(low) tech writer

New (low) tech writer feed address!

2010-01-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

Hi (low) tech writer fans!

I realized only recently that a change I made to the site probably left my subscribers out in the cold! All you have to do to be able to catch up on the several posts since the change is visit

http://lowtechwriter.com ... and re-subscribe from there.

Alternatively you can open your reader and manually enter the following feed addresses:

http://lowtechwriter.com/atom.xml

or

http://lowtechwriter.com/rss.xml

... Sorry for the hassle and thanks!

Dave

Camera Obscura

2010-01-07T17:52:00.000-08:00

I love the West Coast. It is among the oldest coastlines in the world, and it looks it. This impression is confirmed with a look at maps of the way the continents have drifted, tumbled and collided around the globe over millions of years: the west coast of North America has always been pointed out, facing the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In light if this, it seems to make a kind of poetic sense that the West Coast was the symbolic goal of the Manifest Destiny, the prize in the drive to conquer the North American continent and the frontier. I've always had this sense that the history of technology in California and the West was just an extension of the migratory drive westward of the American pioneers. The Pilgrims and their heirs achieved their Manifest Destiny, and the land has been conquered, for better or for worse. But now, with all the land gobbled up, what do we do with our insatiable drive to discover, to conquer? We keep going.

And where is there to go? Why, into space of course. Up into outer space, and down into inner space. Symbols of the extension of our frontier can be seen from the freeway which runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The most obvious is Stanford University's massive radio telescope which towers over the 280 corridor. The Dish, as it is known around here, takes our drive to conquer and points it out to space. The Dish, and all the world's telescopes and antennas, scan the next swath of territory, looking for signs among the stars that we can keep going. A mile down the freeway, for those who are driven to discovery on a different scale, is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Dept. of Energy's two-mile long linear accelerator, which runs under the freeway and plumbs microscopic space, searching for pathways to knowledge in between the atoms.

Most of us don't get to go on these journeys--the pathways of science are as obscure to us as was the way west to Louis and Clark, before they started up the Missouri. We don't understand the meaning of the intergalactic hiss that the Dish records or the significance of the images the Hubble takes, as beautiful as they are. We don't know what to make of the dance of the charmed and strange particles that leave their trails on the target at the end of the particle accelerator. But when we see pictures of stars, or of scattered pieces of atoms, we take some comfort in the fact that someone is searching out new trails, that hidden truths may be revealed.

But I wonder if we are ever capable of arriving, of ending the journey. Having come to this place, to the edge, as it were, can we just appreciate it as a place? Can we ever stop searching and just see? Or is every place just a waypoint? Are we bound to urgently press on? I'm willing to accept that some are called to always search the horizon for new routes, but this straining impulse, this expectation that there is more to discover, more to do, is so deeply rooted in the psyche of everyone who has come to California that it is nearly a disease.

As an antidote to this straining, this looking beyond, there is a place on the coast near here where you are encouraged simply to see. Where you are not encouraged to map out new trails, or to imagine what lies over the horizon. Having arrived, you are invited just to see the beauty of it. In this place is a kind of old-school technology that is also an anti-technology. It's a kind of camera, but one that doesn't fill your shelf with albums or your hard drive with JPEGs. The images it produces do not require or even permit analysis. It is the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura looks from the outside like a cheesy tourist spot: the Giant Camera of the old Playland at the Beach amusement park on the seaward side of San Francisco, built in 1946. But as cheesy as it looks, it is a thing of wonder: a dark room containing a six-foot wide parabolic wooden surface painted white that captures a projected image from outside without electricity, chemicals, or WiFi. The image is often moving, gently rotating with the turning of the lens which sits on top of the building, and as it is reflected via a prism down onto the table, we see the scene outside (the Cliff House behind the Camera, Seal Rock, the beach, and the open sea) panning and turning all at once on the circular surface. It can be a little disorienting, a bit hypnotic; it is certainly beautiful.

The round table on which the image is projected is about the same diameter as the target end of the two-mile long accelerator inside SLAC, as the sensor that hangs suspended in front of the Dish to catch it's magnified space signals, and as the mirror in the Hubble Telescope. But the images it captures are less obscure than these, less abstract. What you see on the table in front of you in the Camera Obscura is immediate and intimate, it is the Place Where You Are. No interpretation is needed. You can't study it, because it's moving and changing and always different. You experience it.

A quick view with the lens at rest.

The table is perfectly round, here viewed from the side.

Technology always promises access to things while simultaneously distancing you from them. The Television delivers programming from around the world but you are still stuck sitting in front of a glowing box in a darkened room. Jet airplanes can move you to the other side of the planet in hours, but you have no sense of the journey--of what you flew over, or through--only a sense of discomfort at having been squeezed into a tube and then squeezed out in a place where everything is different. The internet gives us access to all the world's information, but requires us to keep our eyes fixed on a flat screen, and our ears plugged and wired.

The Camera Obscura, as a piece of technology, is no different, even if it operates on principles that have been understood for millennia: the image on the table is of the place where you are, but you are also not there. You're inside a dark room looking at a projection of an image of the sea, not standing on the beach looking at the sea with your own eyes. Yet like all cameras, the Giant Camera of San Francisco helps you see things differently (or see them for the first time), and unlike the portable cameras we all carry, this camera preserves a feeling of immediacy and authenticity because the camera is bound to the place. You never really suffer that technology-induced isolation. You can hear the sea through the walls.

The Camera Obscura is also made of lovely, low-tech things: essentially glass and wood. A five-inch wide glass lens projecting on a Six-foot wide table with a concave wood surface. Apart from the motor that turns the lens assembly, there is no electricity, no Intel Inside, no HD screen. In the Camera Obscura, you are the computer that processes the image, and if your capacity to remember hasn't suffered too much from our culture of hyper-literacy, then you will recall this trip to the coast as a distinctly satisfying one.

Visit the Camera Obscura:

1096 Point Lobos Ave
San Francisco, 94121

37°46'41.64"N
122°30'51.22"W

(Satellite view): bit.ly/giantcamera

Hey Kids! More on Fractional Foods

2010-01-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I wrote about the weird world of "half products", processed food pellets that are not edible until expansion by microwaving, or some other process. After reflecting on what makes a product natural, or whole, I had another chance to analyze the claims of a "multi-grain" product. Today, to my great surprise, I opened our cereal cabinet to find a box of Froot Loops. The cabinet had never behaved in this way before. The cabinet usually contains boxes with names like "Soy and Flax Clusters", a product more appropriate to a house where 40-somethings will eat, without question, whatever they find in the cabinet.

Where the Froot Loops came from, I did not know. But I knew that I had to have some. What a thrill to open a cereal box again and find that heavy foil-laminated inner wrapper that only the sweetest cereals merit (Soy and Flax Clusters only have a wax-paper liner). What a thrill to gaze upon the bright rainbow of colors made possible by science! Look at it! Did I mention that Froot Loops are multi-grain?

Printer-Ink Registration Marks on Packaging ...
Rainbow of Frooty Goodness ...

Separated at birth?

My initial thought as I chomped down my first spoonful since 1986, was that the cereal wasn't as sweet as I remember. But when I looked at the box and reassured myself that sugar was indeed the first and main ingredient, I knew it must be pilot error. Then I saw the problem: I'm using no-sweetener-added soy milk! Silly me. I am out of practice. So what else is in Froot Loops? Of the three grains listed, only the last of them is "whole". Add to the whole oats--in increasing amounts--white flour and refined corn (think: sugar), but don't overdo it because real sugar has to be the number one ingredient, then add some partially hydrogenated oils, and you have a concoction that only a mad scientist would feed to children.

So why is this stuff in our cabinet? Turns out my wife, a children's pastor, found them in our church resource room where she stages the chaos of her Sunday morning kid's church supplies, and decided that the risk of children eating the stuff was not worth the benefit of making pretty necklaces and decided to dispose of it in a OSHA- and EPA- approved manner, i.e. put it where I would find it. She forgot to mention that the sell by date was almost a year ago. I swear I wouldn't have known that by eating it.

Half Foods

2009-12-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

Behold the mighty Triscuit: Symbol of Whole Food. Mostly unchanged for 100 years. Ingredients: whole wheat, soybean oil, salt. Compare that to heavily processed, science-fair, "home-style" monstrosities like anything from Pepperidge Farm. I know ... delicious. But read the ingredients of their cookies with a Tylenol chaser. Interesterified Oil? Huh? Wow ... uh, how interest-ing. How terrify-ing.

Of course I recognize that Triscuits are a processed food: Triscuits don't occur in nature. At least with the Triscuit it's pretty easy to imagine the steps between harvest and your snack cabinet. And I'm ok with certain, low-tech processing: when we pull a fresh-baked loaf of bread out of the oven, we are eating a processed food. I don't have any qualms about saying that cooking technology improves on nature. After all, when God visited Abraham and Sarah, they didn't just pour a handful of wheat into the hands of the Holy One. They kneaded it into dough and baked fresh bread, and my guess is that God said something to the effect of "it was good". Fresh bread is a benefit of technology. If fire isn't a technology, then the oven that harnesses it to make bread is.

But there are processed foods, and then there are processed foods.

Recently, I did some writing for a friend who is importing natural mediterranean-style snacks for sale in the U.S.. He's going to be selling to retailers, so to get a line on the language and concerns in the marketplace, I did a little investigoogling on snacks. Yummy? Not so much.

It's always a little disorienting when entering a completely foreign culture, and this was no exception. There are risks to peeking behind the curtain that separates the food on our table from it's origins.

My first stop was the Snack Food Association web site (sfa.org) where I was tempted by such mouth-watering foodie writing as The Essence of Quality Potato Chips ... the authoritative 3rd edition of the Pretzel Quality Manual, and the SFA/AOCS Edible Oils Manual, 2nd edition. It is not only not appetizing to listen in on the corporate back-room talk about foods I share with my family: it's creepy. It's a little bit like suddenly realizing there's a one-way mirror in your dining room hiding lab-coat-wearing technicians who watch how you chew. You say, "Mm. I love these chips, they taste great." ... they say, "optimized mouth feel and end-flavor target-mix".

