When novacaine makes you bi-lingual: My mouth was half numb and full of instruments this morning when my dentist turned her head and sneezed. I'm not up on my etiquette, so I didn't know: was I supposed to try to offer a blessing under such conditions, even though it would have been less a "bless you" and more of a "bwah hoo"?
posted by Nathan at 12:57 PM 0 comments

 
I was on hold with my credit card company yesterday for, as I was told, a customer satisfaction specialist. I thought those kind of people only worked for 900 numbers.
posted by Nathan at 12:55 PM 0 comments

 
Nicholas Kristof's column this morning on ideology and vitriol is a relevant followup to my post last week on ambivalence. What he doesn't address, though, is the conventional wisdom that partisan loyalty is, overall, in decline among Americans. Is that still true? Or are moderates just more decisive now? Or are extremists just more outspoken? (And are liberals really getting more secular and conservatives more religious? I thought the heyday of the "Religious Right" had mostly waned, and more evangelicals voted for Gore than for Clinton.)

That ambivalence posting was prompted by a recent offer I got to write some newspaper op-eds. My problem with op-eds is that I hate the sanctimonious and presumptuous tone in which they're usually written, and which I struggle to avoid myself. Mostly, I hate trying to boil things down into overly simplistic terms. I was reading this interview with my brother-in-law, Stephen Henderson, by the Poynter Institute, which two years ago gave him an award for his editorial writing in the Baltimore Sun. The questioner asks if he's "opposed to editorials that say, 'On the one hand...' and 'On the other hand...'" Steve responds, "That's the kiss of death. ... You've got to get all that out of your mind before you sit down at the keyboard." His point is not that an argument should be boilerplate or take on straw men, just that it shouldn't be muddled. Still, in light of Kristof's column, I think that as long as opinion pieces end up at a solid conclusion, they should do a better job of illuminating the merit of two or three sides if they are to truly serve the public and not just rally an interest group.
posted by Nathan at 12:32 PM 0 comments

 
This week in my B&C blog:
A look back at Take Back Your Time Day, and why our working lives are out of whack (and why more TV watching won't help). Plus: two banks' dubious plea to stop and smell the roses and not worry about money. Also: Shangai's sinking skyline; the Pope's legacy; Unmarried America by the numbers; the social effects of spam and phonecams; George W. Bush, member of Skull and Bones; stiff-arming asteroids, "Armageddon" style; how sonar kills whales; roundup of music and "Matrix Revolutions" reviews; and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE

More on my B&C items this week:
-Quote from the linked story on Skull and Bones:

“The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing I think is designed to give them the sense that, and it's very true, life is short,” says Rosenbaum. “You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution.”

-Re: phonecams: A reminder of the ephemeral nature of gadgets.

-More Matrix: I should have added this Slate story on how the trilology lost its way:
posted by Nathan at 3:50 PM 0 comments

 
• Number of the Day: 2 million
Approximate number by which registered cell phones exceed residents in New York City.
-New Yorker

-Previous Number
posted by Nathan at 3:47 PM 0 comments

 
• Thought of the Day: Does everyone keep to a comfort zone?
Does everyone live in a small world? I'm not talking about the Six Degrees of Separation principle, interesting as that is--which says that everyone is linked by informal and remote relationships (see link below). Nor am I talking about the "global village" supposedly introduced by the Internet. I'm wondering if most people, wherever they live and whatever they do, remain mostly confined to their comfort zone--a well-worn routine of home, work, and back (and maybe a leisure spot or two). We tend to traverse typically narrow paths that cover little ground. Or so I've been thinking, in my first year living in a big city. Even though it's a far larger and more dynamic place than my mid-sized city hometown, with more things to do and better means of getting around, my wife and I tend to inhabit but a slice of it. We can list a respectable number of things we've done in the city--from sporting events to the theater to other cultural events--but for the most part we keep to our familiar patterns and routes of home to her work, home to church, and in my case, just home. I was reminded of this as we flew back from Baltimore after a couple days spent in an unfamiliar locale. As our plane glided over the northern reaches of Chicago, we stared down at the grid outlined by the orange specks of streetlights, and I noted the contrast between this vast tableau and the small beaten path we were searching for in vain; the former unfamiliar (at least from above) and threatening, the latter familiar and comforting. I've been thinking lately that this applies to most city-dwellers; we have our home, our work, our commute, and that is the extent of what we regularly experience of this massive metropolis. It's part of the reason I started my Chicago 101 collection, a photo tour of some of the city's historical spots, including some non-tourist destinations many Chicagoans don't know are there. This is also why I chose to go into journalism--to regularly meet people and go places I ordinarily wouldn't. I think this narrow periphery is also true, figuratively, of travelers--I wrote earlier about how business travelers are numbed by the monotony of airplane cabins and airports, and the same may go for truckers and highways. They cover geographical ground but stay stuck in a groove. Funny how this is true of so many people in so many walks of life even after the last century's revolutions in transportation, information "industries" (replacing manufacturing), and communication technology.

