Stuck In Traffic #1
by Calvin Stacy Powers
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Most Hated TV Commercial
The ads I hate the most are the ones from all the different
organizations that have an interest in Health Care urging people
to call their representatives and urge them to do this or that
about Health Care reform. They all try to paint a picture of Mr.
and Mrs. Average American in a Norman Rockwell-esque living room
having a seri ous discussion about health care reform.
"Gee honey, I just can't understand that darn Con gress, don't
they know that what we really want is a single payer health care
plan with employer mandates?"
"Well snookums, have you called our congressman or representative
and told them what you really think?"
"Well, I just havent' had the time, what with helping Jenny with
her studies and Johnny's ball practice and all."
"Well, you can call him right now, the kids are out doing their
community service volunteer work."
"Good idea, Hon, I'll do it right now!"
Aside from painting such a rosy, idyllic, picture of
Americana. The thing that really bugs me is that they work in
just ther right buzz words for you to tell your Congressmen when
you, inspired from these wonderfull commercials, rush to the phone
and call him or her. Not only do they want us to call our
representatives, they want us to say just the right buzz-words, as
if we could not think for our selves and formulate our own
opinions.
All sides and all interest groups are guilty of airing these slimy
ads and I think it shows how desperate all these organizations are
in battling over health care. In the heated battle over who's
going to control our health care, they insult all the Americans
they're claiming to represent with these ads.
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White Noise
I've been a big fan of David Byrne's music, both his work with the
Talking Heads and his solo stuff. Byrne is famous for his
babbling, unfathomable lyrics, and the first Talking Heads live
album was even titled "Stop Making Sense." But his solo work is
chang ing and I've come to the conclusion that he's getting to be
a darn good lyricist.
On his latest album, in the song "A long time ago", there's a
particluar line that's stuck with me:
"In between stations I can hear
a million possibilities.
It's just the singing of the stars
that burned out a long, long time ago.
They burned out a long, long time ago."
Now, everytime I hear static on the radio, I can't help but think
that I'm lis tening to dying stars on the other side of the
galaxy. And I want to stop and lis ten to it.
One of the things that makes good art, is that it stays with you.
It changes the way you look at the world. Where I never paid any
attention to static noise in the past, now I do, thanks to David
Byrne. And he didn't use sex, violence, profanity, racism, or
break any social taboos to do it. There's still hope for pop
culture.
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Woodstock '94
Woodstock '94 is still weeks away and already I'm sick of it.
Somehow I think the corporate sponsor, Pepsi, has missed the
point. To my mind, if there is anything positive to say about the
first Woodstock, it's that the music festival was a spontaneous,
dynamic, free-for-all of music, fellowship, and good times.
Woodstock '94 on the other hand, has all the trappings of a
multi-million dollar marketing hype, the likes of which we haven't
seen since, oh, at least last week. From the endless Pepsi
commercials, the MTV sychophants running hourly commentaries on
perparations, all those darn promotional contests, the 1-900
numbers you can call "for an update", and the the performers
bickering over who gets to play when and on what stage, I'm ready
for the thing to be over and done with so we can get back to
hearing about important stuff, like the O.J. Simpson trial.
=============
On Kervorkian
In Junto 22, Temy Beall, makes a short comment about how Jack
Kervorkian is "doing God's work". Based on his other com ments
about religion, I'm not sure this was intended as a compliment or
not. Personally, I can see Kervorkian's point of view. Who can
say how much pain and suffering a person should have to endure?
And if we are soverign indi viduals, do we not have the right to
decide when and how we should die?
Not that I would ever help anyone attempt sui cide. If I had a
friend contemplating suicide because of a terminal medical
condition, I think I'd be begging and pleading with him or her
until the very end to keep trying to fight it. But I do recognize
everyone's right to control thier own destiny the best way they
perceive. I think the thing about Kervorkian's ideas that scares
so many people is that they perceive it as a _loss_ of svereignty.
People are afraid that the next step will be doctors and family
_encouraging_ doctor assisted suicide. And I think it's a valid
concern.
I think there's another angle to this story that bears mentioning.
Regardless of whether you agree with the notion of doctor assisted
suicide, I think you have to admire Dr. Kervorkian on some level.
Here is a per son that is willing to risk everything he has, his
entire career, and a lengthy jail sentence in order to stand up
for what he believes is the right thing. That takes an enormous
courage and it's a very rare thing these days. I hope that I have
as much courage as Dr. Ker vorkian has if I'm ever faced with
such a serious situation when my beliefs conflict with the
prevailing wisdom.
===============
Man On The Moon
All the recent hoopla over the 25th Anniversary of the moon
landing reminded me of a story from my childhood.
I can't remember exactly what year it was, but it was one of the
later missions to the moon. My family and I were driving across
Tenne see to visit my Grandparents in Texas. Back then the speed
limit was till 75 and 80 most of the way, and if we left real
early in the morning from our house in North Carolina and drove
all day and all night, we could get to my grandparents house in 23
hours.
