Nationalism is racism

Even back when I was a teenager, I had a hard time with an "Indian" identity.  Not because I was anti-Indian.  Quite the contrary; I have always been proud of the long and rich history of the Subcontinent, and pissed off against the British bastards who screwed us browns.

The political unit of India was where my discomfort was.  I had nothing in common with the people from, say, Nagaland or Kashmir.  I could not understand why such a political union was created.

I was at ease in my Tamil identity.  Because, I was born into it, raised in a Tamil environment, read Tamil fiction, listened to Tamil politicians, ... even as I read English fiction, watched English movies, and loved Hindi film songs.  The comfortable Tamil skin did not, therefore, mean that I would have gone to war to defend Tamil Nadu. It is not as if I would not have ditched my old passport in favor of an American one.

I have always been suspicious about cries of nationalism.  How could an accidental birth determine everything political?  Once, I remarked about the accidental birth making me a Tamil Brahmin; the remark did not go well at home ;)  When people are wrapped up with such accidental identities, well, of course people do not welcome such remarks.

Over the years, the flag-waving nationalism has gotten me quite worried.  The backdrop of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany always remind me that flag-waving mobs don't work out well for humanity.  Yet, here we are in the age of trump where he and his 63 million couldn't care about other nationalities.  America first!

Reading the Economist's interview with Mario Vargas Llosa was, therefore, therapeutic and encouraging.  He says there:

I believe that the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism. These ideologies have become completely outdated. But in contrast, nationalism is a defect that is always there under the surface and above all, at moments of crisis, can be very easily exploited by demagogues and power-hungry leaders. Nationalism is the great tradition of humankind; unfortunately it’s always present in history.
And so, I believe that it’s the great enemy of democracy. It’s the great enemy of freedom and a terrible source of racism. If one believes that being born into or forming part of a particular community is a privilege, then that is racism. I believe that one must fight nationalism energetically if one believes in democracy, in freedom, especially in this age of mixing and the building of great blocks.

The interview wraps up with this comment from Mario Vargas Llosa:

I think I have achieved something that I aimed for at a young age, which was to be a citizen of the world. The truth is I feel at home in France, in England and in Spain. Wherever I am, as long as I can write, I feel at home.

If only the American presidency is used to channel such lofty ideals!

Oxford Blues

The title of this essay in the NY Times magazine immediately drew me to it: A Lynching’s Long Shadow.

A few descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, who was lynched by a mob in 1935, try to learn about what happened back in Mississippi.  Higginbotham was "one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas."

The essay's timing is not any random occurrence.  Thanks to Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, "the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice" has opened in Montgomery, Alabama.  As Stevenson puts it:

We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.   

Perhaps the current president would shrug his shoulders and exclaim that there were fine people on both sides.  He would even fault the late Higginbotham for having brought this upon himself!  Other than him and his 63 million voters, the rest of us want to honestly engage with this dark past and reconcile.

Stevenson points to the German experience on truth and reconciliation:

“In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”

It is a shame that we do not have a national museum on slavery.  It is a disgrace that we do not even want to engage in honest discussions on this "original sin."  Discussions that can, once and for all, lead to reconciliation instead of the continuing simmering of those issues. 

In the essay, I came across a reference to a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone.”  I searched for and read it on a website, and will wrap up this post with that poem:

Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone
By Birago Diop

Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut,
they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the fire that is dying,
they are in the grasses that weep,
they are in the whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,
the dead are not dead.

At the Whitney Plantation

It is not an American Carnage?

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” declared trump after he took the oath of office of the presidency.  He won not by painting a picture of optimism and rosy future but through grim portrayals of immigrants, Mexicans, blacks, gays, minorities, other countries ...

His rhetoric and actions have caught on all over the world, perhaps demonstrating in an ironical manner how much America is indeed a beacon to the world!

Why the rise of trump and trumpism when life has never been this good for humans?

So why is that we – mostly in the developed world – often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future?

Yeah, why?

Apparently, "the gap between individual optimism and national pessimism is getting larger."

One tip comes from the observation that, according to studies, the gap is larger among people who have more exposure to news media. And the media – certainly social media – tend to emphasize the gloomy and the gory over the sunny and the sublime. Good news is not news, media executives often mutter. And it takes just a minute on Twitter or cable news to confirm the old adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Depends on the media that we are exposed to.  The media that I read, watch, and listen to reinforce my understanding that we humans have never had it this good.  Even in the US, will women want to live in the 1950s that trump seems to think was when America was great?  Will blacks want to re-live the 1950s?  

Does one want a reminder on the awful conditions in China in the 1950s?  Or how poor South Korea was even compared to North Korea?  

Once we systematically look around the world and examine the evidence, there is no denying the fact that life has become immensely better.  Which means, it is not exposure to the media but exposure to some kinds of media that is the problem.

Add to this a second psychological bias neuroscientists are discussing: because our species has evolved to fend off danger, we tend to be more sensitive to bad news. We react more acutely to pictures of starving children than to reports of improving nutrition levels in Africa. And, of course, we tend to remember those horrible pictures much longer.

trump tapped into these emotions.  American Carnage, he declared.  Only he can make everything alright, he claimed.  63 million voted for him!

never mind what people’s daily experience at home and work suggest; just keep repeating that business elites or immigrants or foreigners are making things worse – much worse! – and sooner or later voters will believe you.

What a shame! 