It gets weirder. The Snack Food Association has a magazine: Snack World.

In the August 2009 issue of Snack World, I found an news-item for J.R. Short, A family business that wants a seat at the dinner table as your "maker of extruded intermediate pellets". What is an extruded intermediate pellet, you ask? Extruded intermediate pellets are known in the business as half-products, because they still need to be cooked, or as J.R. Short so appetizingly puts it, expanded. Extruded Intermediate Pellets, says their web site, "deliver on whole-grain/multigrain and fiber nutritional content claims with a great tasting crunch ... available in a variety of pellet shapes that can deliver great bag fill and perceived value". Pellet shapes?? Bag fill?? Did I just click through to the UPS store?

Maybe we should just take a step back. Deep breath. See, here in America, we're trying to end a decades-old addiction to refined grains in our diets. We're learning that too much white bread is bad for us in the same way that too much sugar is. We know we need to eat more whole grains. Easy to say, but how do we do that? I don't know about you, but I have never in my life been in the same room as a whole grain ... not that was still whole anyway. For the majority of us, if the supermarket doesn't feed us whole grains, we will likely die in our wonder-bread sins. So in order to satisfy our new passion for whole foods (and for living more 'naturally' in general), the food companies must provide products that contain mostly whole grains (mostly, because all that's required for the food to be labeled "whole" is for the first ingredient to be a whole grain of some kind ... the rest of it can be sawdust and saccharine. Most people do not know or care if the thing is really 'whole', only that the package speaks authoritativly to the problem). A company that provides whole grain snack foods is church-like in our pseudo-enlightened world. We secretly imagine them to be providing food for the body and soul.

The J.R. Short company is not actually that company. They are the company that provides the extruded pellets to the company that provides your whole grain snacks. J.R. Short takes powdered grains, seeds, and vegetables--any kind you want, in any combination--and processes them into a paste. And then they sqeeze that paste into whatever shape is required by the food company, which then expands them and tosses them with some powdered flavor. When you browse the products on the J.R. Short company web site, with a little imagination you will recognize things you've eaten out of a bag recently. These are not your father's cheeze puffs.

You may have noticed that what used to be trashy snack food is now yuppie feel-good health food. What's the difference? Simply that processors like the J.R. Short company have replaced whatever was in the cheeze puffs with sexier raw materials. Now, grains or legumes like lentils, flax, barley, and soy join the old standbys-- corn, wheat and rice. Add in vegetable powders from seaweed, carrot, beet, or broccoli and various other "complimentary" ingredients, and J.R. Short will squeeze your custom easy-bake play-do into twists, tubes, shells, ribbons, chips, little balls and beads, even a custom logo-shape ... all of which they call pellets. Hungry yet?

I've got to admit I find this kind of cool in a dial-a-product sort of way. We're not just living in the age of easy information, but the age of easy productization. I can dream up a design and be wearing it on a t-shirt within the week, then sell it in my online store, where you can get the same brilliant design on a teddy bear or a coffee mug. I can write a book and be reading my own first-edition hardcover within a week of uploading the content. Buy my album on MySpace ... watch my movie on YouTube.

Now--brave new world--I can decide that I want a snack chip in the shape of my face made of organic beets, buckwheat, defatted soy, triticale, and sea salt, choose between a "hearty crunch" or a "light and airy crisp" and in no time take delivery of little plasticized extrusions--ready for me to "expand" into a finished food product by frying, hot air popping, or microwaving--in 20 or 50lb bags. Got a party coming up this weekend? Choose the "2,200 pound capacity super sack". Woo.

I should have known that the warm feeling couldn't last. You know what I'm talking about: I'm eating whole grain foods! I'm in touch with the earth! I'm living an authentic life! My foods are crafted by flour-dusted artisans who shuffle around a kitchen warmed by a wood-fired brick oven! Innocence dies hard.

As an antidote to this unappetizing and slightly callous peek behind the food processing curtain, I offer this video of a real flour-dusted bread-making superhero.

warning: contains some language, appropriate to the subject but maybe not to your dining room. To which of these two enterprises would you rather give a seat at the dinner table?

from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Priceless

2009-12-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

Mini R/C Helicopter: 22 dollars

AA batteries: 5 dollars

The following mang-lish instructions: priceless

"This remote control has already installed to protect the device, if want the flight, please open the switch, the indicator would be shining, after operating the pole to the motive to heading up to push then pull to go to most next, the indicator is often Bright, at this time remote control normal usage of ability."

I should probably leave well enough alone, but I ran this English through Google's translator, then took the resulting Chinese and ran it back, just to see if two wrongs might make a right. Strangely, some of the instructions sound better, but with flashes of what sounds like political propaganda.

"The remote control has been installed protection devices, if you want to fly, please turn on the switch, indicator light flashes, it will operate under the motivation, leadership of promoting, and then evacuated to the most, this indicator is often a bright future, at this time, normal use of the remote control"

100 Catalogs

2009-12-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

We started stacking catalogs on Thanksgiving day. The pile didn't get as high as we thought it might, but today (December 24) my daughter and I counted 100 catalogs. These catalogs are filled with clothes (by far the majority), shoes, books, toys, food (popcorn, spices, english muffins, fruit), snowboards, computers, cameras, fleece jackets, jewelry, GPS-enabled golf rangefinders, exercise machines, and endless pages of cheap branded trinkets that will self-destruct 15 seconds after you tear off the wrapping. Our bank sent us a catalog (that's where you can get the GPS-enabled golf rangefinder). There are even catalogs selling sheep and other livestock to give (in someone's name) as charitable gifts to poor families--these catalogs are among the smallest, and that seems good to me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

There are 26.6 pounds of paper here. Zoe looked up the number of households in the U.S. and did a little math for me. In America, we're close to 15 million households. 26.6 pounds times the number of households in this country gives us roughly 3 billion pounds of catalogs. In one month! Be sure to check out our new eco-sensitive clothing line ....

Imagine how big our pile would be if we actually bought stuff from catalogs.

The Old Fashioned Way

2009-12-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

Remember when new jeans came in one style and that style was "new"? (What an OLD man thing to say.) I can remember weeks of chafing and mailing tube stiffness when breaking in a new pair of jeans--only slightly less painful then breaking in a new pair of leather hiking boots. And when you'd really worked those denims for a good long time (like, years), they acquired a beautiful, velvety-soft, sky-blue, wonderfulness. Today, thanks to the wonder of whatever dark magic happens in jean factories, we never have to break in clothes again.

I like soft pants. Who doesn't? I admit it: I'd choose faded jeans off the rack and leave behind the dark blue cardboard that is a fresh pair of 501s. But it's kind of sad to me that I'm paying equal or more to buy clothes that have been washed with rocks and will therefore have a shorter lifespan. Aged cheese? Good. Aged wine? Mmm. Aged pants? Wha? Where can I get me a brand-new car with a thousand miles on it, covered with dents and scratches? Rockin!

Now. I think the jeans pictured here are pretty good in a combat-boot-goes-to-the-prom sort of way, and I think the girl in them is pretty great in that kind of way, and in many other ways too. But wow.

Every now and then, me and the kids (this one, who's 16, and the boy, who's 13) get a little punchy and end up wrestling on the floor, which is getting more and more dangerous ... for me: I've broken parts of myself ... and the 13 year-old recently took me down in the kitchen with one move. I can't count all the times these kids cracked skulls while wrestling on the bed in the early years. We all know the risks! And I thought we shared an equally casual attitude towards our wardrobes: I mean, look at those pants. But what do you think happens at the first sound of tearing? She shrieks: "You're tearing my jeans!" Oh really.

Then there's me. This old pair of Levis has finally reach the point of structural failure. It's possible these jeans are 20+ years old. I should be happy that I now have holes. No more of the shame that attends those whose pants are unventilated. I should feel different, but all I feel is a draft on my left knee. I tell my daughter with desperate pride that I put tears in my jeans the old fashioned way ... I earn them. What an old man thing to say.

The Geography of Hope

2009-10-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, I posted an essay about how a ranger scolded me for walking 10 feet off the trail at Palo Alto's Arastradero Open Space Preserve. This preserve is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a wide-open place where one wouldn't expect the kind of "keep off the grass" rules associated with strips of city park. The title I gave the essay communicated my feelings on the matter ("Signs of The End").

But, I can admit now that I was of two minds on the matter. It still seems ridiculous to be told to stay on the trail in such a wild place. But soon after I wrote the piece, I felt a prick of conscience, and a sense of responsibility to tell the other side of the story. Why? Because I keep going back to Arastradero ... on foot, on mountain bike, alone and with my family. I find myself enjoying that same trail, and many other trails along the San Francisco peninsula again and again, and I began to have new thought share space with my semi-righteous indignation. I realized that I have very little to complain about. I live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, in the high-tech center of the modern world, and yet ... I am surrounded by simply beautiful natural spaces, forever preserved against development or modification beyond the laying of trail. I have in fact enjoyed open space along the Peninsula for my whole life, in all four seasons, in rain and shine, day and night. I've slept under oaks, prayed on benches, sat writing in journals, and stared without a thought into wilderness ... all in settings that allow my heart and mind and soul to drop their guard and to breath.

Room to breath. This is one of the themes in the language of open space. You come across the phrase frequently in the history of one of the largest of the agencies that oversee open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. I wanted to get to know this organization, to meet the people who keep this land for me, and to learn what it takes to preserve open space in a region that the rest of the world associates with high home prices and high technology. How do they do it?

I confess that when I met with Leigh Ann Maze of the OSD, I was looking for dirt (no pun intended): I wanted to hear all about the fights over who gets the land and how it is used. I guess I imagined a great battle over each acre: developers and technologists on one side, and sandle-wearing soldiers in the open space army on the other. Maze couldn't satisfy my need for drama. She said it might get a little hot in the nitty-gritty negotiations over a particular parcel of land, but she's not really aware of any great philosophical divide on the Peninsula. The overall impression I got from talking to her is that the OSD enjoys a lot of favor in the Bay Area. She suggests that open space is a part of what attracts people to live here, and that even the developers recognize that being able to see trees on the mountains increases the value of the homes down in the suburban sprawl between highways 101 and 280.

