A Box of Eyeballs…

It's Just a Box of Eyeballs:  I Don't Know Who Put it There 

Edited by S. Solomon, September 1985. ^©

There are a couple of things that quickly come to mind when the name DMT is uttered. First: that bad smell. Well, it's really worse than bad; it's hellish. Naw, it's worse than that. It smells so foul that it can peel the paint from the walls and kill the dog. It's like burning the dog's corpse to tinder a pile of dioxin; like a calamity of acetylene and sulfur and everything rotten and unwholesome come to have at your nasal passages with rusty hatchet. 

Of course, when you're smoking DMT, you don't notice the smell. When Helen walked in on Me and Bernie, we were halfway through the joint. She says: "Jezuz, what the fuck is burning in my house?" Bernie looks up at her, he's smilin', says nice as can be, "Say'a, He-hellllen, how-w many l-legs do y-ou ha-have?".

This brings up that second big thing about the drug. As my respected and incinerated colleague, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once commented: "DMT is the most powerful psychedelic ever invented!".  Yes, this is so.   

According to the intrepid traveler and poet, C. Zuck, “It’s like having everything in your brain all firing at maximum intensity, all at the same time, and all of the signals are tripping into the next like a match in a fireworks factory.  It just consumes everything and takes you away. It brought me to this, this, this... I don't know. And, it only lasts about five minutes, but, wow, jeez-Louis!". Yeah. Quite a ride. Your proverbial eternity in a moment.

It was Z., naturally, that introduced us to this most philosophical of all fumes. One day, a letter and a small  package there-in arrived. Here is what the letter said:

Dear Friend in the Mysteries,

Over the long journey through life, in the midst of myriad dangers and risk, an intrepid traveler can sometimes stumble across the  mystical. Such was my last journey through the Beyond. So, by  way of thanking  you for the great times had, and the times yet to be had, we have arranged a small loan of magic.

Inlcuded here is a bit of Di-Mystical Triptimus (actually, Dimethyl Tryptamine, really!). Method of application: grab your favorite co-pilot and arrange your affairs in preparation. Take the ingredients, and keeping in mind the sacred nature of the psychedelic, roll a joint with the substance centrally distributed. Then do your religious duty! 

Be sure to consume the entire amount between two individuals. The effect is prompt and powerful, lasting only a few minutes, kind of like being shuffled through God's back door on some  sort of shady deal. Enjoy this dip into the cosmic puddle and let me know what you think.

              

Love, from the Beyond... Z.

Well, we thought it was just wonderful. A bit scary, but really wonderful in the true and original sense of the word, as in awesome. As soon as Bernie and I had recollected our wits and reeled in our synapses, we were on the line to Z., hopeful that more DMT could be sent our way. In the background,  could be heard Helen yelling: "Not in my house! No more. You're gonna go outside with that shit!".

By the time that the next shipment had arrived,  Helen had become intrigued with our truly glowing but utterly incomprehensible reports of this drug's power. She consented to forgo what common sense, and her sense of smell, told her and was game to join us for a furthur experiment. She would not, however, personally partake of anything so powerfully evil smelling.   

We journeyed to the City in the South, to voyage Beyond in the company of our good friends, Cathy and C. For years now, they had been our most adventurous and fearless psychenautical counterparts. 

Indeed, as C. and I were cousins of the Mad Poet persuasion, so  Helen and Cathy seemed Cosmic Sisters. It was well that we were in so comfortable a setting, with such fine companions, for this night's brief expedition would swiftly carry each one of us to strange waters in the Sea of Consciousness.

 

You see, par for the course and true to form, Z. had upped the dose, perhaps conveniently forgetting to so advise his trusting researchers. Yes, one forgot at one's peril that, at heart, Z. was a true Prankster and could be relied upon to extract the maximum quanta of chaos from any given situation.

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Happy Trails, was spinning on the ol' Victorola. In the category of music to get really, psychedelically high on, few recordings can touch it. This is jammin', spaced out at warp-speed improvisation from back in the days when getting high really meant getting high: serious "if only I could remember my name" kind'a shit.

I was taking my second or third toke as the band careened into the heart of the jam. It only takes one toke to start to feel the effects. By the second, you're having a hard time finding the joint. By the third, it's a goddamn miracle that you can still find, never mind manipulate your fingers. Somehow, I still could and slowly brought the roach to my lips. I located my face only with some great concentration, heedless of an all-enveloping blizzard of neural fireworks.

I remember letting my head fall back to a pillow on the floor. The stereo speaker was right next to my ear. "Fantastic!" 

