The Blind Tweeting the Blind

New Yorker cartoon by Liam Walsh

The unceasing and daily intensifying coverage by the news media of the Trump trainwreck is certainly fascinating and appalling in equal parts - but perhaps a bit too much so. It might, in fact, be salutary for us all to stick our heads out of the tweetstorm now and then, and remind ourselves that there is an entire world existing right below our feet that also is worthy of attention - really it is.

Here's an article from the Atlantic that may give pause for thought: "The Binge Breaker." Excerpt:

While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us. . . .

McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.

Sites foster a sort of distracted lingering partly by lumping multiple services together. To answer the friend request, we’ll pass by the News Feed, where pictures and auto-play videos seduce us into scrolling through an infinite stream of posts—what Harris calls a “bottomless bowl,” referring to a study that found people eat 73 percent more soup out of self-refilling bowls than out of regular ones, without realizing they’ve consumed extra. The “friend request” tab will nudge us to add even more contacts by suggesting “people you may know,” and in a split second, our unconscious impulses cause the cycle to continue: Once we send the friend request, an alert appears on the recipient’s phone in bright red—a “trigger” color, Harris says, more likely than some other hues to make people click—and because seeing our name taps into a hardwired sense of social obligation, she will drop everything to answer. In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.” . . .

“Our generation relies on our phones for our moment-to-moment choices about who we’re hanging out with, what we should be thinking about, who we owe a response to, and what’s important in our lives,” he said. “And if that’s the thing that you’ll outsource your thoughts to, forget the brain implant. That is the brain implant. You refer to it all the time.”

And here's a video interview with the subject of the article.




For clarity: Your Head Trucker has no smart phone or even dumb phone, and has no intention of having any.

(Ain't that a damn shame, boys?)

Grab It and Go

Or, as I can just hear somebody saying, how do I explain to my six-year-old that it's not stealing?  This radical new approach to retailing is more than your Head Trucker can get his head around.  And what if, like me, you have no super-duper-nuclear-waveband-hypertechtronic-cell-phone-thingy?  And what about all the cashiers who will be thrown out of work? And what if, if, if -- ?? 

I'm not ready for this, are you?

History of the Next Big Thing

I stumbled across this chart online, but can't be sure of the source - different sites credit it to different publications.  Still, it's food for thought.

Click to enlarge.

National Geographic: Cruise Ship

Now would be a good time to get away to the islands. With five thousand of your closest friends.

The DEW Line Story (1958)

A film about the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line, a phenomenal achievement in the high Arctic that is still amazing to contemplate today.

Behind Your Radio Dial (1948)

An overview of the history and operations of the National Broadcasting Company, including a tour of its studios at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. Note: do not adjust your set - the sound doesn't begin until about the 00:30 mark.

Strange and Amazing

Not to mention the ridiculous and absurd:

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Next Big Thing, Oh My

Andrew Sullivan reports that the future keeps on rolling towards us like a tsunami wave. It's bad enough that now no one under 40 can take a step outside the house, or in some cases even from one room to another within it, without some iPoot in their hot little hands to assure them that yes, they are alive and yes they are befriended by the whole world - and that everybody who's anybody now has that goddamn squawking box on their dashboard a-telling 'em every 5 seconds where they are and where they should have been going.

No, my friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Listen to this:

Meanwhile, by the end of this year we will have Google glasses that act like a smartphone and look like Oakleys:

They will also have a unique navigation system. "The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click," [blogger Seth Weintraub] wrote this month. "We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users." ... The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees.

Good golly, Miss Molly. I strongly suspect that by the time the young generation reaches middle age, they won't a one of 'em be able to scratch their nose or wipe their ass without some machine telling them just exactly when and how to do it.  (The ex-roommate has had to lay down the law to his adult kids:  at family get-togethers, no cell phones in sight.)

Please, people: are you live, or are you just Memorex?

Oh and don't think the techies have left the most important thing out of their devious cogitations: in no time at all, sexbots will be the next essential appliance - coming soon to a big box near you, just like microwaves and VCR's did - remember how amazing that seemed, that you could actually record a TV program at home?  The Japanese are already way ahead on the project, and you know how successful they were with transistor radios and color TV's.

But once everybody has their own custom-programmed, variable-gender, stain-resistant, Windows-compliant, UL-rated sexbot at home (will they sync your favorite playlist and automatically update your Twitter feed every time you fuck, I wonder?) what will happen to all the gay chat rooms? And will you have to pay a cover charge to bring your sexbot to the bar with you? Or will you have to park him outside, like your Toyota?

