tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47882834443858389682024-03-13T10:02:13.318-07:00The View from Guppy LakeNathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-77951384794231171632022-05-28T06:21:00.000-07:002022-05-28T06:21:55.512-07:00Remembering Ned Freed (1959-2022) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oQNZXQFVZMPLT1w97hTUHoO-tox9UUJllarJCm6c8w6Ls_ZOa-IDqq1x_LPyz3dbULRsQ21QuuLLAncFe39OFfShDDufyzhwKSmJcE9_IXil0oucJJxuAKZ7mXeFKuWfO9i-wlfumCTu8pc_JnU5qu7BG9i6duJ_By_MW_iL-gbjOk8r6oLXjI8W/s824/NedFreed.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="760" data-original-width="824" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oQNZXQFVZMPLT1w97hTUHoO-tox9UUJllarJCm6c8w6Ls_ZOa-IDqq1x_LPyz3dbULRsQ21QuuLLAncFe39OFfShDDufyzhwKSmJcE9_IXil0oucJJxuAKZ7mXeFKuWfO9i-wlfumCTu8pc_JnU5qu7BG9i6duJ_By_MW_iL-gbjOk8r6oLXjI8W/s320/NedFreed.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><center><p>
</p></center><p><br /></p><p>
The Internet lost a hero this week.
Ned Freed and I were in our early thirties when we met. I was a
researcher in Pittsburgh, passionate about extending email to include
pictures, sounds, and rich text in any language. Ned was a young
entrepreneur in California, passionate about improving interoperation between
independently designed email-like systems. We were the closest of
collaborators during the early 1990's, when we led the design of
the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) -- three years of
intense partnership that turned out to be the career highlight that
both of us would be best remembered for.
</p><p>
MIME is now used trillions of times daily, in virtually every
web page and email message, and we've both long since recognized that
it would feature prominently in our obituaries. But it isn't what I
think of when I remember Ned. MIME was the product of our
collaboration, but it was the collaboration itself that I most
treasure.
</p><p>
It's my observation that a remarkable number of innovations seem to
originate in the well-timed creative dynamic of
a pair of fortuitously compatible people in a collaboration that can be far more intimate
than, say, merely producing a baby. UNIX came from the pairing of
Thompson and Richie, Apple from Jobs and
Wozniak, Microsoft from Gates and Allen, Google from Page and Brin.
Cerf and Kahn gave us TCP/IP, while Parker and Stone gave us South Park
and The Book of Mormon. Fate -- in the form of Einar Stefferud
(universally known as Stef), one
of the less remembered heroes of the early Internet -- brought Ned and
me together at the moment when something like MIME was desperately needed.
</p><p>
I think that such creative partnerships usually involve people with very
different but complementary personalities and skills, focused on a
common task. Ned and I were nearly the exact opposite --
temperamentally fairly similar, but initially focused on very different
tasks. I
wanted to make email richer, while he wanted to make it more robust and
interoperable. A third constituency lacked email expertise and was laser-focused on freeing
email from its English-only heritage. When Stef realized that these
three goals were highly complementary and might be achieved together, he introduced me to Ned and
suggested we get involved with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task
Force) and try to change the world.
</p><p>
We did, but in retrospect that's not nearly as remarkable to me as the
fact that we did it without a single argument. Perhaps in part
because we came into the MIME work with different motivations and
expertise, we had no built-in disagreements. I've had other very
successful collaborations, but there was always something to disagree
about, sometimes leading to the kind of blowout fights that make you
wonder how a couple can manage to stay together. With Ned and me, however, it
was all harmony. I know we weren't always right -- I frequently point
to one or two aspects of MIME that embarrass me to this day -- but we
were even unified in our mistakes.
</p><p>
Or at least, I'm about 99% sure we were that perfectly harmonized. It's hard for me to be
absolutely positive, however, because Ned was such a master of
reasonableness and amiability. While I would occasionally get
overexcited and argumentative, Ned could stay calm and sunny in the
face of the most egregious wrong-headedness and ignorance, though he
could be frank and even scathing about it in private. There were surely
people who worked well with Ned, liked him very much, and never had a
clue that he thought they were idiots, so gentle was he in debating and correcting them. He could completely separate
their opinions from their identities, and he seemed to like nearly
everyone, which meant that nearly everyone liked him. I
would not put it past Ned to have disagreed with me so gently that he
actually won arguments I never knew we were having.
</p><p>
MIME was our first involvement with Internet standards work, the first
RFC either of us had our names on. The MIME work was a career-making
breakthrough for both of us, but we went different ways
afterwards. I went off in a number of directions, founding
several startups and then helping lead innovation and standards work at IBM
and Mimecast. Ned was astonishingly stable and even-keeled, never once changing employers; the company he
founded before I met him was acquired by Sun, which was acquired by Oracle, where he
remained to the end. His stability, patience, and clarity were a perfect match for
standards work, and he never stopped working
with the IETF, ending up as the author of over 50 RFC's
(far more than my 16, and in fact more than 99.95% of RFC authors), and
one of the best known and most respected figures in the Internet
standards community.
</p><p>
You only had to meet Ned once to understand why he was so good at
this. He was wicked smart, of course, but there are plenty of smart
people who flame out in the process of trying to build consensus. But
Ned always had a warm smile. His humor could be quite biting in
private, but never malicious, and in larger meetings he carried himself in such a way
that it was almost impossible not to like him.
</p><p>
I knew Ned for just over half his life, but never without health
problems. When I met him, at just barely over 30, he was already deep in
his lifelong struggle with ulcerative colitis. He talked openly about
his health issues when asked, but I never once heard him complain. In
his later years his health led him to stop traveling to IETF
meetings, but he remained an active and
soothing presence who proved over and over, to a still-skeptical world
even within the IETF community, how modern technology can allow people
with the right communication skills to be first-class participants
from thousands of miles away. He worked so effectively through his
illness for so long that I almost stopped worrying about him, as if I
expected him to live forever.
</p><p>
The people you hear the most about aren't generally, in my experience,
the people who most deserve it. A lot of the most important and
constructive work is quiet and behind the scenes. Ned never, to my
knowledge, sought to aggrandize himself. Even for the work we did
together, I ended up being the one who people know as the "father of the email
attachment." But I could never have realized my vision of richer,
more powerful email alone. Ned's deep expertise and focus on detail kept me from going
down more than a few rabbit holes that could have sunk the whole MIME project, while
his disposition probably made the difference between a gradually emerging
consensus and a pitched battle of entrenched ideas.
</p><p></p><p>Meeting, collaborating with, and becoming friends with Ned Freed was
one of the highlights of my career, and I will miss him for all the
time I have left. Although I'm not a believer, I'd like to picture him in heaven
right now, smoothing out communication problems between the cherubim
and the seraphim, devising protocols for synchronizing the tuning of
everyone's harps, and perhaps gently trying to convince God to
loosen up and decentralize the universe a little more. If anyone can
do it, Ned would be the man. Rest in peace, old friend.
</p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-18154206794945829312022-04-10T08:10:00.003-07:002022-04-10T08:33:57.587-07:00Grieving and Singing Joyfully at Passover<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i> Note: Although it's not essential, I highly recommend that you play <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0CVaoSSTEk " target="_blank">this music by Elaine Hagenberg</a>(*) in the background while you read this essay. I will be quoting heavily from the underlying poem, by William Wordsworth(*), and discussing the music, which I've been singing with my chorus. </i></p></blockquote><p> </p><p>Like most Jewish holidays, Passover is a celebration of the human spirit in the face of loss and tragedy. (They say most Jewish holidays can be summarized in ten words: "They tried to kill us all. They failed. Let's eat.") Jews are told to remember times of happiness even when things are worst, and to remember times of sadness when we are happiest; a Jewish bridegroom traditionally breaks a glass at his wedding, to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.</p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The earth, and every common sight,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>To me did seem</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Apparelled in celestial light,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The glory and the freshness of a dream."</i></div><p>Such melancholy subtleties don't generally sink in with children, of course. I remember the Passovers of my childhood as times of special foods and family gatherings, mostly happy but with the occasional blowout argument. I heard the tales of how our ancestors were liberated from slavery 3000 years ago, but didn't think much about the suffering that preceded the liberation. Getting together with the family, telling stories, eating traditional foods, and singing holiday songs -- it's hard for a child to see this as anything but joyous.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN83I3qI5Uu6KSTxpgYKWDivVenZ-KXfQhwEaCEE4IorKVhKsjgVd5YRNeme5PG_rXKtzW1q21DGSDrc9QmqsXqtEA6QbZqHt0-f5fURppIafg7aNLDhuvDaPj6GRewC0n8voc84TCqB_ajIv99Y_bGl_Rx9-OO2cgkVzNCnkPkZ4GF6nbuxSF0I2c/s1780/1959MarchNsbStan.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1777" data-original-width="1780" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN83I3qI5Uu6KSTxpgYKWDivVenZ-KXfQhwEaCEE4IorKVhKsjgVd5YRNeme5PG_rXKtzW1q21DGSDrc9QmqsXqtEA6QbZqHt0-f5fURppIafg7aNLDhuvDaPj6GRewC0n8voc84TCqB_ajIv99Y_bGl_Rx9-OO2cgkVzNCnkPkZ4GF6nbuxSF0I2c/s320/1959MarchNsbStan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Me and my father, when I still listened to him.</div><p>It was only when my father passed away on the eve of Passover in 2006 that the holiday developed a shade of sorrow for me. Jews traditionally remember departed loved ones annually on the anniversary of their death, known as the Yahrtzeit. Since 2006, my father's Yahrtzeit has taken place at the Passover Seder -- the meal and ceremony that begin the holiday -- and this adds just the right tinge of sadness for a Jewish celebration. The Seder chronicles the suffering and struggles of ancestors who died 3000 years ago, and is full of commentary from ancestors who died one to two thousand years ago. Taking a moment to mourn a parent who died a few years ago -- the kind of sadness that we grow up expecting to face some day -- fits the holiday perfectly, and didn't really change the tone for me substantially.</p><p>Then, in 2020, as the pandemic shut down the planet, my beautiful oldest daughter, Shana, suddenly dropped dead a few hours before the Seder.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj399SYOiN7JzA3f2HnUiu3Owolwv1XjIoLEiHco0AEj09PDG_-gUiQsUCn4VssUt3W69mrbKnvIc4FBGdopoBvkkNXfijuJ43Wv413jW5G3-2XfrH0y1DcyktLylG_Kv4ZJ5srjGoifi2HfJZR3AgwZu2bLdLhBJV9BNvOj48dsrmyyoYsPsmWV5ZY/s324/Shana.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="248" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj399SYOiN7JzA3f2HnUiu3Owolwv1XjIoLEiHco0AEj09PDG_-gUiQsUCn4VssUt3W69mrbKnvIc4FBGdopoBvkkNXfijuJ43Wv413jW5G3-2XfrH0y1DcyktLylG_Kv4ZJ5srjGoifi2HfJZR3AgwZu2bLdLhBJV9BNvOj48dsrmyyoYsPsmWV5ZY/s320/Shana.gif" width="245" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Shana Nova Borenstein, 1982-2020</div><br /><p>Losing a child, at any age, is nothing like losing a parent at the end of a long life. It tears at the foundation of everything you have lived for.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"It is not now as it hath been of yore;</i></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Turn wheresoe'er I may,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>By night or day.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The things which I have seen I now can see no more."