Overcome: the one stupid thing about a Mac...

** New mouse for Macs has multiple buttons
BusinessWeek
AUG. 2 3:50 PM ET Apple Computer Inc.'s neglect of the humble mouse is over. It now offers a model that's nimble. Apple introduced on Tuesday its first computer mouse with multiple buttons, including four sensors and a tiny scroll ball.

Recommended reading

** Here are some books I've read that I think you'd enjoy.

FICTION
Neal Stephenson:
Snow Crash

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal
Stephenson
plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia
controls
pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise
city-states,
and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's
hype would
lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai
swordsman, and
pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer
drug called
Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a
guy with a
name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century
novel,
Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern
civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a
whole lot
more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be
plausible. --
This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The Diamond Age

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy
of "A
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually
a super
computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord
Finkle-McGraw's
daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian
society. But
Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book"
has fallen
into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to
change.

Cryptonomicon

From Library Journal
Computer expert Randy Waterhouse spearheads a movement to create a safe haven
for
data in a world where information equals power and big business and government
seek to
control the flow of knowledge. His ambitions collide with a top-secret
conspiracy with
links to the encryption wars of World War II and his grandfather's work in
preventing the
Nazis from discovering that the Allies had cracked their supposedly unbreakable
Enigma
code. The author of Snow Crash (LJ 4/1/92) focuses his eclectic vision on a
story of epic
proportions, encompassing both the beginnings of information technology in the
1940s
and the blossoming of the present cybertech revolution. Stephenson's
freewheeling prose
and ironic voice lend a sense of familiarity to a story that transcends the
genre and
demands a wide readership among fans of technothrillers as well as a general
audience.

Quicksilver

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson
launches his most
ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with
the
ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for
MIT in
eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to
resolving
an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried
Wilhelm
Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the
Minerva,
readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with
young
Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early
drawings of
microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious
radicals, and
the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and
enjoys a
lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-—all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked"
Jack
(also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a
Turkish
harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by
Eliza's lust for
fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of
Daniel in the
third book of the novel.

Yan Martel

Life of Pi

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading
experience, an
endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately,
faith. The
precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry,
India, where
he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog
attracts fleas."
Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie
and they
hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds
himself adrift
in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a
spotted hyena,
a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His
head was
the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful
setup, but these
wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized
Disney
feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's
sole
passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting
hunger, the
elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi
recounts the
harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless
passage of
time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that
night was the
worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none
the
champion."
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi,
Yann
Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one
point in his
journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a
book. A long
book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new
eyes and
fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike
Life of Pi is
such a book.


NON-FICTION

Dan Pink
A Whole New Mind

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Just as information workers surpassed physical laborers in economic importance,
Pink
claims, the workplace terrain is changing yet again, and power will inevitably
shift to
people who possess strong right brain qualities. His advocacy of "R-directed
thinking"
begins with a bit of neuroscience tourism to a brain lab that will be extremely
familiar to
those who read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open last year, but while Johnson was
fascinated by the brain's internal processes, Pink is more concerned with how
certain skill
sets can be harnessed effectively in the dawning "Conceptual Age." The second
half of the
book details the six "senses" Pink identifies as crucial to success in the new
economy-
design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning-while "portfolio" sections
offer
practical (and sometimes whimsical) advice on how to cultivate these skills
within oneself.
Thought-provoking moments abound-from the results of an intensive drawing
workshop
to the claim that "bad design" created the chaos of the 2000 presidential
election-but the
basic premise may still strike some as unproven. Furthermore, the warning that
people
who don't nurture their right brains "may miss out, or worse, suffer" in the
economy of
tomorrow comes off as alarmist. But since Pink's last big idea (Free Agent
Nation) has
become a cornerstone of employee-management relations, expect just as much buzz
around his latest theory.


Virginia Postrel

The Future and its Enemies
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Virginia Postrel smashes conventional political boundaries in this libertarian
manifesto.
World-views should be defined not by how they view the present, she says, but
the future.
Do they aim to control it, as many conservative reactionaries and liberal
planners want to
do? Or do they embrace it, even though they can't know what lies ahead? Postrel
(editor of
Reason magazine) firmly places herself in this latter category--the dynamists,
she calls
her happy tribe--and urges the rest of us to sign up. The future of economic
prosperity,
technological progress, and cultural innovation depends upon embracing
principles of
choice and competition. The downside of this philosophy, Postrel readily notes,
is that it
doesn't allow us to manage tomorrow by acting today. And that's exactly the
point: we
shouldn't want to. A future constructed by an infinite number of individual
decisions,
made privately, is one she believes we should encourage. The Future and Its
Enemies is at
once intellectually sweeping and reader-friendly; it has the potential to join a
pantheon of
books about freedom that includes works by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Malcom Gladwell
Blink
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows
in an
instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for
snap
judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid
storytelling.
Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed
dating, choking
on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers
to think
small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely
on our
"adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and
sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new
idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate
our first
impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong
cue
leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome
but hapless
president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he
illuminates
the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou
Diallo in the
Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to
urge
training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant,
cage-rattling book,
one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp
might look
like.