As I mentioned, for me, as I work from home, the boundaries of my periphery are immediate: my four walls. I do have a high-rise view of the city and the horizon, and, by writing about places and ideas, I do mentally connect with a broader world than I might in other professions. But the majority of my living happens in a very small space. I wonder how natural and healthy our patterns of narrow periphery are, and how much they are not. I also wonder about what my friend earlier called the "interior universe." As I read, or listen to the radio, I imagine the place or person being conveyed. As broad as I suppose my horizons are metaphorically, this nonetheless means that most of my engagement with reality happens in my apartment and in my head. Time to re-read what Walter Lippmann said about Plato's cave shadows, and then watch the Matrix again, in order to better worry about this.

• Earlier Thought: The examined life
• Previous Thought: The purpose of ambivalence

• Here's more on the Six Degrees principle from the NYTimes. I also talked about it in my B&C blog here.

Socially, it may be a small world, but it's hard to get from here to there. In the current issue of the journal Science, researchers at Columbia University report the first large-scale experiment that supports the notion of "six degrees of separation," that a short chain of acquaintances can be found between almost any two people in the world. But the same study finds that trying to contact a distant stranger via acquaintances is likely to fail. ... In this global study, more than 60,000 people tried to get in touch with one of 18 people in 13 countries. The targets included a professor at Cornell University, a veterinarian in the Norwegian army and a police officer in Australia. Despite the ease of sending e-mail, the failure rate turned out much higher than what Dr. Milgram had found, possibly because many of the recipients ignored the messages as drips in a daily deluge of spam. Of the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail. As in most social networks, it is not just a question of who knows whom, but who is willing to help.

posted by Nathan at 3:37 PM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: accoutrement\uh-KOO-ter-munt\

1 : an accessory item of clothing or equipment — usually used in the plural
2 : an identifying characteristic

"Accoutrement" and its relative "accoutre," a verb meaning "to provide with equipment or furnishings" or "to outfit," have been appearing in English texts since the 16th century. Today both words have variant spellings — "accouterment" and "accouter." Their French ancestor, "accoutrer," descends from an Old French word meaning "seam" and ultimately traces to the Latin word "consuere," meaning "to sew together." You probably won't be too surprised to learn that "consuere" is also an ancestor of "couture," meaning "the business of designing fashionable custom-made women's clothing."
• Previous E.T.

posted by Nathan at 3:31 PM 0 comments

 
Excerpt of NY Times article for my B&C blog:
-Skip this entry

In recent weeks the devices have been banned from some federal buildings, Hollywood movie screenings, health club locker rooms and corporate offices. But the more potent threat posed by the phonecams, privacy experts say, may not be in the settings where people are already protective of their privacy but in those where they have never thought to care.

"Even simple things like your daily grooming habits around your nose and mouth can be embarrassing if captured by someone else," said James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers who says he has witnessed people being physically threatened for using their phone cameras. "We're moving into an era where there will be almost nothing that's not captured by somebody's camera, and that has dramatic implications for how people choose to live their lives in public."

Legally, the new generation of shutterbugs is probably safe for now. In a public place, the expectation of privacy, which American courts must weigh in evaluating whether a violation has occurred, is assumed to be negligible. News cameras can photograph people in public without their permission, and we have become accustomed to security cameras watching us in elevators, cabs and A.T.M.'s.But ethically, the new surveillance tools seem to puncture a long-held assumption that it is possible -- and often desirable -- to lose oneself in the crowd. And in an image-conscious culture, hidden cameras in the hands of fellow citizens with instant access to a global audience may provoke more outrage than government or corporate surveillance cameras whose images are not shared with the world. ... Camera phones have begun to outsell digital cameras. ...

The object of street photography, whose legacy dates to the invention of the Kodak camera in the 1890's, has always been to capture life as it is lived, and photographers have eagerly adopted technology that would allow them to record it more faithfully. In the mid-1930's, Helen Levitt famously attached a right-angle viewfinder to her 35-millimeter Leica so she could photograph children in New York City neighborhoods without pointing the camera at them directly. But even the most miniature digital cameras require holding the camera up to the eye, signaling that a photograph is being taken. It is the stealth capability of camera phones, combined with their ability to broadcast the image instantly, that some legal experts say may eventually call for a rethinking of privacy laws. ...

