where's the next leap forward?

I hosted the annual "Apollo 8 anniversary" dinner yesterday (each year my family comes up with another thing to celebrate on 25 December — last year it was Sir Isaac Newton's birthday), and, appropriately enough, my youngest brother got the From the Earth to the Moon DVD series that Tom Hanks partly directed and wrote. We watched the disc with the dramatisation of the moon landing on it over dessert.

Now, in case it's not obvious by now, everyone in my immediate family is a geek. We watched a few sitcoms on TV when I was a kid, but not nearly as much as we did documentaries. Wildlife and history were fine, but if it was about space exploration, we were all glued to the set.

I wasn't born yet when the moon shot happened, but I did grow up in a small town that looked more like the late 1960s when I was old enough to remember it in the late 1970s. And what I keep thinking lately, at the end of 2008, is: we haven't come that far.

People love to point out how computers have changed our lives since that time. Look at the technology that was used for the moon shot, though, or that Douglas Engelbart had demonstrated the year before. The technology has been refined since then, but it's still the same technology. We're still using it for the same things they did in 1968, maybe in different proportions (in the sense that computer games are no longer the privilege of MIT students working late hours when no-one wants cycles on the mainframe and they have time for a little fun, for instance), but it's still the same things.

Some things I would like to see us move forward on:

• Greener technology. We've been talking about solar, wind, and tide technology for decades — I did a project on it back in 1977 with a classmate and won a school award. Okay, we were in Grade 2 and drew a poster about how pollution is bad, but the point is, it's not news. Bobby Kennedy had cutting down on pollution as part of his platform in the presidential primaries. There are amazing opportunities here, but people continue to see it as a bad thing to go green.
• Housing. I've been thinking about this more since I bought an apartment for the first time last summer. The new place is about two-thirds the size of my last rental, and really I'm still organising it, but it's forced me to have to consider how to make a fixed space livable. Mostly I've been doing it by creating spaces that can change (watching Transformers with my brothers seems to have had a lasting effect!). Even though the layout is very thoughtful and doesn't have much "dead space," I think it could be more efficient. As much as I love my current bedroom set, I could see switching to a loft bed or a cabinet bed in the future, and reclaiming the floor space to use for active use and for more storage.
• Sustainable clothing. Throwaway fashion that demands you junk clothing because it's a season or two old is ridiculous. The vintage look is the start of the rebellion against it, and so is the utilitarian look promoted by The Gap, American Apparel, and other shops. But I want actual sustainable clothes, too. The sweater I get the most compliments on is one I made in the autumn of 2001. It's been mended three times now (both cuffs and a sleeve), and I know it's only a matter of time before it's unrepairable, but it's always worked because it's stylish, practical, and unusual enough to be a conversation piece. It's never been in fashion, so it can never go out, yet it looks good. I want more clothes like that.
• Real food. The American moon exploration effort led to the invention of a lot of things, including Tang. Tang is wonderful if you're in a space capsule, or camping, or somewhere you can't obtain or keep real orange juice. Real orange juice is wonderful when you can get it. As with clothing, we have to stop making food choices for abstract reasons (including the continuously evolving diet mythology), and start considering food because it's good. Good means high-quality, unadorned, and not specially altered just to make it more salable. Cost efficiencies are literally killing us. The locavore movement (in its non-snobby mode) is a good start here.

As near as I can figure, this is the trick we need to pull off: to embrace new technology when it will actually better our lives, and to embrace older modes when that will better our lives more than some newfangled way someone is selling us. And, of course, the wisdom to tell the difference. That seems to be the next leap forward.

solstice

It's rather late now (past midnight), but happy winter solstice to all of you who celebrate it. I had a decidedly low-key celebration this year, but I'm not entirely sad about it. It made me resolve the following for next year:

1. The "only on the internet until noon" rule was a failure. I can't be on the internet at all. It just doesn't work.
2. I am unplugging my phone just before I go to bed the night before solstice starts. That way I won't get friends who should know better calling and asking me about Christmas, including the ones with whom I have discussed my non-celebration of Christmas at length. That's like calling up your Muslim friend during Ramadan and asking if they want to have an Easter brunch with you.

I guess it wasn't meant to be this year. Next year solstice falls on a Monday, which means that I'll have to use a vacation day to celebrate, but hopefully will have better luck with finding some space.

waxing doesn't make it better

I found another one.

I'm not going to bother to link to it, because the point isn't to single someone out, but I found another author using the phrase, "allow me to wax stereotypically" just before they said something that wouldn't be allowed in a conversation in a bar. Even when it's almost closing time and all the remaining patrons are half off their gourds. The reason why it wouldn't have been allowed is because even when people are half off their gourds, they can spot a contradiction, and after this particular author said the ugly thing he did, he contradicted himself in the very next paragraph. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to reduce the sting of the first paragraph, or to make it so people couldn't object ("Ah, but I contradict myself within the next fifty words, so you can't possibly take exception!"). Yes, readers can object even to muddled arguments. I objected so much I unsubscribed from the blog feed.

