The episodes I watched tonight originally aired in April of 1996. Given that time frame, there were two lines in those two episodes that I found interesting to consider from our current perspective. The first was (roughly), “You can’t take something off of the internet; it’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”

This is a very well-put and not-obvious truth. We, now, know this fact very well, but at that time I don’t think it was very widely understood. To see so prescient an idea spoken about with such eloquence, and on a mid-ranked sitcom, no less!

The second comment was not as prescient, but it still makes us think about how far we’ve come in our thinking about computers. Someone is given advice: “You don’t want to delete your file until you’re sure you have a hard copy.” When was the last time you deleted a file from your computer because you had it on hard copy? We delete files we don’t need any more, but the ones we do need, we keep them on the computer.

Back then, the computer was a tool for creating pieces of paper with writing on them. These pieces of paper were the artifact that contained the idea or the message. Today, the artifact is the file on the computer, and we only print to paper if we need to. We might use the paper to read on and mark up, or to bring with us if we need the information where a computer isn’t handy, or to hand out. In fact, we use the paper as a tool just like we used to use the computer as a tool.

Of course this isn’t true with all computer files. We still use software to create posters or magazines or books, and in that case we still think of the finished product as the thing and the file as the tool, but you don’t know how long that will last. It wasn’t long ago that physical photographs were the medium of transfer, but with today’s memory sticks and portable digital screens, that’s pretty much over already.

Both of the lines that I so liked were spoken by the character Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan, longtime UFC fight commentator and host of the hit show, Fear Factor. So, you never know where it’s gonna come from.

P.S.: While trying to remind myself what the internet was like in 1996, I came across this page, which is wonderful and worth a read:
https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

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When we lost her, I lost a piece of myself. Her passing left a gap in my soul. I know, I know, that’s hackneyed, it’s a cliche, it’s what everybody says. I’m smart and articulate, I should be able to come up with something better, something more true or at the very least more original. Right?

The problem is, there is no more true statement. Sure, I could describe the sadness, how it sucks you in and engulfs you. I could describe the physical symptoms: the loss of appetite, the headaches and exhaustion. These are just symptoms of depression, though, and could be caused if your favorite car were totaled or if your home team bungled the big game at the last minute. Of course those things are sad on a much lesser level, but the basic components are the same, it’s just a question of how much and how often and for how long. There’s another difference, an entirely other thing that happens to you when you lose a person, and that’s what I and others are talking about when we say we’ve lost a piece, and that’s what I want to try to explain.

There was a time, when we each still had her and one other, that I was happy most of the time. Not everything was perfect, but whenever I found myself in a trough in the road, I’d just think of her and everything would seem better. It wasn’t any specific memory; once it was a bath she’d had the night before, how she wouldn’t go in until it was just the right temperature and that she farted and forgot to be scared long enough to belt out one sharp laugh before breaking into tears. Sometimes it was as simple as watching her sleep or pushing her in a swing, but whatever memory it would happen to be, it helped. It didn’t make the work easier or the pain lesser, but it touched the deepest part of my instincts and gave me strength.

It became second nature to me, like a dozing dolphin coming up for air, automatically and rhythmically. Throughout the day, I’d find myself reflexively going back to her in my thoughts. I’d be reading over double net lease documentation and she’d just pop into my mind, blowing bubbles or propped in the corner of the couch, sound asleep. After that, things just seemed… better. It didn’t just happen when things were bad; sometimes I’d be feeling great and I’d think of her and then I’d feel even better. It wasn’t a band-aid or a pep pill, it was a simply a cherry on top: a breath of wind at my back on a long walk home.

Now, of course, that’s all gone. No, not gone. It might be ok if it was gone; I’d lived without that for decades and was quite successful. The problem is that it’s all still there, but flipped over, poisoned. Instead of just being able to leave it behind me, I think about her more now than I ever did before. It’s a chain reaction: I could be anywhere, say, driving home and like always before she’ll pop into my mind. But now, instead of a cool breeze, it’s a dark wind. It stops my heart, catches my breath, makes my hands shake and my eyes well up. I’m nauseated and chilled and it takes everything I have to pull it back together enough not to wreck. Once I get it going again, get my mind clear, it’s only a matter of time until my focus wanders again and my natural reaction to the lingering ill-feelings from the previous incident is to call her back again. The only solution is constant internal vigilance.

