A Simple Experiment

People quit smoking but do not give up cell phones. They are more addictive than nicotine, period. Scientists once focused on tobacco smoke impact have now graduated to electromagnetic radiation research. Most studies suggest no harm, but some large ones are essentially retrospective studies comparing the habits of control groups vs. brain tumor groups. Somehow decade long recollections of folks with brain tumors may be a shaky foundation to build on.

I say a simple way of settling the issue is a massive experiment where all cell phone users use the phone on the same side of the head. The answer will pop out by just looking at tumor location distribution in the future. A cognitive study correlated radiation exposure to one side of the head with longer average response times for the corresponding (i.e. opposite) hand than exposure on the other side. I have no bias for what the answer is, but I like such differential measurements more than interviews.

The massive experiment can be differential: in some countries people will use the phone on the right and in others on the left side of the head, according to the driving convention, for example. Countries with right side of the road driving will use the phone on the left side and keep the right hand free for shifting gears.

Agreement to do anything is hard. We have advertising, market forces, and coercion. None of these forces is welcome. Forget about people, let the phones run this experiment. What we need next is phones smart enough to only work on one side of our head.

Secret Weapon

The soccer withdrawal symptoms left by the end of the 2010 World Cup should be alleviated when the Copa America begins next month in Argentina . We may get some high level competition or just placebo. Who knows.

Rumor has it the best placed South American team in South Africa 2010 has an ace up their sleeves. A mistery player training in Norcal, away from the prying eyes of rivals. Car prototypes are coarsely camouflaged for road tests. Players are coarsely disguised with confusing number schemes, and roam across positions for extra deception.

Facts we can glean are: 200 lbs. mass, and a clenched fist in the old tradition. Redefines balance as the ratio between goals and red cards obtained.

Riveter

The Rosie the Riveter poster turned out to be a factory recruiting tool not a war effort morale booster prop. J. Howard Miller drew it from a photo of a worker, a lady that had lasted just two weeks at the factory. A more muscular arm replaced hers. And for decades she was oblivious to her WWII icon role.

"We Can Do it" turned out to be the only non-fictional part of the poster. But in this crazy world of ours we cannot hold such fiction against Rosie the Riveter. The difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must be believable, per Mark Twain, that and whether "we can really do it" is all that matters.

At the World Trade Center Plaza I used to lie face up with Gabe, a baby, on top. To look up at the towers and the sky in dizzying admiration. I visited Ground Zero and read the notes left by visitors, I saw with dizzying admiration how none was written in anger.

I saw hectic work on rebuilding the site when I visited two months ago. I envision five smallish buildings in a ring to mimic small redwood trees growing around the big mother tree after lightning struck her. But nobody asks me what to build where...

A stranger was doing high fives today at the gas station. His old beat up pickup truck radio at full blast with the news. I should have taken his picture. Then draw a poster of Robert the Pickup Trucker on his "We can do it" moment. We can do what? Revenge or Rebuild? That is up to him, and to the reader.

Oboe

Today Ben's Oboe does the talking.

Pyramids are forever

Balancing the effort put into catching fish vs. teaching to fish is not as clear cut for us parents as the proverb portends:

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”...

No wonder there is no known author to stand behind it, and that improved proverb versions have surfaced on the internet.

Fish makes good dishes but bad metaphors. The short shelf life makes fish hard to accumulate, and harder to pass across generations. If we consider “Give a man gold" vs. "Teach a man to mine gold"...it is less clear which option is better or has higher NPV. But the transfer problem is the main concern, teaching your son to fish or to mine gold are not automatically transitive to his son, and his son's son.

What lasts and has lasting value to benefit subsequent generations. Transferable yet not liquidated by bad actors along the way. An abstract answer forms in my head, and a concrete example comes from Egypt.

Egyptians built back then a few pyramids. Solid pyramids that last, too large to be carted away by corrupt heirs. Posterity they wanted, posterity they got. People flock to visit such unique things that Egypt's tourism industry is the second economic sector with more than $10B/year.

My own answer puts me barely at square one, with at least two other moves to come up:
2) Identify a rare and striking creation that lasts the next 3000 years.
3) Build it.

Forgive my tossing around some blogs and some fish while I work on such a tall order. I try to serve them fresh.

Honolulu Mothball

Doing things on impulse is a form of freedom. Call it poor planning, yet there is something liberating about having no plan. Deciding on Friday to play the Mayors Soccer Tournament and catching the next Honolulu flight leaving four hours later. Of course there is no absolute freedom, Graciela OK'ed my plan first.

The fields are next to Pearl Harbor's Middle Loch, yes the Pearl Harbor where the real freedom fight began 70 years ago. On the way there somebody said the military ships floating in the Middle Loch are mothballed there in case they need to be commissioned for another battle another day.

A fine third place to push away any plans to mothball our team. A rare opportunity to borrow from Mac Arthur's speech "We came through and we shall return" in the Pacific Theatre itself.