Cooking things up

The kitchen has always been a magical place for me.  Maybe because I started hanging around the kitchen right from when I can remember.  Why wouldn't I with all the awesome aromas and the chance to taste dishes and sweets and snacks right off the flame?  Oh that taste of butter that was churned right in front of my very eyes!

The excitement of the magic hasn't worn away even one bit.  I try, in my own ways, to create that magic and share it.  But, I know well that I am a part of a tiny minority.  We are practically an endangered species.  Barely ten percent of Americans love cooking.  Barely ten! "Only 10% of consumers now love to cook, while 45% hate it and 45% are lukewarm about it."  We can expect a lot more of the percentage to shift from the lukewarm category to hate.

It might seem bizarre that fewer amongst us like to cook even as the number of cooking shows has significantly grown, along with a tremendous growth in the number of people watching those shows.  "our fondness for Food TV has inspired us to watch more Food TV, and to want to eat more, but hasn’t increased our desire to cook."  Most people are mere spectators watching those shows, similar to how they are spectators when it comes to many other forms of entertainment--from wrestling to football to reality shows!

The trend is one in which people opt to buy prepared meals--the prepared ones in the grocery stores or made-to-order in restaurants.  People don't even brew their morning coffee at home, it seems like.  Why else would there be long lines at coffee kiosks?  At this rate, homes and apartments of the future might not even have to "waste" space for kitchens!

I wonder what people do with the time that they have from not spending it on shopping for groceries, preparing meals, and cleaning up the kitchens.  Is Facebooking and Instagramming that much a valuable use of time?  The government's "time use survey" from 2016 gives us an idea:

Notice how small that bar is across "household activities"?  Let's look at the breakdown of that category:

Food preparation and cleanup registers at barely half-an-hour a day, on an average.  At that low average number of hours, the best one could do is warm up frozen burritos in the microwave!

Oh well, I suppose this is yet another aspect of life in which I am out of step with the majority.  Time for me to have some home-made food ;)

More on us dumb fucks!

In a number of posts, like in this one where I wrote about the dumb fucks that we are, I have been worried not merely about Facebook, but about the the Frightful Five, as Farhad Manjoo so wonderfully described them: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

The country and the world have kind of sort of started worrying about Facebook. But, we have not even started looking at the dangers that these five, and other rapidly growing AI companies, represent.

Consider Amazon:

Of the top 10 US industries by GDP (information, manufacturing non-durable goods, retail trade, wholesale trade, manufacturing durable goods, healthcare, finance and insurance, state and local government, professional and business services, and real estate), Amazon has a finger in all but real estate.

Amazon is everywhere.  And knows a lot about you and me.

 What makes Amazon so frightening for rival businesses is that it can use its expertise in data analytics to move into almost any sector.
“Amazon has all this data available. They track what people are searching for, what they click, what they don’t,” said Greer. “Every time you’re searching for something and don’t click, you’re telling Amazon that there’s a gap.”
Amazon knows where you live, who you live with, your current location (if you use an Amazon smartphone app), what TV shows you watch, what music you listen to and what websites you visit.

Remember, for instance, how Amazon swiftly moved in and bought Whole Foods?  It was not a whimsical move.

When Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocery chains’ stock prices crashed. Two months later, when Amazon announced it would cut Whole Foods’ prices, grocery stocks plummeted again. The meal kit maker Blue Apron’s stock price fell 11% after the news that Amazon was filing for a meal kit trademark. A vague announcement from Amazon that it was collaborating with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway on some kind of non-profit healthcare venture sent healthcare stocks on a downward slide.

What's good for Amazon might not be good for us though.

“The algorithms are designed to serve up things that best serve Amazon, steering us to some books and not others,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “You have a company that can shape whether a particular author is able to find an audience, and whether they can even get published.”

The algorithms effectively create a world in which you don't even know what you are missing.  “Amazon is just getting started,” said [ Tuck School of Business professor Vijay] Govindarajan.

The manner in which we politically govern the problems is not equipped to deal with the rapidly evolving technologies.

Amazon’s business strategies and current market dominance pose anticompetitive concerns that the consumer welfare framework in antitrust fails to recognize.

Instead of addressing such complex issues, we have a narcissistic megalomaniac who tweets about Amazon and the US postal system.  What dumb fucks we are!

Brain Drain?

The internet was in its infancy, back when I joined graduate school.  Major research universities were connected, of course, and there were plenty of groups that were focused on specific topics.  One of those groups was soc.culture.indian, which was about all things India--from cricket and politics to movies and cooking.

One of the more frequently passed around and commented posts there was about the "n+1" syndrome that apparently affected plenty of students from India.  Those ill with this syndrome will typically tell themselves, and their friends and family, that they would return to India in "n" years.  And, with every passing year, with various life changes, that "n" continued to remain the same number, however.  The "n+1" was about the mind that was conflicted between staying in the US versus returning to India.

I had no such conflict.  And if anyone asked me about my plans, I added my own funny line.  "It is a country with hundreds of millions of people.  They are not going to miss me."  Ha ha.

Intellectually, there was the interest in brain drain.  If the talented leave, then what about the development of the country?  And, what about the investment the country had made in those who leave?  Should there be a tax on the incomes of these expats?

It has been more than three decades since.  The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world:

India has the largest number of persons born in the country who are now living outside its borders. The number of Indian-born persons residing abroad numbered 17 million in 2017.

