Deadline

I have 15 minutes to write this post. What to talk about?

I'm slowly wiring my life, creating electronic shortcuts to simultaneously introduce new levels of distance between myself and my end actions while ironically unifying those end-actions into synthetic, complex outputs. Maybe that's just a really complicated way of saying I'm hooked on universal remote controls and wifi-beaming radio/TV/literature, but I think it is an interesting phenomenon. Some days, 80% of my life is experience through a screen - not just watching TV, but reading journals, connecting with friends, etc. And this has become so second nature, that I've started constantly seeking out ways to simplify this simplification, to compress as many activities into one screen, to compact as many outputs into one interface as possible.

If I was a text, I'd be a web page, a mash up, a portal somewhere(s) else. But I certainly wouldn't be any singular snowflake. I'm not sure what I think about this. What do you think about this?

diePod

Everyone worth knowing has one or two pop-culture obsessions. Quirks, to put it nicely. Mine are a) Ninjas and b) Zombies. This post has nothing to do with ninjas.

Sunday morning I headed out to the local Panera for coffee-flavored work. Heading to my usual table I discovered a good friend had beat me to it - I started to say hello, then noticed her plugged into the iPod. I decided to perform an experiment. Sitting down at the table behind her, I decided to see how long it would take her to detach from the iPod and notice me (or anything). But then The Wife came around the other way with our coffee, and walked right in front of her. Certainly she spotted her, and I thought no more about it - until an hour later, when Leah turned around and jerked in surprise as she noticed us for the first time.

I think you see where I'm going here.

If someone made a movie where 85% of people were plugged into some device, totally unaware of their surroundings, everyone who watched would be horrified by such a dystopian future (though you might still take the blue pill). But Steve Jobs and Co. have slowly zombified America, and everyone's more worried about the features/style/price of the new iPhone than the fact that sounds of conversation have drained from every street, waiting line, and tram station. I used to ride the bus to campus every day, and it was bloody creepy - perfect rows of filled seats, everyone looking at their shoes, wires running into their ears...I had to either stop riding or go buy a shotgun. Just in case.

Seriously, though - I don't know if their is some strange, modern desire to remove ourselves from the world around us, or if it's just apathy induced by all the semi-satisfying artificial contact we're inundated with. What I am sure of, however, is that this is not a good point in human history for impersonalization and disconnection. Darfur, Somalia, nuclear proliferation, insane dilettante dictators testing ballistic missles...not to mention the economic mess - like unemployment and thousands of nearly unemployable retirees forced back into SlaveMart as unbridled capitalism robs their savings and pensions. I suppose riding the iPod mothership to a mass exodus from personal involvement should come as no surprise....But the impetus to confront such problems is exponentially higher when confronted by a human factor like an 80 year old grandmother talking to you on her bus ride to inspect receipts at walmart, rather than data from an NPR podcast. Meanwhile, millions of people literally walk around with cotton stuffed in their ears...

Music is great. Just take the headphones off and enjoy it with someone. If for no other reason -I'm pretty sure the Ultimate Bad Thing that results from generalized civil apathy is the Zombie Apocalypse. And with only a sawed-off shotty between me and the brain-eaters, you shoe-staring iPod junkies don't want me getting confused.

No News = Good News

To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete. - Buckminster Fuller

I have been known to take my laptop to the bathroom with me. I say this not out of my insatiable desire to make others uncomfortable by sharing minor, inappropriate details (it's fun, try it). Rather, I point it out because I may well be ahead of the curve - inadvertently preparing for a future where you no longer hear the rustle of newsprint in the stall next to you, but instead the peck-tap-peck of keyboards. Yes, the traditional newspaper may well not make it through the next decade.

The death-knell has already sounded for some major papers - Denver's Rocky Mountain News died last week and Tuscon's got one going soon. The Tribune company's bankrupt, though for now it's just financial purgatory as their many papers are still being printed. Others, such as the SF Chronicle are "restructuring" - a PC way of saying "panickedly selling off assets and cutting expenses (i.e., jobs)." Even the NY Times is 400 million in the hole. Meanwhile, all the other news outlets can't keep quiet about it - NPR's hit on it several times recently, and even the BBC's been talking. Some think it's inevitable, some fear it as a sign/source of devaluation for journalism, others shrug and read the Onion, missing the humor entirely.

