❧ Local Yarn

(Download the MP3 audio – 12:15, 16.9 MB)

As I write this we have just made it through the blizzard of the decade here in Minnesota – 17 inches of snow in high winds, the eighth fifth largest snowfall ever recorded in the Twin Cities – and that is being followed up by windchills in the range of -20° to -30° F.

The great thing about winter, and the most terrible thing, is that it kills things. We generally do not, for example, have bugs in Minnesota that are biggger than your shoe, or poisonous snakes breeding in the grass. They would all die here in November. But winter also selects many of the noble, warm-blooded creatures to die as well: deer, wolves, birds. Many of them will lay down tonight and die in the midnight hour of this midnight month. Winter brings everything down to a simple matter of resources.

Christmas, of course, brings the gap between ‘enough’ and ‘not enough’ into sharp relief. Those with enough relax and enjoy the festivities of being warm and cheery in the darkest coldest hour of the year; those without must find a way to survive and be content, or give in to despair. I’m heartily in favour of festivities; also of helping as many people as possible survive and be free to enjoy them. It all comes home to you, though, when it may be you who do not survive.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, looking out the window of my counting-house, where things are not going well; where they look, quite frankly, very bleak indeed. For the first time I contemplate not having enough or being enough. I had received a summons to the Clearing for midnight that night.

As I went out one day, one day I met an old man by the way His head was bare and his beard was gray His clothing made of the cold earth and clay, His clothing made of the cold earth and clay.

I said, Old man, what man are you? What country do you belong to? He said, I’m Death, hast heard of me? All kings and princes bow down unto me, All kings and princes bow down unto me.

— Death and the Lady

One night months ago, while I was driving home in the dark, Robert called from Ohio with a parable. He never says “Hi Joel how are you” when he calls with a parable; I just pick up the phone and there he is on the other end telling me the story, as though I had dialed him just in time to hear him tell it.

A man had a son and a horse, and one night a storm knocked down a tree, and broke a fence. The horse escaped in the night. The next day the neighbor said “That’s bad!” The man replied, “How do you know that’s bad?”

The next day the horse found its way home, accompanied by some wild horses, and the neighbor congratulated him saying “That’s good!” and again the man responded “How do you know that’s good?”

A week later, the man’s son was taming one of the horses. The horse threw him and he broke an arm and a leg. The neighbor again said “That’s bad!” and the man simply asked “How do you know that’s bad?”

Three days later a war was declared, and the king’s men came to town conscripting all able-bodied young men to serve as soldiers. The man’s son was spared because of his injuries.

“The lesson is: stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil!”

I’ve thought a lot about this story lately, and of the deer that die in the woods in the winter. We have a tradition that the human race went wrong by eating at the tree of knowledge of good and evil – by trying to figure out what is good and what is bad, and taking it upon ourselves to worry about and fear and avoid the “bad” things, when it’s simply not possible to have that kind of knowledge. How can I know whether it really is “bad” for me to, in spite of all my best efforts, lose my situation, my house, my self-respect? What if I am among those that winter separates unto Pluto rather than to Jupiter this year? This question is what the summons to the Clearing made very real for me.

 

The parable Robert told me might be rephrased in more traditional terms. A poor woman in labour was forced to give birth in a barn in the middle of winter. “How do you know that’s bad?” It seems that when God chose to enter and experience humanity, He chose also to refute our notions of good and evil circumstances by the way in which He did it. I don’t know about you, but if I agreed to become a spider and to enter the world of spiders, I would at least want to end up as a spider that had a fighting chance – not so with the God of the Incarnation. From that wet infant landed in the straw, he was vulnerable and unlikely to survive, due to malice, due to lack of money, lack of food, lack of protection and basic clean living conditions. We can say he loved the whole world from the poor to the great, but we have lost sight of what Divine Love means: it means being vulnerable; it means accepting vulnerability. The more vulnerable you are, the closer you approach to the Divine.

Captain, Captain, tell me true Does my sweet Willy sail with you? No my dear, he is not here For he is drowned in this ocean dear

— Captain Captain

This “summons” – I’ve mentioned it twice now. I’ve always dreaded getting one. I’ve dreaded being that vulnerable.

