Saturday, December 02, 2023

Friday Night Music



This area is prone to droughts, but both nights I went out with friends this week brought unexpected, welcome rains. So much for weather apps. But hello to a new superstition about the rain dance.

Friday night was the chance to celebrate a young friend’s 36th birthday and also to see a bunch of people I used to work with before retiring four years ago.

The journalism community is a small one in the Bay Area, unlike New York or L.A. But a slew of talented journalists live and work here, and this was a rare chance for me to see several at one time. They are collectively, after all, our best chance against the wave of disinformation and conspiracy theories sweeping over the nation like an atmospheric river.

We sat outside in a covered booth at a place near the Oakland/Berkeley border; at one point the conversation turned to why people like us do this kind of work anyway. It’s not like anybody gets rich doing honest journalism and the risks and stresses of the craft are more closely associated with anxiety attacks and high blood pressure than the flashy awards they give us from time to time.

There is very little glamorous about the actual work.

These days it’s a profession in steep decline; jobs are scarce and the competition for them fierce. Most media companies sooner or later announce another round of layoffs; job security is a constant concern.

But none of this dampened the spirits of our merry little band of story-tellers Friday night. At some point we noticed that it was raining softly outside our booth. We could tell this from the music of the passing traffic. 

We ate bar food — onion rings and loaded fries; those who drink sipped their drinks. We traded our stories and tips like journalists always do. We celebrated our lovely young colleague’s birthday.

Eventually the rain lifted and the fog came in at the higher altitudes. We said our goodbyes and went our own ways into the night. But the music of the rain dance remained.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Friday, December 01, 2023

Macro/Micro



 (This is from three years ago, just after the 2020 election.)

There is every reason to be hopeful in the larger sense, with vaccines apparently coming for Covid, a wiser hand soon to be at the helm of the ship of state, and an economy so large and diverse it is almost guaranteed to prove resilient. 

But none of that necessarily translates down to the individual level, where it's the little day-to-day events that make us more hopeful or less.

If you listen to the meta-messaging that never lets up targeting us, there are but two important things we can do in our role as citizens and consumers. We can vote and we can buy.

Well, we’ve voted. So now we are expected to buy.

Oh, there was a third thing -- wear a mask -- but the messaging has been decidedly mixed on that one all along. 

But part of the the problem with paying too much attention to the macro is we live in the micro. 

***
Yesterday we trouped to a beach on the Pacific shore where the air was fresh and clear. in the photo above, I am framed in the diamond formed by two of my grandsons.

What I've been musing about recently is to what degree each day we live in these times is a microcosm of the whole. It's so difficult to remove ourselves from the context -- McLuhan said "the medium is the message" -- by inference "you are the times you live in."

Yet when I go to a place like that beach, which is called Limantour, part of the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, its rhythms take me back 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. In other words, back to many different "times." The long perfect waves crash just as they have forever, the strands of kelp wash up on the beach, as do pieces of lumber lost at sea, chunks of old sunken boats, crab shells and the occasional whale bone.

It's exactly the same whether Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama or Trump is in the White House. And whether I'm buying stuff or living like a monk. Or feeling hopeful or hopeless.

I walked down to the water's edge and stared out to the west, at the lovely endlessness. I've flown over that ocean many times, and I can taste and smell the places over there -- Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and others.

Since Pt. Reyes is a protected zone, it has a timelessness to it that the built-out places lack. The city of San Francisco always feels like the same city, for example, though large chunks of it change all the time.

That is the rather tortured analogy I am seeking about our lives-- we are here, for a while, but the system that contains us, like the physical world, goes on and on with or without us.

What was terrifying to everyone paying attention about Trump's reign, soon to end, was not so much his impact on our little lives but on the macro system of laws and conventions we all depend on. Even now, his unwillingness to concede means we have no real closure on the election. Biden won, but the electoral process remains unfinished and uncertain.

That is Trump's poisonous legacy. Let’s hope he never comes back, because next time would be a disaster on the macro and on the micro as well.

(Five weeks later, the Jan. 6th riot occurred.)

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Rainy Night Lights

The other night, after picking me up in the middle of a light rainstorm on Bernal Hill, my friendly Lyft driver told me his life story.

He’d grown up in Prague, relocated here years ago, learned to drive a car, now lives with his wife and 16-year-old son in American Canyon, which is on the edge of the Bay Area, has a sister in Pleasanton, and plans to visit Prague next summer, where he has two brothers and his mother, who is 77 and in too poor health to make the journey over here.