</i></div></i></div><p>The year that followed was the worst of my life. In addition to losing Shana suddenly, we lost my daughter Lea's husband, Mike, slowly to brain cancer, while my wife and I cared for our three young, soon to be fatherless granddaughters. The year included Mike's fourth and fifth brain surgeries, four minor surgeries for Lea herself, a miscarriage for my youngest daughter, and heart surgery for me, to implant a defibrillator. Along the way, my wife was suffering terrible back pain but postponing surgery to care for the rest of us. It was, in short, a dreadful year, and at Passover in 2021, just 3 months after Mike's death, Shana's Yahrtzeit felt like another blow, the reopening of a still raw wound, and not at all like the first step towards healing.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke</i></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The years to bring the inevitable yoke,</i></div></i><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?</i></div></i><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,</i></div></i><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And custom lie upon thee with a weight,</i></div></i><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!</i></div></i></div><p>This year is very different. For starters, my life has been utterly <a href="https://theviewfromguppylake.blogspot.com/2021/09/i-am-reborn-after-medical-miracle.html" target="_blank">transformed by a medical miracle</a>, leaving me in the best physical and mental health of my entire life, and rather more inclined to embrace comfort, solace, and hope where I can find them. </p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Rainbow comes and goes,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And lovely is the Rose,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Moon doth with delight</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Look round her when the heavens are bare,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Waters on a starry night</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Are beautiful and fair</i></div><p>Moreover, my physical and emotional rebirth was followed by a career change that enabled me to return, this spring, after 30 years of far too much travel, to one of my greatest loves, choral singing. And among the pieces I practiced for my first concert, to take place shortly after Passover, was Hagenberg's musical setting of Wordsworth's poem. Like most singers, I can enjoy singing almost anything, but particular moments can reward us with a powerful physical thrill not entirely unlike erotic ecstasy. For me there is such a moment -- at around 2:30 in the YouTube recording -- where we tenors briefly get to carry the melody, and I can think only of Shana:</p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The sunshine is a glorious birth;</i></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>But yet I know, where'er I go,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.</i></div></i></div><p>The tenors are mostly alone as we conclude this phrase, making any errors excruciatingly obvious. It's not easy to sing this lovely line with a clear and steady voice through my tears. But I feel like a bridegroom stomping on a glass, determinedly embracing the possibility of joy without ever forgetting the saddest of times.</p><p>There is a part of me that feels guilty to have enjoyed the best year of my life so soon after losing a beloved daughter and son-in-law. But my world has been suddenly, as in Wordsworth's romantic youth, "apparelled in celestial light," a light that illluminates both the glory of today and the grief at the glory that is gone.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>What though the radiance which was once so bright</i></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Be now for ever taken from my sight,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Though nothing can bring back the hour</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>We will grieve not, rather find</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Strength in what remains behind;</i></div></i></div><p>At the Passover Seder, we hear about the sufferings of our ancestors in slavery and the triumph of their liberation. We argue over words of wisdom from rabbis long gone, reminisce about more recently departed parents and grandparents, and I inevitably tell jokes about my father. The shadow of my departed daughter will loom over every Seder that remains to me, but I know I will find strength in what remains behind: my wife, daughters, grandchildren, and a much wider loving community of relatives and friends. It is not hard to find strength amid such gifts, only to muster the discipline to focus on what remains rather than what is lost.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Thanks to the human heart by which we live,</i></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>To me the meanest flower that blows can give</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.</i></div></i></div><p>Until these last two years, I'm not sure I ever had any thoughts "too deep for tears." The happiness that I have found in the last year is imperfect, but I can sense, in my bones, an inkling of a larger picture, in which the world may in fact make sense in a manner too big and glorious for my tiny brain to understand, but from which my slowly broadening heart can always hope to take comfort.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU5AEeLMBBEpnlETtTtgPmxJ-9_aFxXMgNeX0ELstzS7fj431v8mliH1rAmN935dcWwM_U7sMqtKbEdKIIZeVLYxGlfW68KiK3rePgzrs8iqEwTLOTGS6O0MFBkoafWboDzwxZTcYroIFejXGQjIm-98ZGhiIl4-za4iyk9dgOA0wTX6lCqpg77JcO/s666/shana-meme.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="666" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU5AEeLMBBEpnlETtTtgPmxJ-9_aFxXMgNeX0ELstzS7fj431v8mliH1rAmN935dcWwM_U7sMqtKbEdKIIZeVLYxGlfW68KiK3rePgzrs8iqEwTLOTGS6O0MFBkoafWboDzwxZTcYroIFejXGQjIm-98ZGhiIl4-za4iyk9dgOA0wTX6lCqpg77JcO/s320/shana-meme.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>(*) Words from <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood">William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"</a></p><p>Music by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0CVaoSSTEk">Elaine Hagenberg, "There Was a Time"</a></p><div><br /></div>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-84863243264816484652022-03-14T08:57:00.000-07:002022-03-14T08:57:24.122-07:00The Hopeful Solace of Randomness<p>Just two years ago, I was
a seeker, hoping to find some purpose underlying my relatively
fortunate life. But after the last two years, the very idea seems
absurd. Today, I find hope
and comfort in the world's randomness. If God plays dice with the
universe, I think we may be in the best of all possible worlds.</p><p>
My first sixty years were mostly very good. Then in 2019, after
collapsing on the street, I learned that I was facing open heart
surgery, specifically a septal
myectomy, in which the wall of my heart would be shaved down from the
inside. I'd known for decades that I had
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), but until then I had been considered
asymptomatic.
</p><p>
A septal myectomy is major surgery, to be followed by months of recovery. My
odds overall were pretty good, but I'm a mathematician, and I knew
that the odds
of my dying were better than any lottery ticket ever printed.
</p><p>
Weirdly, however, I was told that this potentially deadly surgery was not urgent,
and that the timing was up to me. My increased risk of sudden cardiac
death could be
managed with a much smaller surgery to implant a cardiac
defibrillator. But without the big surgery, my symptoms would grow
steadily worse, while the risks of the surgery would also grow as I
aged. At 62, I didn't want to wait until both my quality of life and my
chances of recovery were much worse, but I wanted some time to prepare
myself. I gave myself a year. I decided to have the big surgery at the end
of 2020. I began a slow process of sorting out my finances and affairs,
winding down my career, and preparing myself emotionally and
spiritually for the possibility that my life was nearing its end.
</p><p>
Naively, I saw dying in surgery as the worst-case scenario. But the pandemic
year brought a torrent of suffering to my family, including the sudden death of one daughter, the very slow death
of another's husband (as we cared for three young grandchildren), a third's miscarriage, and
roughly a dozen surgeries, debilitating illnesses, and other emergencies in my immediate family. As the pandemic
raged, our family was broken with grief.
</p><p>
</p><p>As a mathematically minded person, all through this I kept musing
on the unlikeliness of encountering so many crises and tragedies in
such a short time, in stark contrast to the experience of my previous
six decades. It was an impressive streak of bad luck, but luck is a
concept that only makes sense in a world with a purpose. In a
purposeless world, events are random. Past effects do not predict
future events, and no mysterious cosmic hand is guiding events. Over the long
run, things even out, or more technically, "revert to the mean."
I took a great deal of comfort from
the thought of reversion to the mean. I wanted to believe that the
next year was likely to be just "average," a big step up from the
nightmare I was living. My belief in reversion to the mean was more
comforting than any God so cruel as to treat me like Job, or any
supernatural world where such tragedies served a
necessary purpose. At least in a random world, the universe wasn't
conspiring against me.
</p><p>
With my son-in-law dying I did not, as planned, have my big surgery in December 2020.
I decided to put it off one
more year, though my symptoms were slowly worsening. By June, I
couldn't climb more than a dozen or so steps without being out of
breath. I was phasing myself into retirement, reaching out to old friends about unfinished business, and
generally trying to prepare myself to face the surgery without regrets.
</p><p>
And then a miracle occurred.
</p><p>I enrolled in a clinical trial of a new
medication. Within a week, all of my symptoms
completely vanished. But it didn't stop there: my lifelong heart
murmur vanished as well. Even more surprisingly,
I was also relieved of
lifelong athletic limitations I had never known were due to HCM. A
few weeks after starting the drug, I climbed
300 steps and immediately began jogging out of sheer elation. I found
I could run more than I ever could when I was as a child. At
63, I was in the best shape of my life.
</p><p>
This triggered a series of insights into my
childhood, epiphanies about my life experience, and -- instead of
retirement -- an exciting new job at 64. After my hellish 2020, there was no
doubt that 2021 was the best year of my life. As I write this, nine months after the
miracle, I am healthier, happier, and more hopeful than I have
ever been.
</p><p>
The apparent randomness
of all of this was inescapable. I had done nothing to cause or
deserve my miracle. With my year of tragedies fresh in
mind, I knew my fortunes could reverse
again at any moment. I had always believed in
savoring the good in the present moment, but had found it hard
to do in practice. Now, knowing randomness to my bones,
savoring the moment feels like the most natural thing in the
world. My belief in life's randomness had been a comfort to me in
hard times, and it became a constant reminder to savor the good times.
</p><p>Obviously my cure was the kind of miracle anyone would rejoice in.
But having it happen almost immediately after all that illness and
death was like going straight from a sauna to an icy pond. Having
survived the shock, I feel like I am seeing things more clearly than
ever before.
</p><p>
I don't pretend to actually know whether life has a purpose. I've looked pretty
hard for one, but then I'm just a short-lived primate orbiting a minor star
among 200 sextillion others. If there is a purpose, I doubt that I
could understand or affect it, even if I somehow managed to find it. Whether or not the
world is random and purposeless, it will always seem that way to my
limited mind.
</p><p>What I've come to realize, however, is that this is great news.
The big questions are simply unanswerable, and there's no beyond-doubt
evidence of a greater purpose -- of God, karma, or destiny plotting a
coherent path for us. We have to make do with the information we
have, and there's no point in asking, "Why?"
</p><p>In a random universe, no one is watching over us, but no one is out
to get us either. Even the longest streak of apparent "luck" can turn
on a dime. In bad times, we can take comfort from reversion to the
mean, while in good times it can remind us to cherish what we have
now. Bad luck doesn't mean you're bad, and good luck doesn't mean
you're good. People who are doing better or worse than you aren't
doing so because of some cosmic design or justice. We're all in this
together, and the best strategy for a happy life is to help each other out when we can.
</p><p>
Assuming a world without purpose frees us to live our best lives,
without trying to curry favor with, second-guess, or rail against something
incomprehensibly larger than ourselves.
