waka waka waka

I’ve alluded rather obliquely in some of my posts to various schools of inner development, without going into a lot of detail. I’d like to begin to talk about one such system with which I have had various levels of contact all of my life. The ideas in question are those brought to the West by the Greek/Armenian teacher G.I. Gurdjieff.

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Here’s an image I ran across this morning. All that’s missing are Dorothy and her little dog.

Here in New York City the Sanitation Department will pick up pretty much anything you leave out for them. Unwanted furniture, old stoves, Christmas trees, paint cans, wooden planks, TV sets, you name it - just leave it at curbside and it’s gone the next day, gobbled up by the big white truck’s insatiable hydraulic maw. But a while back I managed to find the one thing that you can’t throw out.

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Tonight is the beginning of the Year of the Dog, lunar year 4703. It is called “bingxu” in the “Stem-Branch” system, which repeats a name every 60 years.

To translate: Congratulations, and may you prosper.

Having written a post earlier about James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces, I probably should remark on the recent brouhaha about the story, which you would have had to have been in a persistent vegetative state not to have noticed.

It turns out that Mr. Frey’s tale of recovery from multiple addictions was perhaps as much fiction as fact. Among other things, he wrote of jail time that he never in fact served. He fabricated an excruciating account of undergoing multiple root-canal procedures without anaesthesia. He concocted a tragic backstory about being responsible for an adolescent girlfriend’s death. In other words, he simply made a lot of stuff up and passed it off as the truth. A lot of people are pretty upset, not least of whom is his principal benefactor, the towering Oprah Winfrey, who dressed him down before the Entire World yesterday.

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It being Chinese New Year this weekend, it is a bit of a busy time for kung fu schools, and Yee’s Hung Ga is no exception. Tonight we had a lion dance to do in Manhattan; I’ve only just got home to my Park Slope château, and it’s after 11.

I’m just too worn out to write much tonight, but I certainly don’t want you all to go away empty-handed. So, as we prepare to ring in the Year of the Dog, I offer some exceptionally beautiful photographs of far-off Cathay’s exotic landscape. I do hope you enjoy them.

Well, after last night’s gloomy post, redolent with the odor of the crypt, I think it’s time for a little comic relief. This comes by way of comedian Kip Addotta, who sends me little tidbits from time to time.

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I am haunted tonight by a link sent to me by my friend and coworker Eugene Jen. I had decided earlier this evening not to mention it here, because I thought it might have the same rather harrowing effect on some readers that it has had on me. But that left me still having to write this evening’s post, and try as I might I couldn’t deflect my thoughts. So if you don’t want to read a disturbing item, just amuse yourself in some other way tonight, perhaps by browsing our fascinating archives. waka waka waka will be back to its usual cheery self again tomorrow, I promise.

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It wasn’t until I began blogging that I realized how different it, and journalism generally, is from what one usually has in mind when one contemplates taking up writing. We have a mental image of the writer toiling in solitude to leave his brilliant existential mark; one thinks of the words, once set down, as going up on permanent display for the delight of the ages, and this is indeed the case for the successful author of books. But the journalist’s or blogger’s work is more like the chef’s - meant to be consumed as soon it is prepared, it is served up in single portions, with a new dish offered every day. I have to admit that there is, though, a tug of sadness at seeing a favorite post work its way down, and eventually off, the screen.

But for those who seek enlightenment, blogging is the perfect avocation. Like the elaborate sand mandalas prepared by Tibetan monks, it teaches us that life is a process, not a destination, and helps train us to avoid the attachment to the results of our efforts that is such a spiritual trap.

On the other hand, if you are Oprah Winfrey, and think that The Best of waka waka waka has a nice ring to it, do get in touch. In training oneself to avoid attachments, it’s always good to have something substantial to work with.

My friend Salim Ismail has written a good post about the evolution of the Internet (in fact, the piece has the imaginative title “Evolution of the Internet”) over at his excellently named blog, You’ve Got Ismail! In it he talks about the three kinds of uses to which the Internet has been put.

The first was messaging, which just involves transmitting a packet of data from one place to another. This was the underpinning of the first big-time Internet application: e-mail, which got rolling in the 1980’s. The second was request-response, which is what HTTP is all about, and which made possible the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s. The third, which is just getting underway, is publish-subscribe, in which content on the Internet, which up until now has had to be actively fetched by the user, is able to announce itself to all interested parties.

