When fingers do the reading

Monday evening, our Webelos den went to the library to work on earning their Communicator pin. After going over how to find books and how to take good care of them, the children’s librarian brought out what looked like a very large photo album. This was a Braille copy of the Bible, she explained, and she gave the boys a chance to feel the pages.

My parents had friends who were blind, so I was familiar with the look and feel of Braille materials from an early age. (Not that I ever learned to read them.) It came as somewhat of a surprise, Monday, to realize that it has been so long since I have seen someone actually using Braille that it was probably something completely new to these fourth grade boys.

The librarian added that no one was using the Braille books anymore, so they had been removed from the library’s holdings. She saved the Braille Bible herself, because it seemed a shame to lose something so wonderful. Today people use recorded books instead, she explained.

When I was growing up, there were recorded books, but they weren’t widely available. When my grandfather had cataract surgery, he had patches over his eyes while he recovered, and we took turns staying with him and helping him out while he was unable to see. To pass the time, he listened to some recorded books, which were loaned out by the organization that made them available to blind people.

For the challenge of it

In a recent post I quoted mountaineer George Mallory’s famous line about why he climbed mountains: “Because it’s there.” The challenge drew him irresistibly, even to his death atop Mount Everest. While I like hiking, I’ve never been drawn to dangerous climbs. But I do respond to the challenge of a good puzzle.

My sons, especially my younger son Al, do not seem to feel the same way about challenges. I am annoyed when he helps me with a puzzle I’m working on, though I try to express appreciation because I know he means to be helpful. I do not want help, I want to solve it on my own. Some of that may be pride, but it is also because it is the challenge itself that appeals to me, and to the extent that hints reduce the difficulty of solving it, they reduce my pleasure in finding the solution.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some kinds of challenges appeal to me more than others. At one time, the idea of fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles appealed to me. One sort has no picture, just a solid color, and only the shape of the pieces shows how to put it together. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle, where every piece is exactly the same shape, and only the picture provides the solution - plus the puzzle is double-sided, with the same picture on both sides! But by the time I had money of my own to purchase such puzzles, I found I was no longer interested.

I enjoy difficult crossword puzzles, but if I spend an hour on a puzzle and have only come up with a few words, not enough to help me get any more, the puzzle is simply too hard for me. I will try even longer on an acrostic, but eventually I will give up on those also if too many clues are too obscure for me to come up with even a decent guess. I can do “cross-sums” puzzles, but I find that too often, I discover three quarters of the way through that I must have made some error in logic early on, and the only way to undo it is to start completely over. So I rarely start them at all.

One kind of puzzle I enjoy is computer programming, but never purely for the sake of the challenge itself. I like doing programming that provides a useful solution to a problem, or an entertaining game to play. I work at the application level, meaning the level where the program interacts with the user, rather than at the systems level where the program simply provides a platform for other developers to write their programs.

One kind of computer puzzle I have never found an interest in is hacking. The term hacker is often used in a pejorative sense, because some hackers have used their ability to alter hijack code for malicious purposes. But at root, hacking is simply figuring out the secrets that are coded into computers and not intended for anyone but the people who put them there to know. It’s not a challenge that appeals to me, but it has a very strong appeal to many people – at least to many young men (estimates of hacker demographics indicate that about 90% are male and median age is 25).

Happily behind the times

I am behind the times. I still think email is the way to communicate with people I don’t see in person. I get my news from the internet, but I don’t Twitter, and I rarely log on to facebook. I spend a good deal of time on the computer, both at home and at work, but most of the time I’m reading, not participating in communcation with other people.

I still think a two-hour response time to an email is pretty good (unless an urgent task at work is waiting for the answer). If I want a faster answer, I use a very old-fashioned means of communication. I get up from my desk and walk to the desk of the person I want to talk to (the requests I process come from people in the same building). I have Office Communicator available to me, but I have never once signed on.

