Default Views, Part II

You’ll remember last week I wrote about Alan’s students at the CSPA summer workshop, and how they shared in common a set of default views to which they’d never put much thought. You’ll also remember how I said this:

I’m not bringing this up, of course, because I want to make fun of anybody. I could draw up a similar list of tropes that the locals believe without bothering to investigate them. It's just interesting to see the differences. Here, we'd get nothing but big cities are riddled with crime and strife and drugs and hookers and always smell faintly of pee from kids who haven't been to anyplace bigger than, say, Salt Lake City, or any further east than Jackson, Wyoming.

So I spent a good portion of the day today reading my own students’ proposal essays, in which they propose a solution to a common problem. Some of them chose to write on unemployment and, as I predicted, came up with their own batch of commonly-held belief to which they’ve maybe put some more thought than their younger, more liberal counterparts on the East Coast, but which still kinda don’t stand up to the sniff test, if you get my meaning.

Lots on trickle down economics. Lots on getting rid of regulation – even the minimum wage – as a way to encourage businesses to create more jobs and to stimulate the economy and to motivate employers to create opportunities and compete for workers and more of that rainbows and unicorns stuff. It’s like they all were John Stossel acolytes or something.

Again, in their essays as well as their younger counterparts, lots of opinion without fact to back them up. I’m encouraged they’ll work harder in their revisions to fix these errors (one of the reasons I comment on their drafts, rather than leaving my lightning strikes for their finished papers).

Remember Dialup? Not Like This

So this is probably the most weirdly creepy noise I've heard in a long time. And considering I've got a yappy wiener dog, work in the company of whistling marmots, and have kids who occasionally squawk like peacocks, that's saying a lot.

That is, of course, that good ol' dialup sound, spend up 700 times. Here's what it sounds like normally, for those who have never heard it (For those who haven't, this is like the Internet equivalent of sending smoke signals. Yup. I remember the day I finally got rid of that 2400-baud modem. Woo.)

And if you think it's computers that made this sound, boy are you wrong.

Man Without Smartphone

UPDATE: Farhad Manjoo's call in Slate.com for a cheaper iPhone, coincidentally, falls with the announcement that Apple may offer a free iPhone 3G on contract starting in the fall. Still doesn't get me around the ol' monthly charge for cell/data service, however . . .

The only way I could be more backwards – or maybe retro, given hipster affectations for All Things Old Except Politics – in the world of telephony is if I went to the thrift store and brought home one of those rotary dial phones they have there. While I’d look a bit silly toting one of those onto the bus for my morning and evening commute, it would certainly be less expensive (and, yes, less useful) than a modern cell phone.

But I have one of those. Well, modern in the may it cal make phone calls from pretty much everywhere the bus goes (though I can’t make calls form inside my building, too much RF interference from the engineers’ radios next door). I have a randomly-branded and –named dumbphone through Tmobile, pay-as-you-go, that costs us maybe $50 a year.

That’s why I don’t have a smartphone. Sure, I can’t browse the internet or get email on my dumbphone (and I don’t even carry that with me; it’s pretty much my wife’s phone), but I also sure don’t spend $50, $60, or $80 a month for the privilege of having a smartphone to mess around with.

Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, argues that Apple needs to come out with a cheaper iPhone to help the unwashed masses like myself dive into the world of smartphones.

Not so. While I might balk at the idea of paying $200 for a top of the line iPhone if I were interested in getting a smartphone, what steers me from smartphones (and cell phones in general) is not the price of the phone, but the price of the monthly service. I don’t have $600 to $1000 to toss into cell phone coverage for a year. Remember how I said we spend less than $50 a year on our current cell phone? That’s all I’m willing to pay.

Would it be nice to have email and internet capability all the while I’m on the 1 ½ hour bus ride home? Yes, it would. Is it necessary? No. So I look at the opportunity cost and decide I’d rather spend that money on something else.

Ah, many argue – you still have a landline at home. That costs you about $35 a month – $420 a year – plus the at-home high speed internet service, another $360 a year. Yes I do. But don’t compare apples to oranges here.

I could eliminate the landline and substitute a smartphone for it. But I’m still spending more money for phone service. Moving money from one bucket to another and calling it a cost savings (which is what most people tout when they brag they’ve gotten rid of their landline) is disingenuous. And while there are ways to tether cell phones to work as high-speed internet lines, cell phone carriers are clamping down on that – all that internet browsing is cutting down on the bandwidth others might want to use, for, say, making a phone call. So I’d have to retain my at-home high speed internet and pay extra to have an internet-capable smartphone. I just can’t pry the wallet open far enough to do that.

So I will remain smartphoneless. And not unhappily so.