So it may be that some experience it as a tension, and others as harmony, but either way, there's no argument over whether it is good to have open space here at the end of America's westward expansion. You might expect to see an insulting profusion of development here, in the same way you see great mountains of boulders at the terminus of ancient glaciers. After all, people keep coming .... Instead, land dedicated to open space is increasing, not as much as in the early days, but still increasing each year. Anne Koletzke writes in Peninsula Tales and Trails, a guidebook to the district, that the Bay Area has one of the largest systems of public open space to be found in any urban area in the United States.

But it wasn't always that way. Journalist Jay Thorwaldson, in the foreword to Peninsula Tales and Trails, describes looking down, as a youth on horseback, from the ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the "valley's endless apricot and prune orchards [gave] way to homes and highways in a sad, but seemingly inevitable, roll of market demand and economic reality. Before silicon became the heart of computers," and a significant driver of development for the region, "this was called the 'Valley of Heart's Delight.'" In 1970, the threat was very real. But Thorwaldson was on hand to document a local, citizen-driven campaign to preserve open space. He himself influenced that campaign through editorials which urged these early environmentalists to find a way to buy the land they wanted to protect against development, a strategy also promoted by Wallace Stegner, a Stanford professor and novelist who contributed important ideology to the movement. If you want to preserve open space, the argument went, you have to own it, so that you can keep it open for ever.

Today the OSD owns over 55,000 acres of land, most of which can be explored by anyone who lives in, or visits, the Bay Area. When land is purchased, the first goal of the OSD is preservation, ensuring that the environment in and around the land is protected. These concerns always extend beyond the boundaries of purchases. Wildlife (from ubiquitous deer and squirrels to endangered red-legged frogs) pass through open space preserves and policies within the boundaries must account for the through-traffic. The course of streams in preserves can affect local watersheds and species (including our own species) many miles downstream. At times, early 'improvements', such as logging roads (called by the OSD, 'cultural resources'), need to be reversed to halt the pernicious effects of erosion on the ecosystem.

A very few times, the OSD closes a preserve to human visitors. But the "goal is to keep them open," says Maze, though always with limited provision for human comforts. "We set ourselves apart from other parks: we like to keep the infrastructure to a minimum. ... You'll see dirt parking lots and pit toilets, but no barbecues, play structures, or picnic tables ... the whole system only has one overnight campsite. ... We call what we do ecologically sensitive recreation and education." This emphasis on letting nature be, and not filling it with soccer fields, golf courses, or other recreational infrastructure, is summed up by Wallace Stegner in his Wilderness Letter, who asserted that preserving natural open space has "no more to do with recreation [than] churches have to do with recreation." We need, he says, to learn the "trick of quiet" that our ancestors knew from time spent in the big empty plains. "We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses ... all the wild that still remains to us."

Adding to the delicate balancing act that is managing a piece of nature, the OSD is a public agency and so is accountable to local public opinion, state and federal governments, policies including the Endangered Species Act, and other rulebooks overseen by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There are a lot of layers," says Maze, "even for one little project of putting in a bridge ... we have to get permits from cities, counties ... and the public always want to weigh in. ... Ultimately it's the public's land; it's your land, your trails."

With all these obligations to balance, the OSD seems to work really well. They do a great job communicating to the public -- they have a quality website, good-looking publications, and were willing to talk to a snarky blogger like me (that "end of the world" post was not much of a calling card). And, of course, they do a very good job stewarding the land. My experience of the preserves is that they are consistently clean, accessible, and well laid-out. I know that takes work, even when the bulk of the land is trusted to natural processes. Finally, and maybe most impressively, from what I've seen, it appears the OSD manages and spends their considerable budget wisely.

It doesn't mean it's all sunny skies over the preserves though. The downturn in the economy has affected the OSD, like it has every other business. Grants and private donations have dropped, and to add insult to injury, even though the District manages it's budget very well thank you, the State of California is exercising it's "emergency right" to take money from "special districts" to deal with it's own budget shortfall. They are borrowing roughly 2 million from the OSD, "which legally they need to pay back." (uh ... good luck.) When I asked if the money taken from the OSD would at least go to save some of the state parks that are expected to close (again, good luck), Maze couldn't say, and she showed a remarkably goodnatured attitude towards Sacramento. "We look at it as an investment in the state."

For all this organizational complexity, federal policy, resource managment, state budget trouble, and, yes, the threat of development on currently un-preserved land, the OSD does an amazing job of giving the people exactly what was hoped for some thirty years ago: room to breath.

And though I don't like fences in the wild, I recognize the difficulty of protecting land, especially when the land in question is surrounded by forces hostile to it. Regardless of the relatively harmonious relationship between open space and ... crowd-space on the peninsula, I know that if the fences came down, the land would be lost. So I'm thankful for the activists who fought to purchase land to preserve it, and I'm thankful for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and other powers that protect land for me, even if it means there are some views I have to enjoy from the trail.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. -Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter

A (low) tech writer principle: invest in the things you love. If that loose community of nature lovers back in the 70s had only come together to complain and had not put their money where their collective mouth was, the land between San Jose and San Francisco would be very different today, and we would all have a lot more to complain about.

=====
http://www.openspace.org/
Get your copy of Peninsula Tales and Trails at the OSD's website to support their work. It's a classic guide book.

Mid Peninsula Regional Open Space District Headquarters
37°23'46.79"N
122° 6'21.03"W
=====

Photography by Karl Gohl and used by permission of the photographer and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

bag

2009-09-14T12:54:00.001-07:00

My Bag has one pocket, and it's BIG. I like simplicity in my bags. I do not like complexity. My bag used to have a single inside flap, stitched to the top lip of the opening, with an assortment of little pockets for organizing stuff, but I removed it. It's not that I don't like being organized: it's just that I don't really like having someone else's principles of organization forced on me. The organizer pocket that was stitched inside this bag had a couple pen slots (I carry more than that and so I use a pencil case, which you can see in my profile picture), a wide pocket sized for something like a palm pilot (which most people now keep in a box in a closet, while they wait for the museum to call), a tinier fleece-lined pocket for a phone or media player (which is now a single device, and holstered to my strap for quick access while riding), and other miscellaneous slots that simply didn't fit the stuff I have. So out with the perma-pockets! The bag's a little lighter, it sits open more readily because there isn't a heavy array of pockets pulling the lip of the bag down, and is ready to be customized according to my needs.

Even when it left the factory - organizer pocket intact - my bag was downright simple compared to the modern daypack. Daypack design has gotten a little silly: the more specialized pockets, ports, sleeves, techy functions, fobs, and space age suspension technology a bag has, the more X-Treme you are, and the more money you will be separated from and ... the more doomed you are to throw away the bag as soon as your needs change. Think of it: you buy a new bag to fit your stuff. Your stuff breaks, or gets replaced with new stuff, or you stop using this stuff, or somebody invents a new piece of stuff that has an entirely different form-factor ... then you have pockets and features that are no longer relevant.

What if you don't have an MP3 player? Or you want to put it somewhere other than the specialized, padded media-pocket with a custom port for the headphones? What if you buy a bag with a padded pocket for your 12-inch laptop, then upgrade to a 15-inch? What if the water reservoir that came in the special insulated hydration-sleeve breaks or gets funky (it happens) and the new one you buy has the tube-thingy coming out of the wrong part and so doesn't reach out of the special hydro-hole and so on?

Custom pockets and padding and extra zippers add weight and more points of failure, and often stay empty for want of the Right Sized Thing. My bag, a Timbuk2 large Classic Messenger Bag (made in San Francisco), on the other hand, is insanely durable and beautifully flexible. In the one pocket of my bag, I have at different times carried a case of beer and snacks (ahem, to share), a full-size bike stand (a four foot long box ... it stuck out), camera bodies and multiple lenses, groceries, full picnics for a family of four on the beach or in the mountains (then all the rocks and stuff we collected to take home), and small ad hoc reference libraries. Basically, I can carry more in my bag than is wise, comfortable, or safe for anyone to carry while riding a bicycle. Of course when I only have a few things in it, it collapses to fit. It has no frame or foam suspension. It's a bag: it has the shape of the things it is carrying.

I do have the need to organize and carry small things: bike tools, pump, lights for night riding, food, extra clothes, books, journal, pencils and pens, and various other possibles. I have cheap little ditty bags and stuff sacks for all the things I carry, each one perfectly suited to my purposes because I chose it. If my needs change, I swap out the cheap bags. I put my laptop in a neoprene 'sleeve' that fits it like a glove. If I were to buy a bigger laptop, I'd get a different sleeve to fit it. What happens if the sleeve is stitched into the bag? And for that matter, what does the pocket do when you leave your laptop at home? What else do you put in a permanent, rectangular, foam-padded pocket? A very carefully folded sweater?

Bags with tons of pockets are also a serious liability in the rain. Bags with a lot of pockets and openings either have to use waterproof zippers and specially sealed seams (every stitch point is a point of entry for water in a downpour) or must be under a waterproof cover. My bag has one large, vinyl-coated, rain-proof flap, with no zippers to fail. Simple, beautiful, and durable.

(One extra provision I make for the possibility of really bad weather is the stuff sack that holds my rain gear: this bright orange bag is also waterproof. If the weather turns bad, the rain gear comes out and anything really sensitive to moisture goes inside the bag as extra insurance against water finding its way in.)

(low) tech writer principles. Rigid compartmentalization and design complexity limit flexibility and shorten the lifespan of a thing: complexity wears out its welcome sooner than simplicity. Complex things slow you down, require more maintenance (of a more specialized kind), solve problems you probably don't have, and cost more in the bargain.

Simplicity in design is more enduringly functional, flexible, adaptable, durable, and inexpensive (both on the day you buy it and when you need to repair it).