Somebody took the roach from my hand and I closed my eyes and began an experience that, to this day, confounds and fascinates me. I believe that I tripped in time. That is to say, I experienced the same moment thrice that was observed from the outside as but a single event.  Helen was straight; she saw it. Here is what happened from my point of view.

As my eyes closed, I was quite conscious of the music but began immediately to experience a profound and completely "real" type of visual hallucination. It involved my awareness with all of the conviction that normal "reality" would deserve. I had no awareness of this as being an internal event. Indeed, it was as mundane, and fully articulated as the world I now experience.

This world, you see, was the stock-room of some department store. I don't know where. But, it was totally normal: gray, metal shelves with boxes, concrete floor, cinder-block walls, fluorescent lighting. And, there was this guy in there, dressed in a navy-blue jumpsuit, like a stock-worker, carrying a big, flat box under his right arm. My view was from just behind a wood laminated fire door that, I would guess, led to the sales-floor.  

Like I said, mundane or what? Not the stuff that metaphysical revelations are normally made of. Well, there was something a bit strange. I couldn't change my point of view. My eyes wouldn't move and I couldn't see the guy's face. It remained just out of the top periphery of my vision as he walked toward me and then turned and went out of the door. Frustrating.

I remember that, at this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed.

I was back in my stock-room world. The guy was back where he started, but this time, as he came toward me, he began to open the box. He was holding it now in both hands as he pulled the lid open, but he turned and went through the door before it was clear what was inside.

At this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed.

Back in the stock-room, my guy was coming toward me again. This time, he had already begun to open the box. It was full open as he reached the turn to the door. I looked inside and then my point of view began to change as a camera would zoom in for a close-up... zzzz-ooooom... and I see... can it be.... oh, my, yes... it's a box full of eyeballs! Freeze-frame... 

Eyeballs! They're all arranged like candy easter-eggs in a protecting pile of white tissue paper, each one sitting in its own little paper cup. They're just like candies, but they're all staring back at me! Perfect, shiny, blue and white and finely veined with big black pupils: eyeballs in a box. "Oh, my God; this is weird. Why do I feel so good?"    

At this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed. The music ended, fading to the city sounds, filtering in through the window. The DMT seemed to be wearing off as swiftly as it began.

C. was still floating out "there", just starting to come down. He was evidently the last to take a toke. Cathy seemed quite normal, still smiling that smile.  Helen looked on in quiet amusement as I began to tell my little story. As I recounted the third part, the revelation of the eyeballs, she interrupted: "How long do you think you were out?".

"I dunno. A few minutes."

"You were on the floor maybe two-minutes, max.", she said, matter of factly. "And, you only looked up once, just after that last toke." I was bewildered. "Cathy, you saw me, didn't you? How many times did I look up at you?"

She laughed. "Jezuz! I only remember once, but who's to say. All I could see was a whole lot'a burning confetti with you in the middle of it."  Helen was resolute. "You only did it once."

I subsequently timed that piece of music. She was right about at least one thing; it only lasted one-minute and forty-nine seconds between when my head hit the pillow for the first time, and when I sat up again. Yet, at the minimum, I had experienced three separate "trips", "dreams", whatever you want to call them, that each had the subjective space of a couple of minutes.

I'm totally baffled at this triplicate reality business. No, I'm not talking Deja Deja Deja Vu. Rather, that I had experienced three different versions of the same general event in apparent sequence, while being observed to have experienced them all at once, and only once.

I've discussed this episode with members of the mental health community. My initial theory, that I had experienced multiple neural pathways for the same high level, preconscious event, does not quite hold up to logic. Nor was this some kind of simple echo. After all, the event was so different each "time". 

My professional colleagues have no answers, nor even useful conjecture. A couple have been concerned as to why I should spend much time thinking about such matters and have strongly discouraged me from using DMT ever again.

For my part, I do continue to be puzzled and fascinated. Perhaps I had caught a glimpse of something not easily seen regarding our human consciousness and the nature of time. How wonderful then, that the fabric of my mind would cloak such insight in a box of candied eyeballs.  How very nice.

I would invite any of my readers who might have similar anecdotes, or any light to shed on this type of experience, to contact me through my publisher. Please be prompt, however, as Time is of The Essence.

I Remain Yours in Happy Confabulation,

AS, PhD

God, for lack of a better word, is that Order implicit and emergent in all possible Universes, in all possible dimensions, within and without Time."

Anton Saurian

Circa 2005CE

   

 

It's About Time…

Folks,

I’ve been meandering along the Cognitive Midway at The Future Fair the past couple of days. Here’s where that stroll lead me as I encountered cosmic carnival barkers, Barnies, Clems and Bozos, and various games of chance… or no chance at all.

