Journal Entries
Ode to Email
Posted Jun 21, 2001
Oh, to live in cyberspace,
to join an electronic race.
With lightning speed and matchless grace
I'd zip my thoughts to everyplace.
Alas, I live in nature's place
condemned by entropy to waste
to useless energy in space
encrypted, truly, with no trace.
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Latest reply: Jun 21, 2001
The real purpose of the brain
Posted Jun 14, 2001
Brain as hot pudding
I've been doing some neurological research lately (actually more like gedanken experimenten) and have made a breakthrough in discovering what I now believe to be the true purpose of the brain:
It's no coincidence that we lose 90 per cent of our body heat through our heads. That's because our brains are really just heat sinks for the rest of the body. Does your body feel okay? Is your temperature at or near normal? Then rest assured your brain is working perfectly.
I'm also led to believe that all thinking is really just an illusion, probably an accidental by-product of the convective heat currents in the brain. So, Blondie's song: "Fade Away and Radiate" is really about death, although it should have been titled "Radiate and Fade Away."
A friend objects that my theory leads us to the testable conjecture that hard thinking should generate lots of heat, and really hard thinking might turn us into fire hazards. A piffling objection.
My other musings about the brain also take me down joyful paths. Some scientists in Britain recently concluded that the old maxim: "We only use 1 per cent of our brainpower" is not even remotely true. According to their biophysical, biochemical and bioelectrical investigations, our brains are being used at 70 to 80 per cent capacity. For them to work better, we would need many, many more synaptic connections, and axons as thick as our wrists (there may be a link after all between head size and smarts).
Well, that set me to heat-currenting about the meaning of it all. What it means is that our brains are already working at or near their top level. This is as good as it ever gets. And by extension, whatever you do is the best you possibly can. And that means you never have to worry about measuring up because every moment you simply exist is a personal best.
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What's all this about pudding? It seems that if you whip up
a batch of your grey matter, it has about that consistency.
So long, fellow pudding brains!
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Latest reply: Jun 14, 2001
I think that I shall never see…
Posted Jun 14, 2001
A digression concerning human understanding
SOME TIME AGO, on one of those inexplicably cold and stormy spring days in New York that seem to follow improbably hot ones, I was trudging up Broadway, little knowing the length of digression I was getting myself into before making the life affirming observation this great, broad avenue had prepared for me.
Broadway is a quintessentially New York street, if, by New York, you really mean Manhattan. It runs diagonally from near Battery Park at the southern tip of the island, to 79th Street on the classy Upper West Side; from there it straightens and aligns itself with the rest of the rectangular grid of north/south avenues extending from 14th Street to 181st Street and beyond. This grid is the largest part of Manhattan and, but for the odd crossways lurch of a wayward street, it's a cartographer's wet dream of regularity.
Travel the length of Broadway, and you will see almost all that Manhattan is: the old (but mostly updated and thriving) Financial Section fades into Chinatown, which segues into the Lower East Side and the East Village, two areas on the cusp of decrepitude and fashionability. This whole area developed long ago, without the aid of planners. Streets twist, turn, angle and suddenly end, or change names in the most reckless, mysterious and human way.
Near 14th Street, Broadway caresses the eastern boundary of Greenwich Village, notable for its music clubs and toleration of eclectic lifestyles. Above 14th Street, almost the whole of Manhattan is regular, charted, and fully knowable, and it's here that Broadway crosses through Grammercy and Murray Hill, old toney districts now gradually being squeezed by commerce to the west and decrepitude to the east. Now, Broadway angles its way through the sleaze-in-transition area of Times Square at 42nd Street. Now that Sony and Disney are here, the transition from sleazy to respectable is almost complete. But I still think of it as an arrow aimed at the heart of New York's famous Theatre District. And, considering the close association down the ages of theatre and the sex trade, the juxtaposition seems appropriate.
Still angling, Broadway heads to a slightly seedy neighbourhood around Columbus Circle, at 59th Street, where discount books, inexpensive hotels and cheapo diners nestle: an enclave of the demimonde on the fringes of greatness. Just to the east, lie some of the world's most expensive shops and hotels; just to the north is the Grandeur of Lincoln Center for the Arts and the Splendour of Central Park -- New York's most valuable refuge where, when the weather turns hot and muggy, any and all cooling greenery is welcome.
Once Broadway noses out of the Upper West Side, you're on the fringes of Harlem, more particularly Spanish Harlem, which, apart from the odd blighted section, is a lively, thriving and welcoming place. It is not the fearsome hell-hole you might think if you paid too much attention to the media and the movies.
Anyway, here I was, digression over, trudging up the west side of the block between 11th and 12th Streets, and for some reason paying attention to the gratings. One of the peculiarities of New York streets is that those with subways running under them have extensive sidewalk gratings every block or so, to ventilate the subways and keep the ever cheery mass-transitters from suffocating. These gratings seem familiar to me. As a young boy, I remember movies, books and comics featuring other young boys striving to extricate a quarter from one, using a long stick and a piece of freshly chewed gum.
The gratings, you see, open to a rectagular pit, a metre or so wide, nearly half a block long, and anywhere from one-and-a-half to five or six metres deep. How deep depends on how far below the street the trains run. The heavy metal grid is wide enough to snare high heels, bottle caps, gum wrappers, and whatever spare change hops out of your pocket when you take out your crumpled wad of bills to see what kind of meal you can afford. They also collect their share of the tons of dust, debris and grit that falls on Manhattan every day. And, of course, the rain.
So here was I, peering into the depths when I spotted, of all the unexpected things looking back at me, a leafy green sumac sapling. It had reached up nearly all the way to the sidewalk, snagging stray beams of light and feeding off New York sludge. From its size, and the time of year, I judged it to be at least two years old.
Looking into still other gratings, I saw more saplings, half a dozen in all. This was more than a mere symbol of spring! It was a harbinger of the supremacy of nature over anything mankind can do to thwart, tame, or destroy it. It reconfirmed my sense that, for all our technical and intellectual attainments, we are a puny, late addition to the life of this planet. If we turn our backs, even for a moment, Mother Nature starts reclaiming what she has lost. That may inspire some among us -- the Trumps, the Rockefellers, the technocrats -- to extra vigilance. But it just plain inspires me.
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Latest reply: Jun 14, 2001
teamster
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