Al is sipping a tall decafe mocha with whip.
Al is writing about "high-semantic storage" and other things he doesn't fully understand.
Al is eating a drumstick at his desk and trying to imagine world peace. The drumstick is really good.
Al is reading Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (His friend Karen Croft did a lot of the research.)
Al is going downstairs for an iced latte.
Al is on a conference call with a bunch of very forward-looking people.
Al is thinking he'd like to be in Maui, bobbing in the waves of Napili Bay right about now.
Al is taking Bodie for a quick walk in the courtyard.
Al is trying to arrange an interview but his subject doesn't have the bandwidth for that right now.
Al is ready for the weekend. Oh, wait, this is only Wednesday.
Al is chowing down on leftover pizza, his workday done.
Al is at the yoga center.
Al is.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Are You Precient?
Here's an outtake from a fascinating conversation I had awhile ago with Steve Rubin, one of our top engineers at Sun ...
"I think that scientists in general are not acting like scientists anymore, but are acting more like religious figures, with their belief in some stuff and rejection of anything that doesn't fit within their doctrines — for example, paranormal effects. I used to reject the paranormal, too. You know, 'That's BS.'
"I had the standard skeptical thing until I did some programming work for Dean Radin. He's considered a paranormal or psychic researcher. He's a Ph.D., scientist, statistical expert, skeptic, and what he does is he goes around and he repeats the experiments that people claim are demonstrating paranormal effects. Someone says, 'The following proves a paranormal effect,' and he says, 'Bullshit. Let's see for ourselves.'
"I was his programmer, building his experiments, and it was quite convincing. Here's one example; I wouldn't have believed it could work.
"Are you prescient? Can you see the future? Some people think they can, but they can't quantify it. They can't prove it. There are a lot of people, by the way, who believe in these effects, but they can't really defend it because someone can always say, 'Oh, you just got a hint from somewhere.'
"What Radin did was he got a collection of pictures. Some of them were 'calm' pictures as he called them. A picture of a spoon. A picture of a flower. Then he had 'difficult' pictures. A picture of a deformed face. A picture of a bloody accident. Pictures of people having sex. Pictures to get your blood boiling. He would then randomly flash these pictures on a screen in front of a subject. Not only that, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, he would play the most annoying, grating, screeching sound. And he had you hooked up to a number of devices, measuring your blood pressure, heart rate, and stuff like that.
"All he told the subjects was, 'We're measuring your response to these pictures.' and he'd show a few dozen pictures. Sure enough, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, the curves jumped. People were not happy. And when the calm pictures hit the screen the biometrics just continued normally. Except for one interesting thing. Before the difficult pictures hit the screen, people's rates would already start to climb. People knew. People are prescient.
"I programmed this thing, and I know I did it right. In fact, I've been programming computers for almost 40 years now. Since high school. I have never in my life had my code scrutinized so heavily as this code. First of all, the random decision to show a calm or annoying picture had to be made immediately before it happened. They didn't want it made ahead of time so someone could argue that it was stored in the computer and somehow detectable. They also wanted to make sure that the amount of code that was executed for the the two paths, calm versus difficult, was the same length of time so no one could detect a little delay.
"They went on and on with this level of scrutiny of the code, checking everything. But there's no doubt about it. Statistical analysis bears it out, as well as just an eyeballing of the data. When a calm picture is coming, people stay calm. When the difficult picture is coming, people know before that thing hits the screen, before that sound comes out of the speaker. They start to get tense ahead of time. Everyone does it (not just the people who claim to be prescient). We can document that all people are prescient, even though they don't know it.
"Prescience? Intuition? These I believe are real phenomena, and we could have endless discussions about why I think they're real. I'm not saying it's real because I've seen the aliens, or taken too many drugs, or something like that. There are some real phenomena out there. And there are many people with theories. My basic take on it is that it's just a phenomenon we haven't learned to measure yet. No one believed in electricity before it was invented. Or radio waves. How magical is that?
