Showing Their True Colors

My hometown is Fort Worth TX. It was not exactly at the bleeding edge of avant-garde architecture or design, especially in the 1950s. Thus, when I was growing up, all I ever saw was the most plain, vanilla styles of homes imaginable. They were all earth tones or pale off-white colors, occasionally tinted with very light pastel blues, greens or yellows. It wasn't quite as gray as the Kansas depicted in Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, but it was getting there.

I've lived in Ann Arbor MI since 1975. It is rather a different kind of place from my home town. For example, it is very much a college town, being the home of the University of Michigan. One grows used to seeing somewhat wild bits of external 'ornamentation' with student housing. Certainly, college students typically show a great deal less inhibition when it comes to the choice of the paint colors that they use.

However, I live over a mile from the nearest concentration of off-campus housing. Almost everything around my house for a number of blocks is ordinary, single-family dwellings. Still, these homes are not uniformly bland. In fact, they sometimes manifest a kind of ... daring? creativity? damaged sense of the aesthetic? Whatever it is, here in my supposedly more conventional part of town one can find some very interesting choices for exterior color.

I drove around for about twenty minutes a few days ago, taking photos of some of these unusual paint choices. I didn't go further than about ten blocks from my house. These photos do not do justice to the sharp oddity of the color choices I'm talking about. In bright sunlight they are especially striking. Unfortunately we here in Michigan have now entered into that season of the year that is more akin to the climate of Mordor, i.e., cold and perpetually gray and gloomy. My poor digital camera simply cannot bring out the richness of the colors. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Nevertheless, it is with great pleasure that I present to you ... [drumroll] ...

The True Colors Of Ann Arbor!

The lady who owned this house wanted to know why I was taking a picture of it. I told her that I loved the color. She looked doubtful but let me go without further comment.






This house is what one is compelled to call 'mustard plug yellow'. That is, it is exactly the color of the dried mustard one finds on a squeeze-type mustard bottle that has been sitting out all day at a hot-dog stand.





The purple color this photo really has a kind of electric (shocking?) quality in the bright sun.







This place is sort of a bright, little girl pink. (By that comparison, of course, I do not in any way want to disparage the color choices of little girls. It's just non-typical, if not downright odd.)






The oddness of this teal color, or whatever it is, doesn't come through here at all. However, it is enough to make you do a double-take when you drive by.






This is another head-turner, and it's on the same street, if memory serves. It's not quite a fire-engine red, but more of a Faygo Red Pop kind of red.






My son Dave worked last summer for one of those 'College Pro Painter' kinds of outfits. This is one of the houses they did. Dave and his fellow painters were much amused by the owner's choice of colors, which they characterized as Christmas red and green.





Near our house is a path leading through some woods to an adjoining neighborhood. When you come out of the woods, this is what you see. It is sometimes enough to make you wonder whether you should turn around and go back.





We pass this house very frequently, since it is on one of the two routes into our neighborhood. It's hard to say exactly what color it is. It's not quite salmon, nor is it quite peach. I asked my daughter what color she thought it was. She looked at it, and immediately said "Ugly."




This house is actually not easily visible much of the year because of foliage. However, once the trees and bushes drop their leaves, you can see it from Pontiac Trail, which is one of the thoroughfares leading through our part of town. I guess you'd call it a kind of light purple. Sort of. Maybe not.




My wife said this was 'green apple'. Maybe, but none of the green apples I've ever seen were fluorescent.







One has to wonder why people chose colors like these. Perhaps they feel that they are expressing their individuality or their non-conformity. Maybe they got a really good deal on the color at the paint store. Of course, they could simply be trying to make their house unmistakeable ("You, can't miss my house. It glows in the dark.") We will probably never know.

This is America. Apart from whatever limits local zoning ordinances may mandate, you are free to paint your house whatever color you want. However, the rest of us are free to marvel at your choice, and maybe snicker, at least to ourselves.

Dreams Of Flight Or Switched-On Daedalus

Most people have had dreams in which they find themselves flying. Usually it seems effortless, and even exhilarating (unlike dreams of falling, which are another matter altogether). Several days ago, the UK's Daily Mail had an article about Yves Rossy, who managed to do it for real in a very convincing way.

There is a semi-slick music video version of Rossy's feat. There is also a more technical version (still has a music track for the flying scenes). Sadly for non-Francophones, the explanations are in French. His flight looked as good as or better than any dream I've ever had of flying. I never left a contrail in my dreams, either. On the other hand, I didn't need kerosene. But those are just details.

By the way, I suspect that Rossy's flight must have happened some weeks ago. Unless global warming is having a bigger effect in Switzerland than I know about, I doubt if anyone would be wearing shorts at this time of year, as one of Rossy's ground crew was.