The appointed time was midnight, the place was a clearing in a very wooded, very overgrown ravine between two rocky bluffs. That night it was snowing hard, which was itself an added disappointment. I thought at least it would be nice to be able to see the stars. Trixie came with me of course. The summons was really for both of us, our fates having been irreversibly fused some time ago. We drove as far as we could, and parked the truck, and sat inside it with the heat on as long as we could, and held each other quietly. Eventually we stepped down into the snow and left the truck behind, wading and trudging on foot through the woods towards the Clearing. We didn’t say anything. We weren’t sad, or happy, just quiet.

I had imagined, I guess, that the Clearing would be empty, and that Trixie and I would have to build the fire ourselves; but as we drew near, we heard the fire crackling, and even some voices talking. And who should come to us out of the clearing but Robert, the breath pluming out of his mouth as he laughed and gave us a big hug. Robert and I have nothing in common – not lifestyle, not background, not age, not appearance – nothing at all except that we had both apparently received the same summons. Others were there too – many which I did not expect. There was Daniel and his wife, there was my Liberian friend Henry, there was Erik and his wife and daughter. Some had only been acquaintances – but now we looked in each others’ eyes and realized we had more in common than we could have hoped, and were glad. There were even several deer standing at a distance from the fire.

There we left everything behind – our wealth, our families, our reputations, our warm breath. Was this a bad thing? We had asked ourselves this question a hundred times before, but we were not asking it now. We stood around the fire facing each other, and raised our hands and looked up into the falling snow, and in raised voices, asked for the last thing there was to ask for, as the sparks flew upwards.

I want a sober mind An all-sustaining eye To see my God above And to the heavens fly

I want a Godly fear A quick discerning eye That looks to Thee my God And sees the tempter fly.

I’d soar away above the sky I’d fly to see my God above.

— Soar Away

 

The first music cue is an acoustic sketch by my friend Benji Flaming. The other cue not linked above is O Come, O Come Emmanuel from Charles Dickens Christmas.

This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.

(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)

(Download the MP3 audio – 4:52, 6.8 MB)

Radio address for December 8, 2010, a poem I wrote this last Sunday.

The land was, once, just the land you could see; There was no “what I see, and what the map says Is further on” – traveling meant finding someone Only by walking, your footsteps constantly Unraveling each horizon into things You could remember. If you remembered them In order, you would get where you were going: Those pines you remembered every time you saw them, Where you always thought you’d like to stop awhile – Those were the only things like roads, once, There were no paths, and no homes, yet, either. Even so, as far back as you can imagine, I suspect, you’d have found traces of other people, And before them, of God Who walked here Himself And left you a sealed letter in the field with your name on it: “Not to be opened for twenty thousand years.” As it happens, here you find both the letter And the human traces – those pines, for instance, That gave you pause when you walked near them In the snow, when it was evening all afternoon: You sat down beneath and between them (your many layers Allowed you to sit and yet remain warm). You noticed another stand of pine far off, A distant dark green monument across the snowfall. You could give up your place and walk there, But it was likely to be just as comfortable here. The sky was so grey it almost hid itself, So grey you’d almost say you couldn’t see it Even when you looked right up at it. And falling snow gave you that odd, best feeling Of being both on and inside a blanket. The pines Were the quietest of all – quieter, even, than home – Was that not a hint? The letter I spoke of? – And besides, the great calculation was, Whether there was not already someone else In that other clump of pines as well, maybe looking Across at you – probably not though. This is where you’d hate to find a beer can But if you did, you’d just leave it there. It doesn’t fit, at first – you wanted to think You were the only one ever to come here, That this stand of pine is its own new world That will be gone again when the snow stops – But, after a moment, your perspective shifts, All on its own, and the can is a part of it all, As much as anything else there, as much as The dry grass poking through the snow drifts; The same way, you see, the pines themselves Are part of the farm…as is that passing car, with its headlights on.

— The Settler

The music at the end is Meg’s Hair from the much-loved Little Women original soundtrack.

This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or “see past episodes”:http://jdueck.net/radio.

Listening to the audiobook of 1776 by David McCullough lately, I was struck by how many of the common soldiers in the ranks of both the Americans and the British kept journals. Even more interesting was the content of many of the entries. In addition to conventional entries about marches, fights and privations, they often wrote things like “nothing to report,” “cold,” or just “Same as above.” For whatever reason, with no offical order to do so, even those lowest in the ranks felt it was important to document what they saw, no matter how seemingly unimportant or routine, or how unlikely anyone was to take note of it. They made a point of writing something down even when there was nothing to write down. The fact is that now, two hundred and thirty years later, their accounts give us an extremely valuable balance to the officers’ “official” perspective (and the newspapers’ extremely stylized perspective) on the events of their time.

