Cinna the Poet

A New Painting

Here's a new one I did a few weeks ago.  Click to enlarge.

Frans Hals on the iPad, oil on canvas

Tamson with Dialog Box

I was going to paint a portrait of Tamson from life, but then I had an idea to paint it from a photo I had on my laptop.  But instead of just using a photo on my computer as reference, the idea was to paint the entire desktop (windows, dialogs, etc.) and to paint all of that from life.  I'm not at all sure if was a good idea, but It's basically done now and here's how it came out.

(Click on images to see a larger view.)

And here are a couple of photos of the work in progress.  This first one shows the paints I mixed to create the bands of color in the dialog box.  The one below shows it a step later and includes the whole setup, including the laptop I was painting.

 

 

Copyright Evan Simeone, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Yes, We Are Getting Stupider

A couple years ago there was an article in the Atlantic headlined Is Google Making us Stupid?  It got a lot of attention at the time and now the author, Nicholas Carr, has followed it up with a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which is a more accurate title, since it is not specifically Google but the effects of Internet in general that is being questioned.  I haven't read the book yet -- I don't believe it's been released -- but I can set your (softening) mind at ease right now with the answer to the fundamental question:

Yes, the Internet is making us stupider.  This is not to say that it's a bad thing (or good thing for that matter), just a fact about what is happening and will continue to happen no matter how much hand wringing and alarmism we can muster.

The trend toward stupidity is nothing new or unique and the more general trend by which we are weakening is not at all specific to the Internet or to our intelligence.  It is part of the fundamental nature of humanity and our ability to create new technologies.

I would formulate the general rule as follows:

Technology makes people worse at doing whatever the technology helps them do.

But I guess it's better summed up by the quip "invention is the mother of necessity".

Examples are countless, but here are a few random ones in no particular order:

• Matches made us worse at lighting fires with flint
• Books made us worse at memorizing oral traditions, epic poems, etc.
• Cell phones made us worse at remembering phone numbers
• Word processors made us worse at spelling and handwriting
• Shoes made us worse at walking barefoot
• Machinery and modern agriculture have made us physically weaker and fatter
• Telephones have made us worse letter writers

You can take pretty much any invention, look what it helps people do and find a corresponding decline in skill that is its result.  Just picture yourself dropped off naked in the forest and consider how difficult it would be to survive.  We don't always think of them as such, but simple things such as clothes, shoes, shelter and fire are of course technologies that we didn't use to need.  Our early ancestors survived without them thanks to skills and strengths that most of humanity has long since lost.

Now you might say that there's a difference between not being able to light a fire with a flint and not being able to think clearly.  Because the Internet helps us with information itself, relying on it and sacrificing our internal abilities -- our smarts -- is far more serious.

Yes, it's true.  But it's also true something great was lost when, after the adoption of writing, the last generation that knew the Iliad by heart died off.  But that's the way it goes and nobody's complaining that literacy made us stupid, even though in some ways it did.  After all it is not the raw ability of a person in isolation that matters -- the hypothetical naked person in the woods -- but the total capacity of a person in their real environment, with their available technologies.  Matches in fact made us better at lighting fires, telephones helped us keep in touch, literacy helped us tell stories, etc.

Today our real environment is overflowing with constantly improving technology.  The more technology we have available, the faster we can invent more technology, causing an acceleration of innovation that is now approaching an inflection point of radical change.  Sooner than I think most people realize it will alter humanity in ways impossible to predict.  In fact it's already happening.  As it continues to pick up pace we will become more and more dependent on technology and yet capable of doing so much more with its help.  As computer interfaces begin connecting directly with our brains our dependence will accelerate further as will our effective capabilities.  As computers surpass (natural) human intelligence, the distinction between us and our technology may be impossible to discern, or at least will no longer be relevant.

So I guess my point is that on the one hand alarm over the Internet making us bad at reading Tolstoy is overblown because it's part of a trend that's nothing new, and on the other hand it's wildly understated because it is about to lead to the end humanity as we know it.

I'd give humanity as we now understand it forty or fifty years on the outside.

And there's nothing short of the end of civilization -- a real possibility given a nuclear war or some other technology related catastrophe -- that is going to stop it.

Funny, huh?

Does Not Compute

I was a chubby, nerdy kid.  (I'm now a nerdy adult, as you may have observed, though I'm not particularly chubby at the moment.)  When I was seven or eight years old (early 1980's) I learned about computers and how to program.  My dad had been in the software biz since the 60's and was very helpful and encouraging.  I quickly became obsessed with programming and was lucky enough to get a computer of my own around that time.  I won't bore you with details of what computer it was and launch into a good old days story about '80s PCs, as every other nerd seems tempted to do in this context.  But I was good at it and I liked it.  I liked that I could create something, build something with pure logic.  My dad loved that I was interested in computers both because he shared the interest and because he thought it would one day be a valuable skill.  The idea of getting paid to play with computers seemed good to me and so I decided that's what I wanted to do when I grew up.  My future seemed clear and my chubby head swam with dreams of endless geeky possibility.  Artificial intelligence!  Robot butlers!  Video games!

But by the time I got to junior high school, I was sick of computers and thought programming was totally lame.  I was just too cool for that shit.  I had started to grow quickly and so wasn't chubby anymore.  Suddenly I had more friends and girls started noticing me.  I couldn't believe my luck.  The last thing I wanted to do was sit around like some F-ing Poindexter and work on a computer.  I had trouble to get into, girls to flirt with, homework to ignore.  Besides, the fact that my dad liked the idea of me programming computers was now a major strike against it.  Whatever my parents wanted me to do was by definition what I didn't want to do.  (In all fairness, I should point out that my parents always supported my doing whatever I wanted, including being a starving poet if I chose.  This presented a young wanna-be rebel with the challenge of figuring out what they thought would be better or more practical, what they were somewhat inclined towards, in order to determine what not to do.)