It illuminates the futility of wishing things were other than they
are. But we can use this knowledge to savor and share our transient joys,
to comfort and relieve each other's transient suffering, and to help
each other enjoy the ride. </p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-68739629826149293262021-12-10T06:20:00.000-08:002021-12-10T06:20:15.364-08:00How Bad Could the Coming Cryptodisasters Be?<p>The International Monetary Fund has just issued an <a href="a href=https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/imf_calls_for_crypto_regulation/" target="_blank">urgent call for cooperative international regulation of cryptocurrencies</a>. They are worried about multiple plausible scenarios in which the new technology could have disastrous economic and social consequences. </p><p>Traditionally, bankers tend to err in the direction of conservatism, so one would expect them to be cautious about such a radical, disruptive new financial technology. However, you'd also expect them to speak in measured terms framed not to cause panic, but their warnings about cryptocurrencies are uncharacteristically dire, verging on apocalyptic. Unfortunately, they may still <i>understate</i> the dangers. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1opXkdPHlSY/YbNh1sxI9GI/AAAAAAAALDo/jJZPZl4JSa8eYBn4PjcRviZFhhC220mSACNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1opXkdPHlSY/YbNh1sxI9GI/AAAAAAAALDo/jJZPZl4JSa8eYBn4PjcRviZFhhC220mSACNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="240" /></a></div><br />Human financial systems have evolved over thousands of years and, like the human body, have all sorts of adaptations for times of crisis. A human-designed system (like any or all cryptocurrencies) has not been shaped by evolution, but by programmers who NEVER anticipate everything. The likelihood of collapse in a crisis is simply much higher in an artificial system. <p></p><p>That's what happened in 1987 when program trading crashed the stock market. Fortunately in that case the damage was relatively contained, and regulations were quickly introduced to reduce the risks. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that every collapse will have so few lasting effects. Moreover, cryptocurrency is much more important and dangerous than program trading ever was.</p><p>It seems to me that if cryptocurrency isn't properly regulated by governments, it will be controlled by the most ruthless and greedy among the 1%. Those are the only two choices I see. Governments are far, far, far from perfect, but the ruthless rich are even less likely to anticipate and avoid a crypto-precipitated economic collapse. </p><p>Unfortunately, political reality means that cryptocurrency won't even begin to be properly regulated until we've endured some predictable disasters. Every technology enables new disasters, and the cryptodisasters are coming soon. Because we cannot anticipate the precise form disasters will take, we can only hope that the coming cryptodisasters will be as minor as the stock market dropping 20% one day in 1987.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-18969841207969767982021-09-08T18:36:00.001-07:002021-09-08T18:52:08.269-07:00I am reborn after a medical miracle!<p><span style="background-color: white;">I didn't come into 2021 even daring to hope for a miracle. I was pinning my hopes on a simple reversion to the mean; anything, it seemed, would be better than <a href="http://theviewfromguppylake.blogspot.com/2021/04/i-get-by-with-little-help-from-my.html">the year my family and I had in 2020</a>. But a miracle is what I got, and after</span><span style="background-color: white;"> spending much of last year complaining, I now want to share my good news with everyone in my life. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">I was doing my best to prepare myself for likely open heart surgery this winter. But thanks to an experimental drug in a clinical trial, I have, stunningly and suddenly, found myself not only relieved of my symptoms, but possibly, at 63, in the best shape of my life. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">I didn't learn that I had a congenital heart malformation (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM) until I was in my 40's, and I wasn't aware of its lifelong effect on me until just this year. </span><span style="background-color: white;">I was a terrible athlete as a child, always the last kid chosen, and never sure whether to blame my deficiencies on nature, will, or character. But</span><span style="background-color: white;"> I was fortunate in many other ways. My hyper-intellectual family put almost no value on physical achievements, so I never had a disappointed parent pushing me beyond my capability. (As it turns out, that could actually have killed me, as HCM is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes!) Moreover, in non-athletic venues I was a superstar, a child prodigy, and I grew up certain that I preferred my lot to my opposite number, the proverbial dumb jock.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">Still, I was hard on myself, always feeling that if I just tried hard enough, I ought to be able to at least, say, jog a half mile. I ignored the fact I was otherwise quite persistent, and never saw my mix of physical abilities and limitations as any kind of clue. For example, although I could never jog more than a few hundred yards, I was always an epic walker -- hiking on the Appalachian Trail as a teenager, and walking several miles daily most of my life, generally briskly enough that people with longer legs asked me to slow down. I was also a dancer, even occasionally teaching and performing, but generally needing to rest between the most vigorous dances. No one ever thought to view this as a medical mystery.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">I did know that the men in my father's family nearly all suffered sudden cardiac death in their 40's, 50's, or 60's, and I never expected a long life. My father's terror of that legacy led -- after enough false alarms to raise the issue of hypochondria -- to his diagnosis with what is now known as HCM. Because the condition is congenital, I got tested in my 40's and learned that I, too, was born with this abnormal thickening of the heart wall. Although I had a heart murmur, I didn't appear to have any other symptoms, and the doctors basically just told me to get checked regularly. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">After I turned 60, however, the symptoms began. Previously I ran out of breath quickly if I tried to run, but I could walk more or less indefinitely. Now my breath began to run out walking up hills or stairs. I pushed myself blindly until the hot August day 2 years ago when I landed in a Manhattan emergency room. After incorrectly being diagnosed with a heart attack, I learned that my symptoms were due to HCM, and was directed to a specialist.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">At the HCM clinic in Ann Arbor, I learned that I was likely to need a <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypertrophic-cardiomyopathy/multimedia/septal-myectomy-image/img-20123847">septal myectomy</a>. I had always hoped that, if the day came when a doctor delivered bad news, I would be calm and philosophical. So I listened quietly as my doctor explained the plan to crack open my chest, stop my heart, thread a knife through my aorta into my heart, and shave down the muscle of the heart wall. After they picked me up off the floor and revived me, I also learned that, horrible as that sounds, the surgical mortality is less than 1%, with a major complications rate under 5%.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">Those are good odds, but I was a math major, and if I heard of a lottery where my odds of winning approached 1%, I might actually buy a ticket. Moreover, there was no rush. HCM patients have "nearly normal" life expectancy if treated properly, but often with increasingly restricted abilities. I could defer the myectomy almost indefinitely, but my symptoms would only grow worse, as would my ability to recover from surgery as I aged. The timing of the surgery was largely up to me, and I began to plan to have it during the approaching winter.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">So I started putting my affairs in order, and even increased my walking in hope of losing weight before the surgery. Then larger matters put my little problems in perspective: over the next year, while a pandemic ravaged the globe, multiple illnesses and deaths hit my family. While I had relatively minor heart surgery to implant a cardiac defibrillator in my chest (a requirement for that "near normal" life expectancy), I deferred the big surgery for a year as my HCM symptoms slowly worsened. By June of 2021, I could only climb 15-20 steps before I needed to stop and catch my breath. And then, after the hardest year of my life, came the miracle.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">As luck would have it, my cardiologist was the lead investigator in a clinical trial of the<a href="https://www.ajmc.com/view/patients-taking-mavacamten-report-big-leaps-in-quality-of-life"> first drug ever specifically designed for HCM</a>. Within my first month on the drug, I returned to <a href="http://www.us23heritageroute.org/location.asp?ait=av&aid=28">Iargo Springs</a>, a beautiful local spot I had doubted I would ever visit again because it required climbing 300 steps. When I reached the top after stopping just once -- and only because the people I was with wanted to stop! -- I was so excited I actually jogged around the parking lot in my exuberance! </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">As of this writing, my symptoms are almost completely gone -- my cardiologist no longer even hears a heart murmur! -- and I won't need the surgery unless they return. </span><span style="background-color: white;">I feel healthier and more athletic than I did even as a child, and</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">I'm in a nearly constant state of joy and gratitude. For the first time in years, I can imagine my best days may yet be ahead of me. I am excited to see what comes next!</span></p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-34152011026981283782021-05-14T12:50:00.001-07:002021-05-15T08:44:51.602-07:00The Year of the Geese<p> It is the year of the goose at Guppy Lake. Well, geese, really -- the most ever on our little pond. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LKYiXBJCSYk/YJ6_ubo6QTI/AAAAAAAAHlk/oQscNB5RQq8COe07XntmYarq3kMi60jVgCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Six%2BGeese.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LKYiXBJCSYk/YJ6_ubo6QTI/AAAAAAAAHlk/oQscNB5RQq8COe07XntmYarq3kMi60jVgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Six%2BGeese.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>We've often had nesting geese here, but never more than one pair at a time. This year we have three pairs. It's been pretty noisy, but gradually the three allegedly-monogamous couples are settling down to being simply picturesque -- though that changes, of course, if there's the slightest hint of new arrivals, as in this video I managed to capture:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzUp4DWv2g-7EKlYQx-S2qhKZsZm0J7dhTCK1gng0om-NGt8lHj3ob1l2leAeTsFrrIlJ84nv2DTXTZQdrz9Q' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><p></p><p>In my mind, however, I also hear the ominous soundtrack of a Hitchcock movie.</p><p>Every year or so, in the spring, a pair decides to try to raise a family here. It's a big mistake; tragedy inevitably ensues.</p><p>The problem is that the body of water we call Guppy Lake is actually quite small and shallow, and not really much of a barrier to predators. But even in high water years, there are several islands in Guppy Lake that apparently look safe to geese, so they lay their eggs on them. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-quQe96aDGk4/YJ7T2LCoXGI/AAAAAAAAHnM/k9-FybZBo-Izvvgsq074ISzyjspwL4rJwCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Island%2BSwing%2BGeese.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-quQe96aDGk4/YJ7T2LCoXGI/AAAAAAAAHnM/k9-FybZBo-Izvvgsq074ISzyjspwL4rJwCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Island%2BSwing%2BGeese.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>There are few predators around here that would tangle with an adult goose, so they're mainly looking for turf on which they can defend their eggs against a direct assault. They guard the eggs well, and soon we're treated to a line of adorable little goslings, following their parents around the lake like soldiers.</p><p>Alas, it is the goslings, not the eggs, that are vulnerable. The lake's size permits weasels/stoats/ermines/fishers to attack from below, snagging a gosling before the parents have a moment's warning. A great honking lament ensues from the parents, which can last for days, reinforced as the remaining goslings are picked off, one by one. I don't think I've ever seen one survive. And the geese really do mourn.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XYgo6MZ18M0/YJ7UCC6GnoI/AAAAAAAAHnU/mzNasIuQHEcLH9REVZVZ6Kx33RFKwNPoQCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Two%2BGeese.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XYgo6MZ18M0/YJ7UCC6GnoI/AAAAAAAAHnU/mzNasIuQHEcLH9REVZVZ6Kx33RFKwNPoQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Two%2BGeese.jpg" /></a></div><p>So this year three pairs of geese are visiting the Guppy Lake Gosling Abattoir. Usually, peace and quiet are among the first words you'd use to describe Guppy Lake, but we can safely expect a record cacophony of mournful honking in the weeks to come. But timing is everything. Trina and I are about to spend a month in New York, for the birth of our newest granddaughter. If we're lucky, the folks watching our house will bear the brunt of it, while we're enjoying Manhattan's relative quiet and serenity.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vK7eKm4n1jw/YJ7UQaNh06I/AAAAAAAAHnY/2MPLots4EnsxekdasgEnmar6eiZOtFRzwCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Five%2BGeese.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vK7eKm4n1jw/YJ7UQaNh06I/AAAAAAAAHnY/2MPLots4EnsxekdasgEnmar6eiZOtFRzwCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Five%2BGeese.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /><br /></div>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-89257109924667082362021-05-10T04:20:00.002-07:002021-05-10T04:25:00.809-07:00 Modern Medicine: Our Selfishness is Our Doom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8b-ZFlz5wds/YJkYBPI-8FI/AAAAAAAAHhk/JY40uxnabdoKfN3M-OLVrQYd4oGZ_9v8ACNcBGAsYHQ/s2230/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-10%2Bat%2B7.23.24%2BAM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1046" data-original-width="2230" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8b-ZFlz5wds/YJkYBPI-8FI/AAAAAAAAHhk/JY40uxnabdoKfN3M-OLVrQYd4oGZ_9v8ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-10%2Bat%2B7.23.24%2BAM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>I am deeply appreciative of the miracles of modern medicine. I cannot help but feel grateful, in particular, for being able to participate in a clinical trial of a new drug that might help me avoid open heart surgery. Few living creatures can escape a certain level of selfishness when it comes to the desire to stay alive.</p><p>But as we all should know by now, our miraculous technologies come at a cost. In her fascinating book "Lightning Flowers," Katherine Standefer investigates the ecological and human cost of the computer that lives inside her chest -- and mine -- in the astonishing expectation that it will bring us back from the dead if necessary. That cost is measured, among other ways, in Third World mines that destroy forests, rivers, and communities of human beings. </p><p>How much collateral damage is acceptable as the cost of saving a geriatric life? I fear that modern medicine has largerly failed to properly consider the broader cost of many of its interventions. </p><p>Case in point: Every month, my clinical trial requires me to go to the hospital in Ann Arbor for some tests and to be given my new month's dosage of the experimental drug or placebo. It's important that they take back any pills I have left, and give me all new pills, because the ghost in the machine at the heart of the study may have changed my dosage for the month.