Archive for September, 2008

Ishmael and Napolean

Saturday, September 27th, 2008
When I was an undergraduate at UC Irvine, I had a French Lop rabbit named Ishmael, named after the loner good-guy in Moby Dick, who I always related to. The pet shop owner where I bought Ishmael had sexed him for me — “yup, he’s a boy”, she said. Ishmael lived on the enclosed patio of my apartment on Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, about 50 feet from the sand — he’d scratch on the door to come in, he’d do figure eights around and between your legs, he’d jump on your lap to have his ears gently pulled, he used a cat box, so long as you put the box where he was going to go anyways, he chewed my shoe soles thin, and just about anything else chewable, unless you shooed him. My roommate, Steve, and I loved that rabbit. 

Ishmael traveled with me to my parents’ house in Santa Cruz (Aptos, actually) during Summer break, when I was working in the Graphics group at HP. I got a call from my friend Jim, recently graduated from Stanford and married, that his wife (I was their best man), was “making him” get rid of his French Lop rabbit, Napolean (clearly, this all had something to do with attracting women). I drove up in my VW bug and picked up Napolean (these weren’t fragile li’l mini-lops — these were rabbits), and brought him back down to Aptos. Ishmael had been living in the back-of-the-garage-library-turned-bedroom before I got Napolean, but when Napolean came back I put them both in a large enclosed yard at the side of the house (maybe 10 by 30 feet), after insuring that they got on OK (you’ll be able to tell in a moment I really didn’t know squat about rabbits). My little sister Diana was with me when I put the together. Napolean started mating right off the bat, but I thought they were both male, so strong was my faith in the pet store owner. I remember my sister asking something about it, but can’t recall exactly what it was or what I said — stuttered I’m sure, if I said anything.

Over the next month, I’d see Napolean laying around or eating, doing nothing really, while Ishmael worked tirelessly, day after day, for quite a time on a burrow — digging away, pushing dirt up and out, perfecting the entrance. I was dense. One morning before work, I looked out the window and saw 8 or so fur balls hopping around the side yard, with Napolean and Ishmael — I hope that I got it before that, but I certainly got it then. There was only one thing that Napolean ever did that had an analog in human nobility, and I didn’t see it until after the bunnies came — if anyone approached, each and every time, all the bunnies shot into the burrow, then Ishmael, then Napolean. I love that.

I was around a lot of animals as a kid and through adulthood, including monkeys, mainly stump-tailed macaques, that my father and brother saved as members of the Simian Society (http://www.simiansociety.org/), and I still watch animal shows unless there is some cosmology show on… an internal battle … I don’t see males doing what we’d call work in (m)any other species, and I think that its a miracle that human males do substantive work, even to the death — its amazing — given where we come from .. that human males work seems remarkable. We are still in transition though, my brothers.

PS — the best way to sex a rabbit is to put two of them together — if they start fighting immediately, they are both male, if nothing beyond sniffing happens, they are both female, otherwise one is male and one is female, and its clear which is which — NEVER get between two males — yank them apart from above and behind, or better yet, make sure they are both in cages beforehand — you’ll get badly sliced otherwise — I won’t make that mistake again!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Motorcycles, Vulnerability, and Clarity

Sunday, September 21st, 2008
I’ve never seen a motorcyclist experiencing road rage, nor do I ever expect to. If someone cuts me off in traffic while I’m on a cycle I back off and say “Thank God”. I’ve been mildly annoyed, but it dissipates quickly — no mantra necessary. I’m the most vulnerable person on the road, and I know it. There is an awareness, alertness, clarity that stems from understanstanding my vulnerability, not in my head, but in my cells. Moreover, my life depends on the behavior of other people, and I know the interdependence in my gut.  

I think that road rage and carelessness are luxuries of those that are isolated and feel protected by a ton of fast moving steel, though of course, I’m alive and unmangled today because most of the people, most of the time, are not rageful nor careless in their big, scary cars. (But I’ll tell you something — I don’t and won’t ride in Arlington and DC — I get challenged by cars while in crosswalks on foot ! That’s good enough.). But I can’t help but feel the car and SUV people are missing out on something profound.