There was of course a Digg posting about Rossy's free flying adventure. I was amused to note a nasty comment there, by someone who basically claimed that others have done similar things before, and that Rossy is just engaged in self-promotion. Perhaps so, since he does have his own website (English language version). However, I couldn't help thinking to myself that this particular critic was suffering from severe wingspan envy.

Hiding In Plain Sight

I have a vision problem. Unfortunately, it's not one that can be remedied with an optometric prescription, laser surgery or medication. The heart of the difficulty is that sometimes I don't see what is right in front of me.

It seems to happen in any number of purely domestic situations. For example, my wife Mary tells me that there is a certain food container in the refrigerator with something in it which I will like. I go stand in front of the refrigerator for long minutes, peering high and low, moving things around, but, alas, I don't see it. I call Mary. She walks up, opens the refrigerator, immediately puts her hand directly on the invisible item (without moving anything), picks it up, and hands it to me. The same thing happens with some regularity for clothes in my closet, almost any kitchen item smaller than a gallon milk jug, and most items in our office. It also happens with tools and materials in my workshop.

A couple of days ago, I had a somewhat more serious episode of this selective blindness that troubled me. Because of the cancer I am recovering from, I take a number of drugs and supplements. Naturally, these come in bottles of various sizes, which run out at different rates. We try to keep ahead of that by periodically checking the levels, and then calling in refills to the pharmacy. After we pick up those medicine containers at the pharmacy, we put them in a special place so that we will be ready to switch quickly when the current nearly-empty containers run out.

On the Friday before Christmas, I went through this level-checking drill and realized that one of the meds I take, which comes in liquid form, was going to run out before the weekend was over. I called in a refill as usual. Later in the afternoon, when I went to pick up this refill, the pharmacist told me that the insurance company had rejected the refill request because it was too soon by at least a week. In other words, according to them, I shouldn't have run out yet. I explained that, whatever the insurance company thought, I would be out of that particular medicine in one or two days.

The people at the University of Michigan Cancer & Geriatrics Center Pharmacy have become great friends, and they always go out of their way to help us. The person there who handles the phone and the insurance went right to work, and somehow bludgeoned the insurance company into accepting the claim. It took twenty minutes or so, but I was glad to wait for it. I thanked my pharmacy friends profusely, tooks the meds, and headed home.

Mary, who had not been involved in this particular refill request, put the new containers in the appropriate spot when I got home. A couple of days later, when I finally exhausted the current bottle, I went to get the next one. The refill bottle I had just picked up was there, but to my surprise I saw that there was also one more bottle. This was the one that the insurance company must have thought that I had. I swear that I looked in the refill spot before I called in the order. And it's not like it was one of a dozen identical little pill bottles, either. It was a relatively big container, roughly the size of a typical cough medicine bottle.

How could I have missed it? Why does this keep happening? How can I miss seeing items that are obviously right in front of me? Certainly it has to do with focus of attention, but what does that really mean here?

One could speculate that perhaps this selective vision has to do with how much one likes or desires the thing looked for. In other words, I would more readily see something I desire and less readily see something I did not desire. However, that doesn't really explain it. When I stand in front of the refrigerator, I am hungry and I desire food. In fact I desire the particular food I am looking for. Why cannot I see it? Similarly, I want to get dressed, so why can't I see the shirt I want hanging in front of me? I want to take the medicine because it is necessary for my health, so how could I possibly miss seeing it there on the shelf?

Upon reflection, I think this kind of vision error has to do with the degree of affinity or liking, not for the item looked for, but rather for the activity which the seeing is part of. I like food, for sure, but I dislike food preparation. It is almost as if, in my juvenile way, I'm still wanting someone to prepare all my meals for me. Mary in fact does the bulk of the food prep here and does a wonderful job of it without complaint. However, she does not and should not have to prepare absolutely everything I eat. I can manage at least a sandwich or bowl of soup without spousal assistance. The thing is, I don't like spending my time this way. I hate putting in more time preparing the food than it takes to eat it. My guess is that this dislike somehow negatively primes my visual recognition ability.

Mary, on the other hand, gets great satisfaction out of doing those very things I dislike so much. She has very little problem seeing things in the kitchen, the closet, or pretty much anywhere else in the house. Now that I think about it, our kids often suffered from the same kind of blindness while growing up, and likewise had to depend on her (e.g., "Mom, where are my shoes?" "You left them under the coffee table.")

However, Mary does have her vision problems, too. I realized this while helping her over the last number of weeks as she learns how to use Windows XP. She does not like computers, but she realizes that she has to be able to use them to some degree given the prevalence and usefulness of email, web browsing, etc. It turns out that Mary has this same kind of selective blindness when it comes to looking at the Windows desktop. I'll say something like "OK, see the little box to the right of the cursor?" or "Now click on the 'Move File' link in the left hand column", but those location descriptions are not useful for her. When Mary looks at the screen, she sees a confusing mass of text and icons. She does not see things that are right in front of her. Needless to say, this has been a continual source of difficulty for her in getting comfortable with Windows.

