Mental Mashup

I like a phrase in the latest HP commercial with Gwen Stefani in it.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhiIV6srJ0

She says that creativity is a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. She also says that creativity can't be turned on and off, it just sort of comes out.

I've often wondered about where ideas come from. I used to find that I would come up with revelations at odd times. For a few years there, they always came during gardening, but I've also had bouts of driving and running inspired creative thought.

I like to absorb as much information as I can. I admit, I'm an information junkie. When I was younger, I read books, magazines, and newspapers. Now I also browse the internet and listen to podcasts. Notice I don't list television as a source there. That's probably not entirely justified, but I just don't feel like it has much to offer in feeding the mind. It's more for turning the mind off and relaxing. I listen to so many podcasts now that I can't keep up with the rate they are generated. I find it very odd and gratifying from time to time when two or more podcasts, sometimes of very different genre, discuss similar ideas. Sometimes it's obvious, it's actually the same subject, but often, it's just analogous, which is more interesting.

I was inspired by the movie Good Will Hunting, of all things, when it came to education later in life. This guy is brilliant, and he taunts a Harvard or MIT student that what the student got for $100,000, he got for $1.65 in late fees from the public library. The movie Phenomenon also has a character that expands his mind simply by going to the public library. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had a great love for books, and was a voracious collector. He had a large collection of books that was amassed over his life which he donated to the government and started the Library of Congress. American founding fathers were well read, and wanted others in their nation to enjoy that same privilege. What inspired me about these examples is that the knowledge of the world is available to anyone with the time, desire, and devotion to simply pick up the books and start reading them.

How much information can we hold in the human mind? I've often wondered if the mind can actually get full. I know when my computer hard drive fills up, I have to start saving the stuff I need on other storage mediums and start deleting as much as I can so I'll have room for more. Does your brain work that way in some respect? If it does, I hope it's only deleting the stuff that is least used, and not anything important. I know if it does, it's not a process I'm in control of. I wonder if you do indeed have all the memories that you've ever accumulated locked away in your brain. If this is so, think of what happens if you die, how much knowledge dies with you.

Until that time, I plan on continuing to feed more information into the pile to see what grows out of it.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.

Stay the Course

At lunch today, my co-worker Nick remarked that he didn't know who he would vote for, since he didn't like anyone that was running. This during a phase in the election, just before the primaries, when we have a maximum number of candidates.

He's right, though. There are no good choices when it comes to elections. The people that make it through the election process are rarely what the country actually needs. And I'm not sure we would recognize what we need or elect a person like that if they actually came along.

When I was first learning to drive, I had a little problem. I tended to veer back and forth on the road. I had a problem that someone figured out and explained to me. I was looking at a point about 10 feet in front of the hood of the car. My focus was so close to the car that I was overreacting to every little bend in the road or movement of the car. Whoever figured out that I was doing this also had a cure for the problem. I remember being told to focus on a point further down the road, to lift my viewpoint up and align myself with where I wanted to be farther out down the road.

And so it is with the country. We elect leaders that are so short sighted that they have the country veering back and forth from the left to the right instead of barrelling forward and taking us where we need to go. Due to the 2 year election cycle, we are always campaigning. Leaders are not rewarded for making tough choices and fixing long term problems. They are rewarded by the public - this IS a democracy - for coming out on top of the most recent news cycle. And the people are to blame because we forget so quickly as a group. We forget the problems and mistakes that people make and re-elect the same bozos year after year to go back to Washington and raise funds for their next election rather than working on what the nation truly needs to have done.

If you were a professional assessor and were hired to make a prioritized list of the biggest and most important problems that the nation has, that list would not reflect what we see on the news. Budget, health care, social security, medicare, national defense, space defense, and education and investment in research and technology. That's the highest priorities I come up with (given just a few minutes reflection). Instead, we argue about immigration. We don't even have honest arguments about any of the subjects. It's like a trial where both sides hire their expert witnesses that come in and give opposite views and everyone that wants their side to win thinks their expert is perfect and the other side's expert is a crackpot.

I was recently asked if I thought that America had seen its high point and if our greatest days were behind us. My answer to that is that if we don't correct course and learn to focus on long term problems, that it certainly could be a downward slope for us. But all we have to do is raise our focus up from the ground right in front of our feet and start looking at where we want to be a bit further down the road.

