Tag: BBC

Lost art of typing

The BBC has a piece on Japan Love Affair with the Fax Machine. Older population has gotten used to that technology (which allows for hand-writing). For years, I have used email except for  Thank-you notes in writing. I can reasonably predict that even typing (as we know it) will be a lost art (speech recognition will be in) I-pad, I-phone replacing IBM Selectric.

The late Andy Rooney was seen inseparable with his typewriter. So was American literary giant, Norman Mailer.

Something about the man and his tools. We think as we type. The neurons are hard at work, one character at a time. The sound of those banging keys is rhythm to our ears, which then reflects each thought. A feedback loop. We know you are out there in the ether. And that you are lonely. We, writers, are too. Awake at night, half-sleep during the day. We are commanded by sudden thoughts. We are mere instruments and Irises.

Via fax, chat, text, tweet and type, we send out an SOS. That we were once here, alive and breathing, waiting for validation. Each, with love, hope and fears.

Love unceasingly. Hope never fails and fear as basis for survival.

We invent, reinvent and reshape this known universe in our likeness (while we are byproducts of earlier version).

Confined, reduced and restricted, we try to liberate ourselves by any means we can. We imitate others, read their works, copy their findings and their maps.

From Magellan to Mandela, we know they are out there, not taking injustice sitting down.

Yes, some did not play by the rules. But most do.

In the end, humanity benefits and makes progress as a whole.

Rilke advises the young poet that he should dig deep inside, where it’s dark and vulnerable.

We each carry that river of doubt. About our tomorrow, about the unknown and unfamiliar.

We want change and continuity at the same time. We are paradoxical.

A little progress, yes. But not too much. Because new pieces of hardware displace old ones, we end up making frequent trips to the Salvation Army or Goodwill, where their electronic section kept piling up with industrial waste. Among those, the fax machine.  Somewhere along the way, I hope to run into an IBM Selectric. CSI of the future will learn that our civilization once have a love affair with bulky stuff, fax machines made in Japan, and used in Japan.

Imagine, again

By now, we all have seen the picture of Congresswoman Giffords, in glasses, recovering from a near fatal shooting. Let’s rewind to 1980, and imagine John Lennon with that same  “luck”.

I can only see Lennon as the nemesis during the 80’s, if not again during the Iraq war.

We would have been stronger, not weaker, in the presence of harsh critics.

It would be a test, to see if the draft (Vietnam) itself was the main driver behind war opposition.

On the arts side, we would probably have seen Lennon in various designer’s sunglasses. Perhaps Paul and John would have played together at the marquee of the Ed Sullivan theater in New York City.

Thirty years is a lot of time for an artist to stretch his imagination, expand his vision and mature in his expressions.

If the US hadn’t been innovative enough, it would never be even with government mandate.

Creativity came from within. Intrinsic,  not forced or legislated.

I propose this time, not “American in Paris” as in the last century, but “American in the Orient”. Come to learn, not to loot. Columbus set a bad example and precedence (among the unintended consequences is tribal casinos, a legalized form of taking back what’s been taken). As of this edit, the Chairman of Blackstone did just that: offering scholarships for American to come to China and learn about China.

We watched in amazement as the head of an investment fund in Vietnam gave an interview on BBC, answering in Vietnamese, his second language.

http://bbc.in/kpiHH7

His obvious competitive advantage.

Britain might or might not have planned it, but the Beatles and subsequent ” British invasion” , have accomplished much more than all the germs, guns and steel. Soft power in the age of declining monarchy.

Artists and musicians connect at the emotive level. Memoirs and white papers are for PR folks. We got our Gaga on the ” edge” since she was “born that way”, or Madonna who had admitted long before Paris Hilton appeared on the social scenes that she was “a material girl”.

But then, I couldn’t have come up with a better plot than reality itself.

By shooting John Lennon, Mark Chapman forever became a publicity parasite, dangling on the looming shadow of a great artist and icon of all time .

I don’t know where John Lennon is today (we will all find out by default), but I do know every time I hear those piano notes from Imagine, it brought me back to that scene, with me waiting, under a tree, with my heart beating fast (puppy love).  Every generation has to come to terms with its own illusion and delusion. Mine happened to be eclipsed by war. One thing I know, time went faster when you lived in the extremes. Yet even then, we took time, to dream, to love, to hope and to imagine.