Is Time real, or a necessary shadow of Creation. Perhaps it is both the death shroud and essential invocation of Experience? Can it run backward, as well as forward? Start with those linked articles in this paragraph as a random points of departure and explore further, if you’ve got the time and inclination.

Well, there’s nothing in the math of physics that says that Time cannot run willy-nilly as it will. It could run sideways, by any account perpendicular to our perceived timeline. What would such an orthogonal timeline look like to a Human observer? And, what has Time to do with G-d, His preordained plan, and our humble study of comparative religions and the relationship of World religion’s to physics? They do seem to be bossing their way into each others’ territory as Time goes by. Answers aplenty in the bye and bye.

Yes, so many good questions that I cannot answer. I can offer some personal observations on the questions themselves, and perhaps a clue or two as to where the answers may lie for you or I.

First question… is Time required by Creation, or merely a support for the balustrades of and within Human intellect, a device required to experience Experience? Two of Einstein’s great quotes are apropos in these queries. 

Let us begin with: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” In this, Einstein suggests (among other things, to be mentioned soon) that our minds are perhaps too little evolved to handle Everything, Everywhere, All the Time. Still, anybody who has tried to tackle deep Physics or even taken a gander at the proceedings of modern Cosmology, anybody who has taken a true, fat trip on any certain chemical or vegetable substance knows the desire to know It All. Paging Dr. Faust! Paging Dr. Faust to the Red Emergency Phone!!!

Well, perhaps Uncle Al was simply commenting on the limited capacities of the Human mind. He might have been thinking of the possibility that Time does exist, and the Universe, Itself, requires Time to evolve. But, this notion is belied by another of his quotes. “Time is an illusion, but it is a persistent one.” It seems that our wise friend might have been inclined to believe something akin to the religious notion of G-d’s Will. Every theistic tradition has such a concept and its expression in words: God se Wil, Mapenzi ya, 天命, Dei voluntas… etc., etc.

Implied in such words is the thought that an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, by definition, knows all. All has already happened in The Creator’s Mind, in The Great Plan. There are no surprises for The One who cast Time upon Space and coddled Space within Time in an infinite moment of infinite and all encompassing Creation. In this conception, the scientist, the mystic and the psychedelicist may not be exclusive of each other’s intellectual and spiritual company.

So, just as a theory or a devotion taken as fact, Everything has already happened. Creation is complete. It (IT!) has already All been done. We Humans thus have nothing to do but discern G-d’s intentions and live in accordance with them.

I am not a religious person. Spiritual, yes, darlink, but not religious. Nonetheless, another quote from our old friend comes to mind. “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Yes, Al, given what physics now tells us about time and space, the history of the Cosmos, that anything exists is a fine operational definition of a miracle.

So, back to Time. Time as we experience it is not required by the math behind current physics. Despite our never seeing it actually happen, there is no reason that the coffee that I just spilled in you lap can’t pour itself back into the cup that I dropped, the cup itself undropping, your pants unsopping… it just might take longer than the lifetime of our Universe to witness this statistical possibility or it might not be memorable, might not be glued to our minds’ presently enmeshed in our Universe… or not. We won’t be around to see it happen… if Time exists. 

Now, if this is not weird enough for you, let’s move on to the possibility of Sideways-Time. What would that look like? It’s a slippery thing to try to get one’s mind around. That’s why I find it useful to contemplate in meditation. There’s nothing better by my lights to stop my mind than trying to wrap my pia and dura maters and all their electrochemical goop, synapses and glial cells around Orthogonal time. Can’t be done. It’s a good exercise for a busy and experience besotted mind.

Still, Sideways-Time might exist. Consider the Universe that we inhabit from the point of view of an electron traveling through a true vacuum at the speed of light. At the maximum velocity permitted by nature, and according to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, all physical dimensions as seen by said electron, are compressed and perpendicular to the point that the electron inhabits, and time has stopped. If that pointy particle could see and report back to our world, what might be in view?

A gander to the left or right, up or down… it’s all relative when everything has become perpendicular to your location… might it be given a view into other Universes? Yes, there is some theory emerging that certain forces, Gravity and it’s weird kin, Dark Energy, chief among them, may have some of their weird properties as a result of our Universe’s “leakiness” into neighboring and otherwise unobserved Creations. 

So, on to Orthogonal Time and the proceeds of my deliberately idle meditations and a strange little science fiction story. I’ve got a perpetually unfinished short novel before an agent. If she smiles upon the first draft of the main story-line, all I’ve got to do is actually finish the damn thing. That entails weaving in a sub-plot and set-up for a prequel and a video game franchise. Ho-ho-ho! That is where the real money is. Bigger than movies!!!