So that’s my missing piece. It isn’t a figurative thing, no kind of Platonic ideal or metaphor but an actual, tangible void, as real as a missing limb and just as debilitating. There’s no better way to describe it. You don’t search for simile when describing a missing hand, and I can’t do it now either.

I had to leave the firm, of course. The practice of law isn’t as stressful and life-destroying as people make it out to be, but it is hard work and it demands faculties of which I find myself in short supply these days. We divorced soon afterward as well. Neither of us blamed the other but it turns out that the one person least able to help someone with a missing piece is the only other person in the world who is missing that same piece. We still love each other but we just can’t be together any more. It’s the insult to injury, this massive loss precipitating the death of an otherwise healthy relationship.

So here I am, a thousand miles from the only other place I’ve ever lived, a bachelor legal secretary living in a studio apartment overrun with roaches from the deli downstairs. People ask me, sometimes, in moments when they feel very close to me, how I keep going. That’s easy: nobody knew her but the two of us. We are the only people in the entire world who spent more than a total of 10 days with her. Her memory lives on only with myself and with her mother. I carry a precious cargo, so I don’t have an option. I don’t have to thrive, I don’t have to be happy, I don’t have to do anything except carry that gift with me for as long as I can.

I wonder what kind of underwear nuns wear.

I listen to audiobooks during my commute (when I drive, anyways. I usually don’t drive, but I missed my bus this morning and so was forced to take to the car (some people were blocking in my parking space, making me late for my short drive to the bus station (so I do actually drive every day but usually only for 7 minutes, not for the 45+ it takes me to get all the way to work) and I missed my bus by only like 30 seconds)), usually I try to listen to crappy genre fiction, as it’s sufficient to stop be getting horribly bored, but it’s not good enough that I wish I’d read the book for real. Sometimes I err too far on the side of crappiness, a recent piece of spy-thriller garbage by Jack Higgins being an example. Other times I listen to something really good, like the Bill Bryson book I listened to last year.

Anyways, now I’m listening to a non-fiction book that’s about amateur astronomy, and it’s falling nicely into the zone between good and bad. It keeps me occupied, but if my mind wanders for a while and I stop paying attention to what’s being said, then it’s no big deal. He talks a lot about how amateur astronomers help the progress of professional astronomers, largely by their willingness to do regular observations of things that the big telescopes simply don’t have the time to handle. They also do more all-sky surveying, which is why amateurs usually find new comets and things like that.

The problem is that the goals of the amateur astronomer, which are to have a good time looking at the stars, or to get interesting pictures, or to find something new, are rarely coincident with the goals of the professional scientist astronomical community, which values regular observation of either specific objects over a certain time frame, or systematic surveys of the whole sky over a relatively short time span. Sometimes the professionals manage to convince the amateurs to help them out, but that’s often more difficult that it’s worth.

So, my idea was this: we develop an installable telescope system that’s cheap to produce (most important), remotely-controlled, rugged and sufficiently precise for scientific measurement. We then install these small scopes on roofs all over the world. They would be bolted down relatively permanently, wired to the power systems of the buildings they’re installed on, and controlled from a central system that could coordinate their efforts to maximize value for all users.

Just like any major telescope, people could sign up for time to observe any object they choose at any time they choose. Unlike major telescopes (once there were a reasonable number of these things around the world,) you wouldn’t have to wait forever to get your observations made, and the costs would be much lower. Of course the light-gathering power of any individual system would be relatively low and they wouldn’t have all the fancy anti-turbulence correction facilities of the major observatories, but for a lot of kinds of research, that kind of thing isn’t particularly important. Weather would cease to be a major concern; a given heavenly body should always be visible from somewhere (in the right part of the globe at any rate) at any given time and so if one telescope is obscured by clouds, another can take its work. Even more excitingly, this kind of system could be put to work doing a variety of VLBI-type tasks that could really revolutionize some aspects of modern astronomical observation.