It was near midnight as he was telling me all of this, and the traffic was light as we crossed the Bay Bridge. 

It’s smooth sailing,” he observed cheerily, glancing both at his GPS screen and the road ahead.

He was curious about me so I filled him in on the details of my life. The rain intensified.

As we reached a spot a few exits from mine the traffic suddenly slowed into a sea of brake lights, including a few flashing ones far ahead.

“Oh oh,” he said. “I did not see this coming.”

***

As I sort and collate the news day after day, frequently I see warning signs flashing like emergency vehicles on our route ahead toward a common future.

There’s the Mideast War.

Also, a key judge in the Jan. 6th cases warns that we are seriously close to losing our democracy and ending up with an authoritarian future instead. (Politico)

That threat comes as soon as next year with the 2024 presidential election.

Then there are the longer-term threats posed by climate change and artificial intelligence. Even if we can grasp the nature of those risks, it is hard currently to imagine any solutions.

Meanwhile, sitting the backseat of my Czech river’s car, I tried to imagine how he could elude the traffic mess ahead.

Not to worry. He skillfully navigated his way through the lanes crammed with stopped vehicles to an exit off-ramp and continued overland to my home, dropped me off and returned into the night.

I thanked him and said goodbye, went inside, got into bed and thought about all of those other flashing red lights in the news listed below.

We are going to need all of our combined skill and effort to find the exit ramps from those dangers.

HEADLINES:

  • More hostages released as Israel-Hamas truce deadline approaches (CNN)

  • Henry A. Kissinger, 1923-2023 (WSJ)

  • More hostages to be freed; Israel expects to further extend pause in combat (WP)

  • US says it foiled alleged plot to assassinate Sikh activist in New York (BBC)

  • Trump targets Judge Arthur Engoron's wife on Truth Social (Salon)

  • ‘Damning’: New Pence notes point to GOP senator's role in Jan. 6 plot (MSNBC)

  • Nikki Haley's getting buzz, but faces tough math to beat Trump (Reuters)

  • The US economy grew by 5.2% in the third quarter, even faster than previously estimated (CNN)

  • Judge key to Jan. 6 cases warns US faces ‘authoritarian’ threat (Politico)

  • Chinese Hospitals Are Housing Another Deadly Outbreak — Authorities are covering up the spread of antibiotic-resistant pneumonia. (Foreign Policy)

  • stronomers discover six planets orbiting a nearby sun-like star (WP)

  • Most dinosaurs were killed by climate change, not a meteorite, new study suggests (Salon)

  • How Moral Can A.I. Really Be? (New Yorker)

  • Google DeepMind's AI Dreamed Up 380,000 New Materials. The Next Challenge Is Making Them (Wired)

  • Why Won’t OpenAI Say What the Q* Algorithm Is? (Atlantic)

  • Scaling deep learning for materials discovery (Nature)

  • A year after launching, ChatGPT is already changing medicine (Axios)

  • OpenAI’s Custom Chatbots Are Leaking Their Secrets (Wired)

  • AI Systems That Master Math Will Change the World (PYMNTS)

  • How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution (New Yorker)

  • Biden Addresses Nation: ‘Does Anyone Else Ever Feel Like They’re Floating Through A Dream They Can Never Wake Up From?’ (The Onion)

 

at No comments:

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Wednesday Links

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Message in a Bottle



(The following essay is from August 2009, and is clearly dated, but it reflects my fascination with social networks at that time. I was not yet much aware of the downsides. Accordingly, it is like a message in bottle from an earlier, more hopeful time. I’ve edited it lightly.)

One of the characteristics of a big family is all the different roles people take toward one another, especially over time. Of course, if you're Dad, you're always Dad, but the relationship with your children evolves as everyone gets older.

My oldest three kids know more -- much more -- about all kinds of stuff than I do. My youngest three kids are familiar with technologies, cultural trends, and music that I’m only just learning about. 

Case in point: There's no way I would know that "SpongeBob, SquarePants" is a brilliantly-written TV show unless I had young children.

Besides all of this, there's a network effect as you add people into your family through marriage and friendships. The bigger the group, the larger the multiples, as family members create different relationships with each other.

This is why social media like Facebook, if you keep at it assiduously, will eventually yield a community of contacts in the thousands. (Note to file: I don't do this.)