And John Lennon, shot down, but not out, helped us along.

I cannot imagine a scenario for Imagine 2.0, because one cannot mix oil and water, analog and digital. Genius and talent came once in a life time to grace us with their combination of the 7 notes. Can’t legislate that. Being outside of the box, we don’t have to be told  to “think out of the box”. What one sees depends on where one stands.

East-West shopping

Retailers in Europe figured out a way to push merchandise in this time of austerity: shop in your underwear, leave fully clothed.

Meanwhile, a reporter from the BBC went to Hanoi to learn about another way of shopping: buying paper clothing for the dead (old Hanoi, pho “hang ma”).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h35lv

That’s how different East and West is. The only way to deal with trade imbalance is for Western countries to export designer “paper clothes” to China and Vietnam, so people can trade up in matters of ancestral worship.

(given that most textile imports to EU and US have been from these countries). When it comes time for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I miss my deceased parents, and the opportunity to buy them a Fathers Day, Mothers Day card.

If in Vietnam, I would be given another shopping opportunity for them: gold leaves and US dollars, all in paper, to be burned at their graves.

At the very least, I can burn an incense .

Filial duty. One of the highest virtues.

Another one is to gift your teachers on New Year.

Now with online education and home schooling, there is less human interaction . Some virtual math tutors are connected from India, the same way we reach call centers  for tech support.

It’s the best of times (to be learners) and the worst of times (to be teachers).

Characters and learning (now defined as information soaking) are decoupled.

Hence, the Confucian way of modeling characters (Tien hoc Le, Hau hoc Van i.e. first learn characters, then literature) to mold and make mandarins is phasing out.

A bunch of us know full well that those coffee servers (who wear skimpy outfits) in Vietnamese enclaves earn multiple times their customers’ income.

When in Rome, dress like a Roman.

Maybe this Black Friday, Wal-Mart can avert its earning decline by posting a sign that says “come as you were born, and leave fully clothed”. Its puritanical root in Benton, AK probably prohibits this. But those European stores already did , with much fanfare and press coverage. All these campaigns put VIrgin‘s Branson (whose airline launch was the talk of the town) in the back seat. Each generation must come up with a creative-destruction. Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake the proverbial survival tree (societies who hunt in pack figured out different ways to eliminate the unfits).

Hang in there ole friends. Live young and together in the West, die old and alone in the East (where Father’s Day and Mother’s Day extend well beyond the grave). That’s the only way to end the story. Alone again (naturally).

flat “pyramid”

Viewed from above, the Pyramid in Egypt looks flat,  almost origami-like. And viewed from where I am sitting, the 18-day Revolution looks protean: leaderless, collaborative and spontaneous.

Although not the first to use Twitter ( Iranian post-election was), last week’s protesters showcased coordination and team work only digital natives can pull off.

First, they understood the power of organization i.e. the means (self-organized citizen patrol),

the mode (social media) and the manner (being kind to soldiers, just stop short of ” wearing some flowers in your hair”).

Second, they staged their demonstrations to appeal to Western media, their conduits to the developed world, Mubarak‘s entrenched base of support ( note the use of sound bites, and visual symbolism e.g. burned effigy).

Third, collaborative model. They built tents in the square, make-shift first-aid stations etc… like  Woodstock without the mud slide.

And they were young, urbane, well-conversant in English ( to offer comments on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera).

The tipping point was when their expat counterparts flew back to join them while Westerners, American “non-essential” community, were evacuating for fear of the worst .

In The Future Arrived Yesterday, the author argued for the Protean Organization (boundary-less with a soft core). To unseat the Pharaoh who sat on top of the Pyramid takes a lot of thumbing (texting) (in 1989, they had to use electric saws to cut down the Wall).

This youth revolution, despite being leaderless, wasn’t disorganized. Its flat “org chart” was in contrast to the traditional command-control style.  It accommodated many sub-cultures (tech, youth, urban, westernized, pro-democracy) and world views, secular and religious. Their future arrived not a day sooner.

In all, they managed  to un-brand the leader (dictator) and throw a red carpet in front of the new flat pyramid for Nobel-prize winners from abroad and Muslims albeit Brotherhood Muslims at home, and any one in between (including a Google executive).

Even the author of the World is Flat was taken by surprise when he witnessed his ideas jump off the page into the middle of the Square, Tahrir Square.

Where have they gone?