That is to be expected from a country whose population exceeds that of the population of the entire African continent by a 100 million people.  Let that sink in: India's population is greater than the population of the entire African continent.

I am an Indian-born person, though an American citizen for a long time.  Most Indian-born persons living and working outside India carry only Indian passports.  Their connections to India means that there is one heck of a money flow from the expats to the home country.  How much do the Indian expats send home?

India retained the top position as recipient of remittances with its diaspora sending about USD 69 billion back home last year

69 billion dollars.

I tell ya, they don't miss me one bit!  My exit was no brain drain; as the old joke goes, with my move from India to the US, maybe I even simultaneously increased the IQ levels in both countries ;)

The appified life!

The pace of criticism of our computer-driven existence has picked up a great deal.  Which means the damn thing is happening way more than I can imagine and understand!

Consider, for instance, MealTribes.  I hadn't even heard about this until very recently. Recently as in yesterday!  MealTribes is an app that helps people connect with others and get together at potlucks to make friends.  Technology, which created our lonely existence, is now being tapped into for young people--who might have hundreds of virtual friends, but are lonely--to get out into the real world and connect with real people.

Founded by 28-year-old Jared Gold and some friends in 2017, MealTribes bills itself as “a better way to authentically connect with peers nearby.” Prospective diners create a profile on the online platform by answering a brief questionnaire, with some optional questions not unlike those you’d find on a dating site: Are you a “nature lover,” an “advice guru” or a “chef”? If you could live as any person for a day — dead or alive — who would it be? Users then sign up online for either a weeknight dinner or weekend brunch, with six or seven strangers.

An "authentic" way of connecting:

MealTribes is capitalizing on something else, too: the so-called “loneliness epidemic” we’re all supposedly experiencing as urban millennials, though we’re way too cool to admit it. 

Such is life in this algorithmic world!

Algorithms not only are used to connect with people in the real world, but also to shape our tastes--from what we "want" to wear to the trendy foods to whatever:

This impacts not only the artifacts we experience but also how we experience them. Think of the difference between a friend recommending a clothing brand and something showing up in targeted banner ads, chasing you around the internet. It’s more likely that your friend understands what you want and need, and you’re more likely to trust the recommendation, even if it seems challenging to you.
Maybe it’s a particularly shapeless garment or a noisy punk track. If you know the source of the suggestion, then you might give it a chance and see if it meshes with your tastes. In contrast, we know the machine doesn’t care about us, nor does it have a cultivated taste of its own; it only wants us to engage with something it calculates we might like. This is boring. “I wonder if, at the core of fashion, the reason we find it fascinating is that we know there’s a human at the end of it,” Pieratt says. “We’re learning about people. If you remove that layer of humanity from underneath, does the soul of the interest leave with it?”

I wonder how the question of "what does it mean to be human?" will be answered in the coming decades.  Come to think about it, I would rather not know!

Shut the front door already!

Remember this?

Source

Or this?

Source

We in the US did not care. 63 million elected a guy who lacks even a drop of empathy.  The fate of Syrian refugees is not what he and his 63 million toadies worry about.  As long as the safety nets are torn apart, the natural environment is destroyed, and non-whites are shoved into the corners where we belong, well, their mission is accomplished.

Of course, the refugees being Muslims makes it all the easier for the 63 million bigots to close the door, even though the Syrians are not dark-skinned as most of us from shithole countries are.  So, more than a year into his monarchy, er, presidency:

In the last years of the Obama administration, the US resettled tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. When Trump took office, that number plummeted — partly because of the 120-day “refugee ban” that prevented nearly any refugees from being brought into the US over the summer of 2017, and partly because of specific scrutiny facing refugees from several countries, including Syria.
The result is that the US is on pace to resettle fewer than 100 Syrian refugees in the fiscal year that ends September 30. And it might not even be that many.

We might not even resettle 100 refugees this year.  Not even a 100 out of the more than 5.5 million Syrians who have fled the country!  

The global refugee crisis is, by some measures, worse than ever. And the Syrian civil war, and the world’s response to it, is a big part of why. Syria accounts for 24 percent of the world’s 22.5 million refugees recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. (Before the war, Syria had about 21 million people, or 0.3 percent of the world’s population.)
But what truly distinguishes the current refugee crisis is that now, more than ever before, refugees are likely to remain displaced for years or even decades, instead of being able to either return home or be permanently resettled in a third country.

The 63 million bigoted bastards "fundamentally don’t believe that there is such a thing as the “global refugee crisis."  Exactly what their religious leader advised them to do, right?!

Source

The Silicon Slimeballs

Yes, I did it.  But, the larger problem isn't going away anytime soon.

I speak of Facebook, algorithms, and AI.  We are but only at the very beginning of it all!

It is not Zuckerberg the person, the programmer, the entrepreneur that is the problem.  It is his techno-fundamentalism:

Zuckerberg isn’t a cynic; he’s a techno-fundamentalist, and that’s an equally unhealthy habit of mind. It creates the impression that technology exists outside, beyond, even above messy human decisions and relations, when the truth is that no such gap exists. Society is technological. Technology is social. Tools, as Marshall McLuhan told us more than fifty years ago, are extensions of ourselves. They amplify and distort our strengths and our flaws. That’s why we must design them with care from the start.

And what can/should be done?

To chart the way forward, Zuckerberg has few effective tools at his disposal. He should be honest about their limitations—if not for his company’s sake then for ours.