</p><p>Unfortunately, one month I couldn't hang around long enough for the new pills. I could have come back, but they offerred to send the pills by courier. It seemed a little decadent, but they offered, so I said yes, and the pills were promptly delivered. What was delivered was 30 ordinary sized pill capsules. They did not need refrigeration, and were not toxic to touch like chemotherapy drugs. Perfectly ordinary capsules, probably containing nothing but sugar. For some reason, they put them in two bottles, either of which would be big enough for all of them:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-floC3_hHAlQ/YJkU0KSuZKI/AAAAAAAAHgw/OdY0nM48NPwS0OITrG8LK36hhHSM_4NkQCNcBGAsYHQ/s786/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.25.36%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="688" data-original-width="786" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-floC3_hHAlQ/YJkU0KSuZKI/AAAAAAAAHgw/OdY0nM48NPwS0OITrG8LK36hhHSM_4NkQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.25.36%2BAM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>They put each of these little pill bottles inside a larger pill bottle:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cL7HqdDco2A/YJkU7IAPtMI/AAAAAAAAHg0/XurFl-8nMW83SdKQmRz_8zudiQFPjUw8ACNcBGAsYHQ/s1136/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.26.05%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1136" data-original-width="834" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cL7HqdDco2A/YJkU7IAPtMI/AAAAAAAAHg0/XurFl-8nMW83SdKQmRz_8zudiQFPjUw8ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.26.05%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><p>Despite the fact that the medicine is not toxic to touch and does not require refrigeration, they included a mask and gloves, and an electronic temperature monitor that documented the temperature in transport:</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w_YNoRkxq9U/YJkVDKX6CGI/AAAAAAAAHg4/ZBc_btnFyy05Bbm3kqYYl3Z0tVDkrtD5wCNcBGAsYHQ/s950/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.25.53%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="844" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w_YNoRkxq9U/YJkVDKX6CGI/AAAAAAAAHg4/ZBc_btnFyy05Bbm3kqYYl3Z0tVDkrtD5wCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.25.53%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>They put all this inside an 8" x 8" cardboard box, "protected" by 12 Koolit gel packs:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SyRV-p7JD0Y/YJkV7yyQFqI/AAAAAAAAHhI/bnAYzBFQgG4eazzi0psafDX4NLL_K9E4wCNcBGAsYHQ/s1298/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-10%2Bat%2B7.14.26%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1278" data-original-width="1298" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SyRV-p7JD0Y/YJkV7yyQFqI/AAAAAAAAHhI/bnAYzBFQgG4eazzi0psafDX4NLL_K9E4wCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-10%2Bat%2B7.14.26%2BAM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>They then put that box inside another cardboard box, this one 9" x 9" with lots of styrofoam glued onto it, rendering it unrecyclable. They then put that box inside a 17" styrofoam cooler, specially shaped to fit around the styrofoam glued onto the 9x9 box and immobilize it. Before closing the top on the styrofoam box, they threw in four more Koolit gel packs, each of them 3 times as large as the previous 12. The styrofoam box was then placed inside a final cardboard box, 17.5"x17.5", and proudly labelled "KoolTempGTS Excel Qualified Shipping System"</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qTxAVMlurIA/YJkWKqQdk9I/AAAAAAAAHhM/PXTP-mUtFs4e58TdRGGu1pIJVyzk4XOIQCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.27.27%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1208" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qTxAVMlurIA/YJkWKqQdk9I/AAAAAAAAHhM/PXTP-mUtFs4e58TdRGGu1pIJVyzk4XOIQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-09%2Bat%2B11.27.27%2BAM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>I'm 63 years old. It would certainly be nice to have a couple more decades, but modern technology has already made that pretty likely -- the heart surgery that would fix my problem is astonishingly invasive, but the mortality is less than 1%, and the serious complication rate under 4%. This new medication is being developed not so much to save my life as to do so more *conveniently*.</p><p>I'm not fishing for compliments when I say that I don't think destroying habitats, rivers, watersheds, and the entire cultures of some ancient communities we dismiss as "primitive" can possibly be justified by it making my path to a longer life more convenient.</p><p>Fortunately, I really don't believe it's an all or nothing game. The whole point is how unnecessary this waste is. For 30 pills, they sent me four plastic bottles, an electronic temperature monintor (disposable, apparently), twelve POUNDS of gel pack at God knows what environmental cost, three cardboard boxes, one of them bristling with non-recyclable styrofoam, and a styrofoam cooler big enough for two dozen beverage cans. </p><p>They could have delivered me these pills in the smallest size of plastic bag the supermarket sells. I'm deeply grateful that so many people are doing research and studies that could extend and enhance my life. But couldn't they think about the planet at the same time? Shouldn't the professional vows that doctors take, which are focused on the welfare of the patient, take into consideration the longer-term well-being of the patients and their descendants?</p><div><br /></div>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-52991621846940449782021-04-19T05:58:00.000-07:002021-04-19T05:58:15.809-07:00I Get By With a Little Help From My Coworkers<p>No one has ever described me as the strong, silent type. For a baby boomer male, I’m rather quick to share my feelings. But it would probably surprise some people to know that, having been raised amidst cultural expectations of male stoicism, I still suppress quite a bit. When things were tough, I have more often than not simply said, “Fine thanks, how are you?” – especially at work, in the name of professionalism.</p><p>But then came 2020.</p><p>There was the pandemic, of course, and the consequent economic and racial inequities, and the terrible incivility of a toxic election. And while my wife Trina and I own an Airbnb that was hard hit, all of that was just a sideshow for us.</p><p>To summarize quickly: In February we went to Chicago to help care for our granddaughters (8-11) while our daughter Lea had esophageal surgery. During her recovery, her husband Mike had a recurrence of his brain cancer, so we stayed for another surgery. Then COVID hit and we became a "pod" with our daughter Miriam and her family, all camping out at Lea's house for nearly ten months. Then our daughter Shana died suddenly. Then we spent the rest of the year caring for the girls and nursing Mike through two surgeries until his ultimate slow demise January 10. Along the way I had heart surgery. Lea had several minor surgeries. Miriam miscarried. Several other close relatives battled life-threatening illnesses. And through all this, Trina was delaying much-needed back surgery to care for others despite tremendous pain. She finally had successful surgery in March, which we hope will prove to be the final echo of a horrendous year. </p><p>I decided, fairly early on, that “Fine, thanks” was not going to cut it for me in 2020. When anyone asked, I tried to answer succinctly but factually, to the predictable horror of a friendly coworker, or even stranger. I was surprised to find that speaking about these horrors, even to people I barely knew, was helpful, simply because I no longer had to work to hold it all inside. I was most hesitant about unburdening myself at work, but that’s where I got the biggest surprise.</p><p>I’m fortunate to work for a company, Mimecast, whose CEO has established from the top a culture of caring for one another. With this encouragement, my colleagues faced no inhibitions to their natural empathy. They didn’t just put up with the difficulties my personal life was causing, but went out of the way to offer help and comfort.</p><p>When I missed all or part of a meeting because I was needed to help Mike, or to help with the grandchildren’s virtual schooling – I was de facto tech support for the household – my co-workers didn’t just put up with me. They urged me not to worry about it, briefed me on what I missed or met with me separately, or even offered to cover some of my work. </p><p>As the year went on, it felt like nearly every meeting of my work group began with questions about how I and my family were doing, and whether there was anything anyone in the company could do to help. And on the few occasions there were, it was forthcoming in an instant. My memory of the first dark weeks after my daughter died is a blur, and I honestly have no idea how many of my work duties I might have missed, because no one troubled me with it. My manager stepped in and covered for some of my most urgent tasks, and throughout the year my colleagues picked up the pieces I was struggling with, small and large.</p><p>None of the many kindnesses, of course, could make a real dent in the overwhelming sorrow that was my life in 2020. But the help and, yes, the love of my coworkers minimized my sense of guilt at work, made me more effective with the time I had, and reminded me of the world of goodness and joy that seemed temporarily out of reach.</p><p>I know that Mimecast is special in this regard. I don’t know of any other companies whose CEO responded to the pandemic by starting a weekly podcast he called his “Shower of Love,” in which he dealt with the concerns of the company and the needs of the employees as equally important parts of our mission. But I suspect that even in the most toxic of workplaces, employees sincerely care about each other, if not the corporate mission.</p><p>During the pandemic, many of us worked from home and experienced profound isolation from our colleagues and the world. When we said we missed going to work, it was usually our coworkers we were missing, not the coffee machine. The idea that at work we are cogs in a corporate machine began to break down, to reveal the underlying truth that we, as human beings, are shaped by our relationships with others. Our satisfaction at work has far less to do with the code or spreadsheets we produce than with the way the person at the front desk smiles when we walk in the door, or the moment the person in the next cubicle invites us to share a coffee break.</p><p>None of this was a great secret, but I had nonetheless underestimated the importance of my work relationships. In 2020 I came to realize that many of the people I might have described as “cordial coworkers” were in fact real friends who played by an unwritten code of emotional restraint. There’s nothing that will bring this home quite like having a room (in this case virtual) full of people delay the “real purpose” of a meeting to find out how you’re doing this week.</p><p>Not all companies are so supportive, but they should be. Far from paying a price for encouraging us to care for one another, Mimecast has prospered through the pandemic and the transition to working from home. And if the people I know are any indication, our dedication to seeing the company succeed has only deepened with the outpouring of caring that went, not just to me, but to everyone in the company, in a time where one could safely assume that nearly everyone was struggling.</p><p>Many years ago, I lived at a great distance from the headquarters of a company I co-founded, and flew in every month or so. As a founder I was permitted to meddle in just about anything. So when I heard, one visit, that a new director-level hire wasn’t working out, and was viewed as a cold fish, unwilling to make friends with anyone, I decided to pay her a visit. As I talked with her, I gently pried out of her the fact that, in between her hiring and her first day of work, her fiance had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Her desire to act professonal led her to mask the raw new wounds of her grief, which was what made her seem cold. I persuaded her that this had been a mistake, and that it would be better for all if she didn’t have to hide her tragedy. She changed her approach, and quickly became a valued, respected, and cared-for member of the team.</p><p>For too long, too many of us have divided our lives between work and “real life” – as if we check our humanity at the office door. That has been a recipe for preoccupied workers struggling to hide their personal troubles, with an inevitable productivity cost. I’ve come to believe that a company is more likely to prosper, particularly against strong headwinds, if the workers feel that they and the company all have each other’s backs, and care about each other as human beings.</p><p>Toxic masculinity, in particular, has played too large a role in shaping what we think of as professional work attitudes for both men and women. There’s no reason we should all try to be “tough guys” at work. The ideal should be a team of people who support each other while they strive towards a common goal. Everyone needs to think about how much of a company's success is caused by the desire of their workers to continue as a team that cares for one another.</p><p>John Lennon wrote that he got by "with a little help from my friends.” But surely those friends included his co-workers Paul, George, and Ringo. Work demands professionalism, but professionalism doesn't require that we suppress our humanity. Given how many hours we spend working, we need to start acknowledging that our "work friends" are among the most important ones we have.</p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-85905218574474778482020-12-14T14:07:00.000-08:002020-12-14T14:07:59.173-08:00Section 230 Lessons from Pornhub's Retreat<p>Under pressure from Visa and MasterCard, pornhub, the world's largest porn empire, has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55304115" target="_blank">abruptly taken the majority of its videos offline</a>, under pressure because its unvetted user-supplied videos included depictions of terrible crimes.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">It's long overdue for porn sites to take responsibility for user-uploaded atrocities.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But pressuring Pornhub on this issue is only feasible due to the near-universal condemnation of the content, the relatively clear-cut criteria for banning content, and the reality that Visa and MasterCard are the global porn police.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Most other content disputes, however, can’t so easily reach consensus on questions of clarity, morality, and practicality.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That’s why we have section 230.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Without section 230, almost any content provider (particularly social media) would be vulnerable to legal challenges not just over explicit and clearly illegal depictions of rape and child pornography, but over nearly any kind of content dispute, initiated by</span> nearly anyone, in nearly any venue, and nearly always without recourse to an all-powerful enforcement authority.</p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Content providers would inevitably become more lawsuit-averse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>One might imagine that the legal burdens of a 230-free world might tend to drive out extremes and nudge our discourse back to a happier centrism. But unfortunately, in the legal arena it's likely that the "center" would be defined largely by wealth and power, among other things.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> The most marginalized voices would have the least room even to express their views in public.</span></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">What kinds of content might dwindle in a world without section 230?</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(6, 6, 6); background-color: white; color: #060606; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-25535764123154033772020-12-09T15:50:00.000-08:002020-12-09T15:50:20.125-08:00My Br@ther's Dementia and Bad UX Design <p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the middle of the day, the networked Brother printer stopped working.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Although I was hundreds of miles from my Ph.D. hood, I remembered the sacred incantation:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>reboot everything.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Nowadays this is almost a cure-all, but not so this time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> I r</span>ebooted the printer, network, and client.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> No Joy</span>.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I checked the printer’s configuration.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In a sudden fit of dementia, it had completely forgotten the wireless network.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So I configured it anew, and… it told me I had the wrong wifi access code.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Now, this is a password that is easy to mistype, so I tried again. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then I questioned my memory and tried a variant a few times. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then I went to my son-in-law and confirmed my original memory of the password.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With renewed certainty, I tried again.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Several times.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Nope.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Adding insult to injury, my helpful Brother printed an error page every time the authentication failed, so every password attempt killed a bit of a tree.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And that’s when I happened to notice something squirrelly about the Brother keyboard.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Throwing caution to the wind, I will reveal that the access code I was typing contained an “@“ sign. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The Brother printer helpfully provides an @ on the primary keyboard — prioritizing it over even the comma, as if one types email addresses into the printer all that often — and that’s what I had been using -- lower right, above the friendly "OK":<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dFZt2ZowrTQ/X9Ff0oBPVrI/AAAAAAAAGMI/iAF3LueztAsqfpBijLU0x9U0gl6tKJWHwCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/PXL_20201209_225719972.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dFZt2ZowrTQ/X9Ff0oBPVrI/AAAAAAAAGMI/iAF3LueztAsqfpBijLU0x9U0gl6tKJWHwCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/PXL_20201209_225719972.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But then, by chance, I noticed something odd:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the tertiary keyboard is all symbols, and it ALSO has an @ -- at far right, center:</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fpNoiqY8mC8/X9Ff0jWCT4I/AAAAAAAAGMM/jtx7dtJBJbgbUGw-xgpUbDBBHnOaYzRmgCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/PXL_20201209_225731453.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fpNoiqY8mC8/X9Ff0jWCT4I/AAAAAAAAGMM/jtx7dtJBJbgbUGw-xgpUbDBBHnOaYzRmgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/PXL_20201209_225731453.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I tried one more time, now using the @ from the third screen rather than the first.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Worked perfectly.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It's an old printer, but you'd have to be older than me for this to be an acceptable design flaw. A novel entry in the User Interface Hall of Shame.</p>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-57059627167162832682017-07-12T08:49:00.001-07:002017-07-12T08:55:15.918-07:00Eight Years Without Net Neutrality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "san francisco" , , , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px; white-space: pre-wrap;">My whimsical contribution to the day of action for net neutrality can be found at:</span><br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-80411963505047321542015-12-09T06:40:00.004-08:002015-12-09T06:40:43.650-08:00Judith Glasser, 1936-2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For decades, comics in search of easy laughs have fallen back on the mother-in-law joke. Apparently enough people have difficult relationships with their mothers-in-law that they're a reliable way to get a few laughs out of even the toughest crowds.<br />
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For over 40 years, however, my response to such jokes has been to thank my lucky stars. My mother-in-law, Judith Glasser, was one of the finest people I've ever known. Her compassion, her patience, and her willingness to do whatever it takes to help those around her have been an inspiration to me and to almost everyone lucky enough to known her.<br />
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The Talmud teaches that some of our moral obligations are absolute, but others are more contingent: if you are walking through the woods and find a baby bird that has fallen out of its nest, you have a responsibility to try to help it if you can, but you have no responsibility to comb the woods in search of distressed birds. In other words, as a finite being in a specific time and place, you can't do everything, and you have the greatest and deepest responsibility to those nearest you. A refugee on the other side of the planet deserves what support and assistance you can provide, but a troubled person in your own community demands your time and attention.<br />
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Judith's patience and compassion seemed infinite to me. Wherever she lived, she attracted people who needed her, and she would spend long hours talking through their problems, encouraging them, and often assisting them in more concrete ways. Often these were difficult people with difficult problems, for whom few others had the patience, but Judith always did. She never brokered a peace deal across an ocean, or otherwise drew the attention of the wider world. She simply transformed the lives, one at a time, of the baby birds she found in her path. And by both words and example she encouraged everyone around her to make better choices, to do the right thing, to be better people.<br />
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In recent years, Judith and Larry spent their winters in Spain, where Judith saw something special in a shy Spanish high school girl, beyond the constrained brightness permitted by the Spanish school system, and spent three winters tutoring and encouraging her. This very month, she is applying to go to university in America, another life changed by Judith, this time across a gulf of culture and sixty years of age.<br />
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Alas, she was the last baby bird. Last month Judith died suddenly, while she and Larry were in Valladolid, distant from all their relatives. Having lost both my parents, I thought myself somwhat hardened, but have been surprised at the depth of my grief. The world without Judith seems a harsher, less caring place. It seems to me that the only appropriate tribute is for those of us who loved her to find a way to ourselves be more caring, compassionate, and patient. I doubt that I can live up to her example, but in her memory I will try to come a bit closer.<br />
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[Donations in honor of Judith Glasser may be made to: Planned Parenthood, 160 Stone St., Watertown, NY 13601-3250, or to the local animal shelter in Potsdam - 17 Madrid Ave, Potsdam, NY 13676.]<br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-8427069268291164272015-01-26T21:29:00.000-08:002015-01-27T16:49:03.696-08:00Never Take Color for Granted<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chris is seeing blue & yellow in art for the first time. At the aquarium, he saw fish and coral where he'd previously seen blurs.</td></tr>
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It would be difficult to overstate how much my life has changed since, about 4 months ago, I took<a href="http://theviewfromguppylake.blogspot.com/2014/10/discovering-color-at-age-57.html" target="_blank"> a big step away from color blindness. </a><br />
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People close to me have have noted changes in my personality -- they say I'm more patient, relaxed, or happy. I suspect it's all true.<br />
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But after four months of color, today was another notable day. For the first time in four months, I took color for granted.<br />
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I hope I never do it again.<br />
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In my defense I can say that I had just spent a grueling but exciting weekend in Chicago, filming other color blind people seeing colors for the first time, using the new AmplifEye prototype digital technology for bringing color to the color blind.<br />
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I got home from Chicago after midnight Sunday, intending to go straight to sleep, but made the fatal mistake of "peeking" at the 63 gigabytes of video from the weekend. The video shows unmistakable success in bringing color to the color blind. I fell asleep at 5, woke up in a daze at 9, and was passably lucid in the afternoon, when I drove into town to buy groceries.<br />
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As I was getting into the car, I realized I had left my color-correcting glasses inside. They're usually around my neck, but in my mental fog I had left them on my dresser. I was cold, and decided that I could do without color for a run to the grocery store. I took color for granted.<br />
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I didn't miss color on the drive to the grocery -- pretty much everything is white this time of year. Entering the store, I came face to face with the produce.<br />
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For 57 color blind years, I had I bought produce without much trouble. The only real problem for me was determining whether bananas were ripe. In my previous life, I would have stopped a friendly looking person, explained that I was color blind, and asked which bananas to buy.<br />
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I couldn't do it. My color blindness never used to feel like a handicap, but now it did. Rather than beg a stranger for banana help, I bought a pomegranate.<br />
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The bananas didn't matter. What mattered was... everything else. Surrounded by fruits and vegetables, I was perfectly qualified to transact the commercial business of buying non-banana groceries. But I have taken a bite of the color apple, and I am no longer innocent of the knowledge of what I'm missing. Looking at the produce was the antimatter equivalent of a "wow" moment. In a word, it was sad.<br />
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To date we've tested 3 other color blind people using the AmplifEye technology. Every "wow" -- and there are plenty of them -- has a tinge of regret for years lost without color. Even 17 year old Chris spoke of the time he had lost.<br />
<br />
I've turned my own 57-year tinge of regret into a new mission. I want to give the gift of color to every color blind child, at the earliest age possible. The earlier kids get treatment, the more colors they will learn to see, and the less they will ever need to regret.<br />
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As a few of you know, I'm working my way up to a crowdfunding effort to turn the AmplifEye prototype into a reality. Whether that's news to you or not, I invite your comments on this draft explanation of what we want to do:<br />
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<a href="http://amplifeye.vision/">http://AmplifEye.vision</a><br />
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Life is worth living without color. The color blind don't need to be pitied. As far as handicaps go, color blindness is a pretty small one. But everyone deserves color in their life. In a few weeks, I'll be asking for your help spreading the word about the crowdfunding. But in the meantime, consider this: 1 out of 12 males (and 1 in 200 women) is color blind, with half of them considered moderate to severe. How many of the people you care about are colorblind? Who are they? And what would you do if you knew you could bring color into their lives?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CsPBCf4_fhY/VMcenSygvhI/AAAAAAAAAhQ/kYy_lkzKHHA/s1600/JohnAndVanGoghsMom.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CsPBCf4_fhY/VMcenSygvhI/AAAAAAAAAhQ/kYy_lkzKHHA/s1600/JohnAndVanGoghsMom.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John, seeing green in Van Gogh for the first time. Pictures of forests also astonished him. I, on the other hand, was gobsmacked by the red in sunsets.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-11833524880461653052014-10-13T09:35:00.001-07:002014-12-03T13:17:42.442-08:00Discovering Color at Age 57<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CcpOdkAEVtk/VDv84FIxe9I/AAAAAAAAAd4/9fJVD3i-YIE/s1600/Summer1979TroutLakeSunset.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CcpOdkAEVtk/VDv84FIxe9I/AAAAAAAAAd4/9fJVD3i-YIE/s1600/Summer1979TroutLakeSunset.jpg" height="247" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I've been seeing these sunsets for 35 years... but not really.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Severely color-blind from birth, in the last few weeks I have gained the ability to see more (by no means all) colors. I can't imagine that my writing skills are up to this task, but I feel the need to try to explain what it has been like.<br />
<br />
I've always been interested in the possibility of treating my color-blindness, and had tried a half-dozen technologies before. Some, like the high-tech <a href="http://enchroma.com/" target="_blank">Enchroma</a> lenses, simply didn't do very much for me, probably because my color blindness is too severe. Others, using tinted glassses, only worked a little bit, and only on the brightest of sunny days; I coudn't wear them in low light. And some required contact lenses, to which I could never adjust. In any case, all such technologies must be used nearly full time for several weeks before the brain rewires itself, and I never got that far.<br />
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Recently, however, the good folks at <a href="http://www.harrisvilleeyecare.com/" target="_blank">Harrisville Eye Care</a> set me up with a pair of glasses that used a much lighter tint, which is apparently what I needed. I can wear them indoors in relatively low light, which means I was finally able to wear them long enough to start to see a major effect.<br />
<br />
That effect was just beginning to kick in, the week before last, when my wife and I went on a road trip, starting in Chicago, where my granddaughters live. They quickly sat me down to watch The Wizard of Oz with them. Now, I'm only red-green color-blind; I can see blues and yellows just fine. So I knew to expect colors when Dorothy opened the door after arriving in Oz. But really, I didn't know. Munchkinland was a riot of unexpected beauty. I managed to cry quietly, without (I think) the girls noticing.<br />
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I've always enjoyed movies, but now I want to rewatch any that are noted for their use of color.<br />
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Emboldened by that experience, we took a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I have largely avoided art museums all my life, because they tend to be very frustrating. Many impressionist paintings were simply incomprehensible blurs to me. But this time was different. Some of them were still inscrutable, but others were a revelation. I stood for fifteen minutes just staring at Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte." My artist daughter gleefully guided me around, explaining colors to me, while the other three grandparents took the children to exhibits like the Thorne Rooms.<br />
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After 57 years on this planet, I suddenly like art museums.<br />
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From Chicago we drove to northern New York, where Trina's parents live. On the drive there, Trina pointed out the trees changing color, but I was able to see only a bit of difference there. I figured it was too subtle, and that I was still too color blind to appreciate autumn.<br />
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Trina's parents live in a cabin on a hill with a view westward over Trout Lake. It's famous for its sunsets, of which I have seen hundreds over the years. I've always loved sunsets, and I was eager to see what my new glasses might add. Well before the sun began to set, I settled in on the couch, where I could simply look to the right to see the show.<br />
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Of course, I got wrapped up in working on my computer, and lost track of time as the sunset got under way. I didn't look up until my father-in-law casually said, to no one in particular, "nice sunset." I turned my head to the right, and my entire world changed.<br />
<br />
I beheld a fiery sky, not just with more colors than I'd seen before, but extending far further in every direction than I'd ever imagined. I immediately gasped so loudly that everyone in the house wanted to know what was wrong. My jaw dropped and my hand clamped over my face, but I wasn't actually thinking anything. The usual constant chatter of consciousness was simply gone, and for perhaps a few seconds, as the tears poured down my face, I was nothing but pure sensation, swimming in a sea of unfathomable beauty.<br />