Salim gives a clear and cogent account of it all. He has also added a post today, I see, in which he explains the important distinction between prospective and retrospective search.

Do take a look; what he is describing is the Next Big Thing.

Yesterday we had a visit from my mother-in-law, Lily Phillips. She has had quite a remarkable life - she grew up in Vienna in an educated family of Jewish heritage, and was separated from her parents just before the beginning of World War II. Although she was technically too old - she was already in her late teens - a place was found for her on the Kindertransport, and she was evacuated to England, where she worked, utterly displaced and alone, as a servant in a succession of strangers’ homes. After the war she made her way to New York City, where she was reunited with her parents, who had managed to escape the ovens as well, and where, as a talented artist, she found work as a comic-book illustrator - an extremely unusual occupation for a woman at the time. She was nearly the only one.

Lily is very intelligent and well-read, and has kept her mind active in her later years by taking courses in philosophy and literature at Hunter College. Widowed since 1982, she lives alone on East 72nd Street, in the apartment where my Nina grew up. Her late husband Randolph, himself an extraordinary man, was, among other things, the first chairman of the Committee to Impeach Nixon (before Watergate). He argued before the Supreme Court, despite not being a member of the bar, and was the defendant in a landmark conscientious-objector case during WWII that set the precedent that objectors may refuse combat service on purely ethical, rather than religious grounds.

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I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, an avid reader himself, he referred to my attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”.

Gus makes a good point. There are few technologies - and the printed word is, of course, a technological artifact - that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.

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I am increasingly aware of how different my twenty-first century life is from the world I grew up in, and in fact from the life led by anyone more than a very few years ago. When I was a young boy, color televisions were a big deal. I remember the introduction of push-button telephones, audio cassettes, digital watches, and hand-held calculators. But the real revolution, of course, is the Internet.

I work as a software developer for a company that does Web search, so perhaps my immersion is deeper than some people’s, but I am noticing that it feels more and more odd to be “offline”. My life consists more and more of being seated at a computer, managing simultaneous streams of information - email, blog posts, online chess games, instant messages, Skype calls, PubSub alerts, news bulletins, desktop weather data, and so forth. Many times a day I wish to know something or other, and immediately retrieve the datum in question from some or other online source. I can swoop down on any part of the world with Google Earth.

Although this is a natural evolution - our success as a species is due above all to our gift for communication, and the Internet might well, I think, be on its way to being the wellspring of an emergent, collective human intelligence that will begin a new chapter in the history of mankind - we have also increased our risk of losing touch with the very real world around us and inside us.

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From my friend Steven Cohen comes an interesting link for those of you who tend to accumulate books: LibraryThing. It’s a Web-based system for cataloguing your personal library. You can tag your books according to subject, view other online libraries, see who has collections similar to yours, and so forth. It looks like a fantastic tool for hard-core bibliophiles. Take a look.

If you hate shoveling snow, I’ve got good news. Dr. James Lovelock, who brought us the Gaia Hypothesis (a theory in which the biosphere is responsible for both the creation and regulation of Earth’s climate), has announced that our little blue orb, as a result of Mankind’s environmental rapacity, is about to enter a rapid phase of warming that he likens to a global fever. By the end of this century, according to his sunny prognosis, the climate in temperate regions will have heated up by 8° C. (that’s 14.4° F.), most of the tropics will have become scrub and desert, billions of humans will have died, and “the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” And it’s too late to do anything about it, by the way.

You can read the article here.

Oh well, que sera sera, I always say. See you on the boardwalk in Toktoyaktuk! Don’t forget your sunscreen.

In yesterday’s post I promised to write an item explaining the difference between “retrospective” Web search, which is what conventional search engines like Google do, and “prospective search”, which is a new and complementary paradigm exemplified by services such as PubSub. As I began, though, it dawned on me that I had already written such a post back in August, on the PubSub house blog, Sandbox. So for those who are interested, here it is.

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There’s something new and important you bloggers should all know about: Structured Blogging. Here’s what it is, and why it’s good.

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One of the things that people like to do is “boil down” the staggering complexity of the world into comprehensive rules and principles. Surprisingly, the world often cooperates by revealing itself to be, in fact, a rather orderly place that does indeed seem to behave according to laws that are simple enough for us to ferret out.