More on Simple Toys & the boxes they come in

2009-08-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

It's the simple toys that last, and that have a lasting impact. In our house we occasionally clean out the closets of old toys. Massive piles of colorful plastic are thereby doomed to landfill (you'd be surprised how un-recyclable these things are). Each addition to the pile stirring feelings of mild parental shame; each missing a small piece essential to its function, or missing something altogether more essential than just a part. The toys that remain are missing nothing, except perhaps marketability. ... The giraffe, the duck with the floppy feet made of old bicycle tubes on wheels that go flap-flap as you push it around, the little wooden car, unpainted, colored darker brown where handling has stained it. (The pic below is from DoodleTown Toys, a 37 year old maker of classy wooden toys. Click the picture to see their web site, and some really wonderful tiny toys. I like the Doodle Dozer and the Doodle Pickup.)

These unpainted, unpowered, analog, silent, and imagination-ready toys don't get old, and don't get thrown away. When you're done with one of these toys, they are given away to serve for a season in someone elses home. They are simple but come to life when a child projects their imagination onto them. Kids need a blank space to project onto.

With these toys, the less provided, the more room we have to add our own stories, to really make a toy a part of our story. They are the truly beautiful toys, that are quiet enough (in every way) to allow our children to think, to begin to dream. It's not really that there are too few of them, it's that there are too many of the other kind ... noisy, plastic, electronic, brightly colored toys-with-an-agenda that fill the shelves

Some toy designer somewhere is thinking about adding more lights, more sounds, more chips to toys. Toys have to compete with computers now, is how the story goes. It talks to you! It's more lifelike! It follows you around! It responds to your commands! It sings-and-shows-you-the-notes-on-an-LCD-screen-so-you-can-learn-to-read-music-before-you-turn-three!

My son has a robot toy that occasionally gets woken up (with the push of a button, if the batteries aren't dead) to do it's pre-programmed dance (to pre-programmed music). But that's it. It will break soon, or we'll get tired of providing the four D batteries required, and it will go to whatever place these clever-complex toys go when they die (I have my theories). Sometimes I wonder if we haven't gone to that place, when he tells me all about this years' model with it's much more realistic robot dance.

Once, when my daughter was very little, her grandparents came home from a trip with a stuffed monkey from the airport (warning). Yes, I'm talking about you, Mom and Dad. Its fur was a kind of hyper sparkly white, and it held a red satin heart that had some earnest expression of affection written in white cursive on it. When they handed it over, and showed her how to squeeze the heart, that little howler monkey from hell began to shake ... and ... shriek. Repeatedly. I remember the look on their faces: a kind of embarrassed thrill. They had clearly scored points in some grandparent competition but seemed uncertain about their victory. There was nothing to do but bask in the ridiculous, momentary joy of their granddaughter and dodge the momentarily incoherent protests of her father. They don't have to worry. Even if I will remember this event, ahem, for the rest of my life, I think better of them than this. They are much more thoughtful than the howler monkey episode suggests. They are progressive and intelligent and my kids have not had more than their share of silly gifts. It's a grandparent thing. I will have my moments when I get there, I'm sure.

To balance this painful memory, I recall the time my dad used his jigsaw to cut a rifle shape out of plywood for me. No paint. No moving parts. No logos or names on it. Talk about room for imagination! So cool. Or the times he helped me trick out cardboard boxes for play. Now there is a plaything to make a wooden car seem high-tech. In a flash of brilliance, a toy museum in New York inducted the humble Cardboard Box into its hall-of-fame (next to Barbie and GI Joe and an old Atari).

Empty boxes are ready to be filled with stories. Yes, kids will shriek with joy when they get the hot new toy, as seen on TV. Yes, it's great to get a really big gift. But the truly blessed will recognize that it's not the size of the gift ... it's the size of the box it came in.

At the end of any holiday, a kid should have a cardboard box to climb into, if only to shut out the noise and light and have some discretionary quiet time. If it was socially acceptable for grown-ups to climb into a cardboard box, with a blanket and stuffed bear perhaps, maybe there'd be less people climbing into a bottle at the end of the day.

My best cardboard-box memory has a techy twist: I set up a box in the garage and punctured it with a string of Christmas-tree lights so that I could pretend I was inside the blinking cockpit of an X-Wing fighter. Yes, I converted my simple, low-tech box into a high-tech cockpit from the future! I see the irony, but it was my choice. I made that X-Wing fighter. It was my imagination fueling the creation, and the thing lasted precisely as long as my imagination did: a few days. There was no grief when the whole thing was broken down and the Christmas tree lights went back on the shelf. Nobody was upset about wasting good money, and I got a memory a hundred times more powerful than any packaged, licensed, authentically-styled, battery-powered Star Wars X-wing with authentic sounds and lights could ever provide.

CAUTION - A toy that never goes away

2009-07-01T18:51:00.001-07:00

In total contrast to the toy that once belonged to the power transformer of the previous post (which has disappeared from our lives for reasons that may include, but shall not be limited to, a) failure of electronics, b) boredom deriving from the limited electronic function, c) breaking of shiny and colorful but flimsy plastic enclosure, or d) inability to find the power transformer of the previous post when needed), the toy in the above picture has been a part of our lives and a fixture in our family room for something close to fifteen years. Seriously, for no other reason than we never got tired of it, this thing won't go away. Not only do visiting children instantly straddle it to roll around the room, but our kids occasionally do, and they are 12 and 16 years old.

'Nuff said.

CAUTION-ELECTRIC TOY

2009-07-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

'NUFF SAID?

The smells of success

2009-06-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

My family just spent some time at a lake house as guests of good friends. It was a nice vacation: I think we all got the kind of readjustment that we were looking for. There was water-skiing, swimming, sun-worshiping, fishing, and ... we even got in a hike to a small jewel of an alpine lake called Crystal Lake (that's my happy place). There was also much consuming of barbecued meat, and, although you can do that back home, for some reason barbecued meat tastes better next to a lake at 5000 feet surrounded by friends and by pine trees that are catching the setting sun after a day of fun when you know you get to have another day of fun right after that. I think that's a culinary principle.

To get to this lake, we had to cross over the Pacific Crest, the high-elevation spine that runs through California. I love the change in atmosphere as you climb out of a hot-and-dry valley like the Hwy. 5 corridor. First the temperature changes--but not like you'd think: the air is crisper and feels colder, but the sun is more intense, so it can feel hotter. The air is thinner, which means you'll be out of breath for a few days, but your body will adjust. Then there is the smell. On a drive like this, I can't wait to roll the windows down and be done with the air-conditioning (and air-recycling) needed to survive a hot valley highway jammed with traffic: up high, the air seems so much more breathable. It's the smells.

Above 4000 feet, the air smells fresher, cleaner, and richer. You can smell the herbal shrubs when the sun hits them and they release their perfume. You can smell some of the giant trees, like the pines that cover these mountains. You can even smell the dirt ... and it smells good. One of the most powerful (and I'm ashamed to say, most satisfying) smells comes when a logging truck carrying felled pine trees passes your car. I know that's not so p.c., but the trees are logged sustainably in this area, and anyways, it is such a surprise to smell something good behind a truck that it catches me a little off-guard.

Speaking of trucks, two of the families at our house towed boats up to the lake. One was a fishing boat, and the other was a sport boat that pulled the water skiers. Both of these boats were towed by the original giant sequoia of the road, the Chevy Suburban. Though I am a low-and-green-tech kind of guy who would like to see less big gas-burning cars on the road, I can't deny that these are the very cars you need when towing six people and a boat up to the mountains. Or, as one of the dads said as sixteen of us piled into the two Suburbans for our trek up to the trailhead for an afternoon of hiking, "... Probably the most fuel-efficient way in the world to move 16 adults and kids up to 7000 feet. Prius just wouldn't do it."

I'm inclined to agree, and anyway, this is not the crowd to blame for SUVs crowding the roads in the cities and suburbs: these families are actually using their trucks as trucks. But too many people buy SUVs for their (perceived) safety, their (very-real) projection of power, or the (dubious) image of success they bestow, and then proceed to drive them like cars to and from the market and soccer games. The Suburban has the right size engine for towing and climbing mountains, but way too much engine when all you're towing is ego and attitude. Just because you can afford the gas to drive an empty truck doesn't mean you have a right to burn it: that aroma on the roads of Silicon Valley just may be the unintended smell of success.

When our families arrived at the trailhead for our hike to Crystal lake, one of the moms got out of the car, took a deep breath and said, "Oh! It smells so good here!" And it did. I said to her, "There's lots of good smells back home too, we just don't know it, because there are too many other smells on top of the good ones." I don't like the idea that it can only smell good far away from home. That sweet smell of the naked earth, uncluttered and unmasked, was one of the rewards at the end of our long ascent. But what about those hidden smells back home? How should our home towns smell?

As in the case of the giant, pine-scented logging trucks laboring over the mountains, one powerful smell can mask another. On mountain roads, I learned, pine trumps diesel (and how cool is that?). Back home in the Bay Area, the smells of nature are more subtle and diffuse than cut-pine: as a bicycle commuter who often spends time wedged between SUVs, I can tell you what smells are winning. I wonder: is there anyone still living here in suburbia who remembers what this place really smells like?

A lover's quarrel

2009-06-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Heather writes a beautiful, honest post about returning home to Georgia and the tension of how things change. She talks about Georgia like one might a former boyfriend--winsome memories of lovable qualities, and a hard encounter with all the reasons why it could never have worked out .... Her clear-headed reflection on the imbalance in the urban/rural relationship is itself balanced and evocative.

When I return, I feel...I feel betrayed. Atlanta has sprawled beyond her rightful and necessary boundaries. Or you could say the symbol Atlanta is of urban commerce has overrun its banks and flooded the rural landscape that gives that commercial river the right to flow in the first place. I'm not naive enough to say that commerce is bad or that cities are bad but I am principled enough to say that when the balance of urban and rural gets knocked off its fragile footing both sides lose.