This inspired me to buy a separate journal for use at work. My plan is to simply write down a bare-bones account of what happens every day in the office, or wherever I am working, from now until the end of my career. It occurred to me that I would liked to have started on this five years ago, and have it handy to look back on – a lot of significant things have happened in that time. I also thought of how much I would have liked to be able to read such a journal from my grandparents. This made it all the easier for me to just buy one and get started.

I wanted a fresh book to get started with, and I chose one of the limited-edition Peanuts journals partly because Charles Schultz is from around here and partly because Peanuts seems to fit on many levels. I do already have a book that I have used for work purposes, but it is mostly filled with crossed-out todo items, phone numbers, and sketchily-abbreviated meeting notes.¹ I also have a personal journal which this does not replace for obvious reasons.

The idea is:

1. The work journal is strictly “vocation”-related. I just write down what I saw, did, or thought at work.
2. I write in it every single weekday.
3. Entries can be as short as one word.

A representative sample from the first few days. “Trixie” and I hang out with each other at our jobs whenever possible since we get so little time to spend together. I also like to note the temperature and the weather.

I don’t know exactly what use this information will be, whether it will ever be deemed important or even what will ultimately be done with it.² Those are exactly the kinds of questions the rank-and-file journalers didn’t concern themselves with. What they recognized is that simple, regular observations have inherent value, both to us individually and to our collective memory.

In addition to whatever personal value this may provide in the future, I’ve found that writing a work journal in this way has the following effects:

• It helps me to live in awareness of patterns and trends in how I work.
• By condensing the events of the day down from isolated memories into concrete observations, I am better able to mentally “take only what I need” from the day and discard the rest.

—JD

¹ These probably have just as much historical and “rememberance” value as anything else. In my case, I want to provide myself with opportunity for observation and gloss over the details of specific tasks. There is no single correct mix, but this one fits my priorities and more closely matches the practice of the 1700s-era soldiers that inspired me to begin with (I’ve always liked old things).

² Realistically, I expect that my journals will be of interest to my family for a few months or years after I’m gone, and stored in boxes thereafter. I think ideally there would be a place where families could donate such things to places that could archive them permanently, and make them available for later research.

(Download the MP3 audio – 6:05, 8.5 MB)

Radio address for December 1, 2010. It is extremely cold and snowy here now. These are just a few glimpses of surviving and micro-thriving in the middle of winter.

The music at the end is The Snail and the Rosebush from my friend Benji Flaming’s album Solo Banjo which you really should listen to. The other music cue is Sitting in the Stern of a Boat from the Lewis and Clark original soundtrack.

This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.

(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)

I don’t have a problem with technology’s place in our lives at all. I have, however, a growing problem with the backlit screen, and a growing desire to see it, if not abolished, then at least dethroned and humbled.

Backlit screens are something we’ve grown very used to without realizing what they’ve done to our way of thinking. They are hypnotic, arresting, and distracting. No matter how small a backlit screen is, it quickly occupies your whole field of vision. It ruins your sense of your surroundings in the same way a flashlight ruins your night-vision. It is, to my mind, the single biggest reason that we find ourselves trying to divide our attentions between a “real-life” world and a “digital” world – an unnecessary and ultimately wearisome paradigm.

In the beginning, computers featured blinking lights, fans, buttons, switches, paper punchcards and printouts, all of which we as humans can “read” and connect with as we would with any other physical object, without any heady sense of escaping from reality.¹

This video is from a 1969 Disney movie, and I do not mean to use it as an example of the state of serious computer science in the 1960s. I do mean to use it as a rough example of where computers fit into the popular mindset of our culture at that time. You can see, from listening to Professor Quigley’s line of reasoning and his use cases, that in 1969 the computer was seen primarily as an appliance, like a washing machine. It had brains and memory and could be fed instructions – but the whole point of it all was that it could augment your everyday life and make it more convenient, e.g., open the door to let your cat in while you were away. The highest possible use envisioned for the computer at that time was as an advanced calculator – i.e., still an appliance, just an appliance for NASA engineers this time instead of housewives. You used a computer as you would any other appliance, by flipping switches and pressing buttons, and the results were typically imagined as a printed piece of paper in plain language.