On the other hand, when I look at a computer screen, I take in the whole thing almost instantly, identifying all the points of interest without trying. I very rarely miss any important detail. In fact, at times I've been able to diagnose colleague's bugs or find typos in their prose with no more than a passing glance at a screen-full of text. You might say, "Ah, but perhaps it is just a matter of practice." Maybe, but I've always been that way with computers, all the way back to when I did my first programming in 1967 in a high school summer program. I took to computers like a bee to a field full of honeysuckle -- I needed no encouragement and no instruction. Obviously, I liked computers. I suspect that preference primed my visual recognition so that I always spotted salient details on a screen or printout very quickly.

So, perhaps one's ability to see things in a given context is modulated by how much one likes the activity that the seeing is part of. If so, what do you do when faced with an activity that you don't like to do, but that you have to do? The kind of seeing or blindness I've been talking about is an unconscious thing. Willpower will avail you little in fighting the unconscious. I'm not sure how I should approach my own issue in this regard. Now that I recognize this performance shortcoming in myself in certain domains, I can at least try to take it into account. For example, I suspect that slowing down will help. I am naturally inclined to hurry through activities I dislike, which aggravates the blindness problem. If I slow down so that I truly look, I'll bet I'll see more than I have been seeing. Also, "no man is an island" (Paul Simon notwithstanding), so I should also just accept the fact that my blind spots and Mary's blind spots are at least complementary.

Merry Something-Or-Other

I have been wanting to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas for several days, but I've been wondering how I should do it. The PC notion of a completely neutral seasonal greeting still irks me, although I know perfectly well why people feel that is necessary. Of course, I don't want to offend anyone deliberately, or attempt to manifest my allegiance to a Christian American cultural hegemony. Still, it seems obvious to me that, if someone gives me a greeting or blessing or good wish or whatever that is pecular to their particular culture or group, they are doing so with a good intention. If someone is doing something from a good intention, and it doesn't actually harm me, why should I do anything except gratefully receive it? After all, they aren't cursing me or saying bad things about my ancestry.

A number of years ago, my employer sent me to an affiliate company's site in Paris. While there, I was often caught off-guard when people would wish me a pleasant Bon Jour as I passed them in the halls or on the streets. It was the appropriate greeting for them, and they clearly meant it well. Only an Ugly American would have taken offense. Instead, I took some small delight in the greeting and its novelty to me, and did my best to return the greeting (although doubtless my American accent immediately gave me away).

Given all that, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas, and express my hope that you find this day and the whole season a happy time for yourselves and for those close to you.

Reflections On A Red Cross Donor Card

A few days ago, I was cleaning out my wallet, removing some of the detritus of the past year. It's almost embarrassing to see how much useless stuff that I have been carrying around. Anyway, among the items I found was my Red Cross Blood Donor ID card. I've been an RC donor since the early 70s. According to the RC records, in the 31 years or so that I have lived in Michigan I have donated 80 units of whole blood. I have always donated several times a year, and in recent years I have often hit the legal limit of five donations a year.

One of the reasons that I donated so regularly (besides the fact that it's just a good thing to do) was that I have an O Negative blood type. Only about 8% of the population is O Negative, but the really valuable thing about that type is that it makes me a 'universal donor'. That is, pretty much anyone needing blood could take my O Negative blood regardless of what their type was. Every time I donated, I would be reminded of my 'specialness'. Frequently, the RC would also send snail-mail reminders, which always mentioned the need for O Negative blood.

I really didn't mind donating at all. Unlike some of my fellow donors who became faint or dizzy after a donation, I never had any trouble at all. Instead, I always looked forward to the cookies and juice they provided in the 'recovery' area after a donation. Even more valuable to me was the fact that donating presented a good excuse to get out of the office.

This happy situation lasted until about two years ago, when I began having serious health problems. Around Thanksgiving 2004, I contracted a nasty cold/flu of some sort that I just couldn't shake. The RC rules are that if you have an active infection, you aren't supposed to donate. Unhappily, this infection lasted for many weeks, frustrating several scheduled attempts to go donate.

In a previous post, I warned that I might get tiresome talking about the following subject, so don't say I didn't tell you. Going into 2005, the cold/flu thing continued, but I also started developing other unpleasant symptoms. This prompted a number of rounds of doctor's visits to figure out what was happening. Finally, on March 10, 2005, I learned that I had contracted multiple myeloma, a serious bone marrow cancer. The day after I got the diagnosis, I started some heavy chemotherapy, which then continued for a number of months. Later I had a couple of bone marrow stem cell transplants. All of this high-intensity medical activity undoubtedly saved my life, but it also meant that I would never again be able to donate blood.

Rather, over the course of the months following the initial diagnosis, it turned out that I needed to receive a number of blood transfusions. Although I don't think I have received 80 units back, I know I have put a good dent in that number.