Around this time I started getting interested in literature (which for some reason was less nerdy in my mind) and so after I gave up my dream of being a computer programmer I decided I wanted to be a writer instead.  But to be clear, by "wanted to be a writer" I mean that I wanted to have written books, not that I wanted to actually sit down and write them.  That seemed like a pain.  It was work, took time.  So forget it.  In any case, I had stopped programming entirely and forgot all about it.

In college, I majored in English with a "Concentration in Writing" and a minor in Russian Literature.  I considered studying physics or math or computer science, as my dad still encouraged me to do, but I found that at NYU all of those classes were early in the morning, which was an absolute deal killer.  The lit classes mostly started in the afternoon, around the time I usually woke up.  Besides, physics, math and especially computer science seemed so... practical.  I hated the idea of studying anything useful.  I preferred the pointlessness of art and literature for what I imagined were philosophical reasons.  And so all during college I was still bent on being a writer, and still not actually writing all that much.

Once I graduated I spent a nightmare year working at my first real job, the only one my English major qualified me for, as a PR flack at a small firm.  I barely made enough to live on and writing was only a small part of the job.  I was dying to go back to school, so I applied to MFA writing programs and luckily got in.  Grad school was the first time that I actually wrote with any consistency.  I didn't write nearly as much as I should have, but I completed a screenplay and a half as well as a small collection of poetry and a handful of short stories.  Still, I preferred reading and talking about literature to actually writing it.

This was around 1995, just as the Internet was getting interesting.  By chance I had landed a cushy work-study job in the school's computer lab.  For more than ten years, I had used a computer for nothing other than word processing.  I just had no interest.  But in the computer lab I noticed a lot of new stuff.  The Web was something really new and promising.  Suddenly computers, which I had all but forgotten about, were worth paying attention to again. This was mostly a matter of my changing interest but looking back now I believe that computers actually were less interesting during the decade or so between when I was in junior high school and grad school.  Between the dawn of the personal computer in the mid-80's and the advent of the Web in the mid-90's, there just wasn't that much exciting going on.  Graphical operating systems, better spreadsheets, desktop publishing, blah, blah, blah.  Who cared?

Now as a young grad student, I was totally broke, and I started hearing about people getting jobs doing Web programming for a lot of money.  I thought about my lazy writing habits not to mention the abysmal prospect of trying to make a living writing poetry and figured I would make some easy cash with a day job programming computers.  Of course this was exactly the situation my dad had predicted, being a smart and practical man.  By this point I was not such a knee-jerk contrarian to his advice, however, and in any case comforted myself with the fact that I had simply changed my mind.  I had been right all along, but the circumstances had changed.  Before I didn't have to earn a living; now I did.  So be it.

I went out and bought some books on then-modern software development, loaded some programming tools onto my PC, locked myself in my room for a weekend, and taught myself how to program these new-fangled computers.  I picked it up fast because it was was basically the same crap I knew from when I was a kid, but fancier, easier, faster and marginally less pointless.  What really surprised me, however, is that I enjoyed it.  It was work, but it was fun.  How odd!

The Internet boom was really ramping up at that point and tons of jobs were available if you had the right skills.  I had no professional experience at all aside from a part-time job at the school computer lab.  But I understood computers and was a fast and efficient -- if amateurish -- programmer.  I stayed up all night and built a sample program to show to employers and hoped it was enough.

Within a week or so I landed a full-time job at Rational Software doing small programming projects for the product management team.  Yes, my friends and I all laughed at the name of the company.  It seemed like a parody of a tech company.  I'd never heard of Rational, but it turned out I'd lucked into a great entry position at one of the best software companies around.  I wasn't making a fortune, but it sure felt like I was at the time, having subsisted on beer and cereal for the last few years.  It was the perfect place to start in the tech biz and learn the industry, though at the time that was not my plan at all.  I was just looking for a well-paid day job.  Anyway, I took a leave of absence from the MFA program, having by that point completed all the coursework I needed to graduate, but not having yet presented and defended a thesis.

I never went back.

Now, about fifteen years later, I'm an exec at a mid-size software company, running the product development and engineering groups.  I'm good at it and I do enjoy the work.  But here I am, in my spare time, writing this dopey amateur lit blog.

In the intervening years I've written more than I ever had before.  Having a real job that I was actually interested in taught me how to work in a way that I had never really needed to --or been able to -- before, and so I found myself writing at night, cranking out stories, (mostly uncompleted) novels, screenplays and poetry.  But all that is just a hobby, an amateur amusement.  I almost never sent any of it out to publishers and I'm sure that most of it would not be easy to get published anyway.  I have mixed feelings about this, including:

• Who cares, I'm just writing this crap for my own amusement anyway
• Who cares, even if I were widely published, it's not like I'd make any more than I do now
• Who cares, publishing this stuff means thinking about its marketability rather than writing whatever I want
• Who cares, it's not like there is an audience for the Petrarchan robot love sonnets I tend to write, so why not just polish the collection for the proverbial desk drawer, and leave a nice bundle for somebody to puzzle over after I'm dead
• Who cares, getting published just requires sending stuff out again and again, ignoring rejection and being persistent, which seems hardly worth it
• I care!  I care!  I really want to be published!

But what do I really think, what do I really want?  Have I abandoned my dreams? 

Yes, some of them, but then again I've accomplished some of them too.  It's just that I have lots of dreams.  (By the way, writing and software only touch on two of them, I will leave the full spectrum of my dilettante palette to another post.)

So my nerdy ten-year-old self would be thrilled with how things turned out; it's my wise-ass adolescent self who's still waiting for his moment...