Hah!  Imagine Zuckerberg or anybody else in his position being honest!  Hah!  The Silicon slimeballs are increasingly a threat to us all.

AI is severely limited:

At its heart is an assumption that historical patterns can reliably predict future norms. But the past—even the very recent past—is full of words and ideas that many of us now find repugnant. No system is deft enough to respond to the rapidly changing varieties of cultural expression in a single language, let alone a hundred. Slang is fleeting yet powerful; irony is hard enough for some people to read. If we rely on A.I. to write our rules of conduct, we risk favoring those rules over our own creativity. What’s more, we hand the policing of our discourse over to the people who set the system in motion in the first place, with all their biases and blind spots embedded in the code. Questions about what sorts of expressions are harmful to ourselves or others are difficult. We should not pretend that they will get easier.

To think about these limitations, to address them, will require technology developers (and users too) to think about all these, which requires an education that is much broader than merely about technology and the pursuit of profits.  Instead, we are doing everything we possibly can to destroy any semblance of a broader understanding.  We prostrate to the market gods!

What a fucking disaster :(

The musician and the intellectual

There is no enemy; there is the American principle of free debate; fighting against an invented enemy is wasteful; fighting for ourselves and one another is constructive, is sharing—otherwise known as love.

That quote is from a bygone era.  It is from Leonard Bernstein.

Some of us still hold on to those dear values and "because of that love I feel more than ever the compulsion and responsibility to re-examine our automatic enemy-concept."

Bernstein was no ordinary musician, but a deep thinker too.  People might have disagreed with him, and plenty did, but he was not an uninformed lunatic.

I was reminded of Bernstein, and his commitment to music and social justice, when a couple of items blipped in my news feed.  They are in the context of TM Krishna's latest book.

TM Krishna is, of course, not a new topic here.  Like Bernstein, Krishna is far from an ass.  A thinking musician who boldly and loudly speaks out on India's troubling issues of caste and religion, he has been well recognized, including with the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

Krishna writes:

There are some who wonder whether an artist has to be loud and open about art’s divisiveness. ‘Can we not just do this quietly, in the way we make art and not announce it to the world?’ Yes! It is distinctly possible, but the danger in this hide-and-seek is that the art world has an instinctive ability to snatch from undeclared counter-movements its energy of questioning.

"Qui tacet consentire videtur. Silence is acquiescence," reminds Bill Kristol.  Quietly is not an option.

I agree with Krishna that "any social change begins with personal conflicts."  It is easier to philosophize in the abstract than it is to look within.

Krishna relates the personal to the causes that he champions.

“For me, they run together,” he says. “Projects related to issues go parallel with traditional concert work.” 

I applaud the man.  There is hope for the old country in people like him.

The machines have won :(

Ever since I started thinking on my own, following something that somebody lays down as a rule has been difficult.  I don't want to merely follow orders.

Now, increasingly, it is not humans ordering us what to do and what not to do.  Machines do that. Algorithms are the enforcers.  It scares the bejesus out of me.

It is not that I don't care for the comforts that these machines provide.  It is awesome that. for instance, the heater kicks in automatically at five in the morning and warms up the home before I get out of the bed.  But, I worry that most of us are mindlessly yielding to computers.

As we transfer agency to computers and software, we also begin to cede control over our desires and decisions.

That loss of agency worries me. It has always worried me.  Agency is what I have always urged in my students too.  I have even semi-seriously joked that my view of college education is to make sure we don't create automatons out of students, and that I want to make sure they can think.

But, automatons we are rapidly becoming.

Already, many people have learned to defer to algorithms in choosing which film to watch, which meal to cook, which news to follow, even which person to date. (Why think when you can click?) By ceding such choices to outsiders, we inevitably open ourselves to manipulation. Given that the design and workings of algorithms are almost always hidden from us, it can be difficult if not impossible to know whether the choices being made on our behalf reflect our own interests or those of corporations, governments, and other outside parties.

I feel like it is a lost cause.  The battle, the war, has been lost.  A few of us jumping up and down shouting about these won't matter--most are not even listening to us.  Heck, they don't even know we exist!

I often argue, as I did even yesterday, it is all about making conscious decisions about "the trade-offs inherent in offloading tasks and decisions to computers."  Agency.  " If we don’t accept that responsibility, we risk becoming means to others’ ends."

We humans are becoming more and more like machines. We are becoming robotic, even as robots are getting better and better.  And that means:

it will be increasingly impossible to distinguish between humans and robots because of our machine-like behavior as much as robots’ human-like features. And could this eventually become the norm, with humans spending their entire lives acting like machines?

I am sure that even now many amongst us will fail the “Voight-Kampff test," which in Blade Runner was used to "assesses capacity for empathy, a human facility that even the most intelligent androids lack."  How else can one explain the election of a man completely devoid of empathy as the President of the US!

I did it!

After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

DAMN! April is the cruelest month

I looked up the news on the Pulitzers.  There is no way I could have ever expected this:

[Kendrick] Lamar is not only the first rapper to win the award since the Pulitzers expanded to music in 1943, but he is also the first winner who is not a classical or jazz musician.

A Pulitzer for a rapper. A Nobel for a singer-songwriter. The times they are a changin'.  Poetry and music, too, are rapidly being transformed like every other aspect of our lives.

I have heard the name Kendrick Lamar.  But, I have no idea about his music. A CNN opinion piece helps me out:

Lamar is providing anthems for revolutionary millennials across the country, in much the way that Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" sounded an anthem for the civil rights movement.
Like Simone, the roots of hip hop are absolutely political.