If you use a phrase like that (usually the exact wording I come across is "if I may stereotype for a moment"), what you're basically doing is allowing yourself to be a jerk for a moment, and damn what the reader thinks. By acknowledging that you're stereotyping, you're hoping you can manage a "get away with it without having to apologise" card.

Now: if the stereotype is the point of the post, or if you need to set some baseline assumptions to get your argument rolling, I can see how that can be within bounds. If you write something like, "Typical of six-year-olds, I hated broccoli," and then go on to talk about how you learned to love the vegetable, I'm cool with that.

But if the stereotype disclaimer is followed by something hideous, and then dropped and never again taken up, or if it doesn't link logically to the next paragraph — at that point, all you're doing is muck-raking. It doesn't spur people to read on. It spurs people to think, "Ick, what a jerk" and navigate to another web site.

If you're going to stereotype knowingly, please make it useful.

Passchendaele

Passchendaele was the film that opened this year's Toronto International Film Festival. I just saw it for the first time last night with the ever-cinematic J-A. I'm not too interested in trying to critique it properly, but I just spent an hour and a half going over the reviews and the IMDB discussion boards, and there are a few points I feel haven't been covered yet by the chattering masses.

I deliberately waited until Passchendaele came to the Fox Theatre in the Beach. This had nothing to do with the endemic Torontonian laziness of not wanting to hike to another neighbourhood for something. The theatre opened in 1914, the same year that Canada entered the war Passchendaele is set in, and has been showing films since then. It supposedly has a stage behind the projection screen, although I've never seen it used. Passchendaele is shot like one would expect a film in 2008 to look like, but I wanted as much connection with the time period as I could get.

I got a root beer to go with my popcorn as a nod to Snoopy's WWI beverage of choice, and then J-A and I settled into the seats and admired the theatre's recent renovations. Then we waited some more. I did some sock knitting , and J-A worked on a scarf. We joked about how we were carrying on the traditions of the first women to watch films in this theatre. Then one of the staff members went to the front of the theatre and explained that the projectionist hadn't arrived yet, but the projectionist's union had been called and one was on his way. During the wait, people joked and talked. The staff members who came in to give us updates were gently heckled, but the hecklers were heckled back by other members of the audience, so no-one got irate.

The film finally started just under half an hour late. If you want a proper review, go ahead and Google some. These are just some of my impressions:

• I liked that the film pointed out that Canada was already multicultural by Edwardian times. I say this as a Canadian of Dutch/Croatian/Hungarian/German/who-knows-what-else descent who is sick to the teeth of only seeing characters of British, French, and First Nations ethnicity in dramas (I know many First Nations people have some bones to pick about how they're depicted, but they can explain that themselves far better than I'll ever be able to). In Passchendaele, a major part of the plot is driven by the conflict between being a born-and-bred Canadian and being of an ethnicity at war with the British Empire. It sounds weird, but it was refreshing to see that on the screen and up-front.
• For me, one of the most important scenes is the very brief one that takes place near the end, where someone delivers a live chicken to a platoon and tells them they'll have to kill and pluck it themselves if they want it for dinner. The soldier who is holding the chicken shrugs, breaks its neck in a single deft movement, and gives it to someone else for plucking. When another soldier teases him on his skill, he cracks a joke about how it's what he would do at home. A few minutes later we watch the same platoon killing German soldiers with guns, knives, bayonets, rocks... It's the first time I've ever seen on film, especially a Canadian film, something I remember being told in history class: one of the reasons that Canadians were such effective troops in the Great War was because they were farmers — they had learned how to kill in the barnyard and the slaughter-house, and they knew it for what it was, unadorned and unromanticised.
• I noticed a lot on the message boards on how "hokey" or "corny" the dialogue was, with some people even claiming the acting was bad. Dealing with the latter criticism first: ever seen films from this time period? They look ridiculous and melodramatic now, but at the time were praised for their naturalistic acting. Conventions change, and so do people's behaviours. At one time people really did "pull their hair out" when they were frustrated; now we just say it as a colloquialism.
  
  As for the dialogue: funny how people are criticising the dialogue using words that would have been popular at the time. Of course it's going to sound silly and old-fashioned — it's from ninety years ago! Give it another fify years and the language will be foreign-sounding enough that it won't grate. Right now it makes us uncomfortable because it's close to how we speak, but not close enough.
• A lot of discussion has been made of how too much time is spent on the "home front," and not enough on the battlefield. From what I remember of the eyewitness accounts I studied in school, trench warfare alternates between mind-numbing boredom and mind-numbing terror and chaos. Either way, showing early automobiles vie for road space alongside horse and buggies is more cinematically interesting. Besides, there's some scenes in the film where different characters talk about how the war is everywhere, not just "over there". If you're just sitting there waiting to see a scene where someone shoots someone else, you're going to miss out on that.
  
