Frame and Fortune

On Wednesday night, I went to a talk at the Commonwealth Club. George Lakoff was promoting his newest book, The Little Blue Book, under the banner of a lecture about framing. Although I do vote as part of my civic duty, I prefer to keep my political views to myself and try to examine the world analytically, so my purchase of a copy of The Little Blue Book was more about getting an autograph of a man whose intellect I respect rather than any political allegiance, The fundamental argument of the book is that Democrats and Republicans use different frames. If two well-meaning people start with different premises, it is quite easy to talk past one another. It is alarming how facile human being can be at self-deception; yet the ability to imagine things as they might be rather than as they are is fundamental to the human capacity of planning and creativity. Here is the nub of the problem, as I see it (and as a fellow human being, I am as blind as anyone else who is reading this): human beings need frames and narratives to process the astonishing amount of information the world throws at us, but this coping mechanism is so ingrained that it is easy to forget it is a tool rather than the only possible representation of reality. The underlying assumptions are buried below layers of reasoning, and an amnesia to this truth leads even the best-intentioned to perceive those who oppose them as stupid or evil or both. Even worse, it blinds one to the assumptions of one's own argument. If you don't know why you believe what you believe, how can you figure out whether it is valid or how to argue pro and con? There's a reason, after all, that true debaters have to understand the opposition's argument as well as their own. Even where there are few facts, and the relevance of those facts are agreed upon, it is not possible for human beings to just look at facts rather than composing a narrative. Human beings are per se creatures of story, and the best we can do is examine how we construct the stories we tell from the world around us and the motivations which drive us.

Big Kitty, Rare Kitty

Down at the Commonwealth Club, I attended a lecture on mountain lions by Zara MacDonald, advocate for the Felidae Conservation Fund. The pictures, of course, were enthralling, but MacDonald highlighted the plight and rarity of felids. Large cats need large ranges, and many migration routes are blocked or hindered by highways or suburbs. The average size of California cats are about two-thirds the size of the average American cats, which may be reflection of the smaller territories, but could equally well reflect some genetic quirk of the local population. The Felidae project has activities for every age group - the one for kids is a game called PumaWild, where you play as a puma trying to survive.

http://www.felidaefund.org/
http://www.bapp.org/

Nos Spectaturi Te Salutamus

On a recent Monday, I found myself down at the Commonwealth Club for a talk, "The Ancient Roman World on Film" presented by the Humanities Forum. Dr. Gary Devore from Stanford was the speaker. He spoke about the way directors manipulated the image of cinematic Romans to present them as Us, Them, Both, and Neither. The Romans were Them in The Sign of the Cross (1932), a bland Victorian pseudo-historical piece spiced up and sexed up as only Cecil B. deMille could do. Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) presented a remarkably pro-Communist message for its day, while being aggressively pro-family. Allegiance to a cause and its leader spans the political spectrum. In Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which Devore described as the "thinking man's epic" in contrast to Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), the Romans are both Us and Them, and serve as a warning to our era. Fellini's Satyricon (1969) absolutely rejects the possibility of identifying with the ancient Romans; Satyricon is a reaction to Fascist use of Roman symbols and the Mussolini-penned Roman epic Scipione l'Africano.

My Forgotten Universe

I was so happy about the success of my science fiction book club that I rented some more episodes of The Big Bang Theory. As I was watching, the Asimovian currents continued to percolate in my brain, along with a recurrent nagging born from a lecture I attended at the Commonwealth Club. Then I remembered I had written three stories in what is generally referred to the Teylothia Universe inside my head - I have several now, all structurally different, including the Haven Universe (one finished story, one fragment), the Semiramis Universe (two finished stories, several fragments), and the Fortunate Islands Universe (no stories per se, but instead one two-and-a-half-years post-by-post world-changing adventure on CONCULTURE).  I went to one of my drawers and removed a translucent blue folder that contained my Branson Senior Project and related material in 1994. Three of the stories were in the TU, although the set was different from that which I remembered. Certainly, In His Own Land, set on the namesake O'Neill colony, was there (the colonies of the 'verse were based on '70s science fiction). The second story, X, set on the Teylothia's fellow Hadean (NB: in-universe term) colony of Telebios, was there also. The third story was not the twenty-page fragment  (all political dialogue - perhaps I'd been reading Dune) set on Pluto, that I had thought.  It was a post-by-post story, Third's the Charmer , written on VEBLEN, set on yet another Hadean colony (Telemachus), featuring an murder charge against a member of a yet another colony (Telephorus). Given the set up of the colony ring structure, that leaves me with two options for the last corner of the hexagon: another O'Neill colony with a name starting with Tele- or the dwarf planet system of Orcus and Vanth. I'm tempted to "complete the set" and leave Orcus-orbit for a different theme. It would be easy to expand the 'verse to include the new dwarf planets in a natural fashion, but I still have one colony space left in Pluto orbit before I need to expand.

