This book came along at a good time. I've been thinking a lot lately, about all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it's difficult, I start down one path, then all of a sudden I'm on on a different path. Even at night, drifting off to sleep I might be working on one of my novels, or writing a blog, or thinking about a work data thing, then I'll roll over and forget what I was thinking about and start something else.
Sometimes it's big picture thoughts, wondering how 70million people could be so deluded as to think that Trump has done a good enough job to be given another 4 years at it, and think, contrary to all evidence, that he won the election.
Sometimes it's small picture thoughts, wondering if I should select some images and actually publish a book of them. Back in the day, editing and printing your own book was called the vanity press, and the strong assumption was that you couldn't get it accepted by a real editor that published real books. That world has sure changed, and not necessarily for the better in all respects.
We are awash in information. We are drowning in it. For all intents and purposes as far as any individual is concerned, there is an infinite number of books published EVERY YEAR and many of them are crap. There are an infinite number of videos posted on YouTube. There are an infinite number of photographs published. I say infinite because while we can know the number of those things, there are far more than can be consumed by any individual.
It's become clear that our education system has completely failed to cope with this deluge. Not all that long ago, facts were relatively limited. They lived in an encyclopedia and the brains of adults. They didn't change much, facts or adults. What was true last year was still going to be true next year.
Which mostly isn't true any more. The work I do, when I do it, didn't exist a few decades ago. The concept of a computer database barely existed when I was a child, and until recently the tools were primitive. Don't get me started on the reversion of Excel from mostly useful to $#@!.
Now, everything is in a database. Nearly everything we see in daily life, and much that we don't see, has numbers attached to it, and those numbers identify it to a database, and information is stored about it. A simple example. Look at any bridge in Calgary. There is a number on it somewhere, and information about that bridge lives in a database. I don't even know what all information is stored, but there could be a lot. The light posts on the bridge have a number, and they might or might not be related to the bridge, but they certainly are related to an electrical circuit, which is related to a transformer. Probably several transformers, and all kinds of other electrical stuff I know nothing of. Then there is all the work that gets done to all that stuff to make sure it's properly maintained and safe for the people around it. Databases keep track of the skills and qualifications of the people doing the maintenance, and the scheduling of the maintenance work, and the materials required. I could go on.
You can buy little RFID chips to attach to every possession in your house so you can find them when wanted. I might yet need to take advantage of this technology. Almost every human already has a myriad of numbers attached to them, and I can see a time when an ID chip will be embedded in our bodies. We do it for pets and there's barely a difference between keeping that chip in your pocket and having it embedded. What next? The pace of change is only increasing. Some days I can delude myself into thinking I'm keeping up, but mostly I know better.
I've been horrified by the concept of cloud computing ever since I heard of the idea. Put your data on someone else's computer? Why? I liked the idea of the internet, but I completely failed to anticipate what's happening with software and computers. It's getting to the point that computers essentially won't function if they are not hooked up to the internet. We rarely buy programs or apps any more. We lease them. They periodically need to talk to the mother-ship to be assured we're still allowed to operate the software. They get bitchy about not being updated. There is no longer any one person that knows all of what any particular program might be able to do if tickled just right. They change too fast and nobody can keep up.
I think of the the old photography model. A camera was a box to control the amount of light that fell onto a piece of film. It was entirely manual, in that there were no batteries. You could put any kind of film into it that would fit, and there were different kinds of film for different kinds of photos. You could take the exposed film to any lab to be developed, and there were any number of them, or you could develop it yourself. There was an entire sub-culture about the subtleties involved. You could get prints or slides done for a modest cost. Images were sometimes printed, framed, and hung for display, or published in books. There were no computers involved. None. Some say the images were better then, but that's because of the skills of the people involved, not necessarily the process.
In an historical eye-blink of time, that changed completely. My camera is a brick if the battery dies, which is why I always carry a spare, sometimes two spares if I'm doing a big event, or have a long day shooting. The images are stored on an SD card, which is a small chunk of plastic and metal without a computer to read it. The computer itself needs special software to read the card and edit the images. More software to store these images or send them somewhere for display. Leased software. Cloud based hard drives that I don't control. The software by which I produce this blog can go away at any time, and those 3500 some blogs go poof. Well, except they don't, I periodically get a back up of them. Which reminds me...
Many of the things I touched on are discussed in this book. It's accessible, almost chatty. My only real objection to it is that it's mostly pretty superficial. You could take any one of those 21 topics, and expand it into a book. If you think of each chapter as a longish blog post, you've got the right idea.
The message in many of the chapters is that we are being lied to, all our lives. To simplify the world, we are told stories to make us believe our nation is better than other nations, that our religion makes us special, that our economic system is better than the others. While you might escape one of the stories, you are unlikely to escape them all. The stories benefit the people at the top of the pyramid. Mind you, if you're of the mindset that buys into one of those stories, you're going to be angered when it's your ox being gored.
What really hit home for me was when he was talking about Brave New World. Which made me think about the recent Battlestar Galactica show. I don't want my data in the cloud. I don't want my software updating itself without my knowing it. I barely trust the process where a photo taken with my phone shows up on one of my other computers, or mostly does although not when I'm in a rush, and it makes me wonder where else it shows up.
I like the process of taking photos with a real camera, (keep in mind some say those old film cameras are the 'real cameras') putting the chip in the computer, deciding what to edit, how exactly to edit, and how to export. Not a fan of what is called computational photography. (If you don't know, you probably don't want to know, although if you have a newish phone, you're already using it.) You may be amused to know that I've thought about getting a film camera, except the impracticality of developing film these days, and if you want to share that photo, you need a computer to scan it.
You can't go home again. There was a time when priests and their appointees (Kings) were in charge and you did what they said or you were tortured to death. Then we started understanding how the natural world really worked, and even ordinary people could understand it when properly explained. People could make their own tools, and fix their own machines. Typically rich old white men were still in charge, but it was possible to escape their grip. Now, not so much. Except even that group is losing their grip. They still get many more toys than most of us, but they are manipulated by Google or Amazon just as much as the rest of us.
They've bought into the story that places them nominally in charge, and they will, and are, fighting tooth and nail to keep it that way. As you've heard me say before, the world is more complicated than a tweet, and anyone that thinks otherwise is dangerous.
I wouldn't say buy it, but it was well worth getting out of the library.
Of the Day
Driftwood
Paperweight, but first, serendipity flower from Feb 2017.
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