"At each point in time we think, 'We know it all. We're done now.' And this is what I complain about with scientists today. They say, 'We have all our answers.' But we don't have all our answers. Did you know that the physical constants are not constant? The speed of light is not constant. Yet scientists blithely treat these things as if they're constants. The history of their values shows that they change, and this is not just due to better measuring equipment. If you go into a lab today and try to measure them ten times in a row, you'll get ten different answers. They're all within a fraction of a percent, or something like that, but they're not constants ... it varies more than the equipment's margin of error. All sorts of things that we think are true are not. But we gloss over that stuff because it's just too hard to believe.
"There is lots out there; we just can't detect it yet."
"I think that scientists in general are not acting like scientists anymore, but are acting more like religious figures, with their belief in some stuff and rejection of anything that doesn't fit within their doctrines — for example, paranormal effects. I used to reject the paranormal, too. You know, 'That's BS.'
"I had the standard skeptical thing until I did some programming work for Dean Radin. He's considered a paranormal or psychic researcher. He's a Ph.D., scientist, statistical expert, skeptic, and what he does is he goes around and he repeats the experiments that people claim are demonstrating paranormal effects. Someone says, 'The following proves a paranormal effect,' and he says, 'Bullshit. Let's see for ourselves.'
"I was his programmer, building his experiments, and it was quite convincing. Here's one example; I wouldn't have believed it could work.
"Are you prescient? Can you see the future? Some people think they can, but they can't quantify it. They can't prove it. There are a lot of people, by the way, who believe in these effects, but they can't really defend it because someone can always say, 'Oh, you just got a hint from somewhere.'
"What Radin did was he got a collection of pictures. Some of them were 'calm' pictures as he called them. A picture of a spoon. A picture of a flower. Then he had 'difficult' pictures. A picture of a deformed face. A picture of a bloody accident. Pictures of people having sex. Pictures to get your blood boiling. He would then randomly flash these pictures on a screen in front of a subject. Not only that, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, he would play the most annoying, grating, screeching sound. And he had you hooked up to a number of devices, measuring your blood pressure, heart rate, and stuff like that.
"All he told the subjects was, 'We're measuring your response to these pictures.' and he'd show a few dozen pictures. Sure enough, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, the curves jumped. People were not happy. And when the calm pictures hit the screen the biometrics just continued normally. Except for one interesting thing. Before the difficult pictures hit the screen, people's rates would already start to climb. People knew. People are prescient.
"I programmed this thing, and I know I did it right. In fact, I've been programming computers for almost 40 years now. Since high school. I have never in my life had my code scrutinized so heavily as this code. First of all, the random decision to show a calm or annoying picture had to be made immediately before it happened. They didn't want it made ahead of time so someone could argue that it was stored in the computer and somehow detectable. They also wanted to make sure that the amount of code that was executed for the the two paths, calm versus difficult, was the same length of time so no one could detect a little delay.
"They went on and on with this level of scrutiny of the code, checking everything. But there's no doubt about it. Statistical analysis bears it out, as well as just an eyeballing of the data. When a calm picture is coming, people stay calm. When the difficult picture is coming, people know before that thing hits the screen, before that sound comes out of the speaker. They start to get tense ahead of time. Everyone does it (not just the people who claim to be prescient). We can document that all people are prescient, even though they don't know it.
"Prescience? Intuition? These I believe are real phenomena, and we could have endless discussions about why I think they're real. I'm not saying it's real because I've seen the aliens, or taken too many drugs, or something like that. There are some real phenomena out there. And there are many people with theories. My basic take on it is that it's just a phenomenon we haven't learned to measure yet. No one believed in electricity before it was invented. Or radio waves. How magical is that?
"At each point in time we think, 'We know it all. We're done now.' And this is what I complain about with scientists today. They say, 'We have all our answers.' But we don't have all our answers. Did you know that the physical constants are not constant? The speed of light is not constant. Yet scientists blithely treat these things as if they're constants. The history of their values shows that they change, and this is not just due to better measuring equipment. If you go into a lab today and try to measure them ten times in a row, you'll get ten different answers. They're all within a fraction of a percent, or something like that, but they're not constants ... it varies more than the equipment's margin of error. All sorts of things that we think are true are not. But we gloss over that stuff because it's just too hard to believe.