O brave new world, that has such machinery in it!

How Music Was Made

Circa 1940. OMG I had no idea - I mean, I knew records started with a master disc from which copies were pressed . . . but all those acids and chemicals and metals and intricate hand labor . . . wow. Could Americans make anything today that required this much work, I wonder?

Take a gander at this little film, boys, and you'll be amazed too, I think.  For several reasons.

Mars Cars

A couple of years ago, I was touched by the plight of the valiant little Spirit rover, which after several years of brilliant success exploring the Red Planet and reporting back to Earth with fantastic pics and data, became stuck in a sand trap, and finally expired there, its solar panels covered with light-blocking dust. Of course, this is anthropomorphizing in the worst way, and it's silly of me. But I was touched just the same.

Here are some very cool vids about Spirit and its brother hot-rod, Opportunity, who is still going about his lonely chores up there.

Artist's concept of Spirit on the Martian surface

First-ever picture of Earth taken from another planet.
Now what was that big problem you were talking about?

P. S. - If I'm silly enough to care about the death of a robot, I'm also silly enough to believe there are canals on Mars - which, as late as my grammar school days, there were still science books in the library that acknowledged the possibility they exist.  And what are possibilities, after all, but the stuff that dreams are made on?  Like us.

I'm not much for science fiction now, but growing up I drank deeply at the trough - wonderful adventures in dream-laden books like Red Planet by Heinlein and The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury.  So don't try to confuse me with science; they just haven't looked in the right places yet, maybe.  I much prefer to imagine the ancient canals still filling with glistening, life-giving water every Martian spring, flowing amid the ruined towers of the cities, where the inscrutable eyes of the old ones watch in the dreamtime.

Do you grok me, brother?

The World According to Facebook

Click to enlarge

I'm not sure what this means, but it does make a pretty picture.  Interesting to note the countries that don't show up.

A while back I read on some blog somewhere a comment by an obviously very young man:  "Forty million people in the U.S. don't have a Facebook account.  What's wrong with these people?  Are they sick, or just crazy?"

Um, maybe they just don't want to be bothered with the damn thing, ya know?  Like your Head Trucker, who is still in awe of the miracle of email - no stamp, no envelope, no waiting.  Works for me.

.          .          .

Speaking of maps, it's also interesting to take a look at the hit counter globe in the sidebar here on the Blue Truck:  the red dots seem to me to indicate the intersection of gaiety, technology, wealth, and civil liberty. 

Or maybe just horniness, when you consider a fair number of visitors arrive from porn blogs and are probably looking for more of the same.  Oh well, always glad to have visitors.

First Recorded Sounds

Stumbled across this intriguing website yesterday, about the work of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor, who in 1857 received a patent for the phonautograph - twenty years before Edison invented the phonograph.  And now, by means of 21st century wizardry, de Martinville's primitive sound tracings on blackened paper enable us to hear the human voice - not very clearly, but recognizably human - out of the long-silent past.

Last year, however, Giovannoni and crew realized that they had been playing the recording too fast; on their website, they offer a revised version which sounds more like a man's voice, probably the inventor's own.  Listen to it and more sounds re-created from de Martinville's phonoautograms here. 

Unfortunately, de Martinville was merely looking for a way to make a graphic representation of the human voice, with perhaps a view to creating a kind of automatic stenography one day; apparently, it didn't occur to him to pursue sound reproduction, which had to wait until Edison had a stroke of genius in 1877.  Here's a short overview of the phonograph's origin, an invention that amazed the world - a talking machine! 



Edison phonograph, circa 1899



Read more about the Edison phonograph and listen to sample recordings at the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress.

The Connection Infection

[Note - I have no freakin' idea why this video won't display, and I've re-embedded it twice.  If it doesn't display on your end, here's the link.]

Your Head Trucker is one of the few people now living outside of a nursing home who has actually sent a telegram for ordinary communication - ten words for $1.50 in 1966.  SRSLY.

Stephen Heiner, a recovering Blackberrier, on the plague of eternal uplinkedness (honk to Andrew Sullivan):

As this breakthrough happened, I realized something deeper about the way we use phones – not just the smart ones: we are their slaves. We jump whenever they call because we never, ever turn them off. They only get turned off if we run out of battery life, and even then we become desperate for a charger and can think of little else until our depleted child has the charging indicator safely blinking and is serenely drinking its electronic milk.