From Heather's blog, Garden Street Farm: A song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.

Upside Down

2009-06-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Once I held the impressive title of Director of Marketing at a Java software company .... Ok, the truth is that the company belonged to my friend Steve, and he was in fact the only employee, #1 of one, until I came along. He asked me to help him staff his booth at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. He made business cards for me with my new title on it. Steve had written a Java Obfuscator (what?) and I was doing some marketing/communication work for him at the time, so I understood his product as well as any of the other attractive young people who handed out brochures at conferences. Yes, I was a booth babe.

It was a blast being on the floor at a tech convention during a peak time in the industry, and we had a choice location. We were right inside the main doors, so that every single one of the 30,000 attendees walked right by our spot. I did a fair job of introducing his product and liked working with him. But the real fun was in walking around the huge hall at Moscone Center and just looking at all the stuff. When else was I going to be at a Java software convention? It was like walking around a city in a foreign country. This was back in the boom times, when companies gave away serious hardware for free. Each paid attendee at the conference got a brand-new Palm V, loaded with conference software.

I didn't do that well, but I came home from that event with a bag full of exceptional swag: logo key chains, stress balls, flashlights, all of it carefully designed so that we would remember ... something about some company being the premier provider of solutions that I'm confident had something to do with Java. My kids got it all ... except one piece of treasure I still use (and who can say that about their Palm V? Beam me your contact info, anyone? ... Anyone?). I visited the booth for Upside, a technology-and-money magazine that I used to read, where I managed to score a nice big UPSIDE mug. I'm drinking my coffee out of it as I write this, and I am almost awake.

This is still the largest coffee mug in my kitchen--almost ten years later--and that's saying something in America, where any technology for delivering food or drink doubles in capacity every decade (I believe that's Moore's law of American food consumption). It had the word "UPSIDE" printed in huge letters on it, with the words "PEOPLE TECHNOLOGY CAPITAL" in smaller letters under it. I say had, because those words are now entirely missing from the mug. Worn off, or faded, or gone to wherever all the money went.

Now you can just barely see where the words were. At the moment, it looks a little like one of those ceramic mugs that has a secret word or picture that materializes when you put a hot or a cold drink into it, the novelty item that reveals a hidden surprise when conditions are right. Only conditions will never be right for this UPSIDE to reappear. Sounds like the year 2000 and the promise of the dotcom market. Is my mug big enough to contain such an overblown metaphor? It is big enough that I will not need any more coffee today. After this post, maybe I should cut back.

Simpler Times?

2009-05-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I found an old copy of Thomas Kinkade's Simpler Times on my daughter's bookshelf, which I promptly re-claimed for collages. She didn't mind: neither of us had ever really read it. The book had been sent to me more than a decade ago when I took a writing job for Media Arts Group, the company that sells Kinkade's pictures. In fact, I poked around on thomaskinkade.com a bit and found the plein-air paintings that I had written about years ago. My words are still there, signed by the Painter of Light himself. You could read my old masterpieces of copywriting if you knew where to look. ... I'm not talking.

The book, Simpler Times, and the art that fills it, is all about a return to some kind of good-old-days: stone cottages, warm firelight, cozy villages, and gas-lit streets. This is all elaborated in the book as the opposite of noisy, media-filled, task-list-crazed individualism. Had Kinkade and his co-author written the book today, I assume blog-writing and -reading, and other webby activities wouldn't qualify as simple-time either. Who would buy a Thomas Kinkade painting of an apartment window glowing with the unearthly fluorescent blue of computer screens? The Painter of Light, 2.0!

Who doesn't love the idea of old stone buildings lit by fire? Kinkade is popular because his paintings strike some pretty big chords - simplicity is highly attractive to anyone who lives and works in this crazy-complex modern world. Longing is probably not too strong a word to describe the attraction. Also attractive are the various elements that populate these works: stone, water, and fire; cottages, gardens, and gazebos. Here at (low) tech writer, I share this attraction. But all of these elements are brought together in a world as unreal as a model-railroad diorama. What is it exactly? A little too much color in that garden scene? Not quite enough color in that crowd scene? Is it all just a little too much of the wrong idea of perfect? As I flipped through the book (before cutting it up for art), I began to discern one significant way that these pictures go wrong. It's the water. When I look at the water in a Kinkade painting, I long for a little less simplicity.

Here's what I see: in Thomas Kinkade's world, water is harmless.

Take a look at the painting titled Almost Heaven (you can zoom in on it by clicking the picture to visit the Web site). The waterfalls in this picture sit on top of the earth like they don't belong there -- like they are just passing through: not like they have been carving the surface of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. One of these uninvited rivers spills over the high-point on a rock jutting out from a cliff, managing a double-miracle: resisting the tendency of water to flow downhill, and also the habit of water to wear stuff down. Other waterfalls in the scene rage with snowmelt, but seem unable to have any effect on the landscape at all. In other works, rivers float through villages on top of the soft earth in perpetual flood, yet also fail to have any erosive effect on the perfect, grassy banks. It seems to me that Kinkade makes a mistake similar to that made by some of the romantic painters of the 19th century: while 'recording' what they witnessed in the new territory of the American West, they often mixed up their geology by painting what they imagined, instead of what was. Albert Bierstadt painted the scenery of the Sierra Nevada in California from a mix of memory and imagination. He seems to have occasionally confused and combined u-shaped glaciated valleys with the v-shaped terrain created by liquid water.

At least Bierstadt was never confused about the violence that water can do, in liquid or solid form. Looking at Kinkade's paintings, we're left to imagine that God formed the mountains and valleys according to whimsy and then sent the impotent water over it for his own amusement. And, I guess, for painters to have something to paint. Will there be no erosion in heaven?

But if God made the mountains and the valleys, then the shaping of them was done with water. If you've ever tried to swim across a river, or escape a rip-tide, or walked under a waterfall, you know that water has power. And power is precisely what is missing from Kinkade's portrayal of nature.

I can accept the unabashed hopefulness--hope needs nurturing. I can accept the occasional too-sweet sentiment--who doesn't like sugar in their lemonade? I can almost accept that there is never any strife in Kinkade's art: after all, he is painting his vision of heaven on earth, and some of us--even before we take in his luminous, idealized landscapes--are invested in the idea that one day our tears will be wiped away and there will be joy. But, while I believe that this kind of heaven is breaking through into the world, I don't think that it will create the homogeneous and impotent landscape that the Painter of Light portrays. In fact, I'd say Kinkade's powerless waters (for starters) give his vision itself a dangerous power ... power to lure the viewer away from the challenges of reality in the way that psychotropic drugs dilute your desire to find real peace. Take enough Valium and you may just give up thinking about what's wrong with your life.

One take-away from this kind of art is the idea that the creation is ideally impotent. That in this picture of heaven not only will the lion lay down with the lamb, but the water will never again shape the rock, or otherwise change the landscape. But what Kincade fails to document in his vision is that this shaping and changing is a part of the design. It is part of God's design that water and earth are locked in constant conflict, and one result of this clash is that the earth is made more beautiful.

Here's what's true about water. Water is not impotent. In nature, water moves according to huge and hairy rhythms and gives swimmers and sailors something to worry about. Water tears at the landscape, breaks it down, carries it off, and leaves the earth scarred and changed. Here's how awesome water is: if Water was invited to make a guest appearance in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors ... it would trump them all, but none would fall more memorably than Rock, which succumbs slowly but utterly to water's power.

A pretty good example of what can result from all this clash and conflict between water and stone is a little vacation spot in the California mountains called Yosemite Valley. You may have heard of it. There are peaceful places in the Valley, but I'm not sure a feeling of peace is the appropriate response when looking at a waterfall moving 2,500 gallons of water per second and cutting through a two-thousand-foot granite cliff. Water has terrible power and who would want it any other way? But Kinkade's paintings suggest that something God made powerful will one day ideally lose it's power, and that is a message with the power to make people mistrust true power, wherever it should be found.

One place where power is seldom trusted, where conflict gets a bad rap, is among the human characters that move here and there on the surface of the planet. While nobody loves the wars that plague humanity, even the proverb says that people shape and change each other, that we are somehow improved by conflict:

"Iron sharpens iron,

so one person sharpens the wits of another."

(Proverbs 27.17)

Conflict is not evil. It's only evil when we try to silence or destroy those who challenge or threaten us. That's what makes war. Allow me to suggest a (low) tech writer people-principle: peace does not come from avoiding conflict or clashes, it comes from accepting these things as part of God's design for beautiful people.

Or to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity".

-----

The photo of Yosemite Falls, 2005, is by Kevin Ingolfsland and is on WikiMedia Commons.

Signs of The End

2009-03-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

Signs that we are in the last days: police action in the wild-lands of Palo Alto. On the very same day as my encouraging visit to Peet's, I was walking in Arastradero Park, in the foothills above Palo Alto. This is no city park: there are no lawns, no landscaped flower-beds, no bandstands--just 10 miles of beautiful trails.

A great effort has been made at Arastradero to return this suburban open space to wilderness. But wild is as wild does.

After shooting some pictures of wildflowers just off the trail, I was met by a ranger (where DID she come from?) who scolded me for leaving the path--a violation of park rules. This picture is the evidence of my shameful transgression.

OK, I know, because she told me, that this park gets "loved to death", and that the rules are there to preserve this natural beauty for future generations. But the whole experience made me feel like I was in a museum, or a zoo, except in some zoos you get to go through the fences and pet the goats. Look at that trail. It's beautiful. Isn't it spoiled, just a bit, by a "Keep Off The Grass" sign?

I've written about this kind of madness before. If I cut off a trail at the same place as a hundred other people, or if I choose to walk just to the side of a trail to avoid the mud in the low track, then I would be contributing to visible wear on the ecosystem. But is it really going to scar the planet if I leave the trail at a random point to walk out in the grass a bit for a different view? Please.

No matter what justification is offered--and it all has a kind of grim logic about it--who can be happy about such barriers arising between human beings and nature? There are many more disturbing things in the world, but this still feels to me like one more sign of the apocalypse.