Damn!

I looked up a review of Lamars' album that the Pulitzer recognized:

Two of the most striking examples of this recur throughout “DAMN.” In one, Mr. Lamar samples Fox News commentators responding to his 2015 uplift anthem, “Alright,” with derision, including Geraldo Rivera’s suggesting that hip-hop is worse for black youth than racism (and Mr. Lamar addresses Mr. Rivera directly on “YAH.”).

Political, damn!

But, I am frankly at a loss to understand and appreciate this music.  I tried a couple of them, including this.  I suppose I might not know what it is all about, as much as I know not about most things in life?

At least this poem I can understand:

Source

We don't know shit!

When people ask me what economic geography is about, one of the examples I give them is what I refer to as a big-picture question.  And that is: Why are some countries rich and some poor?

People always get excited about this example.  Their response is typically along the lines of "wow, I had no idea that geography includes such topics.  I would love to take your classes."

What I don't tell them is this: Don't ask me for the answer on why some countries are rich and some are poor because, well, nobody knows!

We can fairly easily explain why a country is poor.  That is not what I mean.  But, how to place a country on a path of sustained economic and social growth?  This continues to be a mystery, as it was to me when I began graduate school more than three decades ago.

The Economist addresses this metaphorical elephant in the room:

Economists have precious few hard facts about growth. They know that sustained growth in GDP per person only started in the 18th century. They know that countries can become rich only by growing steadily over long periods. They know that in some fundamental way growth is about using new technologies to become more productive and to uncover new ideas. Beyond that, almost everything is contested.

That's what I don't tell people when they ask me about economic geography.  We don't know shit!

But, this is too important a question for us to ignore. The fact that we don't know shit does not mean that we give up.  Why?

A clearer understanding of how growth happens, and why growth-boosting institutions sometimes wither or fail to take root, could raise the living standards of billions of people. The economics of growth should therefore be central to the discipline, even though the questions it poses are objectively hard, and the answers rest more in history and politics than in elegant mathematics.

Note that dig about "elegant mathematics"?  One of the reasons that I chose to go far away from from the economics folks is because of their worship of the math and statistical models, which really don't give any credible answer.  Yet, that is how the academics play their game.

The Economist wraps it up with a valuable advice:

Until they can give better answers in this area, economists should speak with greater humility about how this structural reform or that tax change might affect long-term growth. They have not earned the right to confidence.

Like I said, we need to admit that we don't know shit.

But then, Que sais-je?!

The big uneasy

(I will send a final version of this to the editor)
*********************************************

The annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which was held in New Orleans in early April, was an opportunity to further my understanding of slavery. Despite my intellectual explorations into understanding slavery and its continuing impacts on life in America, I, like many, have a tough time wrapping my head around the notion that human beings were bought and sold over many decades, and treated worse than animals. In this venture, The Big Easy, as New Orleans is referred to, was far from being easy.

After the United States banned transatlantic slave trading in 1808, the domestic trading and forcible relocation of human beings became even more important for the Deep South, whose cotton and sugarcane economy depended on slave labor. As in Solomon Northup's story, which was brought to life in the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave,” even free men were kidnapped from the north and brought to the plantations in the South.

Northup was one of the more than 100,000 humans who were bought and sold in New Orleans, including in the French Quarter, which is now one of the well-recognized tourist spots for food and music. While most of the city, including the French Quarter, even now lacks public memorialization of this dark past, there is at least one plaque—at the intersection of Esplanade and Chartres—that reminds us about the very spot where Northup was sold.

We as a country have never truly come to terms with the true horrors of the buying and selling of human beings and the atrocious treatment of slaves and, therefore, the racial dimensions of contemporary America. Perhaps that is also why we do not have a national museum dedicated to slavery, even though we have national museums devoted to many other aspects of American life.

Thanks to the personal commitment and financial backing from a New Orleans attorney— John Cummings—the Whitney Plantation, located about 30 miles outside New Orleans, is now a museum that is focused on slavery and the lives and deaths of slaves. The plantation was started in 1752, and later became one of the most profitable sugar manufacturers and exporters, with the slave labor working in sub-human conditions in the fields. Visiting the museum, which was opened to the public in 2015, was a painful reminder of the violence and brutality of the institution of slavery.

In this context, a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should worry us all. The report notes that our schools are not dealing with the “hard history” of slavery. In its research, the SPLC found that “high school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions.” It is always tempting, of course, to speed through the awful past and to spend more time on heroes and heroic moments. But, who we are today is not disconnected from the ugliness of the past.

Here in Eugene and in Oregon, we are no exception. Behind the reputation of Oregon as a deep-blue progressive state lies the undeniable fact that not too long ago it was a crime for blacks to be merely present here. Far removed from the Deep South, and yet Oregon along with Indiana had the highest per-capita membership of its population in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

A couple of years ago, I went to the Mims House in downtown Eugene, after reading about it in this newspaper. When CB and Annie Mims came to Eugene seventy years ago, they could not find housing within the city because black families were not allowed to live within the “whites only” city limits. Eventually, the Mims were able to buy property on the “other side” of the river.

Now a monument of historical importance, the Mims House provided safe boarding and lodging to blacks who were denied services in town. The long list of notables who stayed there includes Louis Armstrong, who was born and raised in New Orleans. The Mims House was the only place where people like Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald could stay when they came here to perform. The echoes of slavery and racism were heard loud and clear across the continent, even here in Eugene!