More Good News

Yesterday I wrote about the good news of our jobs not necessarily being on the chopping block for layoffs in September. Today I can provide more good news: The Department of Energy has opted to extend CWI’s INL cleanup contract by another three years.

These two letters, addressed to John Boehner and Joe Biden, respectively Speaker of the House and President of the Senate, from DOE Secretary Steven Chu, began circulating around work at about 10 this morning. Chu writes:

At a time when the Nation is experiencing significant economic distress and job loss, and in light of the President’s economic recovery program to preserve and create jobs, the agency can add work to the existing contract for the period September 2012 through September 2015 and accelerate the decontamination and decommissioning of the Idaho site. Expediting this work also provides significant cost savings in future years.

The Department, therefore, intends to extend the work effort under the CWI contract for work at the INL, without using competitive procedures.

This is good news for us, as our contracted wok is scheduled to dry up this September, at least at RWMC. We’ve still got two waste facilities to build and one to dig in, with some D&D work on top of that. There’s plenty of work to do for the short term.

After 2015, it’s anybody’s guess. There may still be work here for some of us, though not all of us to be sure. This announcement, at least, makes the immediate future a bit more secure.

No, Mr. Adams, No.

I know it’s a popular thing right now to pick on Scott Adams for his Internet ramblings. But when a guy has to stoop to sock puppeting to find defenders for himself when he plants himself in hostile territory, you know you’re stirring – this is a popular Adams phrase – a big kettle of crazy.

So it is with his latest blog post.

But it’s not his fault.

It’s mine. Because I’ve now provided a link to it through my blog where an audience Adams didn’t intend to read his message may now find it.

See, his new message is the concept of “author by location,” which is this (quoted from his own blog post; emphasis his):

I believe authorship - at least in terms of responsibility, not copyright - should transfer when a person moves material from one context where it is appropriate to another where it is not. The same should be true whenever moving material from one context to another changes the message.

As with many logical people, Mr. Adams fails to see the flaws in this belief. Though I can’t blame the guy. He’s stirred up a big kettle of crazy with some feminist bloggers who took umbrage at some of his ramblings. He also kinda contradicts himself in the last paragraph of his post, which reads "This model maintains complete freedom of expression, including freedom to quote material and to criticize. It simply recognizes that moving and changing a message makes you the Author by Relocation."

I agree with the latter portion of his first statement, that in changing an author’s message, the messenger bears responsibility, because the messenger is creating a derivative work. The flaw lies in Mr. Adams’ the first part of the statement in which he implies moving material unchanged from one audience to another shift authorial responsibility from the author to the messenger.

In other words, bringing a new audience into a message makes me the author of his blog post as far as cooling down any kettle of crazy I might stir up by shepherding an audience his direction. That makes as much sense as making Japanese disaster response teams responsible for cooling down the Fukushima Daiichi reactors rather than the nuclear plant experts simply because their radioactive message got spread around by that tsunami. More from his post:

As a writer, you recognize that a huge part of your job is choosing your words to fit your intended audience. When a third party introduces a different audience to your writing, it destroys the audience-matching element of your craft. In a real sense, it changes the product.

Writers should also recognize that they have no control over who their audience is, intended or not. Additionally, this is a phenomenon that existed long before the Internet, which Adams singles out as making this audience transposition by his “authors by location” easier.

While it is true writers may start out writing a piece with a specific audience in mind, once the piece is published – whether in book form or in a blog post or Quattro or a list of theses nailed to a church door – the writer has no control whatsoever over who views that piece, unless he or she puts the piece behind a walled garden and allows in only those whom he or she intends the piece for. That others may come in and read that message and be offended by it – or take it out of its intended audience into a sphere where the original author hadn’t intended for it to be read – does not remove authorship from the original writer in any way, whether the message went beyond its intended audience or not.

I do agree with Adams that if the messenger changes the message by taking things out of context, the messenger then becomes an author because in that case – and this is clearly outlined in copyright law – the messenger has created a derivative work of the author’s original message. The law is clearly on the side of the copyright holder when it comes to someone else making a derivative work of an author’s message.

If, as in Adams’ case, the authors of blogs like Jezebel and The Huffington Post took something from this humble blog, altered it in the translation, and then stirred up a big kettle of crazy in my direction, I’d be understandably upset, as Adams is. But to insist that the mere introduction of an unintended audience to a message not meant for them shifts responsibility for anger over that message from the author to the person who provide the link is ludicrously illogical.

Authorship does not change, however, if the messenger introduces the message to an unintended audience in its entirety. It’s still Martin Luther’s signature on the Ninety-Five Theses whether that paper is nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg or in the hands of Pope Leo X, delivered to him by someone else than Luther.