• There was also a certain amount of noise on the forums about how there's no big hero's ending at the film. I'm glad. If there had been, it would have contradicted the point that although people did incredibly heroic things and behaved with honour... they shouldn't have needed to. One point I saw being made in the film that I was glad to see was that the people who make the rules and the people who live under them are so far apart in viewpoint it's nearly impossible for them to really communicate at all. Without giving out too many spoilers: the main character gets a medal for the very event which gives him shell-shock. It turns out the persistent rumour of a certain German "atrocity" is a misinterpretation of an honourable gesture. And so on.

The Fox is a theatre you have to learn how to attend to fully enjoy. This is true for all cinemas, but as Canadian life has changed since 1914, so have our cinemas. Along with the 1914 ambiance, they have a 1914 heating system (probably upgraded at least once, but it still works like it's ninety years old, and I love it for that). It was about -10C outside, and maybe 17C inside. I knew ahead of time, and was perfectly comfy in my winter boots and handmade cardigan. Being a chronic anaemic, my fingers get cold easily, especially when I sit still for long periods of time, and I had to stuff them into the one sock I already had finished. The toe is shaped according to a design Lord Kitchener invented during the Great War, which has since become the standard in British Commonwealth nations and the US.

I'm glad I saw Passchendaele in an Edwardian theatre, on a cold day, with my sock knitting. Films are always more about what you bring to them than what they bring to you. The "here we are, now entertain us" crowd needs to be taught that level of engagement, or else "twitches" and "jolts" are all that are ever going to get through to them.

If you feel like going to the movies this weekend and live anywhere at all near Toronto, try to make it to the Fox.

Augmented Intelligence

It was 40 years ago today that Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated, in a single groundbreaking multimedia session, an awful lot of things that we take for granted in personal computer user interfaces now:

• an on-screen pointer controlled by a mouse
• a screen organised into windows
• copying and pasting between documents
• hyperlinks
• one of the first (if not the first itself) slide-style presentations

The whole thing was filmed, so we can still see it today.

In 1968.

I taught for seven years, was a corporate trainer for three, and now work as a business systems analyst, and I have to say: the quality of the tools may have got better, but the tools are still basically the same. You have sound capability on most business computers, but it's often disabled or not set up, so instead you use a conference line for sound and show the visuals over remote desktop sharing. You almost always make a slide presentation, if only to kick things off, and you use the mouse pointer to keep everyone focused and on track.

And so, every time the anniversary of the invention of the mouse (in 1965) or of this demonstration comes around, I think about what the purpose of inventing all this interactive "stuff" was: the augmentation of human intelligence so that we could work better together and, to put it one way, surpass ourselves.

Have we? And if we haven't, why not?

I don't know what research has been done on this, but I do know what I've seen in workplaces, teaching, at home, and in various capacities as a volunteer. For one thing, there is often resistance to change and radically new ways of doing things. From what I've observed (and experienced myself), it's not always simple pigheadedness. There is a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water when it comes to new technology, where some people evangelise and other people immediately become suspicious from the hard sell. I think the world would be a better place if people assessed technology rationally rather than emotionally. It feels silly to point that out, but it's true. I have four computers at home. I also have a glass pen that requires an inkwell to dip it into to write with. Both are communication technologies better suited to some contexts than others. I think we're very fortunate that Engelbart's audience wanted to analyse and innovate based on what he showd them that day 40 years ago, rather than knee-jerkedly falling into either technolust or Luddite horror.

What about groupware technologies that let people work together better? Maybe I hang out with too many Luddites, but I have to say that it's only been in the last two years that I've found people willing to use groupware without being in a paying work situation with a manager dictating its use to them. It's as if we all finally learned how to use this openly, instead of fighting with it all the time.

The major point for me as the "mother of all demonstrations" turns 40 is that while there may be the occasional flash of invention, the truth is that these changes happen far more slowly than the hype would have us believe. It's popular to build up remarkable statistics about the rate of progress. But again, that's about technology, not the real standard of living: education, nutrition, work/life balance, happiness. In some parts of the world, these have gone up. In others (including North America, where I am), they're deemed to have gone down or stayed the same, depending on the measuring stick and who's wielding it.

Ultimately the augmentation of our collective intelligence has to be done with our humanity, not our technology. Visionaries like Engelbart can provide us with excellent tools, but it's down to us to learn how to use them and apply them to the right jobs.