As the SPLC notes, teaching and learning about slavery “requires often-difficult conversations about race and a deep understanding of American history. Learning about slavery is essential if we are ever to come to grips with the racial differences that continue to divide our nation.” This is a difficult conversation that all of us ought to be engaged in, whether it is in the Big Easy or in Eugene.

Trading places

As a kid, and as all kids do, I often compared what I was given to eat with what my siblings and cousins were given.  And, almost always it seemed like I was given a raw deal while others had it good.

When I complained, my mother and grandmothers always said something like "look at your plate and eat, and stop looking at other plates."

It was much later in life, as a real adult, that I understood its value as a lesson in life itself, and not merely about food.  The grass, as the saying goes, seems greener on the other side.

As we grow older, we experience more and more evidence along those lines, which is why mothers and grandmothers respond that way.  I am now old enough to be a grandfather and if a kid whines like how I did, I wouldn't have the patience that elders showed me, and would be temped to yell at the kid for being a whiner!

Consider the case of Junot Díaz. 

His short stories in the New Yorker have been some of my favorites.  Díaz is only a few years younger than me, and has achieved wide recognition as a writer.  from the Pulitzer to the MacArthur genius fellowship, he has stacked up awards that would be the envy of most and not just me.

His plate seems overflowing, compared to mine.  If I were a kid, I would complain that life has been unfair to me.  But, I know better.

What I didn't know was that his plate did not merely contain all those awards and fellowships.  The plate has stuff that nobody would ever want!:

I was raped when I was eight years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted.
After he raped me, he told me I had to return the next day or I would be “in trouble.”
And because I was terrified, and confused, I went back the next day and was raped again.
I never told anyone what happened, but today I’m telling you.
And anyone else who cares to listen.

Oh. My. God!

As if the repeated rapes weren't enough, the lifelong trauma of it all, which messed up his interactions with people and his ability to have meaningful relationships.

The older I get, the more I understand and realize what a fortunate life I have had.  My plate is overflowing.  It has always been overflowing.

I did it my way?

Over the years, I have had quite a few students exclaim in classes that they are visual learners or auditory learners. Using these justifications, students have attempted to explain to me why some of the learning materials, or my approach to teaching, did not work for them.

I have always politely nodded my head and moved on.

Left to me, I would have engaged them about where they got such notions that they were visual or auditory or whatever.

Until today, I had no idea such sorting was being done on a large scale in K-12!

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Everyone was special—so everyone must have a special learning style, too. Teachers told students about it in grade school. “Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format,” said Central Michigan University’s Abby Knoll, a PhD student who has studied learning styles. (Students, meanwhile, like to blame their scholastic failures on their teacher’s failure to align their teaching style with their learning style.)
Either way, “by the time we get students at college,” said Indiana University professor Polly Husmann, “they’ve already been told ‘You’re a visual learner.’” Or aural, or what have you.

Oh my!  I certainly understand that there are different ways in which we present information and convey advanced knowledge.  We read ideas that were written down. We listen to lectures. We watch videos, even of lectures.  But, does such multiplicity does not mean there are different learning styles; "a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another."

Unfortunately, such crap has rapidly diffused all over:

The "learning styles" idea has snowballed—as late as 2014, more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed it. The concept is intuitively appealing, promising to reveal secret brain processes with just a few questions. Strangely, most research on learning styles starts out with a positive portrayal of the theory—before showing it doesn’t work.

As I often remind students, almost always what appeals to our gut feeling is wrong.

What do successful learners do? "really focus on the material."  Yep, there is only one formula--focus on the damn learning materials instead of blaming the materials that do not match with "my learning style."

Oh, btw, if you really want to remember what you learnt, stop binge-reading, and give your brain time to process what you just read.  Take a break after reading this blog-post ;)

Me too!

Despite the best efforts of many, the gap between the numbers of rich and poor college graduates continues to grow.

To which all I want to say is this: Duh!

In guarded and polite ways, I have on many occasions asked students over the years: My university awards BA degrees, and so do the flagship university, the university where I earned my PhD, and Harvard.  Are all these BAs the same?  If some BAs mean something more than other BAs do, well, what is the point of awarding those "lesser" BAs?

Of course, not all BAs are created equal; some are more equal than others.  The gap between the more-equal BA graduates and the less-equal BA graduates means that people will seek the more-equal BA, right?  Who are the children who end up at these more-equal colleges?

The wealthy spend tens of thousands each year on private school tuition or property taxes to ensure that their children attend schools that provide a rich, deep college preparatory curriculum. On top of that, many of them spend thousands more on application coaches, test-prep tutors and essay editors. They take their children on elaborate college tours so that their children can “find the right fit” at schools with good names and high graduation rates. Enrollment strategists at these same schools seek applicants from areas where the data they buy confirms that income levels and homeownership are high.

At the end of the day, "the odds against children who come from families earning the median income or less actually graduating from college seem to grow more formidable."

Creating a true meritocracy in higher education would require serious, politically daring changes to our housing policies and the tax code, neither of which seems likely in the current climate. Yet people of means (and I include myself here) are complicit in a system that seems unable to stop itself from extending privileges to the privileged.

Yep, the privileged group includes me too. 