<br />
After seeing thousands of sunsets, I had finally seen a sunset.<br />
<br />
Most surprising, though, was what happened after that. My first conscious thought, emerging from that sea of bliss, was completely unexpected: "Perhaps there really is a God."<br />
<br />
If you know me, and my long history with religion, you know that this wasn't a casual thought. In high school I stepped beyond my Jewish background and immersed myself in other religions -- a fundamentalist Christian prayer group, a Nichiren Buddhist sect, and the Bahai faith, for starters. Then in college, I majored in comparative religions, with a particular interest in Zen Buddhism. I was almost the textbook definition of an agnostic. But over the years, cynicism and rationalism took over, and by the time Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush began demonstrating their competing visions of God's will, I was calling myself an atheist. But in that one instant of beauty, I again became an agnostic. I don't think I ever truly understood the concept of gratuitous beauty as evidence for the existence of God.<br />
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A few days later, we drove to Pittsburgh. My color vision was clearly continuing to improve, because now I could see more colors in the trees. I was beginning to learn to let go and simply experience the colors, rather than constantly trying to name them and test the limits of my perception. I found I was much better at enjoying the colors than analyzing them, and I spent less time naming them and more time appreciating them.<br />
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In Pittsburgh, we went with our friends Tom and Cheryl to the Phipps Conservatory, where every flower with any shade of red in it was a revelation to me. They seemed to bask in the reflected wonder as I saw things in flowers I had never seen before -- at least once being startled enough to gasp aloud once again. Tom said he'd never seen someone so literally following his bliss.<br />
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After years of disinterest, I found myself thinking I might enjoy gardening.<br />
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I was in Pittsburgh for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of CMU's School of Computer Science, and it was there that I went next. Even as I listened to the (very interesting) professional talks, I was aware of a growing sense of pervasive beauty all around me. Even a pile of garbage was more interesting with my newfound color sense, but people in particular were visual miracles.<br />
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I found myself staring at people's lips. They were vivid and defining in a way they never had been before, even without makeup. Women wearing lipstick drew my eyes irresistably. For that matter, I was also seeing blush and most other kinds of makeup for the first time. (With my natural vision, I can't see much more than blue eye shadow.) It took a concerted effort not to stare like a creep.<br />
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After years of fascination, I found women more beautiful than I had ever imagined.<br />
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And red hair! In college, at one point, I was talking with my best friend of the last two years, and the topic of nicknames came up. "Well, people have always called me Red, of course," he said. "Why?" I asked. He looked at me strangely and said, "because I have flaming red hair." "You do?" I asked. But now I could identify many people as redheads, all by myself, and some of them stood out like lightbulbs from across the room.<br />
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I expected the drive home from Pittsburgh to be anticlimactic, but it wasn't. My color vision had improved to the point where the fall colors were visible enough for me to stare at them, smiling, for hours.<br />
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I don't want to overstate what has happened to me. I'm still very color blind, just not as bad as before. (To be technical: I see 11 more of the Ishahara images.) And there are negatives, too: the glasses only work well at a certain distance -- too close or too far and the effect is sometimes lost. Most alarmingly, the glasses play havoc with my depth perception. Staircases have become a real hazard, and I managed to smash myself in the face with a car door because I misread its position. I'm not complaining, not by a long shot, simply warning anyone else who might go down this road.<br />
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Most important to me, however, is a newfound motivation. If I, at 57, can experience this much change in my color perception, how much good could it do a color-blind preschooler? And how might we build on glasses such as these to give an even greater boost to color perception, perhaps even for those with normal color vision? I am determined to answer these questions if I possibly can. But not while the sun is setting.<br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-2569966011969246582014-06-18T13:46:00.000-07:002014-06-18T14:38:13.884-07:00Welcome to the Post-American Internet. Please Have Your (Virtual) Papers Ready for Inspection<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Internet, as is well known, was almost entirely an American invention. Funded by the US Department of Defense, the early ARPAnet was three years old when the first non-US node was added in 1972. America has dominated the Internet ever since, but less so every year. We are fast approaching a tipping point, where no single country is dominant. The changes this transition brings will call into question several core beliefs about the nature of the Internet itself.<br />
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When the newly-commercialized Internet exploded into public consciousness in the mid-1990's, there was no shortage of sages eager to explain the nature of the net, and how it would affect society. The fundamental qualities of the Internet were seen largely through American eyes, with the assumption that the Internet would change global society far more than that society would change the Internet. Although this was correct in some regards, the changes have happened in both directions.<br />
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The most common political assertion about the Internet was that it would, by its very nature, advance the cause of liberty worldwide. As John Gilmore famously wrote (and as was later attributed to several others), "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This reflects a key technical aspect of the Internet's design, a distributed structure intended to survive a major nuclear war. Libertarian prophets gleefully predicted that the Internet would enable a flowering of American-style freedom around the world, and many found libertarianism a natural fit with the Internet age.<br />
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Much of this is correct, as far as it goes; the Internet's architecture does, on balance, tend to discourage censorship and facilitate liberty. However, there's a big difference between resilience and invulnerability. John Gilmore would have been more accurate if he'd said that the net <i><b>tries</b></i> to route around censorship. While the early Internet promoted free speech and facilitated political dissent, the enemies of those freedoms were studying the Internet, understanding its limitations, and plotting their countermeasures. Gradually but steadily, national and economic interests are becoming more effective counterweights to the Internet's predisposition towards liberty, and those counterweights are pushing even America itself in the wrong direction.<br />
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Seen through the eyes of American ideals, optimism, and exceptionalism, the opponents of Internet freedom were simply reactionaries, fighting a doomed rearguard battle. After all, the network was designed to survive a nuclear war by dynamically rerouting data; what hope did the censors have? Like America's military and cultural exports, the Internet was another tool destined to turn the whole world into America, or something like it.<br />
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The first strong hint that this might not be true was China's announcement, in 1998, that it was building what would come to be known as the Great Firewall of China. For the most part, Internet seers -- myself included -- laughed at this public commitment to an impossible goal. But with sufficient investment -- and five years of work -- China built a remarkably effective firewall that today keeps most of the population -- all but the most motivated and sophisticated -- from accessing Internet sites the government doesn't like. They were able to do this in large part by using the power of the government to regulate International data connections and requiring that they all go through the firewall. <b>The Internet interprets censorship as a bug and routes around it, but the Chinese government interprets free speech as a bug and blocks it</b>, by forcing the Internet to use a non-standard architecture (effectively a single routing path).<br />
<br />
Other examples abound, if you look for them. In the 90's we believed that the Internet would create a wonderfully level playing field, allowing entrepreneurs in the most remote corner of the earth to sell things directly to first world consumers. Instead, a few oligopolistic players such as Amazon have become ubiquitous middlemen, with market-making power. The distributed nature of the net was supposed to open up diverse sources of connectivity, breaking up the near-monopolies of telecom companies -- also not <i>precisely</i> what actually happened. <br />
<br />
Most dishearteningly, however, while the cyberlibertarians were carrying on about the inherent freedoms of the net and the need to protect user privacy -- very American ideals, to be sure -- the American government itself, in the form of the NSA, was undermining those ideals to a breathtaking degree. Any attempt to sell non-Americans on the principle that America's ideals should rule the Internet has to face the reality of America's actions.<br />
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As China has molded the Internet to its own ideals, other countries are doing so with varying degrees of success. Iran, for example, is unlikely to match China's Great Firewall without a great deal more control of its international connectivity, and a substantial increase in its technical expertise, but there's no reason they can't do this eventually. (For that matter, China could sell them the technology and the service.) I fear that we will soon see some countries making good on the oft-made threat (even in the US) to require strong proof of identity to use the Internet. It will be hard to implement, but so was the Great Firewall; it awaits only a sufficiently motivated and sophisticated government.<br />
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My greatest fear, however, is a race to the bottom. Now that China has walled itself off, other countries are trying to imitate it. If a few countries manage to require ID's, others will race to follow, perhaps even the US. The Internet surprised human society in the 1990's, bursting upon it like a tsunami, sweeping away many repressive ideals in its wake. But that wave was a one-time phenomenon. It is easy to imagine that over time, just as governments rebuild after a tsunami, they will "fix the damage" caused by the Internet's first wave. In the end, we'll be lucky if the Internet looks like America in America, let alone anywhere else.<br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-57636790379382268892014-01-12T11:03:00.000-08:002014-01-12T11:03:03.183-08:00Another Hidden Downside to Travel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BYbAvnwH5HM/UtLmtJlG0qI/AAAAAAAAAVo/6E2N6pFSQsY/s1600/lonely_airplane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BYbAvnwH5HM/UtLmtJlG0qI/AAAAAAAAAVo/6E2N6pFSQsY/s1600/lonely_airplane.jpg" height="236" width="320" /></a></div>
Very few of us are immune from the occasional game of "what-if." How might my life have differed had I turned right instead of left, bought a house in the city instead of the suburbs, chosen pottery over banking, or Cindy over Susie? But of course you can't ever go back.<br />
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Psychologists say that, in most situations involving humans making choices, increasing the number of options will decrease the ultimate satisfaction of the person making the choice. Perhaps the knowledge of alternatives makes it almost inevitable that we will be too aware of the imperfections of our choices. In this sense, we perhaps should envy the student who attends the first college he visits, the worker who takes the first job he finds, or the bride and groom in an arranged marriage. (Or at least the lucky ones.)<br />
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No matter how our choices work out, we ultimately play the game of "what-if." And if we aren't happy with the answer - if it makes us miserable, melancholy, or just plain restless -- we may find ourselves imagining making major changes in our lives. But more often than not we don't actually change careers, divorce and remarry, sell houses, or even replace large items such as cars on a whim. Most restlessness is held in check by our attachments and our routines. We shy away from the biggest changes, and try to divert our restlessness with fads, fandom, or fashion. We can't ever live an alternate version of our own lives.<br />
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The next best thing would appear to be travel. But you can easily return knowing additional ways in which your life is less than perfect.<br />
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Travel takes us to alternate universes. The home of your cousin in New York has unmistakable differences from your life in suburban Chicago, or your uncle's Iowa pig farm, and yet these differences pale in comparison to Tokyo, Beijing, or Kinshasha, let alone Yosemite Valley or Antarctica. The more you travel, the more universes you will have seen. But, if you believe the psychologists, you may find it increasingly difficult to be satisfied with any one of them. You will always be aware that some things are better elsewhere, and that there's even more that you haven't seen. Your list of destinations grows faster than your ability to visit them.<br />
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Imagine a perfect world, completely at peace, in whatever serves as your vision of Utopia. Now imagine that you could go and live in that near-perfect universe at a small and simple price: you could never again have your two favorite foods. To me, this is the nightmarish "World without Pizza and Ice Cream." Almost anyone would make that tradeoff -- world peace alone is probably worth giving up pizza -- but how many people could be completely content with that choice? I know that for the rest of my life, Ben and Jerry would haunt my dreams.<br />
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That's what travel does to you. You go to new places, and you encounter new things -- new people, new attitudes, new foods, new art, and new music. It's a wonderful experience, but when you go home there are new things to miss, new absences in your less than perfect life. In South Africa, they sell a wonderful kind of biscuit called rusks, without which my life had previously seemed quite complete, but which I now seek, usually in vain, in imported food stores at home.<br />
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Travel expands your horizons, your knowledge of the world, your understanding of humanity and history, and your appreciation of the arts. But it may not make you happy. People who live all their lives in a small village are probably, on average, more content than those of us who keep forgetting what time zone we're in. The things you miss specifically provoke a more intense desire than the more abstract knowledge of things you've never encountered. I miss rusks far more than I am bothered by the knowledge of how many foreign foods I've never even tried.<br />
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For my part, my affinities are scattered about the globe. When I stay too long at home, I begin to miss very specific things -- the theatre and restaurants in London and New York, the scenery in Africa and California, the museums in Washington and Paris, or the omnipresent history in Rome and Jerusalem. But if I moved to Yosemite, I'd miss the ocean, and if I moved to Hawaii I'd miss snow. And when I stay too long on the road, I miss the stability and comfort of home.<br />