This particular trip to Texas happened during one of the Appollo
missions and it was late at night. My parents had tuned the radio
in to a station that was car rying a live broadcast from the
astronauts on the moon. I was laying down in the back seat with
my sister and looking up through the window at the moon and
listening to the voices of the astronauts as the talked about what
they were doing on the moon's surface.
I studied the moon closer and closer until I was con vinced that I
could see the astronauts walking around on the moon! I could see
tiny little figures standing on the top edge of the moon stnding
beside the American flag and the lunar module. bouncing around in
the low gravity.
My parents didn't correct me when I told them that I could see the
astronauts on the moon.
Mr. & Mrs. Jackson
Yea, right. Who seri ously believes this marriage between Michael
Jackson and Lisa Marie (sp?) Pres ley is going to last? My
friends and I are making predictions on how long this happy couple
will remain together. Most predictions are in the 6-12 month
range. My predicition is one year.
I could almost buy this story almost. I could buy the fact that
they fell in love after dating only a couple of times. I don't
object to the notion of love at first sight. And I could buy the
fact that they wanted to keep their marriage a secret to avoid all
the publicity. And I don't have a problem with interracial
marriages. I've never read anything that convinced me that
interra cial marriages are any less stable than other marriages.
The timing is just too convenient. Right after the accusations of
child moles tation and questions concerning Mr. Jackson's morals,
he creates a big stir by jumping into the most wholesome of
institutions, marriage. But what really con vinced me that this
marriage is less than sincere was a news story about he and his
new wife arriving in Budapest Hungary. There was a great shot of
the two of them coming down the steps of the plane. Mrs. Jackson
looked really ner vous and out of touch. The newlywed couple
never even looked at each other. At one point Mr. Jackson took
Mrs. Jackson's arm for a brief moment, like he was going to
escort her. But then he let go and fled down the steps of the air
plane and into the limo, leaving Mrs. Jackson behind to catch up.
It was just a brief glimpse of the two, but the only one offered
on the whole trip and I did not get the impression that these two
were newlyweds. And I certainly did not get the impression that
these two were in love. Time will tell.
==============
What Is Brain?
I read a lot of science fiction and science related stuff. Last
week I read an article in The Science Fic tion Eye magazine that
really impressed me. It was about how popular science and science
fiction writers have portrayed the brain over the years. The
author's thesis is that everyone from psychologists to science
fiction writers, describe the brain by analogy, using the
then-current technology of the day.
Freud, for example, described the libido in terms of hydraulics.
The libido, in his view, is a fixed quantity that could not be
compressed. In the same way that you can not com press water, you
cannot compress the libido without it squirting out somewhere
else. Try to suppress a bad memory and it leaks out in the form
of some other behavior somewhere else. The behaviorists such as
B.F. Skinner, saw the mind as a mechanical machine and you only
got out of it what you put into it. The humanists psycholgists
saw the brain like an indepen dent growing organism. And today,
most cognitive scientists use the computer as an analogy for the
brain.
And science fiction writ ers have followed these changes in
analogy also and have added a few of their own along the way. For
example, many early sci ence fiction writers drew an analogy
between brain size and intelligence. Thus lots of the early
science fiction movies have alien beings with really really big
heads, way out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. Later
science fiction writers por trayed the brain as a mathematical
function that could be calculated and predicted. Some even went
so far as to suggest that every word you hear had an "emotional
weight" and that you could predict the behavior of someone based
on the words they heard.
And most recently sci ence fiction writers, most notably those who
write in the "cyberpunk" genre, have picked up on the analogy that
the brain is a computer. Thus we get lots of stories about
sentient computers and devices that meld brain and computer so
that characters in cyberpunk stories often plug their brains
directly into com puters and instantly learn new languages, new
skills, etc.
As the author points out, this latest analogy is just as flawed as
all the past analogies. The main prob lem with the computer/brain
analogy is that the brain's memory and the computer's memory are
radically different. In a computer, every single bit of
information it remembers is located in a single, unique
location.That location might be in the computers active memory,
or it might be stored on a disk somewhere, but it's in only one
place at a time and only one "memory" is at that one place. The
human brain, on the other hand, is associative. This means that a
memory is not located at a single spot. So, you remember what you
had for breakfast yesterday, but you can't point to any single
spot in your brain that con tains the memory of yesterday's
breakfast. The memory of yesterday's breakfast, as near as anyone
can tell, is spread _throughout_ your brain and is mixed in with
all your other memories at once.
It makes you wonder what the next popular brain analogy is going
to be? The brain is a rain forest? The brain is an ecosystem? I
know mine sometimes feels like the hole in the ozone layer.
=====================
Computers and People
As a programmer by trade, I sometimes get asked if I think we'll
ever be able to have conversa tions with computers and if they'll
ever be a such thing as "living computers" or "artificial
intelligence".
My standard response is that I believe that someday we will be
unable to tell the difference between a computer's conversation
and a human's. But then I add, "Not because comput ers are
getting so much smarter, but because people are getting so much
dumber."
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Stuck In Traffic is a bi-monthly e-zine edited by, and mostly
written by Calvin Stacy Powers. Copyrights of individual articles
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