Anyhow, my little confection is baked at the bleeding edge Cosmology, where the smallest twines with the greatest, where reality meets so-called hard science fiction. I quickly make a shambles of that and the story becomes a fable, a cautionary tale called “The Wisdom of the Edges^©.” There’s enough science fact and theory, and appropriate lingo in the thing to perhaps get a giggle out of the armchair cosmologists out there, and perhaps provide some entertainment to serious scientists as they see their arduous work gleefully perverted. So, I hope.

In the sub-textual rivulet that streams into the main story, there is a fellow, Professor Anton Saurian, who worked earnestly at the behest of Josef Stalin, First General Secretary of the Communist Party, USSR (Иосиф Сталин, первый генеральный секретарь Коммунистической партии СССР). Under the direct instructions of the Great Mush Brained Crazy Leader of All Happy Peoples, the good professor invents a device most sinister yet unassailably attractive… The Super Sideways Time Orthogonal Time Projector^®! Presaging developments to arrive decades later in the fields of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, Saurian creates a machine, an inter-dimensional vessel of steel, bakelite, medical tubing, duct tape and horribly toxic radioactive materials. Upon entering the “Time Craft,” the intrepid traveler could essentially turn sideways to Time and exit this World for any of the infinite number adjacent.

Alas, as happens frequently, not only in my fiction but in Human affairs, things go horribly awry. This is in the Dare All nature of the experiment. It is eons later that a robotic ship from a very distant world encounters the decaying hulk of a dead ship circling a dead sun orbited by the cinders of rocky worlds long gone to their home star’s last rattling gasp. Aboard is found no trace of life, but the incinerated sole of a red converse sneaker, a splotch of a sock’s heel, men’s size 8-10, and within the molten capsule of polyester, a tiny tuft of DNA. This is all that remains of Professor Saurian as he is now about to be spread across the Face of Time, albeit, in an unanticipated way.

The robot craft is on a mission to collect biological samples for another brave experiment. This is the derivation of new species from old; the development of productive creatures of some mental dexterity, but not too much. They will be more than Human, but just as hapless, as the story unfolds over time. And, there is much time for this story to unfold. Time is infinite, as it is instant, in every Universe, every Dimension, every Time possible, all of the Time.

That last thought might ring true beyond my silly story. We may see. Time will tell.

S

psychedelicist

An Extemporaneous Explateration on Life, the Universe and Everything…

Folks,

Last night in northern Connecticut was quite dreary, the woods out back socked in with chilly fog and a nasty drizzle more fitting mid-November than the early Spring. Over the creek behind my Mother’s house coursed a slow moving, pulsing mist, like a zephyr in slow motion. It was occasionally pierced by gobs of sweet water falling from the evergreens and sodden, winter-dead oaks that clung to the decaying banks of the rivulet.

The stars and the Moon where hidden behind a profound haze above. I acutely missed those sign posts to the Heavens. I was reminded of Allan Watts’ wonderful title to his wonderful little book on a westerner’s take on Buddhism, “Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown”.

I’m not a religious soul, in any conventional sense, but my inclinations are acutely spiritual in equal proportion to my scientific leaning. Curiosity is a principle motivation is many of my interactions with other folks and the Universe. Science and spirituality are, to me, incomplete when not informing each other in my outlook and pursuits.

As Einstein said; “The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.”

Read that again. Maybe read it aloud to yourself. It’s that good a notion and well put.

Anyhow, in Einstein’s, my own, and no less than the current Dali Lama’s view, Lao Tzu, the man who generated from Taoism the lineage of profound Eastern philosophies that apprehended no central G-d in the Western sense, but are to westerners considered religions, was a superb scientist. Likewise, the ancient Greek practical philosophers, engineers and proto-scientists, those who trod the path of the Mystery Rites, were as divinely religious as our Uncle Al.

But, back to the stars. Peering into the vaporous ceiling occluding distant points in the Cosmos, I remembered an autumn evening lying, with no embarrassment, on the front lawn of our suburban home with my Father. We were staring at what he informed me was the constellation, Orion. I was about six years old. He asked me, “Do you ever get the feeling that somebody up there might be looking back at us, wondering if anybody is looking back at him?” That question has fascinated me ever since. I am not alone in being thus compelled back, again and again, to conjecture on the possibility, even likelihood, that we are not alone.