Some of the rules we have worked out are abstruse, detailed and complicated, yet have held up well under critical examination - quantum mechanics and general relativity come to mind - while others are vague generalities like “there’s a sucker born every minute” and “faint heart ne’er won fair lady”. Some are obviously wrong, like “a watched pot never boils” (try this one yourself), and “the best things in life are free” (not all payment is in the form of money!), or my pet peeve, “everything happens for a reason.”

Sometimes we pick one thing and make it a central organizing principle. My friend Bob Wyman, for example, has worked out a plausible system of ethics entirely based upon the idea of resisting entropy. Another friend, songwriter Larry Mcnally, has written that “Love is everything - everything else is nothing.” He’s not the first to make the suggestion, but it makes a good song.

Well, I’m not immune to this temptation either, and sometimes I think that the fundamental currency in human affairs - the fungible coin in which the business of mankind is transacted - is attention.

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Today the Washington Redskins are visiting the Seattle Seahawks for an NFL playoff game. The contest has been attended with the usual hype, but the sportswriters covering the game for the Seattle Times have faced a peculiar challenge - the paper has decided not to allow them to use the name “Redskins” more than once in their stories. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the only other obvious token by which to refer to the team is the name of their hometown, Washington, which happens also to be the the home state of the home team.

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All right, maybe pondering arcane numerical sequences, even the really unusual and interesting ones, isn’t exactly everybody’s idea of a rollicking good time. If you would like an explanation of the one I offered in the previous post, click here.

And for a final - I promise! - note on this topic, here is a really nifty website, where such sequences are studied, catalogued, and explained, and where you can enter a sequence and look up the underlying rule.

I few days back I inked a post about Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which I showed a little item from the chapter Figure and Ground, which is about recursively enumerable systems. The tidbit I offered was a most unusual number series. Here it is again, for those of you who didn’t see it the first time around, or who just passed it by without really thinking about it:

1   3   7   12   18   26   35   45   56   69 …

I admit it takes a minute or two to make sense of it, but it is worth the effort. It is wonderfully strange, and is typical of the little jewels that are everywhere in that amazing book.

And don’t worry, I am not going to make a habit of posting retreads.

A frequent topic in here, and in some of the blogs I’m fond of visiting, is the mystery of consciousness. How is it that “mere” matter can become self-aware? Can matter be the engine of consciousness at all, or does it merely serve as a temporary and intermittent host?

There seem to be three avenues by which people approach this mystery - philosophy, science, and mysticism. I have the intuitive conviction that they will, ultimately, give consistent answers - in other words, that they are all three digging toward the same hidden truth, although from different directions, and with different tools. My wish is to try to follow the progress on all three fronts, and to participate actively where I can.

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If you have an interest in science (readers may by now have guessed that I do), may I recommend that you subscribe to the daily email newsletter published by PhysOrg.com. It’s a quick read - just headlines with links - and there is always something interesting. Today’s number, though, was a tad dispiriting.

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In case you were wondering why your dishes were rattling, it turns out that the Milky Way is “flapping in the breeze”. Apparently the Magellanic Clouds, who I always knew were up to no good, have grabbed our galaxy by the dark matter, and are generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Learn more here.

Here’s an excellent sentence - a coruscating little gem of pith and understatement - from Wikipedia’s entry Alcoholic Beverage:

People under the influence of alcohol sometimes find themselves in dangerous or compromising situations where they would not be had they remained sober.

Now that’s good writing. Just think of the ocean of individual human experiences captured in those twenty-three words.

Can’t imagine what put that in my mind this morning, but there it is.

Tonight, I must confess, I am suffused with a mellow glow of self-satisfaction. Let me explain:

I have described, in an earlier post, my interest in southern Chinese kung fu. I began in 1976, at the age of 19, to study the Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar system under the tutelage of the formidable William Chung, and was awarded a black belt in 1982 or so. But due to various circumstances, which are beyond the scope of this post, I was forced to withdraw from my study with him a few years later, and spent the next nine years practicing on my own, teaching a bit, and attending to life’s other clamant demands, which included establishing both a career and a family. By 1993, however, I was yearning to refocus my martial-arts studies under the guidance of a qualified master, and was lucky enough to meet, in my own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, one Peter Berman, a Hung-style expert who had learned the Tang Fung Hung Ga system under the renowned master Frank Yee, and I began to reapply myself to the demands of this fierce fighting style. Although the two systems are very similar - Lam Sai Wing and Tang Fung were “training brothers” under the legendary Wong Fei Hung, a century or so ago - they have diverged a bit, and I began with Sifu Berman “from scratch”. My progress was slowed by the many demands placed on my time by work and family, as well as by several nasty orthopedic injuries, and by the difficulty of the style itself. But my previous training was a great help, and I made my way slowly through the system’s lengthy and complex empty-hand and weapons forms.