For my part, I don't think we'll live in a world without newsprint within our lifetime. For starters, it's not just online journalism that's hurting the papers - free papers are doing quite well, hitting the same markets at everyone's favorite price. The desire for the tangible, tactile experience of reading a paper is still there - it's just that between the ad-driven free model and the instant-access online model, few see the need to shell out subscription fees for either information or newsprint-rustling pleasures. The old model of print journalism has been rendered obsolete - Buckminster Fuller-ed, if you will.

However, what really interests me - irks me, even - is how many folks are calling the failure of the traditional newspaper business model (and it is just the business model that's failing) a "blow to democracy" or lauding it as the "death of impartial journalism." For starters, part of me is almost glad to see these old daily papers go - most, like the rest of the mass media, are owned by huge conglomerates. This obviously injects a large amount of homogenization into coverage, and potentially into perspective; but more dangerously, this amplifies advertiser influence to the point where stories potentially threatening to them can get canned for fear of the consequences (or, due to direct threats, such as Monsanto shutting down exposes on its bovine growth hormones). No, saying goodbye to corporate media does not sadden me, and I've no fear of a hastening fascist state because of it. Quite the opposite.

Many criticize internet journalism as "lacking objectivity." All journalism lacks objectivity. Internet journalism increases access, and moreover, it increases the voices involved in that journalism dramatically. There aren't just a thousand news sites - there are thousands of blogs, thousands of individuals conveying and commenting on whatever happenings...happen...to be happening. Never mind that much of it is shit. That is democracy, kids. Of course, this exponentially increases the amount of "bad information" (which is often a fairly subjective notion, anyway) - but is this really a problem? I'd argue that the flood of contradictory, untrustworthy information is one of the greatest gifts of the internet age. Twenty years ago, the average person absorbed information from "official" sources - books, newspapers, TV - under the general assumption that, surely, it was truth (or close to it). Now, everyone is acutely aware that we must think critically about information. And it isn't just that we question the veracity of knowledge, but its importance. That flood of noise, those millions of voices out there on the internet - they make us acutely aware that we need to decide what is relevant for ourselves, in a way that a world of homogenized TV, newsprint, and radio did not.

Pretty cool. At least as long as the WiFi signal is strong in my stall.

Verbose Snow

So, after nearly three years of being shown radiographs, I'm finally in a course that (supposedly) is going to de-mystify interpreting all that anatomic snow. Not exactly going according to plan as of yet. We spent an hour today staring at lung lesions, which are (again, supposedly) easily classified into four main "patterns." So far, I seem to be improving on the system, easily classifying them into just one "pattern" - anatomic snow. Unfortunately, none of the expert radiologists on staff here are impressed with my greatly streamlined approach.

My personal inadequacies aside, it turns me back to a question I've pondered several times since starting vet school. How do we learn to see meaning in unfamiliar patterns? Or, less prosaically - how do we learn to see what we are seeing?

Way back then I was encountering a more colorful anatomic snow - histology - for the first time. Histology is the study of tissues and their cellular composition - essentially microanatomy - and involves looking at specially stained tissues under high magnification. At first, just separating one (red, blurry) cell from another (red, blurry) cell seems a monumental task. Eventually, though, you start to see the meaning of faint lines and variations in shading, organized patterns become apparent, and suddenly you are translating all this into larger structures and seeing meaningful relationships between different cell types and groups. Two groups of cells layered next to each other, which originally seemed indiscernible from each other, are now quite conspicuously unique, and moreover their differences and relationship to each other have become filled with meaning. Before you know it, you are learning histopathology - the study of diseased tissue - and suddenly slight variations from what you've come to see as "normal" colorful anatomic snow are even more meaningful, and they clue you in to specific disease.

I was acutely aware that this process was happening to me, but I couldn't for the life of me pin down exactly what I was doing (or having done to me) that precipitated such new understanding. I think it's a very commonplace learning experience, but it was the first time I experienced it as a relatively self-aware adult. Children discover new 'theaters of meaning' and learn their secrets all the time - imagine deciphering the meaning of faces for the first time, or decoding 2D photos to 3D realism, or moreover, learning to interpret drawn representations of reality with varying levels of abstraction (DaVinci to Monet to Picasso, say). I think that abstraction is the center of the mystery, too - how do we develop the rules for making loose, imperfect equations?