A Tiny Bit of Light

Though there are clouds of obfuscation that still abound surrounding pending layoffs where I work, a quick perusal of the jobs targeted for the embiggened round of layoffs planned for September does not include technical writers – which is kinda hard to believe, considering we’re kinda disposable in the industry. Any industry, for that matter.

We’re hopeful that the absence of our job code on the list is a good sign, though given we keep seeing the “several hundred people to be impacted” repeated over and over for this coming layoff we’re not saying we’re safe and happy.

Still, a little ray of optimism enters.

What does that do?

Well, it gives me a little breathing space to try to find a better job with benefits. Not that I don’t like my current job – I do enjoy it a lot. Just still can’t shake the feeling that there’s something better around the corner. Still hopeful I’ll get called for an interview at the Space Dynamics Laboratory here in a few weeks. I called them about a week ago and found out they’re interviewing the “senior” applicants in the first part of July, so here’s to hoping I’m in that pool. I’d still like to work there. Drat that Carl Sagan for filling my mind with dreams of space. I know the SDL isn’t exactly JPL, but you know what, it’s a step in the right direction, don’t you think?

So if this tiny bit of light is true and we’re not on the layoff list, that basically gives me another, what, 3 ½ years until the work here dries up. That’s a lot better than 2 ½ months in my book.

Default Views

As you know, I spent a good portion of last week helping Alan Murray edit and comment on a series of assignments he gave to his students at his session of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association's summer workshops. He had about 14 students (some filtered in and out of the group, so I lost count) from various places throughout the east and midwest.

Interesting group. Young, bright, eager, and any other cliched adjective one might wish to applyto the rising (there's that word again) generation.

What I thought most interesting throughout the week, however, was not their ability or eagerness or what have you, but the difference in the default attitudes and assumptions they have, as compared to those of us out West. And it's a bit more than Red State versus Blue State too, you know.

One of them wrote a passionate essay about the evils of farming and the joyful bliss that is an organic farm while demonstrating she'd never set foot on a farm her entire life. To her, all non-organic farms are the evil, gigantic, poorly-lit corporate farms that basically pen up every single animal in as small a space as possible until they're large enough for the slaughter, while organic farms, well, they have these things called paddocks that, well, that's where the organically-farmed animals hang out, sipping coffee in front of an unopened copy of Kerouac, until the inevitable end.

I exaggerate a bit her for comic effect, but the truth remains that they write with verve and passion on the tropes and memes that are just assumed as truth, even though they have done little to nothing to investigate whether they're true or not.

This is the kind of thinking I'm trying to steer my college students away from. For the most part, they are able to do so, not because I'm such a great teacher but because they've got a few years (and, for many of them, a mission) under their belts so they've seen a bit more of the world and experienced a few shattered tropes and memes more than Alan's students.

There's more, of course. One of Alan's students thought himself sophisticated because he could pick out the sexual humor in a Broadway play they saw as a group. If that's sophistication, well, I know a lot of sophisticated thirteen-year-olds.

Then there were all the articles on diversity. Diversity this and diversity that. She grew up in Alabama, but the town wasn't diverse. Columbia is a diverse campus, and the security guard, who got her undergraduate degree there, values its diversity. Diversity, yay!

Of course, it's diversity in skin color and nationality -- but they can't seem to get around to saying that. We're automatically supposed to know what diversity is, and automatically know that diversity=unicorns and rainbows=good. I appreciate diversity. But I know what it is. I can look out on my little dumpy town of Sugar City, Idaho, which is 99 percent white and 99 percent LDS and know that if people who really know what true diversity is, they'll find it here in spades. There's a lady from Uruguay who lives kitty corner to us. A block away is a native Frenchman. I could, of course, list off others -- but that gets to only the easily visible, superficial meaning of diversity. There is a greater diversity of thought, of feeling, that never gets talked about because for most, diversity can't see past the nationality or skin color.

I'm not bringing this up, of course, because I want to make fun of anybody. I could draw up a similar list of tropes that the locals believe without bothering to investigate them. It's just interesting to see the differences. Here, we'd get nothing but big cities are riddled with crime and strife and drugs and hookers and always smell faintly of pee from kids who haven't been to anyplace bigger than, say, Salt Lake City, or any further east than Jackson, Wyoming. 

All of this, of course, inspires me to teach my own kids to look beyond the superficial to see life as it really is, not as the tropes we pick up along the way tell them it is or should be.

Speaking of Marmots . . .

The Perfect Tweet

Yeah, 3,000-some-odd tweets later, this pretty much still sums up how I feel about Twitter.