The Last Veteran's Days

On this Veterans Day, I was thinking this morning about how they have ceremonies for aging veterans each year. I wondered if there are any WWI vets still alive, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, there are 22 still alive, but of those, only a few actually saw combat. These guys are all 106 years old, more or less.

I read John Keegan's First World War this last year. It was a bear of a book that I had to force myself through. Not only is Keegan a fairly dry writer (don't get me wrong, he's an excellent researcher and the information is thorough, just numbingly so), but the subject of WWI is depressing as hell.

Short Summary: Europe spends 20 or 30 years expecting that there will be another war, and does nothing but plan for it. Some obscure and unimportant duke gets shot, and it turns out to be the trigger that sends a horrible cascade of events into motion. Enormous numbers of people smash into each other in great lines, and due to the efficiency of their modern weapons, are forced to dig in. They fight for almost 3 years in an almost static position, feeding millions of men into the action, to no effect. It reminds me of a great machine that is trying to keep a fire called war going, and human beings are the pieces of wood that it keeps feeding in to be wasted. And the war was a waste. Nothing was proved, nothing was gained. Even the victors were bled white and most of a whole generation of young men were destroyed. The war bled the countries' coffers dry and produced such an unhealthy environment that the worst pandemic to ever hit the world swept through in the months following the war and killed even more people that the war killed. Horrible things like chemical warfare were invented. As if the war wasn't bad enough, economic penalties for the losers were so harsh that a vicious hatred was stoked virtually guaranteeing the next war.

Even after all the evidence of the futility of attacking heavily entrenched positions, generals still ordered it and men still went forward into the teeth of the meat grinder. Can we even understand that thinking anymore?

It occurred to me today that those arrogant generals that kept ordering the fruitless attacks are all dead now and that maybe their way of thinking would die with them. Maybe when the last of them died, the urge to send men off to a fruitless, hopeless, meaningless death would find a final resting place in their cold lifeless corpses.

We already know it's not true. Each generation somehow forgets how horrible war is and starts a new series of wars. Maybe this is something that is hard wired into us, a genetic trait. Lord knows there's not much keeping our population in check. If humans were deer, there'd be an unlimited season on them. "Gotta thin the herd." Maybe war is the price we pay to avoid being hip deep in people. If so, it's damned inefficient.

After WWI came a series of little wars around the globe as people sought to push boundaries around and plant their flag in a piece of turf, or assert their domination over another group of people. Then the big countries went at it again. Hell, they didn't even wait a full generation between WWI and WWII. Some of the guys that fought in I were still there to fight in II. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a veteran of both, as well as Douglas McCarthy. Truman fought in the trenches in the first war and later gave the orders that finished off the next war.

Then there was Korea and Viet Nam as well as Gulf War I and the Iraq War. So we didn't learn anything about the costs and results of war. At any given time, there are dozens of wars going on in the world. The print and the network news don't even report most conflicts unless they get completely out of control. Would you like to venture how many ongoing conflicts there are right now? Wikipedia (see "Ongoing Conflicts") says there are 29. The death toll for these wars is mostly unknown, but it appears to be about three quarters of a million. The average conflict goes about 15 years back. Try typing "War Death Toll" into Wikipedia's search bar and gaze in amazement at the carnage from history. The Rwanda Burundi war didn't even make the list and I remember hearing that 1.5 million people were hacked to death with machetes in that war.

They called WWI the Great War and The War to end all Wars. I wonder if maybe the end of war, which would be great, is something of an oxymoron. They always say that those that fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that's right. It's not that people aren't aware of what happened before, they just don't think it's the same thing when it's happening to them. Look at the Iraq War. Many of the people that worked the hardest to make the war happen came of age in the Viet Nam era. I remember when the Iraq War was going to start, there was this really small fringe of people that said that it was going to be another Viet Nam. I remember the reaction those statements got - mostly scorn. The average citizen thought that this was totally absurd. We would be in and out in no time. The problem with this war is that not many Americans think they are affected by it. I don't know anyone that died over there and only a very few that served. I don't know anyone that has lost a loved one over there. But I know that the world seems like a much more dangerous place because of all the resentment over our actions.