Signs of Hope

2009-03-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

Signs of hope ... that we Silicon Valley peoples aren't totally enslaved to our devices. A couple days ago, in a local Peet's, I counted a total of no laptops. You read that right. I also counted no smartphones, no handheld computers, no Internet surfing technologies whatsoever. The place has wifi, but the clientele seemed totally unconcerned that they were falling behind on their email. And the place was full of coffee drinkers: can you drink coffee and not be productive?

There was the old couple in the corner mostly being quiet and looking out the window (searching for ...?). There was the family of four (mom, dad, teen girl, tween boy) sitting around a small table and talking, not on phones, but all in-person and stuff. There was the guy in the corner reading a book, printed on a pre- e-paper technology called, confusingly, paper. There was the man chatting with the store manager, who sat next to him on a bench against the wall.

And just in case you don't know how strange this is, in case you live in a town where it's normal to go out in public to be with people, consider the case of the Red Rock Coffee shop, a mile or so down the street. I was in the Red Rock today. I love the Red Rock. Good coffee. Good art. Good vibe. Good grief: I counted twenty-eight laptops.

Water and Fire

2009-03-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

Crystal Springs Reservoir is an artificial lake that sits on the San Andreas Fault between San Francisco and San Jose. It is one of the more beautiful reservoirs I know of, and there are lots of pretty views along the lake. Nevertheless, I had to work hard to snap a picture that didn't show barbed wire between me and the water. It's filled from pipes that come from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite, famous for the valley of the same name that was destroyed by the San Francisco Water Department when it was flooded in the early 20th century to provide water for the city. John Muir mourned the loss of Hetch Hetchy, which he compared to Yosemite Valley in beauty (Muir suggested that the governement might as well seal up cathedrals and churches for water tanks while they were at it). But Crystal Springs is a beautiful expanse of water in a beautiful area minutes from Silicon Valley, and beggars can't be choosers.

As a suburbanite living in an overcrowded metropolitan area, I am sometimes surprised to be reminded that I am surrounded by water. Yes I can get to the Pacific Ocean in about 40 minutes, but though the San Francisco Bay is even closer, and there are natural creeks and streams everywhere, water is hard to find; hidden under concrete and usually only seen--but just barely--from bridges. I used to live in Redwood City, and it wasn't until I'd been there for several years that I learned that there used to be canals--canals!--running right into the downtown area. While boats had once docked a hundred yards from the beautiful county courthouse, now you can stand where schooners once floated and not even know that water still flows somewhere underneath your feet.

My heart broke when I learned that I could have walked along canals in the center of this old, interesting town, instead of along a loud, car-filled street. I know why they covered them up. Ships stopped contributing significantly to the economy, and the creek feeding the area was too much work to dredge. Add to that the increase in automobile traffic and the economic potential of more streets and better traffic management, and you can see the logic of paving over nature, which has a way of getting in the way of progress. When the creek went underground, something was gained and something was lost. I don't always root for the losing team (my mom and my wife do that), but in this case I'm crying in my beer.

Thankfully you can still get to the remaining wet places in the area, but you have to get out of your car to see them (the scene above is only visible from the car-free Sawyer Camp Trail), and that means that most people won't see them. You can drive over any number of bridges that span the Bay, and hardly see the water at all. This will be partly because of the railings and traffic that block your view, and partly because if you do try to take in the view, you'll probably crash your car, which might give you more time to look at the view, but behind you will be the drivers of many cars who are now looking at the view instead of driving to wherever it is they want to go, and they will hate you. Nobody likes to be forced to appreciate nature.

You need to get out of your car. Looking at water from inside a car (a parked car, please) is like watching the nature channel--you can't really experience water through the window of your car. You might as well watch it on TV. You need to get close. You need to listen to water as it washes over the sand and as waves slap against the rocks. You have to get close to hear the sounds of water as it tumbles over rapids in a stream, echoing off the leaves of shade trees. You need to be able to watch the surface of the water move (impossible, if you are moving yourself--you have to stop). This is another one of those almost forgotten things that causes my skin to tingle when I experience it after a long time of deprivation.

Fire has also been caged and hidden. For most of us metro-unfortunates, the only fire that burns in our houses is safely hidden from view in steel boxes where our water or our air or our chicken nuggets are heated (that is if we still cook with the box that uses heat waves and haven't given it up for the one that uses electromagnetic waves). For those of us in old homes that still have fireplaces, we are told by the law that we can't burn wood on certain days, because then all the drivers would have to roll up their windows to keep from smelling the air we thoughtlessly smoked up. The air we smoked up by burning wood, another natural thing that is being outlawed while we continue to pursue happiness in cars.

Now I know, because I am reminded constantly, that these days any smoke adds to the danger in an already dangerously overcrowded region. I once heard that the Los Angeles basin has always had a natural inversion-layer and that Southern California air quality was a problem even when the only smoke rose from the fires of Native camps. I guess some places were never capable of naturally supporting large populations no matter how they cooked their food or got to work.

And I know that these days I have a choice: I don't need to burn wood to stay warm or cook my food. Even if I want to barbecue, I'm told, I should get a gas grill because it is more eco-sensitive. Better to burn gas under the food I eat: better for the food (less carcinogenic, I'm told) better for the air (less particulates in the smoke), more convenient (Quicker! Cleaner!). If I miss the smoky flavor of charcoal, I can add it to the meat before I barbecue (Smoke in a Bottle! That's green.)

And I know that these days 99% of the population have no choices when it comes to commuting: they have to drive to work, or think that they have to. The society is set up for cars.

I know these things. But I will never, ever be comfortable with the idea that because so many people burn gas in their vehicles to get to work, they should then come home and use gas to cook their burgers instead of charcoal. How did burning petrochemicals in a barbecue become part of the green solution to an air quality problem caused by the burning of petrochemicals?

We have candles in our fireplace now. It's pretty I guess. We don't need the fireplace to warm the house, so it works out. It's better for the air: kids and adults with breathing-related illnesses like asthma will breathe easier. That's a win. But something has been lost too. The sights and sounds of a wood fire in a house are emblematic of home, shelter, comfort: the sound of fire, almost like banners moving in stiff wind, with the occasionally snap or pop that makes you jump and check the floor for sparks; the sight of fire, intensity of color, flames rippling, also like banners, trapped in their own thermals. Move in close, as close as possible, to stare at the embers. It's like looking into a volcano in miniature, as close as I'll ever get.

Will California broadcasters ever realize that most of their audience is now in the same boat as New York apartment-dwellers and put a yule log on the TV at Christmas time? Oh, I forgot, we are allowed to put gas fireplaces in our new homes, which is kind like the TV yule log already, with the following differences: 1) you still get the pleasure of lighting your "fire"; 2) it doesn't come into the home over the air, but through pipes; and 3) it still produces some heat and exhaust gasses. If I had to choose one over the other, I don't know which is worse for the planet. But for my money, if the gas fire is burning behind glass, I figure I'll just go with the TV, and turn up the heat.

Timing and Technology, A Pattern Language

2009-03-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

One of my very favorite books is A Pattern Languageby Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. The book is ostensibly about architecture, detailing how to design and build the places we live, from the regional scale down to the nook in the corner of a child's room. It is a beautiful manifesto for simple, economical, ecological, human-centered design; I know of nothing better to have come out of the 70s. Inside this 1200 page book are about 250 patterns, each describing a principle, a pattern, that is essential to designing and building livable, humane spaces and communities.

But the beauty of The Pattern Language is that you quickly come to realize that the patterns being described are not limited to application in the world of architecture. Alexander says in his introduction that he hopes "that a great part of this language ... will be a core of any sensible human pattern language, which any person constructs for himself, in his own mind" (my emphasis). To read how Alexander lays out the pattern for the furniture in rooms (Pattern 185, Sitting Circle), or for the essential businesses in a town (88, Street Cafe, etc.), you get the idea very quickly that the patterns all assume that the reason for design is to accommodate life, not economic forces or engineering principles. The book has the effect (whether or not you are in a position to build your own home) of awakening an appreciation for community and humanity that has been somewhat dampened by the design of modern social spaces. The book is inspiring, and gives me a sense of expectation that good things can happen between people when technology doesn't get in the way.

Technology, by definition, is the application of scientific knowledge for the purpose of increasing efficiency in any practical endeavor. There is nothing wrong with technology in itself. Problems come when a technological solution is pursued blindly, hastily, and at the expense of the potential intuitive solutions that are much better suited to a local context. Technology is tied to efficiency, and efficiency is tied to questions of scale. It makes a certain economic sense to mass-produce formulaic solutions that can sell, or communicate, across cultures. Technology often provides the most efficient and economical solution. But, does it ever provide the best solution? Getting back to architecture, Alexander argues that normal people are fully able to discern, design, and build their own unique living and work spaces, and that they will do the best job of it for the least amount of money, too. Does that sound radical? Why should it? It wasn't that long ago when that was the way it was done. Today, we assume that anyone who builds their own home is either a licensed contractor or just quaint (think of people that gather for barn-raisings, all beards and buttons and suspenders). Alexander intends to provide "an alternative to technocratic and rigid ways of building that have become the legacy of the machine age and modern architecture" ... for normal people, not only contractors and the quaint.

I've been reading the book for three or four years (not unheard of with me and certain books) and I'm almost done. I recently came to a moment late in the book where I was stunned to realize just how serious Alexander is about providing alternatives to rigidity. This moment, spanning two patterns that come into play as a subject begins to build their house, perfectly expresses when and how to embrace technology.

In pattern 212 (Columns at the Corners), Alexander describes the standard architectural practice of hiring a draftsperson to create blueprints from a design and then turning them over to a contractor, who relies on the drawing to raise the house on-site. But, he says, this practice "cripples buildings". Not only does it force a kind of rigidity on a design and put too many technological barriers between design and construction, but it will be doomed to frequent revision as the builder encounters a multitude of problems on site not imagined when the design was committed to paper. Many trips back and forth between contractor and designer and client result. This scenario, which threatens to suck a property owner dry of enthusiasm and money, might be eliminated if the client could be both the designer and builder, and skip the whole blueprint stage entirely.