There was a fellow, another great physicist of Einstein’s generation, Enrico Fermi, who wondered on this same non-trivial thought. He also proposed what is known as Fermi’s Paradox in light of the possibility that we are indeed, against scientific odds, alone as intelligent life in this Universe. After all, if Life and Intelligence is something that is inherently possible across the breadth of perhaps a septillion of stars, a surfeit of planetary orbs circling those suns, many of them amenable to the creation and sustenance of life as we know it from our own limited experience… where are the dang aliens!?!

Surely we should have spied them by now. If they are now buzzing about the heavens in super-tech space craft, if they have ever have even gotten to the point of playing with crystal radios or blown themselves up with atom bombs, they should have left some clue to their presence in the starry bough.

Solutions to this enigma include that they are advanced enough to stay hid, and don’t wish to listen to the wailing of our baby civilization in its crib. They wait and watch, and hope we grow up and fly right. They may be wise enough fear our immature and violent tendencies. Perhaps don’t really give a damn about what seems to them to be barely more advanced the pond scum.

Another possibility, is that we are aliens. Perhaps our good Earth is but a petri dish, and we an experiment by an advanced species possessed of great patience born of billions of years evolution prior to the initiation of our own synthetic creation as drops of water, bits of clay, RNA and a somewhat reliably clement environment. Our theoretical creators might thus someday be back, in their own good time, to reconnoiter the cold hard data revealed in their planetary wet lab. Let us hope we do not then wind up in the cosmic bio-hazard bin.

S

Enrico Fermi

Reflections After the Flood…

Folks,

I’ve not before written about the catastrophe emerging from the fourfold whammy that has hit Japan. They’ve suffered a historically significant and death-dealing earthquake, a murderous tsunami, the meltdown of one or more nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, and the poisoning of their land, ground water, sea water, and animal and Human life with radiation. The disaster has worldwide health, social and economic ramifications. It may be that wide swaths of land and sea will be uninhabitable by Humans for at least 25,000 years. If plutonium has leaked from Reactor #3, as seems apparent now, the land, drinking water and nearby ocean will be toxic for as long as 250,000 years. That is longer than our species has trod the Earth that we now befoul.

But, the news of the day adequately covers, albeit in a cursory manner, the steady rain of bad news coming from the confluence of Nature’s shrugs and surly moods, and the consequences of Human muddling and arrogance. I’ll instead write a bit about what might be pondered as we move forward as a species from this very moment.

First, let me be clear. I am not a reflexive anti-nuke power sort. We, the people and our democratically chosen governments (where they exist to whatever extent) can tell the nuke industry that the free ride is over; that it is time to solve the problems of nuclear waste storage and disposal, as well as the proliferation of nuclear materials across the globe. They must also design and build self regulating nuclear machines, or none at all. It is well past time for global industry to stop behaving like an adolescent who might at any moment blow off his neighbor’s fingers with the toss of a fire cracker. If we grow up and take responsibility for the perils inherent in sloppy engineering, we may gain a reasonable nuclear alternative to fossil fuels as just one arrow in our potentially environmentally benign quiver of tech.

Okay, so where are we today? We are dealing presently with the second most fundamentally powerful force at our disposal: nuclear fission. So far, we’ve been able to use it build bombs that can flatten entire cities with that power, and we can sort of use it to reliably and sometimes safely generate steam to make electricity with what is essentially 18^th Century engineering and mid-20^th Century physics.

Next up the ladder in terms of essential physical forces at our command is nuclear fusion, the power that makes the stars shine and gives birth to the elements of all life, including our own. As of this date, we can make bombs theoretically scalable to a power able to shatter planets. This potential was revealed in the math and physics of one Edward Teller, the real life model for the cinematic Dr. Strangelove. It is a blessing that Teller’s conjectures have not been proven in experiment and practice. Meanwhile, the promise of harnessing this power for the generation of cheap, pollution-free energy has been perpetually just over the horizon, coming within fifty years, for the past fifty years.

But, there is more in store. Today, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), experiments are underway to probe deeper into the fabric of matter and energy with the grandest, most complex and sophisticated scientific instrument yet created on our pale blue dot of a world. As you read this, scientists and engineers are smashing sub-atomic particles together to potentially reveal the secrets of hidden dimensions in our own Universe, peering into theorized adjacent universes to our own, and they are perhaps on their way to producing sub-microscopic black holes that may, someday, be coaxed into birthing new universes on a lab bench. Shall we children of Earth then have at our disposal the power of a G-d? We better wise up fast, if that is in our future.