According to an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal (technology does let me get ahead on some things), “email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.” It’s true that my internet is always on, because we have cable internet, but I’m certainly not always on the internet. I do carry a mobile phone, but that’s mostly so my husband can always call me. (It’s also handy to have a calculator/stopwatch/alarm clock in my pocket).

I don’t generally need a quicker response than I can get from email. I have little interest in when friends leave for work or get home or go to bed, or some of the other trivial details that get posted on facebook. It is a handy place to see their vacation photos – especially because I can take a quick look and skip the rest if I’m not really interested. I found a couple classmates from high school on facebook – but I have ignored a few friend requests because I don’t really know the people, even if they go to the same church or went to the same college.

The article points out some of the downsides to the communication streams enable by services such as facebook and twitter. There is too much information, and it’s hard to filter out the important from the unimportant. Because you are posting something that may be read by 500 “friends” who are more acquaintance than real friends, you don’t share things you might with real friends. More of your life is on display for huge numbers of other people to find than you may really intend.

Those are some of the reasons I choose to stay behind the times. I only log on to facebook when I want to play Farkle. I rarely post anything on my wall. (After all, this blog is where I put the thoughts that I want to share with the people who are interested enough to read them.) I read blogs of people/groups whose thoughts interest me – even if blogs are also considered passé now.

I don’t dislike technology. But I dislike noise. And the noise level seems pretty high on these new communications streams.

Books: The Bone Garden

This is the first book I have read by Tess Gerritsen, and from the reviews I have read it is not one of her best. Since I did enjoy this one, though, I look forward to reading others by the same author.

The Bone Garden is a combination of mystery and romance, historical fiction, social commentary (on Boston in 1830), and a detailed picture of the state of medicine in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The romance is the weakest part, in my opinion, but then I wouldn’t have picked up the book if that had been its primary element. I was more interested in the mystery, and while one customer review at amazon.com claims that the solution was clear from about a quarter of the way through the book, I certainly did not see it until much closer to the conclusion.

The novel attempts to intertwine the mystery/romance of 1830 with one in the present time, as a young divorcee named Julia attempts to learn the story behind a skeleton found in the garden of the house she just bought. Together with a crotchety old man whose cousin previously owned Julia’s house, she gradually unravels the story by reading letters written by “O. W. H.” to “Margaret,” letters found in boxes in the old house when its elderly owner died.

I agree with other reviewers at amazon.com that this part of the novel, set in the present, is weak and could easily have been left out. The real story takes place in 1830, and after a while I was glad the present-day chapters were as short as they were, because I wanted to get back to where the real action took place. Here in Boston in 1830, the lives of several characters are increasingly intertwined, all somehow involved in a mystery that involves a serial killer.

These cakes are out of this world

I found out today that my 17-year-old son is older than the Sci-Fi channel. He turned 17 in March, almost six months ago. The Sci-Fi channel just turned 17 today.

In recognition of that anniversary, they have a display of 17 sci-fi themed cakes. These are the kind of cakes I can only dream of making. Just look at the detail in that Minas Tirith cake! I’d hate to have to cut into it to serve a piece.

I’m really not much into cake. But I do like the Sci-Fi channel. We didn’t have it all that long before we had to drop it to save money. But it was long enough to become fans of Stargate SG-1 (and Stargate Atlantis). My husband watched some other shows as well, such as Eureka. Recently he discovered full-length episodes of Eureka he can watch on syfy.com (the Sci-Fi website).

But first we decided to check out earlier seasons from the library, so I could watch them as well. Last night we had a mini-marathon of Eureka, watching the pilot plus three more episodes from the first season. I had seen one of them, and occasionally walked through the room during other episodes. But I remembered little except that it was a kind of quirky show.

Extra minutes of sunshine

Yesterday on worldmagblog, Chas was wondering why the newspaper listing of sunrise and sunset times showed more than twelve hours of daytime, even though it was the autumnal equinox. After all, everyone knows that day and night are exactly the same length on that day, right?