Oddly enough, the way I first learned about A Pattern Language was by reading the account of a writer who decided to build a small writing hut on his property. Odd because he falls into the very trap Alexander is preaching against. When the floor of his hut was laid, a mistake in measurement was discovered: the foundation was ever so slightly off-square, and it could not be easily or cheaply fixed. With horror, the author and his handyman realized that the whole building was now going to need customizing. Every subsequent piece of the building would need to be finished with a slight angle to fit the whole, a situation described as catastrophic. I guess this author failed to read or take seriously the part of Pattern Language where Alexander suggests that they could have scribbled the design on the back of an envelope, and then walked the site pounding in stakes where the corners felt right, with no concern for uneven lines or imperfect angles. In case you didn't get that: Alexander is really saying that precise blueprints are not necessary. In fact he would rather they be rejected: in the pattern language, the design process doesn't end until well after you mark out the corners of your building, with chalk or stakes or whatever. The beauty of this organic process, as it is described, is that the design grows around the realities of the environment ... and the concerns of the people who will live there. Stand in "the kitchen" and you'll realize that the wall with the window and sink will need to be bigger, and perhaps angled differently to take in that particular view ... no sweat: move the stakes. Change the size of rooms according to your experience of the site, and obsess ye not over right-angles. Amen.

But before the reader can swear on a stack of building codes never to step foot inside a house where design and construction are happening all at once, we move on to pattern 213 (Final Column Distribution). In this pattern the question is asked how the "spacing of columns" is effected by the size of rooms and number of stories, and the chapter is sensibly free of any organo-hippie vibe. Having just told you in 212 to put the corner columns wherever feels right to you, Alexander goes on in 213 to detail the complex technical formula for determining how to design a wall, with it's intermediate columns, to support the weight of a roof and additional upper-story rooms. And this technical, industry-standard formula comes just in time. It is important for walls to be able to support a roof - this will provide many holistic benefits to the occupants of a home, like not dying under a collapsed roof when you slam a door, or not dying under a collapsed roof when the wind blows, and so on. I believe it is axiomatic that one should not take shelter in a home where the compressive load-bearing capacity of its walls has been intuited organically.

If technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, then there is a time and a place for it in all aspects of our lives. Technology can be a lifesaver. However, apply it too early in a design process and it cripples our products and projects, our homes and communities. They become cold and rigid--we fear any imperfection in them. They will be impersonal and homogeneous, ill-suited to our unique context or environment. You can see the results of an overly technological architecture everywhere you turn in suburbia: homes built according to some remote architect's bland, marketable standard of what a beautiful home should look like ... and when such "homes" are planted on a typical suburban half-lot, these mini-mansions look like part of a demonic plot to destroy a neighborhood. The best thing you can say about them is that they won't fall down in a storm ....

Let's adopt this as a (low) tech writer principle: let individual or community wisdom, forged-in-context, dictate the unique shape of your house, project, product, or organization. Take time to listen for, intuit, and live with the implications of the designs you are working on. Only after organically discerning the shape and scale of a new project should you consult outside "experts" (or formulas). These may aid in developing levels of structure efficiently, but such expert witnesses will seldom have your local, contextual perspective, and so should not under any circumstances be allowed to dictate design.

The Old Testament book of Proverbs 24:3 says, "By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches." This is the original idea of getting the order right in building. "Wisdom", it says elsewhere in Proverbs, is the product of a healthy reverence--awe--for God. In the biblical context, of course, this is referring to the need to listen to God before you start anything that bears The Name, whether a building or a military campaign. In other contexts, the same reverent attention to the names associated with a venture is called for: the name of the family that will dwell in a home; the name of a town where a business in starting up. How does the life of these communities, small and large, dictate the design of the structures that will serve them? The getting of wisdom has to come first in the building of anything, a home or a life. Later, once the foundation is understood and laid, it's gifts of a more intellectual kind (not less sacred) that come into play: the understanding of compressive load-bearing capacities that makes it possible to raise a structure, and the knowledge of the community that dictates the filling of the structure with the stuff that makes a place livable and pleasant. But wisdom is needed to determine the shape of a thing, not technology or intellectual precision. And wisdom comes from a reverence for the life that a thing is meant to serve.

A companion volume to A Pattern Language is The Timeless Way of Building.This book takes a higher-level view of the philosophy of building towns and buildings.

Silence

2009-03-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

I love it when the power goes out. I'm not immune to the inconvenience: I am a computer user after all (note that I don't publish these essays on parchment paper). But the possibility of a power outage is no real threat to me because I'm a laptop user (built in battery backup, you see), so I never worry about losing work, or even productivity. But if the power does go out, I will save my work, fold my laptop up, and revel in the silence and the dark.

Last year, I was in my favorite coffee shop near my office, Printer's Cafe in Palo Alto, when the power went out. It was shocking: the overwhelming silence was a major surprise. There was, normally, so much noise in that place--the fridges, espresso machine, blenders, microwave, dishwashers, the general hum of unseen appliances and infrastructure--that the sudden absence of it was almost unnerving. I got tingles. There is a kind of silence that is hard for a city kid or suburbanite to adjust to. It's heavy. I wish it could be recorded, but like most beautiful things, there's no real way to capture it.

I love it when the power goes out: I often threaten to throw the circuit breakers in my home because it just doesn't happen often enough. To light candles and just be in the beautiful glow of little flames and listen to the subtle, natural sounds ... wind, footsteps, pages turning. To move from one orange and shadowy space through dark passageways to other orange and shadowy spaces. Of course, this is a treat because we don't have to live without power the rest of the time. It's a little unplanned vacation from modernity. I am glad for the conveniences of electricity. But there are always consequences that result from our tireless pursuit of convenience.

Take a mental walk around your work space or living space right now. Where's that noise coming from? Central air? Refrigerator? Computer fan (or some deeper, subtler electronic movement)? Lamps are always buzzing, whether fluorescent, incandescent or the high-powered kind above streets and blazing behind warehouses. Then there are the radios, televisions, Internet media, and the loud-and-low, primevally-musical thumps and rumbles coming from passing cars, or teenagers' rooms.

There is an episode of the radio show This American Life, from the end of 2007, which includes a segment on the sounds that surround us. In the episode, reporter Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, a musician who pays close attention to the ambient noises in his environment. Lester discovered that the sounds of his office heater and telephone dial tone combined to form an "augmented fourth", a musical interval that has the unfortunate distinction of being described by medieval catholic monks as the "most reviled sound ... feared as the diabolus in musica, the devil in the music." Certainly the monks never imagined a place so terrible as The Office Cubicle, but it would not have surprised them to encounter the devil's harmonies therein.

Musicians work very hard to combine sounds that are pleasing to the ear, just as artists use light and color to create images to please our eyes. But we live and work in places that could be described as cesspools of noise pollution: most of the noise in our work and home environments is the unintended waste product of technological progress. Our aural experience could be described as collateral damage in the endless campaign to power our lives. The only way to beat the noise is to cover it with some noise of our own choosing--music, or television: noise-isolating earphones are a growth-industry. Sometimes, mercifully, the wind picks up and overpowers the noise inside, briefly masking it. But our homes are well-insulated against nature, and so ensure that we remain prisoners of our comforts for most of the time. We could buy one of those tiny machines that synthetically reproduces natural sounds and rhythms to relax us (ocean waves ... gentle rain ... mountain storm). Or we could pray for the power to go out.

Sure, the world has always been a noisy place, and not all the noises are pleasant. But Lester notes in the radio spot that we're the first generation of people to live in an environment with so may appliances steadily droning at us. That, of course, is the difference, when compared to the always changing sounds of nature that have surrounded humans for eons.

Having the power go out and encountering the silence of it, is like the feeling of walking out into the warm sun after a week of being in a sick-bed in a dark room: a little uncomfortable at first, but then you remember something you didn't even know you'd forgotten.

Homemade Flute

2009-03-09T23:31:00.000-07:00

I have often wished that I could play a musical instrument, but the learning curve seemed to be too steep. And while I have once or twice tested the waters (Learn Harmonica in 30 Minutes a Week!), I didn't have the energy to pursue it. My parents gave me a chance back when I was in elementary school. I missed catechism at St Bartholomew's that year because I was taking trumpet lessons at West Elementary in Hillsborough. It just so happens that I learned how to play the trumpet from the man that taught Ansel Adams how to play the piano. I take some comfort in the fact that Ansel Adams didn't become famous as a pianist, just like how I didn't become famous as a trumpeter. I can't wait to become famous for the other thing, just like Ansel Adams got famous for his other thing.

But I still wished I could play something and if I could have picked an instrument to play it would have been the flute. A couple months ago, I found designs on the Web for a make-your-own PVC flute. For less than a dollar, I got a scrap of PVC plumbing and followed the directions, and you're looking at the results. I am now the proud owner of my very own flute.

I've been able to pick out some songs on it, even though I can't read music. The trick seems to be that if I have a tune in my head, then I can play it with some practice. As it turns out, the tunes I have in my head are hymns, so I can play Amazing Grace, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, and another one the name of which I can't remember, but if you were here I could play it for you.

What I love about the whole thing, is that I'm playing music right now without anyone telling me how to do it: no learn-to-play-in-thirty-minutes-a-week techniques, just me. I suppose I could take lessons some day, and maybe spend a few hundred on a real flute, but for now I'm loving that I'm enjoying a nice low-tech, low-cost musical renaissance. I'm still not famous, but I am enjoying myself.

A Lost Art (One More on Dictionaries)

2009-02-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

In addition to the mighty Oxford English Dictionary, Excessively Large Edition, I have the comparably tiny, Pocket Oxford Dictionary, which was written by the incomparable Fowler brothers, authors of the still-selling-a-century-later Modern English Usage and The King's English. I can't tell you how many times I've looked up a word in this little book and been delighted by the the definition. Alright. Even I know how weird that sounds, but just listen to this nugget--the beginning of the definition of "Time":

Time, n:

The successive states of the universe regarded as a whole whose every part or moment is before or after every other & position in which is defined in answer to the question, 'when?' ....