There is more, and more of a more pressing matter in view of our carelessness with the relatively feeble energies of fission and fusion. From LHC is likely to come the production of significant quantities of antimatter. That stuff will make the power of Teller’s Super Bomb look like a Forth of July sparkler if some careless lab tech bumps into a chair and drops the beaker on the floor. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other with a release of energy that dwarfs the potential of a giant star’s implosion and explosive radiance as a supernova.

Still, there is even more to awe ourselves into humility in the face of our inventiveness. Far below the almost unimaginable energies emerging from the birth of all we now can know, is the subtle ebb and flow of simple, organic chemistry, and the fundamentals of life. Recently, Craig Ventner’s team (the good folks that helped map the Human Genome) created the Earth’s first synthetic organism. It was just a very simple bacterium, and by no means the creation of life from scratch at Human hands. Nonetheless, the achievement was a signpost on the way to the day, coming soon, when our computers will control machine chemistry labs… and what will issue from those petri dishes will be Life born not of Nature directly, but through Human ingenuity and intention. We’ll be playing G-d, indeed.

So, here in the realm of The Living, we encounter the same issues as with nuclear tech and advanced physics. Can we be trusted with our own tech, or will it be our undoing? A generation or so ago, it was unthinkable that a teenager might have a computer capable of bringing a government agency such as NASA to its knees, or that a media savvy hacker might steal away and then reveal secret State Department documents to the world. But, that is now happening, and we can see the results. So, what happens when some kid in the Ukraine or Spokane, WA decides to make his own bugs? What happens when a maniacal tyrant figures that nukes are old fashioned, and would rather see a prolonged plague on his list of achievements, as opposed to a swift annihilation of his perceived enemies?

Yup… it’s time for our species to grow up.

S

Fie on Both Their Mouses!

Folks,

The state of personal computing has come quite a way in its scant thirty or so years of existence. It’s remarkable how “civilized” and reliable what were once toys for dedicated hobbyists with soldering irons and ribbons of punched paper bearing barely serviceable code that more often than not failed to do anything, and at best did something as useful as tricking a hijacked plotter into printing a giant image of Mr. Spock in Xs and 0s on map paper. The college student that could coax a Mandelbrot set out of a gadget with computational abilities barely superior to a pile of paper clips clumped together with snot and ear wax was worshipped as a genius.

I am a bit of a geek, as was my Great Grandfather. He owned the first home telephone and personal automobile in his little town of Greenfield, MA. My Grandfather, bought the first commercial photocopier, the “Haloid Xerox” company’s behemoth 1959 Xerox 914, to sell in his office supply store in Springfield, MA (once the Silicon Valley of the first Industrial Age). My Father owned the very first Polaroid Land Camera to hit the market. I have gadget lust in my genes, and thus, early on became fascinated with computing, particularly personal computing.

But, I never gravitated toward coding. Rigorous logic and late nights sans intoxicants were not my youthful inclinations. The closest I’ve ever come to a hack was rescuing an early installation of Lotus Notes, which my boss had managed to crash by requiring a return receipt from all our three-hundred-thirty-four employees on the system while our single, much overworked and under-appreciated Sys Admin happened to be on vacation.

So, I 'll confess, I am a "Mac Person"; have been since the first one rolled out in 1984. Over the years, I've bought nine Macs, and I've “sold” more of them than most people who are paid to do so. Relying on the meager tools bestowed by the authors of a superb GUI is my default state, and I’m happy to preach the religion of simplicity, usability, and usefulness in personal computing. Still, I've also used plenty of DOS (and related OSs) as well as Windows machines. I’ve bought several Amigas (remember those?), and actually used the Mac’s Apple predecessor, the Lisa. Once upon a time, you could find me poking my way through the syntax and command lines of Unix-based systems, and mashing up the desktops of various Linux variants.

You know what? None of these systems have worked as well as they should have. Worse, as they've become more powerful and feature-full, they seem, subjectively at least, to have gotten all the more cantankerous, clunky and prone to misbehavior.

Maybe it's because the number of things that can go wrong has risen in proportion to the size of the system and application software. Maybe it's the fact that we now sit in front of these things all day long. Whatever the cause, we're all familiar with machines, Macs and PCs, that crash without apparent cause. Device drivers inexplicably change their settings or interfere with each other. The network has a little hiccup and our computers freeze. Then, when we restart them, they give us angry little warnings telling us that we've been bad users for not properly shutting them down. There is also the matter of application software. The manual for my new publishing application is about the size of the King James Bible. The newest version of Word has so many buttons, do-hickeys and menus, that there's little space left for text. I guess I've made the mistake of assuming that a word processor is supposed to help you write, not to run the equivalent of a print shop inside your computer.

