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In the Port 2525…

May 5th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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Finally got out to Chicago and spent a mad few days visiting family and running errands, after presenting two sessions at the annual conference of the American Society for Indexing in Denver last Friday. I gave the keynote talk and it was well-received—my position that pages are essential and reflowability is a fetish that carries a lot of subtle dangers—but the other talk, which was basically a how-to on getting Windows to work tolerably well, was SRO. People are still struggling with Windows, and when I asked, their reaction to Vista was basically unprintable. I got the impression from their questions after the session that something like Degunking Windows needs to be done again, but covering both hardware and software in the same volume. We did a separate book a couple of years ago called Degunking Your PC, and if I do something again, it will draw on both books. I'm taking notes. We'll see if and where it wanders.

Computer crankiness always seems to erupt as soon as I kick my shoes off and get to work at my Chicago-area satellite office. When I tried to answer some email here, I found to my supreme annoyance that ATT/Yahoo had changed the game again: Simply blocking port 25 and requiring that all outbound mail pass through their SMTP servers was not enough. Now they require that every From: address has to be explicitly registered on their Web site or the SMTP connection to their servers will be blocked.

Screw that. I did a little research based on a fleeting memory that some hosting services listen on ports other than 25 for outbound email, and voila! My hoster listens on port 2525, and after 90 seconds' worth of tweaking Thunderbird's settings, I was able to answer mail again.

Ructions didn't end there. About ten minutes after booting up, my video signal started going crazy. I took the SX270 apart, determined that the insides were squeaky clean and not especially hot, and was scratching my head after seeing the problem persist after a couple of reboots. In frustration I gave the Samsung 204B a hard whack on one side, and the video signal fell immediately back into line. Because the cables were quite tight, I can only assume that the damned thing has a loose connection somewhere internally.

Anger sometimes works, heh.

Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus

Apr 28th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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sent me a pointer to an article by Clay Shirky about the “cognitive surplus”—excess brainpower not needed for making a living. Thought-provoking in the extreme; read it if you haven't already. Shirky's thesis is that free time created by postwar productivity gains have been sopped up by watching TV, and if we watched only a little less TV and deployed that wasted brain-time in collaborative projects, wow! The things we could do! I'm short on time today, so I'll post a few quick observations on the article and the idea here, in the hope for more general conversation:

  • The consequences of the invention of gin are very well covered by Colin Wilson in his book A Criminal History of Mankind. The problem was not solved for 200 years—the urban poor drinking themselves to death was the primary reason for Prohibition—and it's still not entirely clear to me how it was solved. My guess: Universal education and technology (think TV) allowed the poor to entertain themselves in less destructive ways.
  • Do we really watch two billion hours of TV every year, or are TVs simply on for two billion hours? In many households, TVs provide a sort of background noise to prevent too much disturbing silence, but how much attention is paid to the box is a lot more difficult to measure, and I suspect Big Media would prefer that no one try.
  • TV is often watched for the many but very small time slices that it takes to catch the news or weather. Carol and I watch very little TV but The Weather Channel, and we watch it in small chunks of a few minutes a few times a day. It adds up, but converting those dispersed minutes into productive brain-time may not be possible. The problem here is not a shortage of time but a shortage of focus, which is a separate and worthy discussion.
  • Almost incredibly, Shirky does not say much about the immense cognitive energy already spent on collaborative noncommercial cognitive projects. Think Linux and all open-source software, tens of thousands of free ebooks scanned and formatted from out-of-copyright sources (and a few in-copyright sources, like some of mine, sigh) not to mention the work of all those Pixel-Stained Technopeasants who had their day (April 23) last week. This is not new news, though it's good for it to be pointed out now and then.
  • Nor is much said about the general rise in volunteering in more traditional social service pursuits, which by and large are not cognitive in nature. As problematic as I consider some of his conclusions, much good data on volunteering is cited in Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares? Not all time and energy released from TV watching now goes into, or would go into, cognitive pursuits.
  • And the ugly truth that no one seems willing to recognize: A huge percentage of people simply don't have the ability to contribute meaningfully to cognitive projects. This may be by genetics or by adverse circumstances, but it's true nonetheless. I keep thinking that a lot of them, if there were no TV, would go back to gin or to worse things that didn't exist when gin was invented in 1740.

My early conclusion: There's less cognitive surplus than the article suggests, and less upside to be gained by turning away from TV. People inclined to be creative already cluster toward the bottom of the TV time curve, and a lot of the people I consider brilliant don't watch TV at all. There is almost certainly an irreducable minimum number of people who need TV as an anaesthetic, and this number may be higher than we care to admit. Loneliness, clinical depression, and other psychiatric problems dissipate and render useless an immense amount of human energy, and we don't seem any closer to solving those problems than we were in 1740. Those problems may not in fact be solvable, though saying so won't make me any friends.

Still, anything that nudges people away from the box toward creative or collaborative pursuits of any nature is a good thing. My problem at this point in my life is not TV but sleep, since I need ten hours in bed to yield eight hours of useful sleep cycles. The time I used to spend commuting I now spend wondering why I'm not asleep, and if I could lick that problem I would get a great deal more done.