That, apart from being very slightly convoluted while at the same time slightly compressed to fit in such a short dictionary, is delightful. (And, you might benefit, as I did, by mentally adding the word "whose" before the word "position" ....)

The Fowlers wrote this dictionary, and it feels written, not compiled. It is possibly one of the last dictionaries to have just a couple authors instead of an editor and a legion of writers. The old dictionaries that are still read today even though their definitions may be obsolete are the ones that have the quality of great (or at least entertaining) writing (you can still enjoy Samuel Johnson's 300 year-old dictionary for this reason). In the Pocket Oxford dictionary, the definitions feel human and very much like something spoken in English (albeit by very smart Englishmen) rather than dryly recorded in a textbook.

Get the Fowler's The King's English new on Amazonor choose from several used copies for a buck each at AbeBooks (an online marketplace for real-world used bookstores). Tough choice, huh?

Old Atlases, Printed Maps

2009-02-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

There is another book that I like to put on my music stand (see my previous post on old dictionaries): my old Times Atlas of the World, found in a used bookstore 10 years ago. It's old enough to show a divided Germany, Leningrad-in-the-USSR instead of St. Petersburg-in-Russia, and countless other geo-anachronisms, but oh, is it beautiful to look at. And really, do we care what the politicians say about where the borders are, or whose ego is institutionalized on the city masthead? Yes, ok, sometimes we do need to know such facts. But that's what Internet maps are good at. I am well aware of the other ways that computerized maps and atlases are superior to the soon-to-be obsolete printed variety: they are up-to-date (i.e. -to-the-minute), truly comprehensive, and augmented in infinite ways with personalized layers of meaning (see the history of natural disasters for the city you're visiting, or see where the coffee shops are).

Claims of comprehensiveness and currency in a printed atlas always assume you will buy the latest version, which, if you are buying a nice atlas, may run you a few hundred dollars. And why would you not buy a nice atlas? You can get ugly atlases online. So, my recommendation for the killer combination? A nice old Atlas (cheaper, probably prettier, and still 90% accurate) and the Internet to supplement your old beauty with the latest facts. The picture above, of Oban, in Scotland, is from my old Times atlas (be sure to click on the image to see a bigger version).

I love maps, and love studying maps of a place before, and after, visiting it for real. My introduction to maps was via the topographic maps produced by the United States Geological Survey, used by everyone from soldiers to miners to hikers for navigating in the wilderness. There was a USGS office in Menlo Park, a few miles from where I grew up, so we got to browse the beautiful, poster-sized, four-color maps whenever we wanted. On a trip to my wife's family home in Greece, I visited that country's equivalent of the USGS, the Greek Army Mapping Office. My brother-in-law and I were planning to climb Mt. Olympus, and I also had plans to camp out in the Peloponnese. When I asked for the maps that covered the westernmost finger of that peninsula, the army officer looked at me suspiciously. He fetched his commanding officer and they grilled me: "Why do you want to go there? There is no camping there! What is your business?" I tried to assure them (with the help of my Greek brother-in-law) that I was just going to find a place to put down my bag on the coast and enjoy the sea and stars. They never did give me that map. I forgot about the incident until I was awakened on my hillside perch near Koroni, overlooking the Mediterranean, by what sounded like bombs going off. What had sounded like bombs going off was in fact bombs going off .... Turns out the Greek Air Force likes to practice their aim on the little island of Skhiza, which was just about a mile south of my sleeping bag. I watched jets looping and dropping bombs for an hour. No wonder the army guy was suspicious.

Since I can't show the map with Skhiza on it (ahem) ... here is my Greek Army Map of Cape Tenaron, about 40 miles southwest of my camping spot near Koroni. Maybe nothing is as interesting as being woken up by jets dropping bombs at the foot of your sleeping bag, but the topo map below shows the tip of the Mani Peninsula, itself a very interesting place: in the cove near the southern end, surrounded by wind-torn, razor-sharp white rock and ancient ruins, is the cave of Tenaron, the mythical entrance to Hades.

Strangely, USGS topo maps were the thing that reignited my interest in computers, after many years of abstinence: in the mid-nineties, a San Francisco company, Wildflower Productions (now owned by National Geographic), was scanning all the topographic maps for the United States, in various scales, digitally stitching them together, and adding tools for searching and customizing. When I first got a look at their product on the shelves at REI where I worked, I called the company and asked them what I needed in my new computer (the one I didn't have yet) to run their product. At the time, I didn't care what else the computer could do.

I still have a soft spot for this product because it's based on pictures of real maps, made to be held in your hand. The computerized version allows me to look at topo maps for anywhere in the country, and of course you can't own that many printed maps. I understand how computers add value here. But I still say printed maps and atlases are so much more beautiful and satisfying to hold. And they provide much the same opportunity for serendipitous discovery that a printed dictionary does, as I detailed in my previous post. The maps in my world atlas are produced by the famous John Bartholomew & Son cartographers in the UK. Their maps, especially the old, hand-lettered ones, are so pretty to look at, and so clear. Am I repeating myself?

If you can afford the already-obsolete current edition of the Times World Atlas (obsolete, because world atlases go out-of-date about as fast as newspapers these days), here is a link to the Twelfth Edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. But my strong recommendation is to search your local used bookstore for an older version, if only for the joy of the maps.

Old Dictionaries, Old Meanings

2009-02-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

I use the dictionary on my laptop daily, usually to check whether I am using a word correctly. But I'm missing out when I don't use my bookshelf dictionaries. My favorites are the old Oxford dictionaries: I have several in various sizes. In 1990, I joined the Book of the Month Club for the sole purpose of getting a free copy of the two volume Compact Oxford English Dictionary, that miracle of mid 20th century publishing that shrunk 13 volumes containing all the words of the English language (at the time of the original publication, circa 1930)) down to two massive volumes. It had four of the original pages printed on each page, and it came with a magnifying glass.

I know that my OED is outdated. The latest version, the Second Edition of the OED, is twenty volumes and may be the last version to be printed: the English language is growing too fast, and somehow it's easier to admit such additions to the language as, "aerobicized", "celebutante", and "blog", if they will never be bound in a book. Yes, I will always use computers for research: there is just no way for any library to replicate what a computer can do, let alone a personal library. And yet, there is no way for any computer to fully replicate the experience of looking at a page in a book.

Some years ago, I was invited to co-teach a class on "Passion" in my church. One of the first things I did, even before looking at scripture, was to open my OED and look the word up. I knew the reason my pastor had chosen the topic: to inspire excitement and commitment for the faith. I was surprised (as was the group of people gathered for the class) to learn that the principal definition of the word was "to suffer", and that the principal historical usage was specifically in reference to the suffering of Christ on the cross (Mel Gibson's movie had not yet come along to restore the context for the word). Suffering is an aspect of passion entirely lost in modernity.

Here is the first definition offered up when I type "passion" into my computer's dictionary:

passion |ˈpa sh ən|
noun
1 strong and barely controllable emotion : a man of impetuous passion. See note at emotion .
• a state or outburst of such emotion : oratory in which he gradually works himself up into a passion.
• intense sexual love : their all-consuming passion for each other | she nurses a passion for Thomas.
• an intense desire or enthusiasm for something : the English have a passion for gardens.
• a thing arousing enthusiasm : modern furniture is a particular passion of Bill's.

Barely controllable emotion? An outburst? Sex? Are the English really only passionate about gardens? These are the things that pass for passion in our anemic society. When we hear the word passion today, we mainly imagine the strong desires that precede and accompany sex. What a rip off. Not sex, mind you, just that the feelings associated with sex have become the marker for passion between two people when in fact (and in history) the thing that really inspires commitment is when a person is willing to suffer (even die) for another. Am I worth suffering for? Can I inspire such abandon? Sex is not passion. Real passion, if you ever see it today, is a thing that can bring two people together and keep them together for a lifetime. Sex may result.

My computer dictionary fails me here. But my computer dictionary doesn't only fail in the way it defines the word. It fails by only telling me what it thinks I want to know. My OED, on the other hand reveals many more layers of meaning than I can grasp, simply because it's all there for discovering on the printed page. For all the hype around computer hypertext, links only work when someone thinks to include them. My computer dictionary only displays the definition of the word I typed in, and nothing else. On the other hand, when I looked at the entry for "passion" in the OED, I could see the whole community of words related to my original search, just by letting my eye wander. What did I discover? That the word "passive", just down the page, comes from the same Latin root as "passion" and has the same root meaning: to suffer. This opened up a whole world of meaning to me, and to the students in that class. Two kinds of suffering: one chosen, intentional, and accepted; another experienced because of a choice not to act. Beautiful. This is precisely the kind of thing that makes me love language. My daughter is coming under the influence also.

When I worked as the senior writer for a tech company (our first product was a search engine, launched around the same time Google launched theirs ... look up "bad timing" in the dictionary of your choice), the first thing I asked for was a dictionary for my empty bookshelf. None of the young, Internet-savvy executives understood why I wanted a book. I think I told them I preferred the feel of real paper to using my computer as a reference tool. I might also have made some attempt to convince them that the printed dictionary was superior, or at least that it was more reliable (in 1999) than the on-line lexicons. They might have reconsidered whether I was suited to working at an Internet company, but they bought me the dictionary. Years later, I smiled when I read that one of Google's first writers had the identical interaction with his bosses when he came to work: his insistence on using a printed dictionary; their disbelief that anyone still did. This may be the only thing my old company (now defunct) had in common with Google.

These days, it might make sense to describe me as passionate about the OED, about printed books, about old stuff. But I don't know. Am I willing to suffer or die for these things I'm writing about? Or is it rather that I don't want to suffer because I've passively embraced the so-called technological advances that slowly erode the meaning of things.