There were several reasons I needed the blood. At first, I was suffering anemia simply because my bone marrow was full of cancer cells instead of normal tissue, and so I was not producing enough red blood cells. At the time of my diagnosis, my bone marrow consisted of 70% cancer cells. It was no wonder that I felt tired and out of breath all the time.

As I mentioned, I went through a lot of chemotherapy, which killed a lot of the cancer cells. Then, in preparation for my first stem cell transplant in August 2005, I received a massive dose of a chemotherapy agent called melphelan. This drug killed even more of the remaining cancer cells. However, it also killed off most of the healthy cells in my bone marrow. (This was actually part of the plan for the transplant.) After that treatment, I then received an infusion of my own previously harvested bone marrow stem cells. From those cells, I regrew new bone marrow tissue. Naturally, that took some time, so I needed a few transfusions to bolster my red blood cell supply before my newly regenerated bone marrow could get back on the job.

Finally, in October 2005 I received a second stem cell transplant, using stem cells donated by my sister Bliss. This time there was no preliminary 'conditioning' or 'induction therapy' (kinder, gentler terms for chemotherapy). I simply received an infusion of her stem cells. Over the course of some days, those cells found their way into my bone marrow and set up shop.

It took many months, but eventually my sister's stem cells, which were healthy and vigorous, supplanted my own weakened cells. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but after a number of months the DNA tests the lab did on my blood showed that I was '100% donor cells'. Even more interesting, and perhaps amusing, was the wording in a July 7, 2006 cytogenetic analysis report:

The presence of a normal female karyotype in this sample is consistent with the engraftment of cells from a female donor following peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.

In other words, the transplant had been a complete success. My bone marrow was a clone of my sister's, and the blood cells it made were just like hers. It almost looks like a sex-change operation for blood cells. I like to joke that if I ever commit a crime, and leave some blood at the scene, the cops will be looking for a woman. (Someone else pointed out that this would make an interesting plot device for a CSI episode. But I digress.)

There was one niggling detail to spoil this medical success story. My sister was a perfect tissue match for me, as measured by the usual way that one does such matching. However, she had an A Positive blood type. I mentioned earlier that having O Negative blood made me a universal donor. Unfortunately, given the way blood type matching worked, that also meant that I could only receive O Negative blood. This more stringent matching requirement also included new blood cells generated in my own body.

So, while my new bone marrow was busily making new A Positive red blood cells, what was left of my old immune system was promptly killing them off because they were not O Negative. The left hand giveth, while the right hand taketh away, and all that. My new bone marrow was apparently producing plenty of new blood cells, but they never got a chance to do much good before they got wiped out. That meant that I had to keep getting O Negative blood transfusions.

This problem started right after the transplant in October 2005 and went on for a number of months. I received several treatments aimed at correcting the mismatch, but they took a long time to have an effect. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have a permanent problem with this internal blood type mis-match. The prospect of needing blood transfusions in perpetuum was not a happy one for me (or our insurer, I'd bet).

However, right around the end of May 2006, the old immune system finally gave up the ghost, and stopped killing off my new blood cells. When that happened, my hemoglobin level, which had been hovering in the 6-8 range for months, shot up to the 14-16 range, which is normal for an adult male.
(Perhaps you can't quite make out the numbers and dates on the axes of this graph, but hopefully you can see the sharp rise from late May to early July.) Needless to say, we were pleased. In fact, we were overjoyed. I haven't needed a transfusion since that rise. (The graph also shows a little bump around mid-October, but that's a different story.)

This brings me to the insight that flashed through my mind when I pulled out my RC donor card. Ever since the ABO blood typing system was first figured out by medical researchers, a person's blood type was thought to be immutable. Yet, now we know that under the right circumstances, it can change. What other characteristics of a person that we think of as fixed and unchanging are actually mutable, given the right conditions?

I have a friend, a very successful businessman, who fits the classic profile for a Republican supporter. He in fact was a Republican, as evidenced by his financial donations and his participation in party events. Yet, in the years since Bush's election, he has done a complete 180° politically. He now actively (and financially) supports various Democratic candidates, and debates his still-Republican pals in a friendly, but vigorous way. Knowing him as long as I have, I was rather surprised by the switch. Yet for him, the change was necessary, even unavoidable. He was repeatedly and increasingly distressed by the actions of the current Administration, as well as by numerous Republican misdeeds in his own state. As Popeye put it, "That's alls I can stands, 'cause I can't stands no more".

We have all been surprised by people we thought we knew well who did something completely unexpected. A confirmed bachelor finally gets married. A couple we thought had been happily married for decades gets a divorce. A well-known religious figure who had railed against immorality turns out to be a pedophile and porn addict. A hard-core atheist becomes a fervent believer and evangelist.

