th of the sky above you reveals 10,000 galaxies, 123 quintillion stars

What was the message Neil Armstrong gave the universe after he stepped onto the Moon? We, including Armstrong, know what he intended: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Pure poetry, composed workaday — in the biography First Man, Armstrong recounts the line’s invention to author James R. Hansen:

[W]hat can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. [The line] just sort of evolved during the [roughly six-hour] period [after landing on the Moon] that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff [as if to return to the command module orbiting above] and the [Extra-vehicular Activity] prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. [... It] wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare [a step] with.

Wherein the 2009 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the base of the Eagle spacecraft still sitting on the Moon (center of photograph, with horizontal shadow)

The morning after the moon landing, The New York Times reported Armstrong’s famous line as “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” According to the Times, then, and also according to many other ears, Armstrong left out the ‘a’ in ‘for a man.’ Which would render his line equivalent to “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.” A frustrating contradiction. Armstrong might have thrown up his hands a few years ago when he told biographer Hansen:

For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps [the 'a' in 'for a man'] was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said — although it actually might have been. [... Historians] can put it in parentheses.

Today you get all kinds nudging you with their elbows and half-whispering, “Do you know what Neil Armstrong really said?” A setup for their gloating found-feet-of-clay punch: “He flubbed his line!!! He really said — ” and on and on.

Pale Blue Dot: Wherein from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, sunlight scattered off the Voyager 1 probe puts the Earth and you into the universe

But in 2006, after his decoding of the Apollo 11 recording with GoldWave software, a computer programmer named Peter Shann Ford reignited the discussion over what Armstrong said. The Houston Chronicle reported that “According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, ‘One small step for a man …’ with the ‘a’ lasting a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too quickly to be heard.” One person who stepped into the debate was Wina Sturgeon, who in 1969 was married to Theodore Sturgeon, author of the glorious 1953 novel More Than Human, the underlooked 1986 novel Godbody, the 1953 short story collection E Pluribus Unicorn, and many other works. In 2007 Wina Sturgeon discussed her memory of Armstrong’s words for ABC 4:

Neil Armstrong’s alleged first words on the moon are now deciphered by modern technology as grammatically correct [...] My husband was a science fiction writer. The moon landing was as important to him as [our unborn] child [...] was to me; but then, in some mysterious way, the two became connected in my mind; the child that would come out of me and the astronauts that would come out of the ship and walk on the moon.

The movie 2001: Wherein we become More Than Human

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, and not even then. Many questioned the accuracy of Ford’s discovery; Eric M. Jones, for one, in his formidable Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal for NASA, disagrees with Ford:

In 2006, with a great deal of attendant media attention, journalist/entrepreneur Peter Shann Ford claimed to have located the ‘a’ in the waveform of Neil’s transmission. Subsequently, more rigorous analyses of the transmission were undertaken by a number of people, including some with professional experience with audio waveforms and, most importantly, audio spectrograms. As of October 2006, none of these analyses support Ford’s conclusion.

My take? The embedded 7-second audio clip below plays my 88% slow-down of Neil Armstrong’s “for a man” phrase as well as the phrase spoken at regular speed. If you listen very closely — and listen to it loud — and listen again, maybe believing a little, you can hear Armstrong automatically transform, with his northwestern Ohio boy accent, “for a man” to “furuh man.”

If you must pat yourself on the back and straitjacket Apollo 11 into the context of jingoism and the Cold War and the military machine, go ahead; if you must quarrel about Armstrong saying ‘mankind’ and not ‘humankind’ or ‘life,’ go ahead; however accurate you might be, you are right now spinning away, too accelerated to pause for the perspective of the universe as braved in 1969. As you exit, let me send you with a note explaining that in less than a billion years, as the sun burns more and more fiercely, the Earth (unless we move it!) will be hotter than boiling water and will have no atmosphere; in 7.6 billion, the sun, by then a red giant, will swallow the Earth. Those of us who have taken the perspective of the universe care not just about the present but also about the farthest future. Where will life go?

Asking such a question, listening closely, we have herein slowed spin sufficiently to decode Armstrong’s message. We know Armstrong’s intention, at the very least. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

What might it mean?

It’s not symptomatic of some ultimate white flight. I say Armstrong’s combination of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the timely and the universal, points us toward the deepest empathy. Wherein we know ourselves, and without losing our individual identity — a northwestern Ohio accent or another accent adding to the great universal jam session — we blesh with the identities of others, especially those we dislike, working to understand, to reverence all things.