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It isn't just that our lives are too finite to see and enjoy it all; it's that the more we see and do, the less likely we are to ever be completely satisfied anywhere. The more you travel, the more easily you can imagine better places than wherever you are. At least, that's how it works on Earth, but... hmmm... perhaps things might be better on some other world? <br />
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<br />Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-33551460424437394402013-10-05T11:37:00.000-07:002013-10-05T11:37:44.142-07:00RIP Secure EmailLast month, as you may know, two American providers of secure email services exited the business. In announcing his company's "corporate suicide," Lavabit's founder said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I feel you deserve to know what's going on – the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this," Levison wrote. "Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests."</blockquote>
This kind of language has stimulated a wide round of hand-wringing at this latest example of the assault on privacy. Many have suggested that a key to email privacy, in the new world order, is to avoid using service providers that have any physical ties to the United States. But is this kind of extreme reaction justified?<br />
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I'll argue that it isn't, not because the problem isn't real but because there are no useful solutions. I have no doubt that it's a horror show out there; in fact, I believe that the situation is far worse than the most doom-and-gloom commentators have been saying it is. Those commentators fear that privacy is in mortal peril, but I would argue that privacy is no more endangered than a week-old roadkill carcass. It's been dead long enough that you really should have noticed by now that it's beyond further harm, and is best spoken of only in the past tense.<br />
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For starters, email never was private to begin with. The earliest email systems were only as secure as the administrative login on a mainframe. Networked email was even less secure, vulnerable as it was in transit to eavesdropping and alteration. While there have been occasional developments that seemed to move the momentum back towards privacy, such as S/MIME, PGP, and services like Hushmail, Silent Circle, and Lavabit, it must be said that these have been almost complete failures. Their security improvements have always been offset by reduced convenience, a fatal tradeoff on today's Internet. As I've often said, users want security at any price, so long as it's free. And when a service like Lavabit was finally getting a bit of traction on the technical side, it was totally subverted by the hidden hand of the security state.<br />
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We can and should continue to assert the need for a secure email system, but we ought to recognize that, with few exceptions, we've never had one. Email as we know it simply should not be used for genuinely sensitive information. Instant messaging, when used with suitable transport encryption and no message retention, is a rather better bet for would-be conspirators, but not for anyone who wants to keep records.<br />
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It seems likely to me, however, that the essence of email service includes qualities that are fundamentally incompatible with security in today's world. Email users are accustomed to being able to communicate easily with anyone, to retain messages for as long as they like, and to allow company monitoring of corporate email. Each of these requirements is a significant roadblock to true privacy.<br />
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Nor should you get your hopes too high about the nationality of a provider. It is probably true today that you could use a service in another country without the US government being able to see your data -- if you are lucky enough to choose a country that doesn't have any secret arrangements with the US. But even then, as more people do that, how long will it take before it's made illegal to use services outside the reach of US pressure?<br />
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There are still ways to communicate secretly. If you're planning a corporate takeover, an extramarital affair, or a heinous act of terrorism, you can find ways to use the various communication tools of the modern age to protect your plans from prying eyes. It's just that you have to work much harder to do it, so you aren't likely to do so over small matters, which means that minor embarassments will be revealed far more often that major crimes. (And, tragically, every evidence of strong privacy will be seen as suggestive of a possible crime.)<br />
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Email is like a crowded train station. Most of what you say won't get noticed by anyone else, but you never know if you're standing next to a listening device or a human eavesdropper. I'm afraid that either we shall all be living our lives in a state of constant fear, or we will have to dispense with secrets altogether. The best response to the loss of privacy may be the growth of tolerance, so that fewer secrets will need to be kept in the first place.<br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-81897540839437784912013-06-05T07:18:00.001-07:002013-06-05T07:18:37.880-07:00CPSR: Can't Prolong Sadness, ReallyLast month brought the official dissolution of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. The initial reaction to this event, for those of us who cared about it, was of course sadness. It marked the end of an era, of nearly 30 years of activism, education, and outreach. As one who served on the CPSR Board for many years, and as President briefly, it feels a bit like an old friend has died.<br />
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But the truth is that current realities call for different kinds of organizations, and that CPSR lived longer than we had any reason to expect. CPSR was founded in the early 1980's, one of many organizations born in reaction to the Reagan-era military build up and, most particularly, the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as the "Star Wars" program. The goals of that program were so far beyond the technology of the time that it struck fear into the hearts of most knowledgeable computer scientists. As the program was initially construed, a single bug in a staggeringly complex program could easily have cost millions of lives, even as the program gave policy makers a false sense of security about the survivability of nuclear war. It was flat-out terrifying to many of us<br />
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Most of the organizations that formed in that era found themselves winding down after the Reagan-Bush years, and certainly not surviving to the Millennium. CPSR was different. At its founding, it was the only organization focused specifically on the impact of computers on society. As Star Wars faded, CPSR turned toward issues such as electronic privacy, computerized voting, participatory design, and online government.<br />
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In fact, there were so many topics of interest that CPSR could not contain them. Several organizations that began their lives as spinoffs from CPSR continue today, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the 21st Century Project. Other organizations that were not CPSR spinoffs, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), nonetheless diverted substantial energies from CPSR. Over time, then, CPSR became the home for worries about the smaller issues related the role of computers in society, as the larger ones spun off to specialized groups. <br />
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The capabilities of the Internet, and the general Millennial temperament, seem to favor more highly-focused organizations, rather than catch-alls such as CPSR. It seems likely to me that social action groups will be more effective with such specialization, which makes the death of CPSR both more understandable and less lamentable. But that doesn't mean that nothing is being lost.<br />
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CPSR, as a general-purpose organization, provided a social nexus for people concerned about multiple computer/society issues to exchange ideas and devise new strategies. It's not clear to me where this is happening today, if anywhere.<br />
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But perhaps the worst aspect of CPSR's demise is that it leaves some "lesser" issues orphaned. Sure, issues about privacy and liberty will be addressed by EPIC and EFF, but what of the issues with no such specialized organizations? How will computing professionals organize themselve to address those issues?<br />
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Two issues, in particular, are of concern to me. First is the question of electronic voting. Electronic voting machines have an enorous potential to subvert democracy. While there are individuals addressing the issue, without CPSR, I see no organizational home for them. Second, and most ironically, is the role of computers in weapon systems and the military. The issue which gave birth to CPSR is one of the most regretable orphans in the wake of its demise.<br />
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CPSR had a good run, and I can't shed too many tears at its end. It was a 1980's style organization (some would say 1960's) fundamentally ill-suited to 21st century realities. But now, as computer technologists, it is all of our responsibility to consider the social consequences of the rapidly-advancing technology we continue to build, and to create new organizations for new concerns. <br />
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Fortunately, I see signs that this is exactly what's happening. I'm encouraged by the fact that, even as CPSR has been fading away, the importance of social responsibility has become<a href="http://www.computing-professional.org/"> an important part of a growing number of computer science programs</a>. <br />
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CPSR was both too general, in the sense of trying to cover too many issues, and too exclusive, as if there could ever be computing professionals -- or even computer users, which is virtually all of us -- who do not have a moral obligation to worry about the consequences of new technologies. In the absence of CPSR, each of us has an individual obligation to be a computer professional for social responsibility.<br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-33992079031839890792013-05-26T09:54:00.000-07:002013-05-26T09:54:19.129-07:00Tax the Internet!<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-833blQrWRyU/UaI9zJBb52I/AAAAAAAAAM8/V_sVe8bzQx4/s1600/IRS.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-833blQrWRyU/UaI9zJBb52I/AAAAAAAAAM8/V_sVe8bzQx4/s320/IRS.jpg" /></a>
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Depending on whose numbers you believe, the Internet now constitutes about <a href=http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6268.html >
2% of the global economy</a>, or <a href=http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/05/what-is-the-economic-value-of-the-internet.html>
3.8% of developed nations' economies</a>, and its growth rate may still be exponential.
<p> It took the Internet more than four decades to go from zero to two percent of the world economy. If, as I suspect, it's still growing along the same exponential curve that most Internet measurements have followed, a decade from now it could account for a third to a half of all global economic activity. The taboo on taxing it is worth revisiting, and several states are now doing so.
<p> Believe it or not, the original reason why most people favored not taxing the Internet was a desire to foster its growth -- either through the direct economic savings of not being taxed, or by sparing it the potential regulatory complexities of a new kind of international commerce. Back then I thought, and still believe, that this was a very good idea, but times have changed. The Internet no longer needs special tax treatment to thrive.
<p> There are of course complexities that stem from the nature of Internet commerce.
But the sheer size of the Internet economy, two decades after its commercialization, suggests that it's past time to confront the complexities of its taxation.
<p> I am not arguing (here) that taxes should be higher or lower overall, but simply that they will be increasingly unbalanced and unfair if they are only imposed on an exponentially shrinking portion of the economy.
<p> The mechanics of Internet taxation will be tricky, to say the least, but current tax codes aren't exactly simple, either. It seems to me that Internet taxation could be made tractable by beginning with a few core principles, such as:
<p> 1. All mechanisms should be designed for feasibility and simplicity of implementation. This will dictate certain architectural decisions, such as seller-side tax collection, and it will also work to minimize bureaucracy and wasted time.
<p> 2. The introduction of Internet taxation should minimize disruption to existing government revenues. This means that when possible, revenue from taxing particular Internet actions should go to the jurisdiction of the seller that received the revenue. For example, in the USA, sales tax from Internet transactions should be directed to the buyer's state of residence. The seller's venue can be taxed in other ways, but without residence-based sales tax, tax revenue would tend to drain away from populous jurisdictions that don't host Internet services.
<p> 3. Internet taxes should be as uniform as possible across all tax jurisdictions. For example, although the state that receives sales tax should be determined by the buyer's residence, the amount of the tax should be decided more globally if possible. The economic distortions at such places as the Massachusetts/New Hampshire or San Diego/Tijuana borders serves no useful purpose and would probably be even worse if applied to Internet taxes.
<p> 4. National tax regimes should complement each other whenever possible. Rules should be written with reciprocity in mind. It isn't reasonable to expect a small merchant in Haiti to deliver tax collections to every taxing domain on the planet, but it is certainly reasonable to expect a large multinational vendor to do so, at least for jurisdictions where it conducts business.
<p> Having said that, what exactly can reasonably be taxed? The easiest case is basic Internet access, which is already often taxed locally at the "last mile." This is an appropriate offset for the local infrastructure costs, and satellite services could be treated in the same way -- the local folks can see the dishes and enforce the rules.
A uniform sales tax rate would avoid competition between jurisdictions, and would be almost a necessity for a value added tax.
<p> Internet advertising is currently largely untaxed. Taxing it might slow the growth of Internet advertising, but few people would shed a tear for that, and it could be a large source of revenue if exponential growth continues. This could be addressed as a sales tax on the transaction in which the advertising is purchased, but the taxing jurisdiction might be near-impossible to work out, and would be an undeserved windfall for a few jurisdictions. It would be much more tractable if the advertising delivery agent (e.g. Google) collected and reported geographic information to facilitate the distribution of taxes to the domain of the "eyeballs."
<p> However, it should be noted that there are a lot of poorly-thought-out proposals for taxing aspects of the Internet that would be implausible to tax. A "click tax" sounds promising until you realize that someone could write a program that just sits around raising someone's taxes. An email tax would get buried in technical and regulational complexity, given the difficulty of sorting out the true identity of a sender or receiver. Taxes on social networking success are slightly more plausible, where there's a single entity to perform identification and reporting, but it still isn't clear which activities it would make sense to tax.
<p> Finally, there is a strong case to be made for particularly taxing the most bandwidth-hungry applications, and plowing the proceeds back into infrastructure upgrades. Video-heavy services such as YouTube and Skype might reasonably be expected to contribute to the continued upgrade of infrastructure that their services help make necessary.
<p> I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but if the role of the Internet in our economy is still growing exponentially, then it's surely time to open a discussion around the topic of how it might make sense to tax the Internet.
Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-80351852779439908072013-01-02T07:31:00.000-08:002013-01-02T07:31:20.193-08:00Betraying My Oldest Friend <br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Every now and then, you say or do something that you can't take back, and it changes your life forever. Sometimes it's a good thing, like having a child. But when it's a betrayal of something you love, you will carry the regret to your grave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">For me the archetype of such betrayal is Winston Smith, in Orwell's 1984. Imprisoned by the all-powerful government, he has already endured countless tortures, but clings to the notion that he has never betrayed Julia, the love of his life. To break this last shred of autonomy, his torturers confront him with his deepest fear, being eaten alive by rats. Facing this horror he begs, "Don't do it to me, do it to Julia." As his torturers understand, those nine words can never be taken back, and when he is reunited with Julia -- who has had a similar experience -- the knowledge of their mutual betrayal dooms their relationship.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have twice in my life been conscious of such a life-changing betrayal. I regret them both, but would still repeat them if I could. Both may sound trivial to many readers, but my regret is painfully real and deep.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rb--MmKdbLY/UNsi1sikP7I/AAAAAAAAALQ/sSNZygE_qbY/s1600/mets.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="317" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rb--MmKdbLY/UNsi1sikP7I/AAAAAAAAALQ/sSNZygE_qbY/s320/mets.gif" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The first was over a quarter century in the past. I have always been a baseball fan, a fanatic partisan of the New York Mets, who I fell in love with as the perennial doormats of the National League. In the American League, however, I found a second favorite, the team of all my relatives, the accursed Boston Red Sox. For two decades, I rooted for both, confident -- in the era before interleague play -- that they would never face each other, which could only happen if both somehow met in the World Series.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In 1986, as any baseball fan can tell you, that actually happened. I was over the moon, saying (and believing) that I would love every minute of the Series, no matter which of my two favorite teams won. I held onto that belief until the final inning of the sixth game, with the Red Sox an out away from breaking their famous curse, when Bill Buckner committed perhaps the most famous error in baseball history. At the very worst moment in nearly a century of suffering for Red Sox fans, I jumped to my feet and cheered myself hoarse.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I can say that it was inevitable, and that anyone would cheer their favorite team over their second favorite. But I found I could never call myself a Red Sox fan again. I had betrayed them as surely as Winston betrayed Julia.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My second great betrayal happened just this week. To understand it, you should know that I was a bit of a prodigy as a child. I was reading adult books at the age of 2, and had more or less finished high school by the end of third grade. Books have always been my best friend. For 53 of my 55 years, I don't think there has been a single day when I haven't spent at least an hour reading; even hiking the Appalachian Trail, I endured considerable extra weight rather than do without books.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The emergence of e-books has left me wary and conflicted. The logic of e-books is obvious, especially to someone like me, who is away from home travelling more often than not. Depending on the length of my trip, I typically carry 10 to 30 pounds of reading material, and I have a bad back, so switching to e-books would appear a no-brainer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But I couldn't do it. Books have been my most faithful friends since about the time I was toilet trained. To cast them aside for the hottest, sleekest new model seemed unthinkable, and as shallow and faithless as casting aside my wife of 35 years for a similarly hot, sleek new model. (Of course, Amazon doesn't sell the latter for under $100, but I digress.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But every time I travelled, I found myself gazing at the lightly-loaded and paper-free modern travellers with more envy than when I gazed at... ok, that's enough of that analogy. I even experimented with reading a couple of books on my smartphone, where the tiny screen allowed me to pretend I'd tried e-books and found them wanting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Then, a few weeks ago, I got an iPad for work purposes, and, after some dithering, decided to give e-books "one more try." I was only a few chapters into my first e-book, Walter Isaacson's magnificent biography of Steve Jobs, when I realized there was no going back. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Then, within a day or so of that realization, I went out to lunch at an Ann Arbor deli that happened to be a few doors down from Nicola's Books, one of our last remaining independent book stores. Walking towards the deli, I saw Nicola's and instantly found myself struggling to fight off tears. I love independent bookstores almost as much as I love books themselves, and I felt like I'd put a knife into Nicola's heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I doubt I can ever go back. Carrying so much less baggage when I travel, buying each book the moment I decide to start reading it, and beginning to reduce the miles of bookshelves that fill my house -- these are unarguably good things, and I can no more regret this decision than I can regret cheering for the Mets in 1986, or than Winston Smith could regret betraying Julia to avoid the worst death he could imagine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But we can regret the consequences even if we can't regret the choice. Winston Smith didn't want to lose Julia, and I didn't want the Red Sox to lose, or the independent bookstores to vanish. Sometimes, betraying something you love is the unavoidable cost of a greater good. But I don't expect ever to get over it; 26 years later, I still feel guilty every time I look a Red Sox fan in the eye.</span><br />
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Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-7443934601271018032012-10-24T06:45:00.001-07:002012-10-24T06:45:36.658-07:00Software Patents, the Hacker Ethic, and Patent TrollsNowadays I spend a good chunk of my time working on patent-related matters. Many people -- including my younger self -- would judge this very negatively, because they think -- correctly, in my view -- that the current patent system is, essentially, evil. Recently, I've been motivated to collect some of my thoughts about the patent system, and posted them to the Mimecast blog. You can find them in these two posts, if you're interested:<br />
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<a href="http://blog.mimecast.com/2012/10/software-patents-and-the-hacker-ethic/">Software Patents and the Hacker Ethic</a><br />
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<a href="http://blog.mimecast.com/2012/10/the-scourge-of-patent-trolls/">The Scourge of Patent Trolls</a>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-61692407593303303162012-07-26T13:54:00.000-07:002012-07-26T13:54:59.840-07:00Email Don't Impress Me Much<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you're old enough, you can probably remember the day when having an email address was a status symbol in certain crowds. Now, renouncing email is a status symbol for certain rich people, as I discuss in my latest<a href=http://blog.mimecast.com/2012/07/email-and-food-essential-but-not-status-symbols> post on the Mimecast blog.</a>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-45569981315230868572012-02-03T04:06:00.000-08:002012-02-03T04:06:40.936-08:00When Hiring Remote Workers Makes You a Better PersonRecently I had the pleasure of participating in a <a href="http://is.gd/yHstyg">debate, on BusinessWeek.com,</a> about the pros and cons of letting employees work from home. This led me to think more about the most amazing experience I ever had with a work-at-home employee, a remarkable and inspiring fellow named John Ferguson. I write about him here, <a href="http://is.gd/oZRHFY">on the Mimecast blog.</a>Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-30196173565779063162012-01-29T08:53:00.000-08:002012-01-29T08:53:01.170-08:00Goodbye, Glen: A Last Look at a Childhood HeroAt age ten, I hadn't yet developed the passions that make pop music so vitally important to many adolescents. I had sung in youth choirs for several years, where I was always much appreciated by the choir directors -- though probably less for my high tenor voice than for my willingness to throw myself into the works full-voiced and without inhibition. I had also started taking classical guitar lessons in fourth grade, the only new form of study my parents permitted me after bringing the rest of my education to a screeching halt the previous summer. I loved both singing and playing guitar, and thought I had a fair bit of talent for both. <br />
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<p> Nonetheless, I remained much more interested in collecting the albums of comics and humorists than musical groups, more focused on Alan Sherman than the Beatles. So it was a pair of humorists that led me, via musical comedy, to my first appreciation of popular music. My journey started with the Smothers Brothers. <br />
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<p> Tom and Dick Smothers were an acutal pair of brothers, highly talented musically, whose comic personae were a pair of brothers trying to be a folk music act, but whose musical efforts were consistently sabotaged by Tom's goofy antics and the ensuing brotherly bickering. When they sang, their clean, soaring harmonies were a revelation to my ten-year-old self; I came for the comedy and stayed for the songs. <br />
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<p> Naturally, when they got their big chance on television, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour became a highlight of my week. Every Sunday night, when the show I'd so eagerly awaited came to an end, I knew that the weekend was over, and it was time for bed and another five days of mind-numbing tedium. <br />
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<p> But I always thought of the music as incidental to the comedy until the day, when I was a bit over ten years old, that a goofy-faced young man named Glen Campbell stepped out onto the Smothers' stage and began singing John Hartford's "Gentle On My Mind." Campbell was instantly recognizable as what I thought of as a hick -- a country boy with a silly accent, a hard person to take seriously in many contexts. <br />
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<p> Nonetheless, I was mesmerized. Between the range, strength, and purity of his voice and the casual virtuousity with which he laid down his guitar licks, I saw -- probably for the first time in my life -- something that I wanted to become but could never be. My singing has always been pleasant and appreciated, and my guitar marginally competent, but I knew immediately that I could practice a thousand years and never sound like Glen Campbell, accent or no. My fingers wouldn't move as fast as his if I flailed them about randomly, and my voice hadn't a fraction of his power or range. <br />
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<p> Having grown up a prodigy, I was for the first time aware of being flat-out inferior at something I cared about. For the first time, though by no means the last, I gazed longingly down a path I could never walk. I could possibly have still become a rock star, with a lot of luck; some of them don't seem to have any more talent than I do, certainly. But I never really seriously considered a path where I'd have to hope for luck to compensate for marginal abilities. <br />
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<p> Of course, time went on. My fondness for Glen Campbell became an embarassment in the era of Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and I found more culturally appropriate guitar heroes in Jimi Hendrix, Steve Howe, or later Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges. A young hippie wannabe couldn't easily admit to a soft spot for Glen Campbell, who meanwhile became both a right-wing activist and, increasingly, a parody of himself with songs like "Rhinestone Cowboy." He receded safely into my past, one of those childish things we put aside on the road to adulthood. <br />
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<p> Then, in 2011, a full 44 years after his music first opened my eyes, I heard an interview with Glen Campbell on the radio. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, and was facing the slow loss of his memory, his talents, everything he had ever been. But rather than fade quietly into the twilight, like his friend Ronald Reagan, he decided to go on one last tour while he still could. With three of his children forming half his backing band, he hit the road, and I found myself with the chance to see him in person for the first and last time. <br />
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<p> The <a href="http://theark.org/ann_arbor_folk_festival.html">Ann Arbor Folk Festival</a> is a remarkable annual event. For two consecutive nights, a five hour concert presents a dazzling array of performers old and new, averaging 20 or 30 minutes apiece, as a fundraiser for Ann Arbor's venerable folk music venue, <a href="http://theark.org/">The Ark</a>. I've been many times, nearly always discovering a new act that quickly became one of my favorites. When they announced that the second night of the 2012 show would be headlined by Nanci Griffith, Emmy Lou Harris, and Glen Campbell, nothing short of jail would have kept me away. <br />
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<p> Naively, I had simply assumed that Glen Campbell was the marquee star and would be the final act. I've worshiped Emmy Lou Harris from afar for almost four decades, but it never occurred to me that she'd be the one to close out the show. Thus it was that I saw something I never thought I'd see: Emmy Lou Harris as anticlimax. By the time she stepped on stage, the crowd had almost burned itself out saying goodbye to Glen. <br />
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<p> I'd like to tell you that there was no sign of the disease that is ravaging him, but the truth is far more interesting. His memory is clearly already suffering -- he forgot or mangled the words a half dozen or so times, and several times forgot what song was to come next. It was sad, but also touching to watch as his sons and daughter in the band gently guided him back. <br />
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<p> Still, he was magnificent, with a voice as strong as ever, from the rich low notes of "Wichita Lineman" to the falsetto yodels of "Lovesick Blues." And remarkably, his wizardly guitar licks were perfect; at 76 with Alzheimer's, he can still do things with the guitar I will never, ever do. And when I closed my eyes he was once again a 30-year-old cowboy opening the eyes of a ten-year-old ex-prodigy, glued to the television, newly aware of his own limits and possibilities, wondering how far his meager talents might take him.Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4788283444385838968.post-5950408508824760422012-01-06T08:39:00.000-08:002012-01-06T08:39:47.866-08:00Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human RightIn his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html">January 4 op-ed piece</a>, Vint Cerf argued that Internet access is not a human right. While I consider Vint a friend and have tremendous respect for his achievements, I think he’s wrong in this case...<br />
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Read the full post <a href="http://blog.mimecast.com/2012/01/vint-cerf-is-too-modest-internet-access-is-a-human-right/">on my work blog</a>.Nathaniel Borensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03232212556909107350noreply@blogger.com0