We may view some of these changes as unfortunate, or even tragic. Other changes, particularly those of a religious or ideological nature, are often viewed with suspicion. Those who disagree with a person's new views are likely to see him as a traitor or a 'flip-flopper'. However, it seems to me that the very notion of free will doesn't mean very much unless it allows the possibility of a person making this kind of deep, fundamental change. And you have to admit that resisting obviously needed change is just self-destructive: staying the course was definitely a bad idea for Captain Ahab.

In many things I am a conservative, in the older sense of being predisposed to limiting change. However, as I grow older, I am coming to appreciate the value, even the necessity, of allowing and accepting change in others, and especially in myself. After all, if I can change blood types, then who knows what other kinds of changes I have in my future?

Wikipedia Über Alles

Over the past year or so I've noticed a significant change in what Google shows in the top matches for most queries. I have not done any kind of systematic study of this, but it seems to me that I almost always get a match from Wikipedia in the top five matches. What's more, that Wikipedia page usually provides the answer I want. Perhaps this has more to do with the kinds of things I look up, but I don't think so.

Wikipedia of course is one of the great success stories for collaboration software. A few months ago there was a report that compared Wikipedia and Enclopedia Brittanica, and found them roughly equal in terms of depth and accuracy. That is a pretty remarkable finding, considering that Brittanica is a well-established commercial organization with over 200 years experience in collecting and organizing information, whereas Wikipedia is mostly a volunteer organization going back a decade or so.

Of course, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. As do most Wikis, Wikipedia has an open update policy. That means that anyone can update pretty much anything at any time. The Wikipedia staff have had to modify that policy for certain pages. Wiki pages on topics which produce controversy and strong emotion, such as abortion, evolution, Islam, Palestinian independence, Scientology, and the like, became textual battlegrounds, where warring ideologues spent their days deleting each others' corrections. For those pages, the Wikipedia staff have had to step in and lock the pages, and then try to provide some sort of editorial oversight so as to attain to their idea of a 'Neutral Point Of View'. No doubt this is a painfully time-consuming process, but the end result is more likely to represent the different sides of an issue more accurately and completely. I'm glad someone is doing that.

Apart from these more vigorous kinds of disputes, Wikipedia is pretty accurate. Every now and then, however, one does run across an error that no-one recognized, but which later seems to have been a pretty pointed attack by someone. For example, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler recently discovered that he is mentioned by name as "a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert". That kind of thing can ruin your whole day. He got that one fixed.

Happily, those kinds of problems are rare. I mentioned the comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica. On Dec. 15, Wired News published an article summarizing the current state of things. With four million pretty good articles already, it's not so surprising that Google finds those pages so readily.

Update 12/26/2006:
Scoble also notes how WikiPedia often has a better, more focused answer than Google does.

A DIY Stonehenge

Megalithic monuments of all types have been a special interest of mine for many years. Off and on I've done a fair amount of reading about them. The quintessential megalithic monument is of course Stonehenge. I've read a lot about that site, and the related ones around it. There is something about Stonehenge which invites, even demands, an explanation of its purpose and its manner of construction. Naturally, the fecund imaginations that gave us the world's great conspiracy theories are not at a loss to explain Stonehenge: aliens built it, the Atlanteans built it, the Egyptians built it, the Druids built it (even though it preceded the Druids by some thousands of years), etc. Likewise these armchair theorists are not shy about proposing more exotic techniques the ancient builders must have used to move the massive stone blocks around: levitation (either alien or Atlantean), telekinesis, magic, harmonic resonances (especially those using Ley lines), and so forth. There are also some more reality-oriented explanations, such as the idea of using huge numbers of people, the way the Pyramids were supposedly built long ago, and the way the Chinese have built things in more recent times.

Just yesterday I ran across a story about Wally Wallington, a man from Flint MI who has worked out some exceedingly simple but highly effective ways to move very heavy objects. Using these techniques he can single-handedly move and lift multi-ton objects, without any metal tools, pulleys, hoists, or any of the gadgets one would normally expect to use. In other words, his techniques are precisely those that a neolithic culture could manage. He even wants to build s scaled-down version of Stonehenge on his property, and he's on his way to doing that. Take a look at this video showing some samples of Wallington's work.

One of the more interesting legends associated with Stonehenge is that the wizard Merlin built Stonehenge by himself in a single day. Watching Wallington move these huge concrete blocks around by himself gives you the feeling that such a legend wouldn't necessarily have been just a tall tale. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a Stone Age David Copperfield doing some elaborate setup with big stone blocks, and then making Stonehenge appear in a very short time for a suitably prepared audience.

By the way, Wallington has a website appropriately named Forgotten Technology, which gives a bit of the history of his work. Wallington is obviously proficient in the use of technologies that would have worked well even 5000 years ago. For me, there is inescapable irony in the fact that his website 'is best viewed using the latest version of Internet Explorer' , a likewise [ahem] less-advanced technology. If you find his pages ugly or hard to navigate in, be persistent. I have to admit that I couldn't make all of the images on the site appear in Firefox, and I haven't yet stooped to looking at the site with IE, although I may.

