Category Archives: Technology and Society

Education, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Good Old Days Of Journalism

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I think that if we’re going to have schools of journalism, this should be a required exercise:

Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for ALL ON PAPER. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…

You must do math.

First, there’s headline counting: A capital M is two, but a lower-case L (or is that the number 1?) is one-half. So how many counts do I have for a 48-point head across two columns?

Then there are the stories whose column inches must be distributed evenly across the page, requiring long division (without a calculator) and resulting in vaguely sexual newsroom directives like, “I need 11 inches to fill this box, and I need it now.”

Finally, there’s sizing photos with that confounded proportion wheel. Even though it’s supposed to help you shrink or enlarge a photo, and even though the instructions are printed right on the front, that God-awful wheel still doesn’t ever seem to give you the proper percentages. It’s more like a Magic 8-Ball than a round slide rule: much more mysterious than accurate.

“It’s been rough,” Mariam admits. “I’ve found myself sitting in silence, reminiscing about the days when CNTRL+Z was all it took. I miss my iMac.” But she also confesses…

Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.

I’ve never been a professional journalist, but this is the process that we went through preparing proposals at Rockwell in the eighties. It took a long time to get the publications department to go to computers, even after the engineers were writing their proposal inputs in Wordperfect, and some had Macs with Pagemaker. We would have to print out our word processing output, and they would dutifully rekey it into their typesetting machines, because there were no compatible disk formats, which meant, of course, that we got to reedit for typos. They would cut out and wax the columns and lay them out on the boards, and then copy the gallies for us to review.

It meant that you had to have everything done about three days before it was due, because last-minute changes were just too painful to incorporate. On a thirty-day proposal, that was a lot of lost time.

There was an ugly transition period in the early nineties (a year or three before I left the company) when those responsible for actually writing the proposals rebelled and insisted on doing it themselves on Pagemaker. Pubs resisted, of course, reading the handwriting on the wall, and washing their hands of the results, though a few saw the future and came over to help (and learn what they would be doing themselves in a few years if they still had a job). Upper management had to adjudicate the situation, but the transition must have happened, because when I went back to do consulting at Boeing a decade or so later, everyone was publishing in Word, with an editor assigned to the team. But I think that it’s important for journalists using modern tools to understand the roots of their profession. If you could give them a hot-lead type machine, it would be even more educational, though probably going full Gutenberg with carved wooden blocks should be reserved for grad school. Hell, it might even teach them the difference between “font” and “typeface.”

Philosophy, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

More Ettinger Thoughts

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I’ll have my own obituary up at Pajamas Media tomorrow, but he’s an interesting example of a man who lived (and perhaps continues to live) by his own beliefs, never relinquishing them even as he approached deanimation.

Many more men are interested in cryonics than women (though there are many of the latter as well), and generally the explanation for this is that women tend to be less individualistic, and define themselves in terms of their relationships, particularly family. I recall, almost forty years ago, when a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and his mother said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live forever, or wake up in a future in which I didn’t know anyone.” That has never bothered me, and I have never had trouble meeting new people and establishing new relationships. I’d rather do that than give up my individuality and memories. But Ettinger got around it partially by persuading his loved ones to get aboard the ambulance with him (though as he noted himself, it will be interesting times if he gets revived with both wives).

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

From Norway To Hell

27 Comments

Walter Russell Mead is channeling Bill Joy:

The inescapable reality is that the very forces creating our affluent, modern and democratic world also generate violent antagonism. Breivik, like Al-Qaeda and like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, is the shadow of progress. When conditions are right, the lone psychopath becomes a cult leader; in a perfect storm when everything breaks his way, the psychopath becomes Fuehrer.

That would be bad enough, but there’s one more turn of the screw. The same technological progress that helps create violent alienation and rage also empowers individuals and groups. 200 years ago a Breivik could not have done so much damage. 100 years ago Al-Qaeda could not have hijacked a plane. Modern society is more vulnerable than ever before to acts of terror, and developments in weaponry place ever greater power in the hands of ever smaller numbers of people.

This is still in early stages. Fortunately Breivik was a traditionalist and relatively low tech mass murderer; he did not hack vital computer systems to wreak murderous havoc with a rail or air traffic control system. He did not poison the reservoirs with weaponized biologicals. He did not even pump poison gas into a subway system.

We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.

I have to say that Breivik and McVeigh are in an entirely different category than bin Laden. The latter is part of a totalitarian religious movement, with the support of millions, while no one is cheering the former in the streets, and in fact they are being roundly condemned by their own group members (that is, those with whom they share a genetic heritage). I am particularly disgusted by the media’s attempts to paint both as “Christians” when I’ve seen no evidence that either is, and McVeigh actively disavowed a belief in God. But they have to do so to feed the moral relativistic narrative in defense of Islam.

But here’s where I just don’t get his argument at all:

The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.

In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.

We still live in the Age of Apocalypse that opened in World War Two when Hiroshima and the Holocaust delineated the essential problems of the new and possibly last era of human civilization. Mankind has long had the potential for radical, desolating evil; today we still have that potential among us, and we have united it to the power to end all life on earth. We live with one foot in the shadows and another on the high and sunny uplands of democratic and affluent society. We have one foot in Norway and the other in Hell and nobody knows where we step next.

One of the reasons to bother God in our century is the hope that in turn he will bother about us. Whatever is coming, we will face it more honestly and live it more richly with him.

This presupposes that he exists, but that we are just ignoring him. Well, that may be, but I have no sense of it, which is why I’m a non-believer, and furthermore, I feel no need for him for me to intellectually grasp what’s happening. While I admire Professor Mead, I think that he is projecting his own apparent intellectual inadequacies on the rest of us.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Father Of Transhumanism

2 Comments

…has deanimated:

In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.

Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”

I’ve never understood the resistance, either.

Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.

[Update early afternoon]

Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.

[Another update a few minutes later]

This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Google+ Bleg

1 Comment

I’ve done some amount of searching, and I can’t figure out whether it’s possible to automatically feed the RSS from my blog to my stream, and if so, how to do it. I see lots of instructions as to how to follow streams in an RSS reader, but not the other direction. Anyone know? I currently do this on my FB wall (I never manually post anything on FB, other than comments to others’ posts), so if Google doesn’t offer the capability, they need to catch up.

[Update a few minutes later]

Someone asked a similar question in the forum on Tuesday, with no replies yet.