Just like these folk in Holland 1979, jamming out to the universe:

Blesh? The neologism comes from Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human. If you, like The New York Times, still need to ask if someone can “write about spaceships and monsters and alien civilizations and still be a great American writer?”, then pay especial attention.

Wherein you benefit immensely

To “blesh,” Sturgeon writes, means “everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. [...] Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.” As Crawdaddy! creator, rock journalist, science-fiction chronicler Paul Williams writes in his online essay Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller:

Crosby, like most mid-Sixties’ rock musicians (and underground press editors, political activists, dope impresarios, etc.), was an avid reader of science fiction in general and Sturgeon in particular; and he realized early that the Byrds and other rock groups were living examples of Sturgeon’s idea that a group of humans could function as more than the sum of the individuals involved … not just more, but mystically more, so that the group took on its own personality and created things that none of its individual members could even have imagined. Chester Anderson wrote in the San Francisco Oracle in 1966, in a widely reprinted analysis of the new rock or “head” music, “Rock is evolving Sturgeonesque homo gestalt configurations…..” The Merry Pranksters were another example of the same phenomenon, as were all the nameless groups that came together to organize political or cultural events and then disbanded and vanished when the work was done.

[...] Sturgeon, in More than Human and throughout his work, is a moralist as well as a visionary. Not the kind of moralist who knows what’s right and what’s wrong and tells you in so many words, but the kind who is searching for the answers and shares his search with his readers. [...] Sturgeon’s answer is awkward and incomplete, but, for our generation, much more appropriate than Nietzsche’s.

(Paul Williams now requires full-time medical care; his website asks for donations.)

And as to the “wise Latina”? For all the Congressional insistence that a judge not be “activist,” for all the expectorations asserting that “the” law must be mechanistically applied by “impartial” judges, Edward H. Levi makes clear in An Introduction to Legal Reasoning that legal reasoning is necessarily activist, and imperfect, which is why it works so well. What we want on the Supreme Court bench and elsewhere in the universe is the broadest, deepest empathy. Even the George W. Bush-appointed Justice Sam Alito said “in immigration and naturalization cases” he “can’t help but think” of his “own immigrant ancestors,” and he said “When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.”

Good science fiction — or, given Apollo, science fact — sends out a message calling for empathy. Life moves forward toward the perspective of the universe. Signing off this message with a description of that perspective from More Than Human:

[This] ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes. [...]

And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.

The most impressive Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) in Dallas-Fort Worth lives at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The picture above shows a view of it from near one of the Garden roads (along with a few tiny, other trees). Many magnolias in Fort Worth are impressively tall — for example, the one pictured below, which grows next to the library of my alma mater, TCU — but the one at the Botanic Gardens is the best!

A TCU Library Magnolia

From some angles, the Garden’s huge magnolia can at first look like many trees, not one. That’s why I never(!) truly noticed it; I mistakenly saw a big stand of multiple trees, not a single special individual. This past May, however, Kate — a special individual herself – showed me one of the “secret entrances” to the “cave” made by the magnolia’s drooping branches.

A Secret Entrance to the Big Magnolia Cave

Once you go through the secret entrance (no password necessary), you’ll see a scene like something out of Lord of the Rings or a King Arthur tale. This cave hides in plain sight near University Drive, one of the busiest streets in the city! Here’s a shot of it. The branches go all the way around, 360 degrees.

The Secret Magnolia Cave

Texas Tree Trails has a page with many facts and pictures about this particular magnolia. A few facts about the tree taken from that site and elsewhere:

• As of 2004, the tree is 64 feet tall.
• Leaf: Leathery top, fuzzy red-brownish underside, evergreen, alternate simple (whorling at tip), asymmetrical base, pinnately veined, oval-shaped, 5-8 inches long, untoothed margin.
• Flower: Large (6-8+ inches wide), creamy white, fragrant. Borne singly, May-June.
• Fruit: Cylindrical aggregate of follicles (“seed pod”). Green changing to red. Matures Oct-Nov.
• Twig: Stout. It gives off a citrus scent if broken.
• Bark: Brown to gray, thin, smooth when young, but plating or scaling later in life.
• The Southern Magnolia is sometimes called an Evergreen Magnolia, or a Bull-bay.

I took four pictures of the tree’s flowers, each illustrating a different stage of the flower life cycle. You can learn much more about the magnolia flower life cycle, and see pictures of it, at this website.

The Flower Before Blooming

The Flower Begins to Bloom

The Flower Has Bloomed

The Fruit; Flower Petals Have Fallen