Leaky Week

This leaky week started with WikiLeaks disclosing secret US diplomatic cables. Some meaty revelations, but nothing suggests that you or me cannot handle the truth. After three days of leaks the difference between a cable and an email remains a secret to me.

A-priori my sympathies were not with the leaker. I do like the idea of a Texas hold'em model though, where most of the cards are on the table, and we can call a spade a spade. My mixed feelings cocktail is one part jet-lag two parts cynic. My own Diogenes the cynic would say: If diplomacy is not shameful in private it should not be shameful in public.

The jet-lag is from the trip to Diego's wedding. A week stay is not worth acclimating and risking a second jet-lag upon return. Awake every night facing pharma with her sleeping pill collection against my father's large and growing book collection. Harder to swallow I still go for a book at the top of the stack.

Official Secrets is 1999 research with context for the then released transcripts of WWII German Order Police (ORPO) radio transmissions intercepted by British intelligence. The radio codes were rather rudimentary even by 1940's standards. These intercepted contents were kept secret during the war to avoid tipping the parties off as to their interception. The high price paid for that secrecy surely wins Wikileaks some points in retrospect.

The reasons for secrecy, then and now, are operational. That is the dilemma, plans and methods want to be kept secret while analysis and policy want to be public. Facts, reality, truth, where do they fall?

Wikileaks, with the jet-lag book still fresh in my mind, the most recurring of questions recurs: Where were you then during WWII?

One Laptop Per Child

In city traffic the 1977 Oldsmobile screamed stay back by a show of size and how little we had to lose...Got respect precisely because it had no value. It also wore the status symbol du-jour: a fake pigtail mobile phone antenna glued to the windshield. Ironically old mobiles were more expensive than Oldsmobiles.

Phones got cheaper than the gas in a Cutlass tank, proving that status symbols do depreciate. Having nothing to lose is still valuable.

Laptops and smart devices also got cheaper and entered our lifestyle outside two groups. Those that cannot afford them, and those deliberately unreachable. No wireless umbilical cord to a job, a boss, a database.

For folks that cannot afford them, there is Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project. A good cause where internet connected laptops make a positive difference in children lives. A complex project, cheap hardware is just table stakes.

China makes lots of laptops and lots of children. A cynic may note that the One Laptop Per Child project is already at work in China, it is called the One Child China Policy. Just grab a Diet Coke and wait until the numbers of laptops and children cross over.

Don't like Diet Coke or can't wait, then start with less children, may be in Uruguay. Four hundred thousand laptops were deployed there for the largest OLPC experiment. Experts are interpreting the lessons learned, and hopefully come up with less than 400.000 distinct lessons.

Now the One Laptop per Child mantra could apply to the mainstream, re-branded as the Only One Laptop per Child please. Not a simple project, it takes house to house combat, and the arsenal is limited to garage sales and sledge-hammers. Maybe gadgets should come with expiration dates, or somebody finally make the thin client that ends all clients. If it happens I have a pigtail antenna I can glue on it.

Cosmos Ups the Ante

Gabe's academic year started anew, with Friday pickup soccer separating a week of study from a week-end of study. I am there to enforce the separation.

Smarting from a close call in Man vs. Cosmos, I have summoned the muscle stretch to get me through play until dusk. Goodbye cramps.

Cosmos also came ready for the fight: Artificial Lights threaten an endless game. Yet man does not need to outrun the tiger, just outlast some youngsters.

Man lives to play another day, or maybe plays to live another day.

Acutely aware that Cosmos only needs to win once.

Field Jacket M65

Click picture to enlarge

My M65 field jacket started its third life in 1980 when Gonzalo came to the airport to se me off. He took off his olive green jacket and told me it was mine. Never washed it to preserve Gonzalo's inscription under the lining. It was to be read only after I was gone. And gone I was.

It is not exactly my size, and it has the Army surplus patina, yet I resisted my family's attempts to purge the field jacket from my wardrobe. In it I look like a homeless person to my wife. Vietnam vet reintegration kind of homelessness, reason enough to defy the stigma and wear it. Wear it I did.

I picked up Gabriel once after a party at a fancy Palo Alto hotel. The hosts came out to size up the odd green M65 silhouette roaming outside the ball room...

And wear it Gonzalo did, for he is not a slave to fashion either.

With our house full of friends, stories, and a round bread denoting the full circle of a new year, we learn that Luis had been a student of Gonzalo's father, Guaymiran, well esteemed Forensic Medicine Professor. Luis now invents molecules, compounds or something like that here in the US, but is not known for inventing stories.

Upon Luis trip to the states in the late 70's, the good professor asked him to bring something, one of those American military jackets Gonzalo always wanted. An XL if possible, Gonzalo already had a large frame. As Luis narrates his purchase of a military jacket in Utah, I walk to the closet and pull my M65 field jacket, the olive green looks familiar to Luis. Yet only when I ask him to remove the lining and read Gonzalo's inscription our full circle closes. That very jacket just trumped anything a round bread can evoke.

Of the jacket's original owner all I have is that red paint inscription. A tall order to go close that circle, but if I keep wearing it who knows...