Apparently not. It’s one of many things that “everyone knows” that isn’t quite accurate. I found out from nationalgeographic.com why it’s not the way everyone thinks it is (including me, until now). It has to do with the size of the sun in the sky, and with bending of light caused by earth’s atmosphere.

The first aspect is that we don’t measure sunrise and sunset from when the center of the sun is even with the horizon, but rather when the “top” of the sun (as we see it) appears over the horizon, or dips below it. That way “daytime” is just a little bit longer than if we measured it from the center of the sun’s disk in the sky. And the bending of light by our atmosphere means that the sun is not actually quite where it appears to our eyes, either.

That probably was not one of your burning questions today, or even yesterday when it was more relevant. But it’s one more little bit of knowledge to take the place of what we thought we knew, that wasn’t quite right. And for me, at least, that is always a good thing.

The science (and fiction) of H.G. Wells

I’ve enjoyed reading science fiction since I was in about fourth grade. As an adult, I’ve enjoyed even more reading about where science fiction gets it wrong, and where it gets it right. I have two books discussing the science in Star Trek (one on physics, the other on biology), and we enjoyed watching a TV special a few years ago on the science of Stargate SG-1.

Science fiction is often a mix of inventions which remain far in the future (robots that are barely distinguishable from humans, flying cars) and others that have now been far outstripped by reality (think of the size of the modules that had to be removed from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, compared to the size of memory and storage modules actually used in this century). I occasionally work on one of my own science fiction story ideas, but then I start wondering how ridiculous some of my ideas might seem within only a decade or two.

One comparison I hadn’t read before is between the ideas of H. G. Wells’ novels and science as we know it today. I have read a few of his books, but had only a vague notion of when he lived. He was born 143 years ago today, I learned from nationalgeographic.com, and pretty much defined the genre of science fiction with his literary output.

Did you know the U.S. military now has a heat-ray gun? It doesn’t kill, or even cause physical harm, but it does produce a burning sensation and can be used to help disperse crowds. Wells envisioned automatic sliding doors, but he got the direction of the movement wrong (he had the door moving up into the ceiling instead of sideways into the walls).

It may not have taken a visionary to predict attempts to combine features of different animals, though Wells could not have imagined the mechanics of genetic engineering. People have been cross-breeding animals and plants for ages, within the limits of their technological abilities. Going beyond those limits waited only on the necessary scientific discoveries.

Time travel remains one of the most intriguing (to me) plot enablers in science fiction. The linked article quotes a physics professor who states that time travel has not actually been proven impossible, contrary to what many physicists claim. Since most time travel stories I have read deal with the problems created by time travel, rather than the opportunities such travel would create, I rather hope that the ”many physicists” are correct.

My daily dose of science

My reading choices rarely include books or magazines devoted exclusively to science. Partly that’s because I find myself more interested in subjects such as history, religion, and languages. And partly it is because in-depth explanations of science go over my head. (That might be a mixed metaphor, but if you think of science as a swimming pool, the deep part would be over my head.  I can go beyond the wading pool but don’t care for going off the diving board.)

Anyway, I do enjoy “popular science” type articles that appear in general-interest magazines. Apparently these have been declining in recent years, whether because general news media didn’t think science would sell, or because science has become so specialized that it’s hard to write science news for the non-scientist. Worldmagblog reported this morning that scientists have created a new website to address this issue, and I enjoyed checking it out.

Futurity.org is all about science, but it’s written for the general public. Articles are categorized under Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, and Science & Design. There is also a section on Society & Culture, though its articles aren’t displayed on the front page, as with the other three categories. A few of the articles dealt with news I had seen already at nationalgeographic.com, but others were new to me. (And the pages load much more quickly than at nationalgeographic, which I appreciate.)