Here’s an illustrative true-life story of what can go wrong with the best, most highly developed, and supposedly simple to use personal computer. I’m not talking about the iPad or other tablet computers and smart phones now on the market. They are still special cases, at this time (more on that in a bit). I’m talking about my trusty, but now aging MacBook.

A few days ago, I booted the sleek little monster up only to find that the Date and Time setting had become corrupt and was locked up. It was now counting forward from 12:34:06AM PST, March 24, 1969, and I could not change it to the present day and moment. This may seem like a non-problem, as I’ve got plenty of clocks and calendars around me; my cell phone has one that gets accurate network time from an atomic clock in Colorado, and I rely on that when on the go.

But, on my personal computer an array of programs and functions rely on accurate time telling within the machine, itself. Take my personal date book and contact programs and their alarms that rely on an accurate clock. It won’t do to show up forty-two years, three days, sixteen hours and fifty-four seconds late for a meeting with my literary agent. Neither will it be helpful to get an urgent and automated security patch to my OS some decades after nefarious black-hat hackers have made off with my passwords, credit card info, and other private data.

Perhaps an errant cosmic ray had bored through my magnetic hard drive and flipped a bit in this seemingly trivial but crucial software resource. The date and time that the clock was programmed to begin ticking was likely born of mere coincidence. It might have been the moment, one early morning, when a post-doc in Stanford U. had completed his mundane chore of building the original clock code for the first iteration of what was to become the venerable, flexible and extensible Unix OS. Maybe it’s the birthday of the then kid who rewrote the resource for NeXTStep or OSX. Whatever. Software engineers are notorious for their bad documentation, and with all invention, serendipity and handy, half-assed solutions arrived at in the wee hours are always abundant. I just knew I had a to fix a stupid problem with the most elegant personal computing system presently sitting like a paper weight on my hotel room desk.

I happened to have handy the original install discs for the OS that came with the machine when I bought it. The simplest solution was to reinstall the entire system to its original state from those discs. That would take an hour or so, and some courage. I was careful to select the install settings to preserve my current data and program files. I made it so and waited for the hoped for outcome. All went well. Now all I had to do was go through the time consuming process of updating the OS to its most recent and secure form via the ‘net. This only took an hour and a half, while I enjoyed watching the dismal news coming out of Libya on CNN. At least the hotel cable TV was still working.

Next, I found that my most relied upon productivity software was no longer working. Those old install discs had reinstalled those wonderful word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet programs that came bundled with the OS to an earlier version than my most recent updates, and they no longer worked with the now updated operating system. My install discs for those programs were sitting in a box forty miles from my hotel room. Off I went to the Apple Store to spend two hours and $80+ dollars getting the most current versions of that the essential software. At that price, it should have been a bargain, but for the time wasted and the expense of twice buying the same thing.

About five hours after my adventure began, now somewhat financially challenged and behind on an important deadline, I was again ready to enjoy the convenience of thoroughly modern personal computing.

But, what happened to the marvel of self-healing software, long promised, but still a tenuous gleam in the gauzy warp and weave of a computer scientist’s loom of logic? Will the dream of a world of reliable and super-fast delivery of software, security patches, and truly collaborative computing exemplified in primordial form by Google Apps soon appear? Will access to every sort of information sans physical media finally be as dependable as flicking a light switch and seeing your own bedroom appear before you in an instant and as though by magic? Will that software be as easy to use as it is to put on your slippers? Will the vaunted Cloud of cloud computing be so pillow soft that our minds can rest easy upon it to dream and create?

Fortunately, some help is on the way, and not a moment to soon. Cloud computing is starting to mature into a feasible tech and a realistic platform for commerce. Apple’s App Stores, Amazon’s various efforts, Google’s audacious innovations and experiments, all point to a not very distant future of utility computing.

The iPad, and similar devices are implementing the long sought grail of banishing confusing and non-intuitive file management systems with a model that associates all data files with application programs, so you can click on an app and simply see only the  files created by it. Or, perhaps you’d like to see your files stored along a timeline, in just the way you recall life, as a story in time. David Gelernter, of Yale, and others have been working on such intuitive systems. In such a model, the user, a Human, no longer has to do machine-like work and have a memory that cleaves to a machine’s mode of “thinking”.

Some decry this effort as resting control from the Human operator by hiding the guts of their machine’s logic and memory inside a black box. Most Human’s will likely find it liberating to not have to remember where they stored >ImSoMadAtObama< on their hard drive or Goodle Docs account, and what programs will open it. For those that want to dig into the guts of their machine’s “mind”, their will always be hacks and jail breaks, and plenty of good fun to be had in the infinite space of imagination painted in digits and pixels.