Another movie clip, from the 1980s this time. Look at the change in the popular idea of What Computers Are All About. Now the computer featured a backlit screen – sort of like television, already a highly-evolved alternate reality in its own right – except you were interacting with it. When the backlit screen came on the scene, computers ceased to be appliances and became windows into an alternate universe. The movies of the 1980s reflected fascination with this idea, and, twenty years later, the movies of our decade still reflect this fascination. The backlit screen was the feature that changed popular conception of computing technology, and it created this jarring mental framework that leads us to think of computer-based interaction as involving an “alternate reality”. We have been trying to escape from this idea ever since.

  *

I seem to recall seeing a lot of articles online about “blogging burnouts:” people who started blogs or personal websites back in the day and now never write on them any more, and either feel guilty about it or just consciously decide to move on. Many of the people who used to find their websites and blogs to be great outlets for creative expression no longer seem to have the time for them – no longer seem able to make time for them.

There are still plenty of active bloggers, sure, but there is also a lot of turnover among us. It seems like very few people keep at it for a really long time. This, to me, is another indicator of how wearing-down this alternate-reality thing is. It’s addicting but ultimately unsatisfying. There will always be participants, but eventually you will experience burnout. You can’t make yourself stay in an alternate reality for too long; even many self-described geeks eventually want out .²

At the same time, though, we find it very hard to give up “the web,” that thing that we can hook up to our brain and instantly know what our friends are up to and what the name of that actor in that movie was. The web works beautifully as an add-on to our normal lives, but suffers in the prison of the backlit screen. With the backlit screen, the web is a place you can see when you sit down with your computer or your cell phone and stare inside. Your eyes have to focus continually, and your pupils have to adjust to different light levels to see into this web. It is its own dimension, utterly separate from what you see when you look around the room or out the window.

The backlit screens have splintered and multiplied, and are no longer chained to a desk. Now you can have the web in your pocket, on your phone, on your coffee room table. This goes a long way toward making the web less and less a separate reality than a feature of the normal one. Indeed, our language has already adapted to reflect this – the word “cyberspace” already has the sound of a goofy anachronism, impossible to utter without irony. The original flaw of the backlit screen, though, remains in effect: it forces you to experience connectedness only by ruining your day-vision. In the end, the iPhone is still just as much a part of the old “cyberspace” paradigm as the green-screen terminal in War Games: a dimension unto its own, an end unto itself, a prison.

Some time ago, I, like many others, grew tired of writing for the backlit screen. But I tried podcasting and, surprisingly, I kept it up, because I found I could create an experience that didn’t have to tether people to their laptops: something that you could listen to while out for a walk, or while driving to work. This appealed to me a great deal. It’s the same reason why I’m interested in publishing for Kindle: the variety and immediate delivery of the web without the eye strain, without the glowing screen that ruins your day-vision for your immediate surroundings.

My dream is to produce audio experiences without ever once having to sit down in front of a backlit screen. But an even bigger dream is the idea that one day, you will be able to listen without ever sitting down in front of a backlit computer screen either. When the backlit screen has followed the CRT down the path of obsolescence and electronic ink is everywhere, the web will flourish only as a delivery path for things to wind up on your table, in your armchair, your picnic table and your car.

—JD

¹ I hold up the original radio as the most natural interface of any communications technology man has created so far. It has simple controls which map naturally to their functions and are easily understood, and you process its output through your ear, with no special interpretation necessary and with very low cognitive overhead – even compared with, for example, television.

² There are so many of these kinds of posts being written these days that I can just Google ‘back to pen and paper’ and pick one at random.

Adventures in Debugging: Bring Your Tools

I taught myself to program computers out of library books in my early teens, and to design websites by age twenty. Yet I decided not to pursue a computer-related career. I still wonder if that was a smart decision. But the main reason was inscrutability. The further I progressed into computer technology, the more I encountered problems I had no possible way of solving. I gradually came to the conclusion that all technology is basically broken at some level, and that technical savvy consists of elaborate workarounds, and a tolerance of shoddy design¹ – whether at the user interface level or the IDE level or the memory-management level. Some people are geeks enough to accept or even enjoy working in such a field; the idealist in me at age 20 wasn’t able to stomach twenty years of having creative solutions shot down by unaccountable, unfixable, and inscrutable technical problems.