** The Bush victory in November was followed by victories of other bad guys and I'm still holding my breath to see if there will be a dawn. So in the dark night of institutional ignorance that surrounds my little world these days, it's good to hear that things aren't that way everywhere. The Wired Web site carries an adapted excerpt from Daniel H. Pink's new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. It points to the emergence of spirituality and its colorful sidekick, art, into daily life.

Pink argues that throughout history progress has been lifting onerous burdens from humanity in order to allow the songbird of spiritual consciousness to more easily take flight. Those burdens have been anything that can be reduced to a set of rules. Automation has taken on that task in order that intuition and other ways of knowing can come to the forefront.

Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" makes note of the widespread acceptance of aesthetics as a "solid" value in today's world.

As a proponent of spiritual healing, I see these as harbingers of an age where goodness will dominate human life and problems will be solved not with technology but with love.

Revenge of the right Brain

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.

We hear you...dammit!

** Remember when we used to take pity on people who would walk down the street shouting? Now we just get pissed off because the only mental problem these people have is incredibly unconscionable stupidity.

It's an epidmeic -- people talking so loud on their cell phones that live conversations often have to stop. The problem is so widespread that if you take the Acela to New York City, people scramble to get into the QUIET CAR where no cell phone conversations -- in fact not even loud face to face conversations -- are allowed. The Loewes chain of movie theaters has a singing pre-show spot portraying the many venues of "Inconsiderate cellphone man" -- although I've noticed that women are just as likely to be afflicted with this social disease.

Well, Draplin Industries Design Company in collaboration with Coudal Partners are sick and tired and they're not going to take it anymore! And you're invited to join them in fighting cell phone boorishness. They created SHHH - Society for Handheld Hushing. They supply you with printed cards that you can drop on these sociopaths. You can download a PDF and print out your own, some of which are quite funny.

As the mud slides

** …those who want the best for me,
Let them have the last word--a glad shout!-
and say, over and over and over,
"GOD is great--everything works
together for good for his servant."
—Psalm 35 (The Message)

Mudslides, tsunamis and earthquakes aren't just happening in the earth. These are days of tectonic mental change. It looks like the bad guys everywhere are having their day. Paul Krugman thinks it’s “Worse than fiction” in a New York Times Op Ed piece on January 7, 2005 (see below.)

In my own world, five years of development on a breakthrough Web product appear to have been summarily trashed by our venture capitalists. Not just trashed but trashed with an edge of resentment as though the project was a personal affront to the backers.

It would be easy to see these victories of the bad guys as the end of the world. But it isn’t. There’s a poem by Whittier I like that has the words “All the good the past hath had, remains to make our own time glad.”

I believe that. I know there’s no going backward, even when the bad fiction of “our own time” screams reaction and reversal. The poem continues:

Through the harsh noises of our day,
A low sweet prelude finds its way;
Through clouds of doubt and creeds of
A light is breaking, calm and clear.

The turning of the earth teaches us that the “low sweet prelude” is our faith in the Principle that mandates darkness to be only a temporary condition predicting a new dawn on the way.

Worse Than Fiction
by PAUL KRUGMAN
I've been thinking of writing a political novel. It will be a bad novel because there won't be any nuance: the villains won't just espouse an ideology I disagree with - they'll be hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels.

In my bad novel, a famous moralist who demanded national outrage over an affair and writes best-selling books about virtue will turn out to be hiding an expensive gambling habit. A talk radio host who advocates harsh penalties for drug violators will turn out to be hiding his own drug addiction.

In my bad novel, crusaders for moral values will be driven by strange obsessions. One senator's diatribe against gay marriage will link it to "man on dog" sex. Another will rant about the dangers of lesbians in high school bathrooms.

In my bad novel, the president will choose as head of homeland security a "good man" who turns out to have been the subject of an arrest warrant,who turned an apartment set aside for rescue workers into his personal love nest and who stalked at least one of his ex-lovers.

In my bad novel, a TV personality who claims to stand up for regular Americans against the elite will pay a large settlement in a sexual harassment case, in which he used his position of power to - on second thought, that story is too embarrassing even for a bad novel.

In my bad novel, apologists for the administration will charge foreign policy critics with anti-Semitism. But they will be silent when a[JEO] prominent conservative declares that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular."

In my bad novel the administration will use the slogan "support the[JEO] troops" to suppress criticism of its war policy. But it will ignore repeated complaints that the troops lack armor.

The secretary of defense - another "good man," according to the[JEO] president- won't even bother signing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action.

Last but not least, in my bad novel the president, who portrays himself as the defender of good against evil, will preside over the widespread use of torture.

How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel? It was not ever thus.
Hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels have always been with us, on both sides of the aisle. But 9/11 created an environment some liberals summarize with the acronym Iokiyar: it's O.K. if you're a Republican.

The public became unwilling to believe bad things about those who claim to be defending the nation against terrorism. And the hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels of the right, empowered by the public's credulity, have come out in unprecedented force.