Over the years, I have blogged a lot about these issues, and have even authored op-eds--like this one in 2009.  Yes, 2009.  In that op-ed, I wrote:

[While] it is a wonderful ideal that the sticker price of higher education should not prevent any Oregonian from pursuing knowledge, we ought to recognize that knowledge, like most things in life, has costs associated with it. ...
Thus, it is a no-brainer that when state governments decrease allocations for higher education, universities are then forced to suddenly increase tuition and fees — even if that were not in prior plans and even if it means disastrous public relations.  The lack of state funding has, therefore, resulted in the shifting of the cost burden onto students and families. ...
[If] dramatic reductions in state funding are now making it more expensive for students to attend public universities, what happens then to the original notion to ensure that Oregonians do not walk away from higher education because of lack of money?

In all the op-eds, however, I intentionally never raised the uncomfortable question that I have sometimes asked students: If some BAs mean something more than other BAs do, well, what is the point of awarding those "lesser" BAs?

Stayin' Alive in The Wall

I have forever blogged about creativity in the time of advanced computing.  Routine tasks can be translated into algorithms--even facial recognition, yes.  But, creativity?

There is no formula for creativity.  After all, if there is one, then that can be written up as an algorithm, right?

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.

All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why I fully resonate with the following:

Machines are already superintelligent on many axes, including memory and processing speed. Unfortunately, those are the attributes our education system currently rewards, with an emphasis on learning by rote.
It doesn’t make sense to me. Part of my job as an investor is to attempt to predict the future – I need to make bets on the way we’ll be behaving in the next two, five, ten and 20 years. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking.
We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area.

The system in K-12 and in higher ed increasingly make no sense to me.

As an example, think about how music comes about.  And then think about such remixing:




Of course, there is a lot more to creativity than to music alone.

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area. Science and maths, which are often considered uncreative, have shaped human history with huge creative leaps. It was creativity that allowed Newton to discover gravity while observing a falling apple as he was thinking about the forces of nature.

Tell me something that I have not been yelling about!

Oh well ... nobody cares :(

Here is Sir Ken Robinson, whom I have quoted a lot when it comes to creativity:

Philosophers wanted?

Senator Marco Rubio has done a 180.  Yet again.  The guy reverses his positions on so many issues that I can't understand how he is not a prize-winning contortionist!

This time, it is about philosophers.

In 2015, Marco Rubio decisively alienated the philosopher voting base by suggesting that philosophers would be better off as welders.
“Welders make more money than philosophers,” the Florida senator claimed during a Republican presidential debate. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
...
Now, it seems, Rubio has flip-flopped on his assessment. He is in favor of philosophical thinking, he announced to Twitter.

I made fun of philosophy 3 years ago but then I was challenged to study it, so I started reading the stoics. I’ve changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both! Vocational training for workers & philosophers to make sense of the world. https://t.co/ahww7lxN8p

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 28, 2018

All these remind me of my op-ed from two years ago, which was a slightly edited version of this blog-post:

“School teaches you only to be better at school” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment. The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

In a highly entertaining and sarcastic TED talk back in 2006—way before “TED talk” became a part of the common regular vocabulary—Sir Ken Robinson noted that “you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” The student, too, was channeling Robinson’s point. Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists out of students, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value-added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that it is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The myth persists, despite all the research, that there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others are. That is, of course, the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs—like elementary school teaching. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best—unless one wants to be a college professor.

Even the composition of the academic credits towards a college degree gives this away—for instance, while a minimum of 180 credits are required to graduate from Western Oregon University, a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it differently, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be easily wrapped up within a year and a half.

Preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important—skills like writing, thinking, researching, and more—are gained through a broad array of topics outside of one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about as well.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young—and, hence, the country’s future—the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than a geography major, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers . Instead, society—especially the faculty and administrators across Oregon’s colleges and universities—needs to carefully monitor whether students are mastering those skills that are prized by employers. Else, it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Paging the pied piper!

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladle’s,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

A charming tale, we thought. As kids, we tried memorizing the verses. I, for one, failed in that attempt.

We never imagined worrying about rats again though!

An uptick in urban rats has homeowners frantically trying to figure out ways to thwart infestations.
"It is a bad year for rats," said Dana Sanchez, wildlife specialist for Oregon State University Extension Service. "Eugene and parts of Portland are experiencing a noticeable increase. It could mean there are more rats or it could be evidence that people are providing more habitat."

Yes, Eugene is one of the worst-hit cities.  Why?

[The primary culprit is] the prevalence of chicken coops, compost piles and backyard gardens around Eugene. They noted that weather and increased development also can be factors.
In 2013, city councilors relaxed regulations for urban farming. The change increased the number of chickens that a resident within city limits can have from two to six. In addition, a resident now can have up to six chicks.
Robin Morrison, branch manager for Bug Zapper Pest Control, said the chicken coops, compost piles and fallen, rotting fruit are a magnet for rodents.
“That’s like a free buffet for rats,” he said.

Backyard chickens, thanks to the maniacal locavores and a few carnivores insisting on "humanely killing" animals. 

It is increasingly a problem all across the country.  Thanks to which it is not only rats that we worry about, but also significant health risks:

In the United States, contact with backyard poultry is associated with hundreds of multistate salmonella outbreaks every year.

This is nuts!

[Cities] need to carefully consider their backyard chicken regulations and develop strong legal frameworks that protect animal and human health and welfare. 

At last the people in a body
To the town hall came flocking:
"‘Tis clear," cried they, ‘our Mayor’s a noddy;
And as for our Corporation--shocking
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
For dolts that can’t or won’t determine
What’s best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you’re old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we’re lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!”