So far I have only skimmed the stories. I need to re-read them for several reasons. I need to examine the style. Although I have a timeline for In His Own Land, I need to prepare a rough timeline/summary of events. It really is a 'verse, so the interactions are significant, and my original notes are long gone. I also need to brush up on the technological terms and "current" social structure of the 'verse - I haven't calculated it precisely, but a cursory glance at birth dates and vaguely expressed ages suggests that Third's the Charmer occurs almost a century after the events of In His Own Land.

There were two other stories in the packet, Cogito and Those Who Wait. Cogito is a hologram story (written before Voyager aired), and might fit well with one possible development of the Teylothia Universe. It would be a dark development, but then the whole 'verse seems to lean that way - so far there have been incidents of suicide, fanaticism, murder charges, and botched experiments, and mentions of vandalism, promiscuity, and potential political unrest. Enjisi, the protagonist (and I remember Mrs. Moore disputing the term) of Those Who Wait, are on a wholly different scale, and may a different 'verse altogether. She (Enjisi, not Mrs. Moore) may require a different tack.

...In Excelsis Deo!

On Monday night, the Commonwealth Club speaker was Tim Brown, from IDEO (an innovation-minded company, rather than a terrorist organization from a Saturday morning cartoon). Brown was advocating "design thinking", although his interlocutor seemed skeptical and was hardballing the interview. I found that attitude a refreshing change from the much softer Commonwealth Club interview at the Fairmont of the authors of Superfreakonomics, at which I felt the interviewer could have coaxed the authors to talk about matters above and beyond that which could be found already in their book.

It seemed to me that Brown presented a convincing case of his own belief in his idea, but was not going to seduce the entire audience, but just the majority. The problem was not so much the validity of the idea and the associated strategems, as the zeal with which he pitched it, and possibly a detour into overhype, the boom of the idea economy. This reminded me of the way that new academic paradigms, even if they are applied initially to a subset of the discipline, become the new, best way to analyze anything within the discipline and a rebuttal to the intellectual status quo. Sometimes the status quo is so firmly planted that it becomes necessary to use excessive force to dislodge it; but such vehemence can mask the mediocrity of an apparently brilliant idea. "Design thinking" seems to be a valid and effective methodology, but perhaps not as earth-shattering as its most zealous proponents would claim.

A Thursday In Late November

What a strange world I live in! This Thursday I went over to Berkeley. Bruce had asked me to reformat a list of Eagle Court speakers, so I had my laptop with me. I set to, but soon discovered to my dismay that the list did not start at 1990, as I had supposed, but in 1984! I noticed a strong pattern of two relatives presenting the Oath and Charge - in one case, there were three brothers sharing one of the presentations! I did some Christmas shopping with Amy - super-bargain-hunting, of course - and then we took a pleasant walk across the Berkeley campus.

I attended a panel at the Commonwealth Club on the issue of privacy in modern society, especially online, a topic on which Amy had expressed no interest. But then, my parents have quite different interests. The panel included representatives of civil liberties, law enforcement, Google, and Facebook. The anecdotes and concerns ran the gamut, from the stupidity of the self-incriminating to the surprisingly nuanced definition of privacy among social network users.

Then Amy returned. We the Geary, which is indeed "dirty-eight" - I was glad that Amy did have to endure the sight of some of the undesirable elements. Such disdain and distrust may arise not so much from elitism as from the male's urge to protect his woman (a natural feeling, even if it appears sexist in this age). We went to a Chinese bible study on Euclid. The park there looks so decievingly flat on Google Maps! The Bible study seemed fairly mellow, but we were at a disadvantage because they were using a book and were halfway through it. I was the only "English" there.