-Back to B&C blog
posted by Nathan at 9:24 AM 0 comments

 
Charleston, S.C. cleans up, envies the Big Easy
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/cover_story.html
posted by Nathan at 3:09 PM 0 comments

 
ABC execs try to expose NBC News for the cheesy, fluff-puffed, pseudo-drama operation it sadly is. Tough to do when your morning host is the maudlin Dianne Sawyer. Philly Inquirer TV column:
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/11/15/magazine/SHIS15.htm
posted by Nathan at 3:07 PM 0 comments

 
You call it patriotism, I call it groupthink. The truth is in the middle ground, I guess. Mitch Albom highlights the tensions quite well in a column called "Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity."
http://www.freep.com/sports/albom/mitch11_20011111.htm
posted by Nathan at 11:52 AM 0 comments

 
One of the biggest challenges of the digital age is forming any sense of digital history. What sort of permanent record can be left behind in an age of bytes, when texts are not physical objects but rather unseen bits that can be deleted at the press of a button? A good attempt to assemble a library of old Web pages is at web.archive.org. Interesting to see famous Web sites in their infancy: Yahoo, Amazon.com, New York Times, and ESPN SportsZone. Search at:
http://www.archive.org/internet/
posted by Nathan at 10:58 AM 0 comments

 
It's official: local TV news is a farce. The Project for Excellence in Journalism finds this hype industry exaggerates crime, sells out to advertisers, and is thinned out by budget cuts and over-airing (stations fill the air with "news" because it's cheaper than buying syndicated programming). We had a hunch about this, but it's depressing to see the numbers PEJ put together. For example, one of four stories in local news is about crime.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011114/us/tv_local_news_1.html
posted by Nathan at 10:49 AM 0 comments

 
Do you think in words? Are feelings thoughts? Are thoughts just chemical-electrical impulses bouncing around in the cerebrum like a pinball machine? Or are they somehow more spiritual, more visceral? The question was put to me today and I wasn't sure what to do with it. I guess I don't think in words; that's why writing is so hard--matching verbal symbols to the thought process isn't easy. I see an object or remember and experience and I have an emotional burst within. Often segmented words or phrases will leap up as a part of this, but they're more like chocolate chips in batter. The base is a texture of pleasure or anger, nostalgia or hope. No, thinking isn't just about words. That's why writing can be so satisfying--it's good to pull thoughts out of the oven and see how they turned out.
posted by Nathan at 10:39 PM 0 comments

 
VCR's still outnumber DVD players more than 4 to 1 in American homes, but sales of DVD's are catching up to video tapes:
http://nytimes.com/2001/11/12/business/media/12DISC.html

Our national epidemic: children of a consumer culture ingesting too much sugar, fat, and entertainment. The results aren't pretty, says the Arkansas Times:
http://www.arktimes.com/011026coverstorya.html

posted by Nathan at 2:43 PM 0 comments

 
So much for the liberal media. They really distorted an albeit confusing story about the Florida election recount and vindicated Bush when in fact, the winner, and the correct re-counting method, is really a toss-up. The conservative dinosaur Chicago Tribune surprisingly was most frank about the sketchy results, as Jack Shafer writes in Slate:
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2058638
Trib story:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-ballots.story
posted by Nathan at 1:45 PM 0 comments

 
I'll be using nbierma.com/sampler for most of my links. To read NY Times articles, enter "nbiermaread" for both user name and password.
posted by Nathan at 1:38 PM 0 comments

 
Dizzying world events, mixed emotions. A plane crashes in New York, one of the worst accidents in recent years. And we seemed relieved that it was an accident; we're so fatigued from agonizng over hijackers crashing into buildings that this fails to fully seize us with natural shock and grief. Meanwhile, Kabul falls. We're supposed to cheer, to be glad that the Taliban is disintegrating, that rebuilding can begin. And I am glad. I'm also confused, as is the government, over whether the Northern Alliance really are good guys or only slightly less evil, and whether we're ready to build a stable coalition. Maureen Dowd touches on this pretty well in today's NYTimes. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/14DOWD.html
There's also a part of me that doesn't want us to get too excited about war and how well it works. The more war is made-for-TV, with rapid action and easy heroes, as with the Gulf War and (less so) now with Afghanistan, the less we are apt to hear the cries of the suffering civilians and to be self-critical in this and other situations. That was the only good part about Vietnam and America's response to it. It's been mostly lost in a flurry of patriotism of late. And oh by the way, anyone seen Osama bin Laden lately? He's still alive and well, and if he's not, how will we ever know?

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin visits from Russia, and seems to have an awful lot of leverage with the leader of the free world for an average politician in charge of a limping country. Should be interesting to hear NPR's interview and call-in session with him tonight: http://www.npr.org/news/specials/putin/
Dizzying world events, mixed emotions.
posted by Nathan at 12:08 PM 0 comments

 
Yup, I'm going blog. I've long dreaded doing this, dreaded joining the ranks, as I saw it, of the get-a-lifers who paste the most minute details and random emotions to the Web, wasting screen and storage space. ("Fed the dog at 8 this morning," "I'm in a really pissy mood. The end.") I also hate links without context or analysis, which blogs are full of. But regularly reorganizing and FTP-ing nbierma.com gets time-consuming and I can only do it at home, after a long day of looking at a computer screen at work. This way I can add something in a rare idle moment at work, or just after I get off the subway while it's still fresh on my mind. I'll try to make it worth reading and the links worth clicking, and not just to a niche audience, as with many blogs. I'll shoot for substance and analysis, of which there's way too little on the Web. We'll see how it goes. E-mail me and keep an occasional eye on nbierma.com

posted by Nathan at 11:44 AM 0 comments