In any case, what ever the near future brings, let’s hope our junk just works. We need hammers and crowbars, and so far, we’re still getting Rube Goldberg Machines.

S

Fashionable Computers Disappear and Things Start Thinking

Folks,

In the long ago days of 1998, my Mom bought her first computer, an iMac. At the time of her purchase, the fact that it looked cute and didn't require a mess of wires to hook-up was more important than all that megahertz and RAM stuff that she still does not nor care to understand.

Gateway soon introduced a line of radically slimmed down desktop machines, as did Sony and other manufacturers. Intel was showing off prototype computers that looked like brightly colored Aztec pyramids or sleek modern sculpture. A company that made a popular line of web servers was packing their industrial electronics in a blue cube barely bigger than your hand. At the same time, AOL and Microsoft wanted to be everywhere anywhere via a new generation of handheld and TV set-top devices. Palm Computing’s then current offering came in a sleek aluminum case that would not have been out of place on a Klingon Warrior, sheathed next to his Bat’leth.

Today, such design consciousness in digital devices, from computers to gadgets that had not existed in 1998 (WiFi hotspots and routers, digital music players, inexpensive consumer digital cameras, etc.) is the norm. As with an older tech, the automobile, consumers are making buying decisions based as much on a machine’s look and feel, as on the technology inside the box.

So what? Well, there are smart folks, such as the  MIT Media Lab’s near futurist Andy Lippman, that believe this tells us that we are witnessing both the first and final two or so decades of the personal computer as an Everyman's status object and fashion statement. They contend that when a technology gains more attention and confers more status as a fashion statement than its work-a-day purpose, it's probably about to disappear. That's "disappear", as in to be removed from view.

Confused? Let's look at an analogous situation. When was the last time you thought of the multi-gigawatt power plant on the other end of the wire that connects it to the motor you never hear in the compressor that you never think of in your fridge? All four pieces of technology just mentioned used to be big deals in the marketing of electric power, as well as the industrial design of fridges. Remember those old machines with the fat, round compressors on top? If you've never seen one for yourself, look for one in the background next time you're watching a 1930's vintage movie.

Today, the most important thing about picking a place to keep the beer cold is how well it disappears into the decor of our faux colonial kitchen. The last thing that we want from a reliable, ubiquitous technology is for it to call attention to itself. It should just be there, and be working the next time you feel like having some ice-cream. Thus, we hear the prediction that after the current phase of computer and telecom product design, the devices will begin to fade into the background of our environment. Their services, though, will still be there, but more reliably, like the light that comes on when you open the fridge.

What will emerge from this reinvented model for computing and telecommunications? Individually, many services will seem trivial from our present point of view. Milk cartons may access the internet-grocery store when they get low, and order replacements for themselves. A necktie might tell a business associate’s electronic rolodex what your email address is, as you shake his hand. Through the same tech, tablet computers distributed freely across the office will know who is holding them and what documents will be required for the next damn meeting. Pages in electronic books and catalogues, made with electronic paper, will update themselves when new information is available. Web-based information will be accessible from not only from hand-held devices, but previously "dumb" objects such as the tread of your car's wearing tires. 

Other services will seem less triffling. Your tee-shirt may contain processors woven into its fabric and a web-connected cardiac monitor to let the hospital know to send an ambulance when you’ve eaten more heart arresting calzones than you can jog away. That shirt and it’s wireless connection will be subsidized by a changing assortment of ads for the hospital’s services displayed on flexible video screens over your chest and back. Your own exertions will supply the power for the “smart” shirt’s connectivity and computing.

Devices like mice and trackpads, even keyboards, will truly disappear, and not just from view. They will be replaced by an intelligent environment that knows where you are looking and understands your facial and other gestures, as well as speech via cameras, microphones, and machine smarts. You may be wearing a hat or headband that puts you in direct connection to your outboard “brain”. The ubiquitous screen that we’ve been peering at for almost seventy years will disappear into your contact lenses or stylish shades, and they will also be your computer interface.

We are at the threshold of some truly remarkable tech. It will enable the things around us will seem to think, and we will think little of that, as the machines fade into the background and do their work invisibly. This prospect brings both promise and peril, of course. Do we really want our very environment to know all of our comings and goings, where our eyes wander, what stimulates various sectors of our neocortex… the host of our self and self awareness? Will the last bastions of privacy fall with this new generation of hidden tech? Can a society and culture function without secrets be kept from not only its denizens, but their own machines?

Interesting questions to ponder on the high speed ride to the near future!

S