The Cell Phone

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I’m book-flitting and found an interesting title at the library on technology and culture called Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day. They bring both software design and anthropology to the task, and are interested in splitting the baby between luddites and technoenthusiasts. This is an approach that interests me.

The fundamental question they are posing is this: Given technology’s presence in our lives, how can we best bend it to our will rather than bending to its. This question is central to the familial revolution triggered by our acquisition of two mobile telephones. I have resisted this for a long time, been dismissive of it, argued repeatedly that I’ve never seen a need, nor wanted the tether that a phone implies. But our three lives have become a logistically complicated three-body problem, and we realized a few weeks ago that a cell phone could be an enabler and a solution rather than an ankle weight. Nora’s activities are multiplying – theater, several clubs at school, tennis – and giving her the ability to call us on the move from one to the next in order to coordinate transportation, food and other necessities seems like a practical value. And allowing Lissa to be untethered while still executing her self-imposed role of enabling Nora’s complex youth also seem like a practical value. So Nora and Lissa now have cell phones.

We’ll see how the experiment works.

Nukes

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The question of whether or when to resume new nuclear weapons design work is now formally on the table with the Bush Administration’s request to repeal a ban on U.S. research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons.

I am careful here in my personal blog not to express my own views about issues I cover as a journalist. I have what I believe is a good working relationship with both the leaders of the nuclear arms control community and leaders of the nuclear weapons community. I have spent more than a decade talking to both, and I deeply understand their arguments and the passion with which they make them.

Succeeding as a journalist in such a situation requires an odd state of mind – the ability to fully hold, entertain and understand contradictory viewpoints. I need to be able to embrace the arms control community’s argument that nuclear weapons are a fundamental threat to humanity. I need to be able to embrace the weapons community’s argument that nuclear weapons prevented (“deterred”, to use their careful word) world war for half a century.

I’ve spent countless hours doing that in this case – the bookshelf behind me of nuclear weapons policy books is filled with heavy tomes on the subject. Ultimately it has been a morally exhausting experience. The experience has allowed me to write sympathetically about both, and robbed me of any views of my own. In this case, an unwillingness to share my own views is not artifact or journalist’s deceit. It is genuine.

For most of the last five years I’ve hated writing about nuclear weapons for that reason. Grappling with this largest of questions is just too hard. But I do it anew this year because the question is back on the table, freighted with new nuances, in the context of a new world.

Not Me

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This is not me:

John Fleck, in his stage performance ‘Blessed Are All the Little Fishes,’ confronts alcoholism and Catholicism. During the course of the performance, Fleck appears dressed as a mermaid, urinates on the stage and creates an altar out of a toilet bowl by putting a photograph of Jesus Christ on the lid.” Justice Scalia, concurring in NEA v. Finley.

The Bubble

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As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been taking CD’s with me to work so I have music to help drown out the chaos around me when I need to write. I’ve been listening on the computer headphones, but decided yesterday to plunk down the astronomical sum of $28 and buy a portable player. It was a better idea than I realized.
First of all, the sound – Cheap electronics just keep getting better and better. But the really interesting part is the psychology.
I took my new toy with me yesterday afternoon to the library. I popped on the headphones and was in my own little world, surrounded by a bubble of personal space and privacy, oblivious to those around me. I guess this is the same bubble I’ve been needing at the office, a safe space in which to work. But I never imagined it would be transferable, able to follow me as I travel the world at large.

Roach

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I grabbed three CD’s on my way out the door yesterday morning. (I’ve been using headphones to listen to music at work lately to drown out the chaos on days I need to write – mostly jazz, music without words.) I took Birth of the Cool, Brilliant Corners and Saxophone Colossus. I was looking at the lineup on Birth of the Cool and noticed Max Roach on drums. I grabbed the Sonny Rollins. Max Roach on drums. The Monk. Max Roach on drums.

So is there just one jazz drummer?

Actually, it was just a coincidence. I went through my jazz CD’s when I got home and there were lots other drummers. But it made me think that I don’t really pay much attention to the drumming. I pay attention to most of the other players, but the poor anonymous drummer….

So in tribute to Max Roach, I’m going to start paying attention.

Trees

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I’m currently poking my way through Tree Rings and Telescopes, a biography of A.E. Douglas written in the 1980s by George Ernest Webb. Douglas was the astronomer who invented the science of dendrochronology around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to study sunspot cycles, figuring they would be reflected in growth rings in the trees. What he ended up inventing was a fundamental tool for archaeology and for climate research. It was a time when it was still possible for a scientist to be a great generalist – for an astronomer to have a profound influence on fields completely outside his own.

“Wittgenstein for the Defense”

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That alleged (has it been formally alleged?) dirty bomber Joseph Padilla is entitled to legal counsel might seem obvious, but U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey had to reach back to none less that Wittgenstein to undercut the government’s logic for trying to deny him access to a lawyer:

The government’s argument summons from obscurity an abstruse problem – that because no rule can determine its own application, it may appear that there can be no binding rule – that was picked apart on the philosophical dissecting table toward the middle of the last century by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and since has ceased to vex those inclined to contemplate such matters. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ? 198, at 80e (G.E.M. Anscombe trans., 3rd ed. 1958) ( But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.”)

(Link from Steve Aftergood, who characterized the judge as having written “triumphantly and with thrilling erudition.”)

Inspections

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From the Journal:

Rushing to war in Iraq would ignore the success of inspections in containing Saddam Hussein’s military machine, according to Paul Stokes, the retired Sandia National Laboratories weapons designer who headed up nuclear inspections in Iraq in 1994 and 1995.

In particular, Stokes noted the important distinction between chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Chemical and biological weapons aren’t good for much, he said, and nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein doesn’t have.