Archimedes’ Hot Tub

This article about a conference on narrative in the arts was in the newspaper of my alma mater, the University of Chicago. In it, the conference organizer, a Chicago prof named Mark Slouka, noted that

“Nonfiction has been outselling fiction at almost every turn…But what does it mean when the available space for fiction in the nation’s leading magazines begins to disappear, when a publication as venerable as The Atlantic cancils its fiction slot? Is it a temporary swing of the pendulum, or an indication of a permanent change in the cultural climate?”

He further is cited as saying that fiction and nonfiction are almost impossible to tell apart anymore, and athat “what is broadly thought of as story is crossing in to new territory, mating with forms previously seen as distinct, or, conceivably, it’s undergoing a renaissance.”

Nice imagery, and a nice hope. Perhaps the truth is more practical. The trouble with fiction is that it’s not real. The people (characters) seem contrived, their circumstances conjured. You don’t get the sense that their story tells us something about ourselves and our culture. I’m not much good at writing fiction, so I’m not trying to throw stones. I just know that I’ve read progressively less modern fiction, both short-form and novels, since I graduated from college in 1986, because I so often felt like a voyeur.

I exempt dramatic storytelling (plays, movies, even television). I’m not disagreeing that nonfiction hasn’t gotten much more vital (though some of the best nonfiction is also partially made up). And maybe fiction, like classical music, has veered off into a place that matters mostly to its practitioners, not its audience. I will look for a blog from this conference to see if anything interesting was said.

My latest Prototype column, Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game, looks at how the gamer generation is remaking the workplace.

I bought the BioWeblogic BWM calculator based on its glowing reviews, its integration of diet and fitness components and its ability to work on my Treo 700p. The product seems to work well enough, but it has both foibles and one serious problem – it remains menu-driven, despite the prevalence of both the graphical user interface and the World Wide Web. You cannot double-click on a category and see what’s listed there – you must highlight the category, search for your item (and don’t you dare type ‘berry’ instead of ‘berries’), highlight it again, and then go through the rest of the process needed to add something to your list.

I’ve used the program for a week now, and I find that I have mostly adjusted to the interface, though it still causes me problems at times. I would say it took me several hours of poking around to become comfortable with the interface for the food. The exercise interface is more difficult, because of the challenge of finding the right search term. If you go for a run on a treadmill, you can only enter the specifics of it once you’ve searched on your miles per hour. You can’t even search on ‘miles,’ — it has to be the acronym, ‘mph.’ If you don’t search on mph, you cannot enter your run (and of course, the walking search is not based on the same mph idea). To find out the proper search term for the category of ‘running’ and the subcategory of ‘general’ required me to fool around with the database edit function until I got it to expose the various categories under general. That’s directly related to having a menu-driven interface.

The ability to edit the database is useful, though it would be more useful if one could go to the BWM Web site and download updates from other users of the products (even with 21,000 items in its database, there are plenty of things I buy in the grocery store that it doesn’t have. A friend of mine with a different calorie counter says it has the same issue — the companies producing these tools seem not to have noticed the social networking phenomenon). However, the editing function has some quirks – especially in how it displays information. I added a cereal today, for instance, and my database entry shows all the information I entered from the box. But when I added it to my daily totals, the carbs, protein and fat totals displayed several multiples higher (the calorie count was correct, however). This isn’t the first time I’ve observed this with the product. Usually, going in to the database two or three times to reenter the information and save it seems to help with the display issue, but I am quickly losing patience with having to do this. [[An update: I have since realized that this ‘quirk’ is a feature. The BWM program will display food totals in, say grams of fat or fat calories. It shows grams in the main, but will usually display calories when you add something to your totals. This is in fact useful]].

Overall, I am not as pleased with this product as I had hoped, and I was surprised to see five-star reviews on Handango and elsewhere for a tool that has such an archaic interface.