"There is lots out there; we just can't detect it yet."
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The Time of My Life
I was wearing a black velvet suit I'd picked up at the Squire Shop in the Lancaster Mall. Joanne was wearing a long white Gunny Sack dress and looked fantastic.
College buddies played "Here Comes the Sun" on guitar and a borrowed pump organ.
Eleven months earlier, Joanne and I had been among half a dozen students who gathered in Dr. Frazee's office for his course in the Development of Christian Thought. By coincidence, we showed up in similar ski sweaters on the same day, and Joanne was amazed when it kept happening, week after week, on different days.
She never suspected that I might have seen her on campus earlier and run back to my dorm to change.
What can I say? Sometimes fate can use a helping hand.
In the park, with the rain still coming down, it was Dr. Frazee — a bald, robust, and joyous man — who stood before us now with the power to pronounce us husband and wife.
Joanne had earned her art degree a couple of months earlier and was working in the office of Chuck Colvin Ford in McMinnville (home of Linfield College, where we met). I still had a semester to go and had a summer job sorting the empty bottles that came back to the Coca-Cola plant in Salem. Nothing about our future was set except one thing ...
We placed plain gold bands around each other's fingers and promised to love each other for the rest of our lives.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Mom and Apple Pie
When she was alive, my mother made what I considered the best apple pie in the world.
The key to its flaky crust (even on the bottom) was in her fingers. She never used a recipe but knew by the feel of the dough when it was just right.
"When it's too wet you feel it's gooey," she told me. "If it's too dry, you can't roll it out. Then it crumbles too much."
She was 63 then and I was 23, interviewing her for an article I was writing for The Community Press, where I had landed my first job as a reporter.
"I have the feeling — how it's supposed to be," she said.
This small German woman had never even tasted pie before coming to America in 1952.
"I learned how to make it in my second year here," she said. "A neighbor girl came over and showed me how."
She had watched the girl — "I don't remember her name, but she was a very nice girl" — as she carefully measured the ingredients.
"I couldn't read the recipe. That's why I had to see it — what she put in," my mother recalled. "That's why I never used a recipe. I couldn't read English."
At the time she could hardly speak English, and the neighbor girl had to show her, rather than tell her, how to make the pie.
"She measured everything. At first I measured everything, too, but then I just used my own judgment."
If you asked my mom, "How much flour?" or "How much sugar?" she would say, "Until it looks right."
I could never master it, but I did pick up a little secret for anyone who aspires to flaky-crust perfection.
"What makes the best pie is to use lard and shortening together," she told me.
This was not something the neighbor girl taught her, though. She discovered it on her own.
"I didn't have enough shortening one time," she said, "so I had to use half lard."
Don't have any lard on hand?
Get some.
The key to its flaky crust (even on the bottom) was in her fingers. She never used a recipe but knew by the feel of the dough when it was just right.
"When it's too wet you feel it's gooey," she told me. "If it's too dry, you can't roll it out. Then it crumbles too much."
She was 63 then and I was 23, interviewing her for an article I was writing for The Community Press, where I had landed my first job as a reporter.
"I have the feeling — how it's supposed to be," she said.
This small German woman had never even tasted pie before coming to America in 1952.
"I learned how to make it in my second year here," she said. "A neighbor girl came over and showed me how."
She had watched the girl — "I don't remember her name, but she was a very nice girl" — as she carefully measured the ingredients.
"I couldn't read the recipe. That's why I had to see it — what she put in," my mother recalled. "That's why I never used a recipe. I couldn't read English."
At the time she could hardly speak English, and the neighbor girl had to show her, rather than tell her, how to make the pie.
"She measured everything. At first I measured everything, too, but then I just used my own judgment."
If you asked my mom, "How much flour?" or "How much sugar?" she would say, "Until it looks right."
I could never master it, but I did pick up a little secret for anyone who aspires to flaky-crust perfection.
"What makes the best pie is to use lard and shortening together," she told me.
This was not something the neighbor girl taught her, though. She discovered it on her own.
"I didn't have enough shortening one time," she said, "so I had to use half lard."
Don't have any lard on hand?
Get some.
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