We have allowed ourselves to become 24/7 radio beacons. We are always on. Always ready to transmit or receive. There is a nervous habit that the younger generation has of checking their cell phones every 90 seconds or so. Just watch them. They didn’t hear a text message notification, but they are checking their phones just in case. And who knows, one might feel the urge to send a text message because heck, it’s been 30 seconds since one was sent. Watch people in airports, or in the auto repair shop, or on a university campus. There is a constant need to check to see if they are still plugged in. It is a nervous tic that they don’t even know is a tic.

In previous times, when we were more tied to place and limits as a society, people were reached at a specific location. Letters came to homes. Telegrams came to homes. Phone calls were placed…to homes. The cell phone, the harbinger of the always-on internet society, unhooked the anchor of place from communication. And when communication is not limited, is not circumscribed, it becomes unlimited and tyrannous. . . .

While people always cite “emergencies,” more often than not the singular reason that a cell phone exists in their lives is to give them a crutch to prevent them from being alone with themselves, their thoughts, and their fellow human beings. Going to the gym? Call a friend. Running an errand? Send a text. Eating something interesting? Take a picture and show the world on Facebook. We are incapable of living outside the virtual cloud that surrounds us. We can only fully live if we are constantly connected.

Or we can turn it off, put ourselves back in control of the machine, and take back the solitude and dreamy quiet of our thoughts: the beginnings of a recollection that lends itself to prayer and conversation.

What I Say:  It's truly astonishing to consider how quickly and vastly the Internet has changed our lives in what seems to me like a rather short time.  When I was finishing college at the turn of the 70's/80's, computers were still largely in the commercial-use-only phase.   All big companies and most small ones by that time were sending you computerized bills every month, and I do recall that by my senior year the library at my university had supplemented the card catalog - gee, I miss those - with an electronic one.  Which actually had, wonder of wonders, not a keyboard but a touch-screen display (black screen and amber characters, no pictures, no Windows).  Which of course was promptly covered with every kind of greasy fingerprint imaginable and stayed that way.

But even though the very first PC's had just come on the market by the beginning of the decade, if I remember rightly, nobody but a very few intensely passionate fans of technology ("geek" had yet to enter the lexicon as a term for those guys) had them.  Pocket calculators, yes (from about 1975), but PC's, no.  For one thing, they were hideously expensive, maybe the equivalent of two to three thousand dollars now.  For another, to use them you had to learn a whole programming language, like Basic.  But even if you had the dough to invest in one, and the many long hours of solitary study to be able to program it, my thought always was, just what the hell would you do with it once you had it?

Continued after the jump . . . .

Faulkner Speaks

The University of Virginia has put online its collection of tape recordings made during William Faulkner's two years as Writer-in-Residence there back in 1957-1958.  A very short clip can be heard here, but the collection is worth browsing through, not merely for the wonderful sound of Faulkner's old-time Southern accent - our modern accents down here, though still distinctive, are tainted by half a century of exposure to the daily barrage of television - but the collection also includes many fascinating articles by and about Faulkner and the South of those days, as well as photographs like the ones above and below.

What a marvel that we live in an age when such a collection is available at the touch of a few buttons, in the comfort of one's home; all this was just science-fiction fantasy a few short years ago, and now we take it all for granted.  Mind-boggling when I stop to think about it, what a vast distance technology has progressed in just my lifetime - though human nature has not changed one iota, of course.  It never does.

Looking over this collection brings up many thoughts about matters public and private, current and historic, that I don't really want to take the time to blog about right now, so I'll leave you all to make your own reflections if you're interested in this sort of thing. 

Faulkner at a hunt club in Virginia in 1960; the two men are holding a flask of whiskey.

Park to the Future

No flying cars yet, but stackable parking is already here:



And if you think that's something, you'll be blown away by this, um, very personal parking spot - available right now at your local Home Depot for about $1200:



All I can say is:  OMFG.

Eighty-sixed!

From HuffPo via Joe.My.God. - a list of things made obsolete in the past decade:

• hand-written letters
• the Yellow Pages
• dial-up
• landlines
• CDs
• classified print ads
• encyclopedias
• catalogs
• film cameras
• fax machines

Anything you'd add to the list, guys?

The Yellow Pages is still very handy here in a small town.  And once in a while I buy a CD, but I'm getting around to buying music online.  Have to tell you, it's an odd feeling when I think about it - owning a song but no physical disc that it belongs to.  Strange.

This thought comes from a man who still has about 200 LP's sitting in boxes.  All that great music - I can't just throw it away, even if I don't have a record player to play them on.

And I'm not even going to tell you about my 8-track collection. . . .