BTW — it’s said that there are two kinds of motorcycle riders — those that have “laid it down” (how’s that for a euphenism !?!) and those that will. I’ve laid it down three times, albeit at a full and hastily achieved stop (except once, when I forgot that I hadn’t set the kick stand :-O)– “laying it down” at full stop is called “dropping it” — all within the first three months. Thank God I had the opportunity to drop it early — only my pride was wounded :-)

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Ford and Carter on Energy

Saturday, September 20th, 2008
I did a search of “jimmy carter malaise”, as had 92,800 queries (for what time interval?) before me, according to Google, and listened to chunks of three of Carter’s television presentations on energy (2/2/77, 4/18/77, 7/15/79). It’s remarkable to listen to them in light of what current candidates are about … of course, what’s changed since Carter’s time is awareness of climate change, which makes some of the CURRENT rhetoric seem outdated, whereas 30 years ago it was prophetic. For a short (5 min and 41 sec), bipartison (snippets of Ford and Carter) presentation on energy watch   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDYUXVtMM1I&feature=related 

which might motivate a deeper mining of the past.

Ford and Carter spoke in a time when we were, perhaps, potential addicts — perhaps we’ve now crossed that line between cucumbers and pickles, having not heeded their warnings, and it’s now a matter of hitting bottom, acknowleding our interdependence, and embracing our vulnerability.   

I remember congressional testimony months ago, where conservative Republicans were saying that whatever we did wouldn’t matter with respect to climate change unless China did something, then liberal Democrats countering that was humbug and that Americal could lead regardless of what China did — that we didn’t depend on anybody. That conservatives were acknowledging our inter-dependence seemed like the world had been turned upside down — good for them, … as far as they went.

Truth is, countries like Denmark are leading — Depending on how you define leadership, I think that it might be too late for other leaders — the big three or four (China, India, US, Russia) have to follow .. I think that’s what’s so hard to swallow … following, since others are already paving the way. If the big three/four are made to feel that they are leading, so they’ll follow, then thank goodness for the spiritually advanced. BTW — I don’t think that the Dane physiology (for example) is different — but if you lived on the coast and below sea-level, you’d be advanced too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Tarow Indow

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
It’s coming up on the one-year anniversary of the death of one of my favorite University teachers, Tarow Indow: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news_item.php?nid=1546. I met Tarow in my second quarter at UC Irvine, which was my third (and final) university as an undergraduate. I took his memory and cognition class in psychology at the same time that I was taking a computer science course in data structures; one sunny day, as I was walking around campus, it hit me that I could explain something that I’d learned in Tarow’s class — the Power Law of Practice — with a data structure that I’d learned about in computer science. It was one of those ‘Wow’ events! I’m not sure that I was right BTW, but it was still ‘Wow’, and my brain is older now, so who the heck knows — I am open to having been right. I also learned about some concept learning algorithms that matched human behavior in Tarow’s course, and later implemented these algorithms in the computer language Basic (Basic, for gosh’s sake), much to the delight of a later professor. I remember that one project for Tarow was to show that my own enumeration of concept instances followed a Power function — I came across the cassette tape of those enumerations a few years ago … sigh. I remember in class one day, Taraw saying that he could not understand, or that he found it facinating, that a concept learning algorithm (by Bower and Trabaso), which included NO memory of past mistakes, nonetheless accounted for the human data so well, though humans presumably did use memory of past mistakes in learning. It’s reassuring that he didn’t know everything.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Zoo

Sunday, September 14th, 2008
At the urging of my wife, I took the day off — I went to the Washington Zoo. Cleveland Park, one of the Red line stops for the Zoo is quaint and trendy side by side .. I like it. I’ve been to the Zoo before, but still don’t know my way around. I stumbled on the Cheetah exhibit early — it’s off in one corner and quiet (it was a quiet day at the Zoo in any case) — along the walk, written on the wall of the enclosure was a sign just above an orange line on the walkway — an arrow pointed up the walk and the sign said something like “Do you see that orange line down there — a cheetah can travel between here and there in one second. How long does it take you to cover that distance?” I looked and didn’t see an orange line, so I looked back at the sign and thought maybe it referenced the orange line just below it, which made no sense, so I looked again, and WAY DOWN THERE I saw an organge line … jeeeeeezzz.  

When I was about 3.5 I told my father I was faster than a cheetah as we walked our neighborhood in Glendora, CA, at twilight. I remember he laughed and we raced to some mark — I forget whether he let me win. I think that memory is miraculous, so is intellect, consciouness, intention, … people are miracles, and so are cheetahs.

Believe it or not that was the most memorable aspect of today’s outing, though a close encounter with a beaver was a close second. The little guy (gal?) had just come out of the water, and I was leaning over the wall looking at him, and he looked up and we stared at each other for a few minutes, only air between us. Very cool.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off