Apologists for the administration would like us to forget all about the Kerik affair, but Bernard Kerik perfectly symbolizes the times we live in. Like Rudolph Giuliani and, yes, President Bush, he wasn't a hero of 9/11,
but he played one on TV. And like Mr. Giuliani, he was quick to cash in, literally, on his undeserved reputation.

Once the New York newspapers began digging, it became clear that Mr.Kerik is, professionally and personally, a real piece of work. But that's not unusual these days among people who successfully pass themselves off as patriots and defenders of moral values. Mr. Kerik must still be wondering why he, unlike so many others, didn't get away with it.

And Alberto Gonzales must be hoping that senators don't bring up the subject.
The principal objection to making Mr. Gonzales attorney general is that doing so will tell the world that America thinks it's acceptable to torture people. But his confirmation will also be a statement about ethics.

As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales was charged with vetting Mr. Kerik.
He must have realized what kind of man he was dealing with - yet he declared Mr. Kerik fit to oversee homeland security.

Did Mr. Gonzales defer to the wishes of a president who wanted Mr.Kerik anyway, or did he decide that his boss wouldn't want to know? (The Nelson Report, a respected newsletter, reports that Mr. Bush has made it clear[JEO] to his subordinates that he doesn't want to hear bad news about Iraq.)

Either way, when the Senate confirms Mr. Gonzales, it will mean that Iokiyar remains in effect, that the basic rules of ethics don't apply to people aligned with the ruling party. And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write.

Cat got my tongue

** I admire my friends who have started blogging. I started a couple years ago but slacked off for a while. Then I got all bloggy during the election campaign and immediately thereafter went silent again. Since Grits and Kathleen Ream have gotten active I think about it again.

And then I remember why I go silent now and then. I am part of a culture that doesn’t like independent “publishing.” It’s seen as too “personal” and therefore not very spiritual. So my blog has usually consisted of posting pieces from other sources with a brief comment or two. What I envy about Grits and KR is their freedom to lay it all out there. I feel inhibited about that.

Several years ago I made a commitment to be the ward of a group of spiritual students and the organization that authorizes me has strict rules about what people like me can do. If I don’t follow them they could disband my group, which would really hurt their feelings and make some things inconvenient for them. So my loyalty to my students keeps me reticent. In public. Because in private most people, including many students, know I'm bursting with ideas and opinions, many of which are contrary to the culture.

So until I figure out what to do about this I guess I'll just keep envying my blogging friends, none of whom envy me for the responsibilities I bear for my small band of students.

Daily life - just an icon?

** NY Times, Jan 4.2005. John Brockman, publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science, asks a new question at the end of each year. This year's question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
Donald Hoffman, a Cognitive scientist from U. of California, Irvine, author of "Visual Intelligence" wrote:

I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many proposals for where to find such a theory—perhaps in information, complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.

The heroic defense will, I suspect, not soon be abandoned. For the defenders doubt that a replacement grounded in consciousness could attain the mathematical precision or impressive scope of physicalist science. It remains to be seen, of course, to what extent and how effectively mathematics can model consciousness. But there are fascinating hints: According to some of its interpretations, the mathematics of quantum theory is itself, already, a major advance in this project. And perhaps much of the mathematical progress in the perceptual and cognitive sciences can also be so interpreted. We shall see.

The mind-body problem may not fall within the scope of physicalist science, since this problem has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist theory. Its defenders can surely argue that this penury shows only that we have not been clever enough or that, until the right mutation chances by, we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist theory. They may be right. But if we assume that consciousness is fundamental then the mind-body problem transforms from an attempt to bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary: Matter, spacetime and physical objects are among the contents of consciousness.

The rules by which, for instance, human vision constructs colors, shapes, depths, motions, textures and objects, rules now emerging from psychophysical and computational studies in the cognitive sciences, can be read as a description, partial but mathematically precise, of this bootstrap. What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. There is no sun or moon unless a conscious mind perceives them, for both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some this seems a patent absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best science, our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance. And experience once led us to believe the earth flat and the stars near. Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent objects will go the way of flat earth.

This view obviates no method or result of science, but integrates and reinterprets them in its framework. Consider, for instance, the quest for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This holy grail of physicalism can, and should, proceed unabated if consciousness is fundamental, for it constitutes a central investigation of our user interface. To the physicalist, an NCC is, potentially, a causal source of consciousness. If, however, consciousness is fundamental, then an NCC is a feature of our interface correlated with, but never causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness. Damage the brain, destroy the NCC, and consciousness is, no doubt, impaired. Yet neither the brain nor the NCC causes consciousness. Instead consciousness constructs the brain and the NCC. This is no mystery. Drag a file's icon to the trash and the file is, no doubt, destroyed. Yet neither the icon nor the trash, each a mere pattern of pixels on a screen, causes its destruction. The icon is a simplification, a graphical correlate of the file's contents (GCC), intended to hide, not to instantiate, the complex web of causal relations.