Subtitle “Time to remember”.

When I was in high school, the consumer society began to take shape in Vietnam: beer, cheese, cigarettes, toothpaste and vinyl music albums. Then we moved on to AKAI tape.

By the time I got to the US, the first item I purchased was a portable cassette recorder

(to record music from home, not knowing that someday, they could be digitized, compressed and downloaded).

We used Super 8mm for home filming, and Sony 3/4 inch field recorder for news gathering (some stations still hung on to 16mm film, but this required dark room, which slowed down news processing) while college roommates wouldn’t let their  8-track player out of sight.

Audio Editing back then required one to cut the tape by a razor and scotch-tape it back.

And computer time at the lab meant sitting in the hall with punched cards in hand. Those equipment are now museum pieces. Gone also were names like Zenith and RCA. (BTW Samsung is getting into Medical Device space ).

We have tried so hard to deliver goods and services from point A to point B.

Encoding and decoding the content, medium-agnostic e.g. tin cans, message in the bottle, pigeons.

(in today’s term,  “dumb” phones).

Learning in an analog age was cumbersome e.g. researching a subject (Dewey system) and tabulating the findings.

I posted a BBC clip about the Joy of Stats. The professor was able to show case 200 years of progress in 4 minutes. Comprehensive and captivating.

3-D holographic presentation sure beats the transparencies of the overhead projector (whose bulbs got hot and burned out quickly, often times, in the middle of the spill).

Or the slide trays which “sync” pulses on music tracks, and we called that multi-media.

It is hard for today’s teens to comprehend the pre-Google pre-YouTube age. And just for amusement, we can show them a picture of mobile movie box (often on bicycle). I spent a large chunk of my allowance on those Charlie Chaplin clips with head stuck inside the dark drape.

The kids I hung out with, Pierre, mixed French and Vietnamese, Ali, Indian and other half-breed French kids in the neighborhood. where have they gone? And the technology and tools I was used to, where have they all gone as well.

To be sustainable, we will have to do away with resource-intensive tools.

And to accommodate a larger crowd on spaceship Earth, we will have to learn to negotiate in this new economy of hope.  In San Francisco, they are now testing a car-sharing model with many benefits e.g. help pay the bills, reduce CO emission and require less parking space.

If you come to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

And marvel at the Golden Gate Bridge, which still stands uncontested throughout the rise and fall (and reinvention) of Silicon Valley. That I found reassuring. A bridge from point A to point B . It’s still there, so is my resolve to cross it.

 

Boiling point

I was often jolted by the two popping pieces of toast, or when my coffee started to boil.

That last degree in Celsius makes a difference. Conversely, a frog in slow warming water loses its reflex.

The consequences of an over-industrialized world are over-production, and surplus labor/consumers who can’t afford or absorb excess production. “Boiling” factories, but “slow-burned” workers.

When work is moved off-shored, or, as in current wars, gets outsourced to private contractors, we start seeing reverse migration into America‘s heartland like OK and TX, where unemployment rates are more manageable.

Our attention is on the Korean miracle. Rise from the rubles.

Lean and mean machine.

I have yet met a fat Korean in all my years.

And I have met many of them, starting from my early age at kung fu classes, onto Wilshire Boulevard in LA, and most recently, in Vietnam and stop-over at a Korean airport.

The people work hard. Young people start playing hard too.

Now, the problem is keeping up without driving themselves to suicide.

(This is in line with a BBC report on G-20 background piece).

So, we have seen volcano erupted.  Economy that heats up. And we have seen decline in North America, even in traditionally hot states like CA , NV and FL. In fact, studies show Utah is now a rising star (under the banner of heaven!).

With longer life expectancy, and retirement age raised, we expect a larger chunk of Western elders aboard cruise ships.

Talking of cruise ships. They are “camping” out on the upper decks of the stranded Carnival, eating SPAM.

Rough guide to the Mexican seas.

Keep struggling. Keep boiling (and not to give up) until it is boiled. Just make sure you don’t lose the frog-reflex if you happen to be inside the pot. Boiling is a slow death process. Someone said aptly that insanity is doing what you have done repeatedly, hoping for a different result.

Want to know about survival and striving, look at South Korea. I don’t say they are perfect (same with Utah). Just that we can take a  page or two from their playbook. And maybe, take out kim chi for starter. Beats the SPAM on board the Carnival cruise ship.