New York magazine has a funny, pungent interview with Christopher Hitchens, sparked by his new book “God Is Not Great.”

I read a chapter of it in a bookstore recently, and was disappointed by what I read. Hitchens invoked novels as proofs, for instance, and the book itself is long-winded compared to something like Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian.”

But in the interview Hitchens shows a more flexible mind than I’d expected. And he is pithy (though one can never really tell in Q&A formats). I suspect the interviewer pared down his real thoughts on Jewish Hellenism and the impact of Hellenism on Christianity and even Islam. Hitchens surely knows that these religions are infused with Hellenism, but that they’ve resisted to varying degrees the Hellenistic subjugation of the mystical to reason. He also must know that even amongst the Greeks, reason won out primarily in the upper crust, spwaning a kind of ennui that was no help to the Greeks as Rome rose. In any case, perhaps I’ll look at his book again (though Lord knows, Hitchens is just the latest in a long line to argue the point in his title).

I wrote about Jane McGonigal, a professional puppet master, a couple of years ago in a piece for San Francisco magazine that should have been much longer (its clever title was Playgirl). She’s now designing games at the Institute for the Future. About a week ago she put out a new alternate reality game World Without Oil. It’s an intriguing concept and I hope to get a chance to plunge into it soon.

I’ve been brooding over James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia the last few weeks. His message is clear, if somewhat melodramatic, as where he invokes Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. But then, Lovelock believes we are in twilight, that at best some fraction of humanity will survive, likely in subjection to vicious warlords, in some sort of unending Hobbesian nightmare. (For a well-done profile of Lovelock, see Michael Powell’s The End of Eden.)

Lovelock is no technophobe. He supports nuclear power as a clean source of energy, and he is a fan of the idea of space-mounted sun shades and John Latham’s floating nuclei. But he does not like the idea of windturbines and biofuels, which he argues just perpetuate our problems.
He is or has become something of a travelphobe — he thinks we should stay home and use the Internet for entertainment, so we burn less fossil fuel. (At the same time, he argues that most of what we know is from TV and books, and this narrows our understanding of the world.)

Ultimately, he calls for a literate (that is, understandable by non-specialists) book of knowledge, composed on long-lasting paper, so that whomever survives the near-death of the earth will not have to start over.

Lovelock is Malthusian (or maybe Al Gore-ian — though Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is less depressing), though I’m not sure who his Ricardo is (most climate change scientists think things are less grim). But I still find myself wondering what skills I can impart to my children so that they will make it to the Arctic Circle and have a chance to survive. I don’t think I have a whole lot of those skills, myself. I think Global Warming Survival Camp is in their summer future, when they’re a little older.

Niall McKay has a clever new video on carbon offsets, called Skateboarding for a Cooler World. It raises a few more questions than it can answer about the pollution-fighting capability of these, but it is a good quick look at some of the organizations offering these, what they cost, where the money goes and what some of the outstanding issues are.

I went to New York last week to accept my writing award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I won for Grand Plans, a piece I’d written for the Boston Globe Magazine last October on the rebirth of American pianomaker Mason & Hamlin.

There were a number of other excellent pieces that received awards, including an expose on conditions in the gold mining industry by my friend Jonathan Green, and one on the founder of the Curves fitness chain by my friend and fellow Inc. magazine contributing editor Alison Stein Wellner. The ASJA awards list also included several books.

It was a treat to get to stand up and say a few words, and to be able to have several friends in the audience that I could acknowledge for their support over the past few years. Without them, I’m not sure I would still be writing.

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times, To Find the Danger, This Software Poses As The Bad Guys, looks at some efforts to build automated hacking tools, in hopes that they might help reduce the number of opportunities for hackers to break into systems.

L0pht in Transition is a feature I wrote for CSO magazine on the L0pht, a prominent information security research collective in the 1990s. I was interested in them as a symbol for the security industry itself. In addition, I wanted to show something of the hacker as human being, instead of mystery nerd.