Today, at age 49, after more than twelve years with Sifu Berman, and with knees creaking, I completed my final test - the Ng Lung Ba Gwa Cheung Spear Form - and attained the rank of Jo Gow, my second black belt, twenty-five years after the first.

I never get enough sleep. I get up between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., get to PubSub’s Lower Manhattan nerve center at about 10, toil at the “bleeding edge” of Internet technology until 7 p.m. or so, then head home.

There are things to do in the evening. Dinner must be prepared and consumed. Often I will train a bit, and one night a week I teach class. There are books clamoring for my attention. My guitar, a winsome Taylor 310, beckons. There are chess games at RedHotPawn to which attention must be paid. Of course, as a husband and father, I spend time with Nina and Nick (and Chloë, when she is home from college). Most of the time there are other lingering details: mail and telephone calls to answer, or little chores to do. Then there are blogs to be read, upon which perhaps to leave pithy and thought-provoking comments. Finally, I must confect the day’s post for waka waka waka.

The result of all of this is that I never seem to retire before 1:30 or 2 a.m., which means that I am usually getting six hours of sleep at best, and often less. I don’t like that at all; I know I’d be sharper if I slept more. But given all these worthwhile and productive occupations, what am I going to throw overboard? The world is just too interesting, and life is too short as it is.

I’ll just have to comfort myself with the old proverb:

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool.”

I’m just too worn out tonight to do any writing, so I will offer some entertaining fluff for my legions of readers: two links from my friend Eugene Jen over at the PubSub command center.

First, an amusing little diversion. Can you work out the simple trick?

Next, some perplexing scientific questions.

I found a note in the mail the other day announcing the demise of yet another outstanding recording studio. This time the decedent was O’Henry Studios (this link might not be good for long, so click it now), in North Hollywood, California. It was one of my favorites, and one of the best.

When I started out in the recording business, back in the late 70’s, things were very different. There were no desktop PCs with digital audio software, there was no MIDI, no samplers, no digital reverbs - pretty much no digital anything. When people wanted to make a record, they had to go to a studio, and they actually had to play musical instruments. In order for the sound to make it onto the tape (yes, we used 2″ 24-track analog tape back then), the services of an engineer were required. That was my job. I worked at a studio called Power Station, on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, where I worked my way up through the ranks to become a staff engineer.

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Do you have a recording of Chopin’s Preludes? I listened to them today for the first time in quite a while. They are an odd collection, not preludes to anything really, despite the name, but each a unique meditation. About them, Liszt said:

“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart. They are not only, as the title might make one think, pieces destined to be played in the guise of introductions to other pieces; they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams, and elevates it to the regions of the ideal.”

and Schumann:

“I would term the Preludes strange. They are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.”

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It suddenly dawned on me this evening that I had not yet written a post formally introducing my readers to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The world first learned of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s role in the creation of all that is when one Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”, wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board in which he explained that humans received the spark of life from His Noodly Appendage, and described the teachings of Spaghetti Monsterism. Mr. Henderson quite reasonably requests that the Pastafarian account of the origin of life be taught alongside Intelligent Design and Darwinism:

One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

In his letter he also insists that the correct presentation is essential:

Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

In addition to the revealed Truth (which includes scientific evidence that “global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s”), the site also offers some nifty merchandise, and even a festive holiday card. Don’t wait another minute.

One of my favorite books is the astonishingly imaginative Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, published in 1979, is an extended meditation upon the underlying connections between the work of the three men mentioned in the title - Johann Sebastian Bach (who needs no introduction), the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, and mathematician Kurt Gödel. Hofstadter, who inherited the prestigious editorship of Scientific American’s Mathematical Games column from the incomparable Martin Gardner, has described his inspiration for the project:

“I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book.”

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