People, who don't need people?

Two years ago, the university where I work invited interested faculty members to self-nominate themselves to serve on the Strategic Planning Committee.  Given my interests in higher education, and given that the directions that the university sets through this committee will be in place until I retire or am fired, I nominated myself and provided evidence of my track record in thinking above and beyond mere courses and the small little bubbles in which most discussions are trapped.

Of course, I was not selected to be on that committee.  What do I know about higher education, right? 

In a brief thank-you email after receiving the notification that also included the list of faculty named to serve on the committee, I added a sentence that I hoped would make them all think about the committee's composition:

BTW, it seems kind of odd that faculty membership does not include any "people of color" as they say ;)

It was not diversity for the sake of diversity that I pointing out, but was instead about the need to think of the demographic reality.  Strategic Planning is about consciously developing specific action items for the future.  The demographic future of the country is in beige, the 2042 that even comedians joke about.  Oregon is notorious for not knowing how to deal with diversity, whether based on the superficial skin or on religion.   Especially Islam.

Everybody is talking and writing about Islam and the Arab world and Muslims.  The more one delves into the news, the more we realize we don't know anything about Islam, the Arab world, and Muslims.   It is bizarre that we are madly against something about which we know nothing!

Edward Said covered all these and more in his Orientalism.  Naturally.  Said had plenty of profound observations on the distorted--and intentional at that--understanding that the "West" has about Islam and the Arabs.

The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution

In a lengthy essay after his book was published, Said wrote--keep in mind that this was in 1980:

 If you were to ask an average literate Westerner to name an Arab or Islamic writer, or a musician, or an intellectual, you might get a name like Kahlil Gibran in response, but nothing else. In other words, whole swatches of Islamic history, culture and society simply do not exist except in the truncated, tightly packaged forms made current by the media. As Herbert Schiller has said, TV’s images tend to present reality in too immediate and fragmentary a form for either historical or human continuity to appear. Islam therefore is equivalent to an undifferentiated mob of scimitar-waving oil suppliers, or it is reduced to the utterances of one or another Islamic leader who at the moment happens to be a convenient foreign scapegoat.        

If that is the case with the average literate Westerner then do we need to even wonder why there are plenty of Americans today who eagerly embrace the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric from the likes of trump!

Even at the university, the numbers of students from Saudi Arabia and their families have not been strategically used as opportunities to truly understand "them."  Instead, it seems that my university, like many others, merely continues to treat the foreigners as revenue sources, which is not that different from the "scimitar-waving oil suppliers" caricature that Said was upset about. 

Do you remember when ...

I love my mindful existence, which is why I tend to even remember events and people that I should have forgotten for my own well-being. 

Memories.  As the fellow-traveler in Costa Rica remarked, "when you are lying nearing your death, you cannot take your car or house or clothes.  You have only your memories with you when dying."

These days, thanks to technology, people think they are creating lots of memories when they take a gazillion photos and share with a gazillion friends via the gazillion social media platforms.  But, are they really memories?  Or is that mindless documentation?

In the old days, when we rarely took photographs, we were later able to recall the emotions of the moments when that was clicked.  A family group photo triggers various memories from that day.  The photo from a trip decades ago practically brings back the smells and sounds of the place. If you were nude sunbathing back in the day, then it was definitely a rare photo, before this age of nude-selfies and sexting.  Every one pretty much knows when those clicks happened.  Heck, we remember plenty that were never even photographed, right?

So, yes, the mere fact that a lot more photographs are being taken now does not mean that more memories are being created.  That is mere documentation.  And it is virtual.  To make things worse, what happens to all those virtual memories?

Every day about 300m digital photographs, more than 100 terabytes’ worth, are uploaded to Facebook. An estimated 204m emails are sent every minute and, with 5bn mobile devices in existence, the generation of new content looks set to continue its rapid growth.  ... Yet we overlook — at our peril — just how unstable and transient much of this information is.

I bet you have experienced that "transient nature" yourself when the site or the link does not exist anymore, or when whatever you had saved a while ago cannot be opened by the new software.  What happens to your "memory" in that case? 

The first step to forming a lasting memory is to pay attention. Without attention, our brains won’t store the sensations we experience in the world around us.
The brain stores long-term memories by linking neurons. The stronger the memory, the stronger the connections. These neurological connections link all the sensations that form a memory: what a scene looked like, what it felt like, what it smelled like.
But if we’re not paying attention — if we’re not even getting information into our short-term memories — nothing will be stored long term in our brains.

Duh!  I have been saying these for a while now.

At the end of the day, it’s just hard to know what the optimal balance of internal memory and tech-aided memory should be.
But if we want to hold on to certain memories, it’s going to take some mental effort. It means paying closer attention to our surroundings. It means using our cameras mindfully to focus on the details we truly want to remember.
It means putting down the camera for a few moments to notice what the air feels like, what the streets smell like, and writing down our feelings about being there.
Smartphones can help with this process: They can store information and serve as memory cues to help us retrieve it later on. But we can’t offload everything to them.

The more technology keeps developing new things, the more I am inclined to make sure I will have the real, tangible, documentation to augment my memories.  Still, I take comfort--even delight--in the fact that most of my memories are secure in a vault in my brain.  I will take those memories with me in slightly more than two decades.  You can try to make sense of the virtual memories that I will leave behind ;)

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