So far, some of the articles I’ve read have told about nanodiamonds (didn’t even know there was such a thing) that have proven surprisingly effective in delivering DNA into mammalian cells (for gene therapy), the health benefits of the Wii, the microRNA of worms, and the world’s smallest semiconductor laser. I have to admit that I didn’t fully follow the discussion of plasmons in the laser article, and I’m still not sure what microRNA is. But I know that the scientists doing the research do understand it, and I am amazed at the way our collective scientific understanding continues to grow in such impressive ways.

Bidding, bidding… sold!

I first discovered ebay well over a decade ago, when it was still relatively unknown. The clerk at a store had told me about it when I mentioned my husband’s interest in collectible chess sets. It was years before I actually made my first ebay purchase, but it was fun just to browse through the listings of all sorts of unusual items. Kind of like a giant flea market, but better organized so you could just look at the interesting stuff.

It was a few years more before we starting thinking about selling things on ebay ourselves. We’ve tried garage sales, before each big interstate move (from NJ to MI in 1998 and from MI to IL in 2004), and had very little success. Selling items on ebay would save us having to carry everything outside, only to have to carry most of it back in when it didn’t sell. It wouldn’t require sitting by the merchandise hour after hour, and it would attract people who actually had an interest in things we were selling instead of those who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

But it also required learning how to do it. We read through a set of instructions, and it looked doable but still daunting. We didn’t decide not to do it, but we didn’t decide to do it either, and the instructions vanished in the pile of paper and other junk that our desk attracts the way a garbage can attracts flies. The idea resurfaced during a period of unemployment, stalled in the complexities of categorizing and valuing the items to be sold, and was again swallowed in the sea of papers when a job offer alleviated the immediate need.

This summer, with the economy as a whole as depressed as our personal finances, determination overcame the barriers to becoming an ebay seller. This was helped significantly by a speech given in Toastmasters by a co-worker who has a store on ebay, and who described the entire process of getting started in a simple step-by-step Powerpoint presentation. Five days ago, I finally succeeded in listing my first two items.

For the past few days, I watched somewhat anxiously to see the first signs that anyone was even looking at my listings. Finally one showed that two people were watching it, and the next day the other one also. This evening (with only a few hours left in the auction), I finally saw bidding activity. Many buyers – as I have learned to do myself – waiting until near the end of the auction to place any bids.

A few minutes ago the auctions both ended, and I saw with pleasure that both items sold. The dollar amounts are small, but the satisfaction is significant. It really does work, and it’s a lot more efficient than setting up shop in the yard or the driveway. Soon I’ll have money coming into my bank account (via paypal), and then I will happily head to the post office to mail the items.

And at the next Toastmasters meeting, I’ll have to thank my co-worker for her part in getting me started.

Guide for the Perpetually loSt

This morning we visited the local Presbyterian Church, where a group of young people was leading the service, telling about their recent mission trip. One of their adult leaders told how grateful she was for Gladys, who kept her from getting lost as they went to their work assignments. I assumed Gladys was a local resident, who knew the roads well and rode with the group. No, Gladys turned out to be the new GPS system in the woman’s van.

I’ve been in a co-worker’s vehicle that was equipped with GPS, but I haven’t actually seen – or rather heard – it in action. My husband, who admits to being directionally challenged, would much appreciate such a navigational assistant. Next time we take a road trip, we will probably avail ourselves of the service provided by our wireless phone provider, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

I’ve heard about GPS for years, and had some idea of the technology behind it, but really never gave it much thought until Al and I explored the GPS exhibit at the Putnam Museum yesterday. The exhibit consists of a maze, with information along the way on GPS technology, plus hidden treasures to find and puzzles to solve.

As Al was more interested in finding treasures and getting through the maze than reading all the information along the way (plus we had a movie to get to – see yesterday’s post), I only picked up some of it myself. But I learned that, besides being used by travelers prone to getting lost, GPS is also used by search and rescue teams, farmers, and by the global geocaching community.