Fools Following the Marmots and Deer

COMING SOON TO AN UNCHARTED NEAR YOU:

The thing about following game trails is this:

Deer will go anywhere and climb up pretty much anything without giving a hoot or holler for who might follow them.

It might not be deer. The trails we follow as we walk our way to and around Upper and Lower Mesa Falls on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River may very well have been carved by generations of marmots, which are even more mobile and more loco than the deer.

Then there’s the wife factor. Not that she minds following the trails at random, wandering through the scrub under the canopy of pines and quaken aspen. It’s just that she jogs. She’s in better shape than I am. So when I get to the top of a rather steep slope, wheezing and looking for a place to park my sorry carcass, she’s pacing to and fro, fretting in her own kind way: “Come on, I’ve got to keep my heart rate up. That’s the deal!”

Here’s the other deal: If you travel along Idaho’s Mesa Falls Scenic Byway and only stop long enough to see the Upper Mesa Falls, you’re missing a lot of awesome stuff that you can only see when you park your car and follow one of the many trails that lead to and from the two waterfalls in the area and then in random directions, depending on where the deer or marmot wanted to head that day.

We start with a fairly basic trail from our camping spot at Grandview Campground (so called, I suppose, for the fact that from anywhere in the campsite you can hear Lower Mesa Falls tumbling 85 feet through a tight U-bend in the rock to the river below but you can’t really see it unless you head to the lookout north of camp). The trail winds through forests, meadows filled with bluebells and wild daisies, brief stretches of fragrant sagebrush flats and near and far from the canyon rim for about a mile before it merges with the road that snakes down the canyon to Upper Mesa Falls.

My advice: Go visit now. An unusually wet winter coupled with an extremely soggy spring has brought out the green in full force along the trail. I literally have never seen this area so green, and so varied in its greens – the blue-green of sagebrush filling the air with that odd, nostrummy tang of sage and pepper; the bright, eager green of the quaken aspen leaves, the dark, barky green of snake grass and the green of the pine needles, alternating between the spiky green of the old needles to the downy green of spring’s new growth.

Walk slowly through all that green. As you do you’ll see the wild birds the populate the area – Cooper’s hawks, robins, yellow finches and, occasionally, the mountain bluebird. You’ll hear the sharp barky cries of the marmots, calling out to each other as they watch you through the undergrowth. We saw several of them, including a young ‘un, perched on the side of the road watching as we descended to Upper Mesa Falls, watching from a fallen log as we walked the trail back to camp. They probably wanted to know what we were doing on their private highway.

Then there’s the other trail – wilder, steeper, more mysterious. We found it leading from the corner of a tiny parking lot just south of Grandview, where boaters park to prepare their light craft for a strenuous journey down the skid trail to the river. We wanted to find the river so the boys could throw rocks. We never found it. Instead, wandering down that trail that sometimes brought us close to the roar of the falls through the trees and sometimes brought us to spots where the trees swallowed up the roar of the falls completely, we came to a spot where the deer or marmot decided walking along the canyon rim would be a good idea. Mountainous trees to the right, a rocky stumble of volcanic basalt blocks descending fifty or sixty feet to the right.

We opted to turn around. Next time, though, I’m going further.

Next time, too, we’re finding that trail that leads exclusively from the upper falls to the lower falls so we can stand on the butte overlooking that tight U-bend where the water tumbles, living again the axiom science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke put in the mouth of space explorer Robert Kleinman in “Imperial Earth”:

Space is small; only the planets are big.

Our planet is big. We know this as we wander the tiny trails off the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway. We only traveled along those trails for five miles or so and saw not even the tiniest fraction of the entire canyon, where the Henry’s Fork punches through the southern wall of the Island Park caldera to the Snake River Plain below.

Space is small; only the planets are big. And we’re only beginning our explorations.

Getting there: The Lower Mesa Falls overlook off State Highway 47, about ten miles northeast of Ashton, Idaho, is an excellent place to leave your vehicle behind and begin exploring the Mesa Falls area. From the overlook, you can either walk north to the Upper Mesa Falls, about two miles away, or south along the canyon rim past the Lower Mesa Falls lookout, Grandview Campground and on towards Bear Gulch, where other trails, including a rails-to-trails that links Ashton, Idaho, to West Yellowstone, Montana, branch off.

Parking at the Lower Mesa Falls overlook is free. Parking at Upper Mesa Falls isn’t – that costs $10 per carload. Nothing stops you from making the walk to Upper Mesa Falls from the lower falls to avoid paying the fee, however. Potable water and bathrooms are also available at the Grandview campground.

The campground itself costs $13 per night. If you have a second vehicle, the price goes up $6. There aren’t many spots at the campsite, so plan on getting there early – it’s first come, first served.