Sometime I'll have to write about what I've learned of Stonehenge's design and purpose. It's fascinating stuff, and there are a few legitimate archeoastronomy researchers who have come up with explanations that strike me as very solid.

VGPR

Back in March 2005, I was diagnosed as having multiple myeloma, a very nasty cancer of the bone marrow. My family and I had an especially strong reaction to this diagnosis because this was the same cancer that killed my father in 1985. Since my diagnosis, I have been through a lot of stuff, including four rounds of intensive chemotherapy and two bone marrow stem cell transplants. The second transplant used stem cells from my sister, and was ultimately successful. There were several significant complications, including a relapse around July of this year. But thanks to medical advances, a very effective round of additional chemotherapy, and the mercy of God, I have now reached a condition called Very Good Partial Remission (VGPR, in the trade). If I can maintain this state for three years, I can claim the Full Remission label.

My family and I are thrilled. Of course, being a stodgy, emotionally repressed white American male I find it uncomfortable doing a Snoopy-style happy dance, or anything like that. But don't let my lack of shouting and whooping it up fool you. This is the best news I've had in two years. I will probably become tiresome talking about it.

If you would like to read more about my Adventures in Cancer Land, you can peruse the WBC Remission Network site.

Update 11/4/2009: I had to take down the above named website, which had been implemented as a straightforward forum. It was getting hammered by hundreds of spammers trying to post their crap on my forum, and I got tired of dealing with the messages and alerts. I hope to convert my content from that site into a more conventional blog through Blogger/Blogspot soon.

'Contra Ancoralia Redux' Redux

Doubtless you remember how I complained in a Nov. 1 posting about the nastiness of dealing with the loosely tied Gordian knot of cables behind my desk. Then I wrote again on the same subject, this time about a supposed 'wireless extension cord' sold by ThinkGeek. Well, just now, I found myself somewhat chagrined when I went back to ThinkGeek to add this item to my wishlist. This gadget is an April Fool's joke! The description was so well done, and the technology mentioned so plausible, that I and everyone I know who looked at it were completely taken in. Or were some of you aware of its false nature, and just let me stumble on to embarrassment?

It seems that increasingly one has to double-check everything! For urban legends, there's Snopes and such. But has it gotten to the point that one has to try ordering a product to find out if it is real? How far can a joke like this go? After they take your credit card number? What other kinds of pseudo-information are out there that one has to be careful of?

How Do You Keep Up?

Over the years, I've often complained about how fast stuff (mainly information and tasks) pours into my life. I regularly said things such as "It's like trying to take a sip from a firehouse -- it's a good way to lose a lip." I'm certainly not unique in feeling this way. Moreover, as is now obvious to anyone with an internet connection, this problem has not gotten any better with the march of time. Knowing that I am at home on extended medical leave, you would perhaps think that I would have more time to stay caught up, and fewer required tasks to deal with, but alas, it is not so.

Periodically I go through cycles of blissful obliviousness, shocked recognition, stolid denial, bleak despair, sullen resignation, and philosophical acceptance about this issue. Once in a while, I learn something interesting that just possibly might improve matters. A couple of days ago I ran across an essay by Kathy Sierra entitled "The Asymptotic Twitter Curve" which makes clearer for me what the real problems are. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the issue is not so much the volume and speed of incoming stuff, but rather my ability to focus my attention on that tiny fraction of the torrent which genuinely warrants attention. However, Sierra's analysis of the mechanism of the offending behaviors was really insightful. Again, it is not the facts that surprised me, but the degree to which those facts impacted my ability to work.

Sierra's essay starts off talking about interruptions, and how each succeeding technological development seems to shorten the mean time between interruptions. She has a wonderful graph that illustrates this perfectly:



(Image used without permission, but Hey! I want you to go read her post! This is just an appetizer.) Twitter, it turns out, is like the hellish union of inane blogging and inane IMing. It's sole purpose is to allow a group of people to provide for each other the answer to that cosmic question "What are you doing now?", in real time of course. Far, far worse than useless.

Twitter is of no interest to me. What does interest me greatly, however, are Sierra's comments on focus, flow and interruption. 'Flow' is a notion from human performance psychology. It refers to that wonderful state one enters when completely engrossed in a single activity. In such a state, one is able to function at a very high and effective level. If memory serves, the notion of flow was first applied to describe how very talented athletes 'got into' their performance. They learned to concentrate so completely that they become aware only of the game, the competition, their performance. They forget about themselves, their anxieties, the crowd, the arena, the officials, and so on. Sometimes this condition was also called 'getting into a zone'.