Of course there are tons of potentials problems: is it even possible to make something affordable that’s sufficiently rugged and self-maintaining? The cost of keeping up a worldwide maintenance/calibration team would surely swamp the project. Even installation would be a major problem, although that kind of thing might be able to be contracted out to, say, cable television companies. The system for controlling these things would be a real beast to develop, although once the hardware is in place, solving the control problem is something that can be accomplished iteratively, and a very simple initial system I think would be an entirely tractable problem for a relatively small development team.

I think this is a good idea. I haven’t looked very hard, but I find it entirely reasonable to assume that someone out there is already working on something of this nature. What do y’all think? Is this just a pie-in-the-sky idea, or is this something that might really happen someday? Also, I can’t think of a good name for this. Any ideas? This being astronomy, a clever acronym would be appropriate.

I thought to myself that it was a shame that her enormous energy, know-how and dedication to craft couldn’t be put to to use at a job someplace, but then I thought further, is it a shame? It’s possible that she is as happy as she could possibly be, and any attempt to make her work to deadline and work at the direction of someone else would result only in a reduction of that happiness. The only reason she would need a job, frankly, is for guarantors of health like money for food and medical coverage, and it seems to me like those are the kinds of things a wealthy government should provide to everyone living in its borders regardless of employment. Some people would call that welfare and would say that people ought to be able to pull their own weight, but that sounds to me like saying that a person ought not be allowed to live if they do not serve the purposes of others. The only reason that I am seen as more valuable and more accomplished than she, is that I am able and willing to do a particular thing which some other people want.

Some people judge the health of a nation by its unemployment rate. That is, they count the number of people like me, people who are useful to others and are put to that use. I think that the health of a nation should be measured by the number of people like the crazy shopping cart lady, that is, people who are happy.

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342 pp)
5. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 2 – 1-20-08 (240 pp)
6. Hari Kunzru – Transmission – 1-27-08 (276 pp)
7. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 3 – 1-30-08 (240 pp)
8. W. Michael Gear – The Way of Spider – 2-7-08 (408 pp)
9. Dick Francis – Hot Money – 2-12-08 (423 pp)
10. W. Micheal Gear – The Web of Spider – 2-21-08 (648 pp)
11. Philip José Farmer – The Maker of Universes – 2-22-08 (247 pp)
12. Samuel R. Delany – Empire Star – 2-23-08 (132 pp)
13. Philip José Farmer – The Gates of Creation – 2-25-08 (188 pp)
14. Neil Gaiman – Don’t Panic – 2-27-08 (182 pp)

Totals:

Books: 14
Pages: 4073

I’m still on track for an 84-book year, but I still hope to make it to 100. We’ll see.

I don’t mean the tonsure or the cassock or any of the religious stuff, really. What I mean is the removal of oneself from the world. Going away from everything, using as little energy as possible to keep oneself alive, and using absolutely the rest of your energy in the service of some greater good. The problem I have with being a real monk, of course, is that what they do with all that extra energy is pray. I don’t feel like praying actually does anybody any good except for, maybe in some cases, the person praying.

So what I think would be a good idea is some kind of secular monk association. It would be similar in a lot of ways to the religious monks: people would join up, either for their whole lives or maybe just for a certain number of years. While in the organization, they would have no possessions and would do nothing apart from the least possible work to keep themselves alive and comfortable and maintain the physical plant of the organization, and the rest of their time would be spent doing their work. As to what exactly they’d do, I’m not sure; nor am I sure how money would be handled. The work would have to be something which produced a result which directly improved the lot of the world. The result should probably be usable to fund the existence of the monastery as well.

Imagine groups of purely dedicated people working essentially non-stop on some medical problem, and their solution being released to the world free of charge. Imagine how much more work could be done by a group of people so purely focused,without having to worry about their family or their commute or mowing the lawn or paying rent. I think it’d be a good thing.

[*] And yes, I know that Mr. Pérignon probably didn’t really invent champagne, per se. However, I’m confident that, had I been a live at the right time, we’d all be drinking Dom Avignon ever New Year’s Eve.