Back to the link (above): the hacker in me found the above post entertaining and even easy to follow, despite the fact that I have only an intermediate understanding of the technologies involved. The compulsive chronicler in me appreciated the fact that Piotr took the time to document an obscure problem, the troubleshooting process, and the solution, and work in some people lessons while he was at it. No matter how obscure the problem is, someone else will have it again sometime; and now a trip to Google is likely to bring them to Piotr’s explanation and save them a world of trouble. It’s exactly the kind of thing for which I started my Notely blog.

The thing that caught me most however, was the customer-service dimension of the solution. For the customer, the problem must have been annoying – because of the particular performance issue, yes, but also because it seemed totally unaccountable and unsolvable. They bought a box, plugged it into their network, configured it properly, and everything ground to a halt. From their point of view, everything pointed to a defective product – yet when Piotr fixed the problem (without blaming them for their unpatched server, the real problem) they went on to buy several more products from his company. Why was this?

I can tell you for certain that when an IT worker demonstrates an ability to see into and fix random problems that pop up like this, they set themselves far apart from the pack. Most IT workers are just workaround-tolerant hacks in disguise, and this tells in their² proposed solutions: try swapping this out, try rebooting, try installing updates. Even when these “solutions” work, they lack satisfaction because it’s obvious that no one understands the problem. There is very little to distinguish the troubleshooting from mere voodoo, and I find it regrettable that a profession which purports to deal in logic and technology should depend so much on superstition.

In short, Piotr’s post rekindles in me a hope that the “voodoo veil” in technology can be pierced after all. It somehow reminds me of how getting police diver training taught me that things are not irretrievably “lost” once they fall into a lake: you just need the equipment and the expertise to get all the way to the bottom of the problem space. Perhaps all IT lacks is effective mentoring connections between the experienced and the newcomers. But that is a whole ‘nother issue.

—JD

¹ Blame it on my Wintel-centric upbringing if you will; but I see plenty of complaints on Twitter from Apple users pointing to the same basic, “unsolvable” problems.

² I speak of IT workers in the third persion, but I often end up operating in this capacity as well.

(Download the MP3 audio)

Radio address for October 14, 2010, released a few days late. Have you ever been pathetically but persistently pursued?

A smudgy PDF transcript of today’s address is available.

The poem at the end is The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins, about which my poetry book has this to say:

After the fantastic description of the bird in the first nine lines, Hopkins turns to the poem’s divine addressee [Jesus Christ] & asserts that His glory is a billion times greater. The comparison of Christ to a million-million predators is breathtaking enough, to be sure, but the final three lines are even more spectacular. In imagery drawn from accounts of the Crucifixion (“gall” and “gash”) and the Eucharist (gold-vermilion parallel to bread-wine, in turn parallel to flesh-blood), the ember sends out brilliant light.

Music cues are Quodlibet performed by the Kronos Quartet, Setting Out from the Sherlock Holmes Televsion Soundtrack, and Air Spirals by Richard Harvey.

This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.

(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)

I had this idea yesterday and decided to just try it. $5 gets you a decently good shot at winning a free Kindle 3G and a certainty of helping out an entrepreneur somewhere in the world. I take a slice for the time involved, which is my main risk in the endeavor. I have no idea how this will go over! Send me questions by email or twitter.

Details and drawing slots are available on the drawing’s page. The drawing is in one week!

P.S. More episodes are on the way!

This is an interesting report on a very intriguing study based on a great concept: defining and determining “group intelligence”. And, subjectively, I would be inclined to agree with the results of the study:

“In groups where the conversation was more evenly distributed, where you had better participation – and more equal participation among all of the group members – the groups were more collectively intelligent,” Woolley says.

But they left out a piece of information crucial to their credibility.

How exactly did they measure the results?

This is extremely frustrating.

I came across another church web site today, with the line “We are not perfect, but Jesus is.” Since when did anyone, inside or outside the church, care about Christians being perfect?

Christians really need to stop using “we are not perfect” as a promotional line. It comes across like a hot dog vendor on the street saying “I’m not a billionaire CEO.” What kind of admission is that? Everyone knows it already.

What would mean something would be if, as a whole, Christians acted as though we knew we’re not perfect, as though we knew we were living in borrowed clothes. There are too many of us arguing too loudly and obnoxiously (under the guise of “contending for truth”) for any of us to be able to use the line “we’re not perfect” with any credibility. We’re already suffering for our own faults; to add “we’re not perfect” is just to rub it in.