Somewhat later performance researchers recognized that the notion of flow also applies to many other disciplines ranging from the arts to brain surgery. I have certainly experienced this state many times in my software work over the years, but far less frequently in recent years. The fact of the matter is that the best way to be happy when one is working is to be in a flow state. This is probably one of the reasons why I have been unhappy in my work this past decade or so. I almost never had a chance to get into a flow state with my work.

I was particularly struck by Sierra's analysis of the truly insidious nature of interruptions, and why they are so deadly for flow experiences. She has two graphs near the end of her article that show this. One depicts how a person would typically perceive interruptions over the course of an hour. The other depicts what really happened over that hour. The killers are the little interruptions that we cause ourselves. As she says "WE cause interruptions because we are addicted to 'staying in the loop'." That is so, so true of me. I love being connected. It is amazingly addictive. In my last job, the company made heavy use of IM. The excuse was that some of our co-workers were located elsewhere, and that it was more efficient to pop quick questions to them through IM. Really, though, I think that the real reason was that most of my co-workers , who were much younger than I (roughly 25-35), were used to and even dependent on IM. They used IM to talk to each other, even from neighboring desks, particularly if the subject was not one that a manager should overhear. Likewise, they spent a lot of time talking with people outside our work.

It didn't take long to suck me in. I have to admit, there is a certain warm, wicked glow that non-manager-type personnel feel when making sardonic anti-management IM comments to each other during meetings. (Yes, we even took our wirelessly connected laptops into meetings.) I kept exploring other IM possibilities, even setting up a Jabber server on my home machine for a group of friends. At one point I was using three different IM clients to talk to people on a bunch of different IM networks. (One is sobered by the realization that taking medical leave to deal with a life-threatening condition might have been the only way to disconnnect thoroughly from this compulsive real-time communication.)

When you add in blogs and feeds and feed readers, not to mention email and discussion groups, it is exactly like a drug addiction. No matter how much you get, it's not enough. One of my particular weaknesses is news, both of the Google News kind, and the more specialized kinds typified by Digg, Slashdot and now Google Reader. One could spend all day spelunking through this maze of twisty little passages all alike, and never, ever come up for air. I act as if it is dreadfully important to assimilate all inputs, and miss no possible bit of incoming information.

So, what is one to do? Sierra semi-jokingly refers to a 12-step program for 'in the loop' addicts. That may be what it takes. In the meantime, simply turning off those distractions is a start. I know this is blindingly obvious, but I could simply choose not run any email client all the time, nor any IM client, or any feed reader. If they are not running, they will not interrupt me. Instead, I should limit their use to specific, limited periods of my work day.

Another culprit is trying to do several things at the same time. Like a brightly-colored, highly attractive leech, the seductive idea of multi-tasking actually drains one's ability to focus. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that trying to flip back and forth between two or more tasks gives all of them short shrift. A task that is truly worth doing should have my attention, all of it.

I remember reading an article several years ago about how little of a typical work week goes toward completing useful tasks. I was struck by the article's claim that in reality we spend only a small fraction of our work hours, say 5-10 per week, on tasks we should be working on. Another way to look at it is like this: If I could completely focus my attention, I could get the equivalent of a typical week's work done in a single day, and then take the rest of the week off. This claim very much resonates with me. I'm certain that there have been many, many weeks in the past few years in which I got less than 5 hours of honest-to-God useful work done.

So, here's my plan, starting now:

• Avoid having any email client (Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc.), any IM client (Google Chat, AIM, etc.) or any source of news (Google News, Google Reader, etc.) open except when I am deliberately using them.
• Avoid multi-tasking. If this means I have to wait for some painfully slow process to complete, then I will wait for it, rather than flipping over to some other task in order to 'make better use of my time'.
  

Nothing startling here. What would be startling, I suppose, would be if I manage to hold to this discipline for any substantial length of time. Check back with me in a while.

It is interesting to look at the behavior of my kids and their friends. They claim that multi-tasking works for them. For example, they insist that they can listen to loud, driving music while studying Spanish. I don't know, but it's hard to see how that can work. I know that I can't write at all if there is any music playing that has lyrics in a language I have even the faintest understanding of. (Admittedly, I can sometimes write fairly dense prose while listening, say, to Russian choral music, or Dwarvish chants from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. But then, I don't speak Russian or Dwarvish.) Likewise, I cannot do math or programming if there is any music going on at all. Still, my kids claim that I'm just old-fashioned (not to mention just old), and that they can handle it even if I can't. I once caught my son Dave talking on the phone, while playing music on the computer, carrying on several IM conversations, and watching TV. (He probably was supposed to be doing homework as well.) I would probably have had a nervous breakdown trying to do that. I rather tend to agree with Sierra on this point:

We're evolving much, much, much too slowly... Brain 2.0 isn't coming anytime soon.