Although there is no possible way you could ever get to know, or even meet all of those people you are a degree of separation or two away from, when you add in keyword search, and targeting technologies, you can see why a service such as LinkedIn might well help you find your next job.

This was all swirling around in my head today as my older son helped me prepare for an upcoming conference presentation. I meanwhile, was channeling Julia Child and cooking him an omelette, my prosaic new cooking specialty.

This is a mid-week that features my two middle children, both boys, here with me. One of them is also a youngest child, while the other is also an oldest child, due to the peculiar math of having raised two separate groups of three.

So, at breakfast, my 28-year-old, a neuroscience PhD candidate was walking me through the logic of a fascinating if obscure exercise about how color affects our brain's response time when completing simple tasks, like reading.

Then, we packed up his stuff for his upcoming trip to Burning Man.

Next, the news came in that my other “middle” child, 14 years old, has made his school's varsity soccer team as a freshman, after a grueling eight-day tryout in blazing heat. He also has advanced up to honors physics through testing at the same time.

They are two boys in the middle of the family pack, with two older siblings older and two younger. Despite my obsession with math, I'd just never thought of them as in the middle that way before. You'd think that with 128 “years” of parenting under my belt plus two more “years” to add before next month is out, it would have occurred to me, but there you have it.

Burning Man. Neuroscience. Soccer. Physics. Two boys, one Dad. Just workin' our network...and feeling the benefits.

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Monday, November 27, 2023

The Quest

On a blue-sky Sunday I drove across the Bay Bridge into my favorite city to have brunch with my two youngest sons. Traffic was light for a change and I was in a good mood, courtesy of Michigan’s dramatic victory over rival Ohio State on Saturday.

We met at a cafe on Potrero Hill, a dynamic neighborhood bustling with the usual Sunday morning foot traffic. The place wasn’t overly crowded, probably because some residents hadn’t yet returned from Thanksgiving break.

We all ordered coffee — regular with cream. My youngest son is a relatively recent convert to the habit; he told me it dates from his visit to Italy with his girlfriend last summer.

“It was those little cups of espresso,” he said. “And then getting into my job back here.”

He works as a researcher for a large global media company.

His brother, who simultaneously works as a medical assistant and is pursuing an advanced nursing degree, is a long-term coffee drinker, like me.

Both boys are in their late 20s and the early stages of their careers and later stages of their advanced educations. We had a long conversation about the balancing act they seek between pursuing their dreams and earning enough wealth to be comfortable.

It’s partly about incurring educational debt and paying it off. And also about finding a way to be self-sufficient without sacrificing their values.

Talks like these ones transport me back 50 years to when I was considering those same questions. And of course the specifics of when and where a person reaches this stage of life matters a lot.

Living in one of our big coastal cities is very expensive; we all know that. Yet, if you can avoid the temptations of an excessively consumerist lifestyle, you can get by on far less than the common wisdom suggests.

Frugal living can buy time while they sort things out.

A good work ethic is a necessity. (They both have that.) Finding the types of work they enjoy is the big challenge early on. But the alternative — just taking whatever you can get in order to make money, and sticking with that, is often a prescription, in my view, for long-term misery.

Neither of the boys have taken that latter path, thankfully, and like most of their friends they have chosen to pursue their personal dreams over what some might consider more practical options. 

That’s a strength about growing up in a place like San Francisco — social reinforcement that it is okay to nourish your creative needs and find purpose in work. It’s not automatically assumed to be an unresolvable contradiction. 

Meanwhile, as we age, those of us who are parents naturally seek some sort of affirmation that the guidance we gave our kids as they were growing up will yield some meaningful results — for them and by extension for society as well.

The jury will remain out of those issues, of course, because they can only be judged over the breadth of time. And people may draw differing conclusions about what matters in the end anyway.

But after my sons and I had eaten, hugged and said our goodbyes and I was driving alone back to the East Bay, I realized just how proud I am of my dreamers. I always encouraged all of my kids to find and follow their passions, and also to think of the others around them in the process.

Also, as near as I have been able to tell in the course of my own life, money can’t and doesn’t help a person find happiness on its own. Lacking it is stressful, however, and getting enough does allow you the generosity to do some nice things for others from time to time. 

Finally, seeking to satisfy and achieving (even partially) your dreams gives you at least a fighting chance at finding that essential balance that may constitute the best proximate version of happiness every person deserves. 

That, in the end, is what you could call the quest.

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Sunday Links

 HEADLINES:

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)