The problem with resentment is that it doesn't die with the people that harbor it. They pass it down to their children, and it gets nurtured and preserved. One of the premises in the Serbian Bosnian Croatian Kosovar conflicts was some massacre that happened hundreds of years ago. I'd never even heard of it. No one alive today was there, much less effected by it. Our continuous chain of wars and atrocities stretching back to antiquity is like some kind of twisted perversion we keep feeding and never try to break free of. It's the serial drug addiction of the human race.

All that gloomy sentiment said, I have to say that overall, life is pretty sweet. You get to see interesting things, have good friends, love your family, and cherish sweet days with beautiful weather and glorious scenes. You get to struggle against disease and hardship, grow and learn, strive and achieve, and see the world change and history take place around you. People are basically decent, if you get to know them. There are few people on Earth that no one loves, that someone can't understand or appreciate. Maybe some of them only have animals for friends, but most people have someone that wants to have them around. And sometimes we send people off to war to stop things from getting worse, to preserve our way of life. Not many soldiers that march off to war think that they are doing something worthless. But in the cauldron of war, watching all the suffering and loss around them, I'm sure they have one thought in their minds - "If I get through this, I'm gonna do something to make life worthwhile."

We need to find a way to teach that lesson without war.

Energy Independence

I did a blog entry on this subject on September 5th. Obviously, I had been thinking about it for some time. Here's another story on the subject that I wrote on 8/18/04:

Energy Independence

It’s been 228 years since America has issued a good Declaration of Independence and I believe we are about 30 years overdue for another one. I think the only thing stopping us from embarking on a program of Complete Energy Independence is a misguided case of group-think. There are many cliches being repeated out there that stand in the way of our independence and I refuse to believe them. I would like to ask everyone’s help in breaking this dangerous cycle of negative group think.

We will never be independent of oil in our lifetime.
The major energy companies will do anything to hold onto their power.
It’s against the capitalist system to tamper with energy markets.
You will have to sacrifice freedom/fun/power/performance in order to save energy.
The average American will not stand for any change from what we now have.
There just aren’t enough alternative energy sources to replace oil.
You can’t expect a wasteful government to help develop new energy technology.
Big companies are in business for profits, not public welfare and won’t be interested in alternative energy.
Americans are too stupid to understand energy and technology issues.
We can’t do it.
It will take to long.
It’s too hard.

Look at these statements. How many are indesputably, undeniably true? How many of them cannot be challenged or refuted? None of them. Each statement is a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If you believe them, they are certainly all true. Join me in crushing them and declaring to the rest of the nation, to the rest of the world, and in particular the Middle East that we reject all of these ideas.

Do you know what catapulted a young America past the rest of the world? Technological Innovation. In the early 19th century, we changed the way textiles were made. We put the entire process into one building and powered by our streams, we made new machines that cranked out cloth in quantities never before conceived. None of those ideas were new or originated here. They all came from Europe. These grand ideas were conceived in a Europe whose manufacturing guilds and trades were so entrenched that innovations that threatened those groups were simply not allowed. We were too naïve, crazy, young, idealistic, and enthusiastic to let that stop us. We shot past Europe in a generation and never looked back. We developed steam power and criss-crossed the nation with steamboats and railroads in one generation. We developed electricity and communications and knitted a far flung nation into a single unit in the next generation. We pioneered flight. We perfected the assembly line and mass production and developed the best standard of living in the world. We harnessed nuclear energy first. We saw space being exploited by our cold war adversary and passed them on the way to the moon and never looked back. The rest of the world has followed our lead closely.

We Americans can do anything we set our minds to do, our history proves it. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. We need to use our undeniable and overwhelming technological dominance responsibly. We need to move the world forward to unlimited energy sources not restricted to decidedly unfriendly parts of the globe. We need to develop renewable energy sources based on fusion, hydrogen, ethanol, wind, solar, geothermal, biological, and fuel cell technology. Maybe we’ll find something new with quantum physics that will astonish us all. We need to do it in such a way that we utilize the framework of the existing energy grid to make the transition to these new forms of energy. We need to find a way to use public money to help do this for the public good while also boosting corporate strength and health. This will provide jobs and help clean up the environment, but most importantly, it will put us strongly in control of our own destiny.

Once we have developed these sources and methods, we need to enrich our nation by exporting the technology to the rest of the world, and then push into space and begin the exploration and colonization of space in earnest.

We Americans can do this, I have no doubt in my mind. All we have to do is state our intentions and declare our independence. Do your part to help make it happen. Simply believe in us.