The Amazing Slow Downer

If you are a serious musician, you probably have run across the problem of how one learns difficult music that is played quickly. Trying to play along with a recording can be an exercise in extreme frustration. New guitarists in particular struggle with this. The real obstacle is that you cannot just play the recording back at a slower speed, since that will change the pitch. The issue can be a show-stopping bummer in trying to master a new song.

A few months back I ran across a reference to a software application that changes all that, the Amazing Slow Downer (ASD). Despite its incredibly unhip name, ASD performs the miraculous feat of playing MP3 files at a reduced speed while maintaining all pitches. I was completely floored by not only how well the software worked, but that it worked at all. The application reliably slows down everything (vocals, instrumentals, percussion, etc.) by up to 400%, but maintains the pitch of every sound. When you think about what it has to do to achieve this, it is even more amazing. When you slow a sound down, you essentially spread it out in time. In order for every sound wave to keep its pitch (i.e., its shape), the algorithm has to "fill in the blanks". That is, for every frequency present, it has to slip in as many new wave forms of each frequency as necessary in order to fill in any gaps caused by the slowdown. There has to be some pretty clever digital sound processing going on here. I'll bet this algorithm wouldn't have been feasible even a few years back because the computers we had then just weren't fast enough.

I read about ASD one morning during my usual net reading time. In one of those wonderful bits of synchronicity that gives our lives mystery, purpose and a means to thwart the skeptical, that very evening at dinner my son Tim, who is an aspiring guitarist, wistfully wished for some way to play songs slowly. He had been working for days on a particular solo, but had been frustrated by the difficulty of figuring out how to play it. He had the tablature for the song, but just couldn't seem to make his fingers do what needed to be done at the required speed. I gleefully told him of what I had learned. After dinner we downloaded a trial version of ASD to his Mac, and in a matter of a few minutes he was up and plunking on this song, only at quarter speed. With this advantage, he finally was able to master it. After a few days, he decided that he wanted the full version of the software, so he sprung for the $45 to buy it. Although I am not much of a musician, it seems worthwhile to me, and I'd recommend the product highly based on what I saw of his experience.

Sherlock Holmes In India and Tibet

My wife surprised me the other day by bringing me a book that she found in the Ann Arbor District Library, a book I hadn't been looking for or asking for. This is the first time in 30 years of marriage that she has done that. She just happened to see it on a shelf, and thought that I might like it. She was right -- I did enjoy it.

The book was Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years by Tibetan author Jamyang Norbu. The subtitle is The Adventures Of the Great Detective In India And Tibet. Published in 1999, The Missing Years is a pastiche, an interesting attempt at combining the fictional worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. The author, a contemporary Tibetan, begins the tale by describing how he came by a remarkable manuscript written by Hurree Mookerjee, who appeared in Kipling's Kim. In this document, Mookerjee describes a two-year period in which he traveled across India and Tibet with Sherlock Holmes. The period described covers the 'missing years' between Holmes' supposed death at Reichenbach and his re-appearance in London. Mookerjee plays a Watson-like role, both as a foil for Holmes' deductive brilliance, and as a stalwart companion who on more than one occasion saves the day himself.

Norbu has done a very nice job of weaving together numerous tidbits of story-lines from the two fictional worlds into a coherent whole. However, I must point out that I was fairly surprised by how the story changed gears from a skeptical, scientific adventure into a peculiar supernatural thriller. During the first half of the story, there are numerous typical Holmesian kinds of events, faithfully recorded by a perpetually astonished Mookerjee. Then, somewhere around the middle of the tale, various bits of supernatural and spiritual phenomena begin appearing, until by the end there are long passages that seem to be more like something from a fantasy story. I must confess that I never read any Kipling, who I know did write stories with strong supernatural elements, so perhaps these parts of The Missing Years owe more to that side of the union. By no means do I object to such stories, it's just that it caught me off-guard to find those elements in a Sherlock Holmes story. Still, if one accepts the supernatural parts, the resulting story is certainly exciting and coherent, and quite enjoyable.

I mentioned that Norbu is Tibetan. As is true of every Tibetan I have ever heard of, he has no love for the Chinese. He manages to weave into the story some of the long history of China's repeated aggressions against Tibet. I didn't find that these bits were at all heavy-handed. In fact, they set the background for much of the story's action in a thoroughly believable way.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Norbu's facility with English. He must have been well educated in English-style schools, because he has the various idioms one would expect from upper-class men from the Victorian era empire down pat. Mookerjee also turns out to be a scholar, so a lot of the 'manuscript' is written in a scholarly way. Norbu treats all of this with appropriate seriousness, even to the point of providing footnotes and cross-references. He even provides a glossary at the back of the book containing numerous Hindustani, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Afghan, etc. words.

I am always reluctant to recommend books, movies, etc., so I won't say that you'll definitely enjoy this book. However, I did enjoy it, and was glad it crossed my path. If you read it, let me know what you thought of it.