Category: Technology

How cheap bandwidth is used against us


When I was a newspaper copy boy back in 1966, I operated a Teletype Model 19 exactly like this one. Teletypes like this used long-distance telephone lines. If you remember how much long-distance telephone calls used to cost, then you can imagine how expensive it was to keep a long-distance telephone line connected 24 hours a day from, say, New York to San Francisco. For decades, it was the Teletype network that brought us the news and supported commerce.

In September 1995, the Economist, which often gets things wrong because of its neoliberal obsessions, got something exactly right. The cover story was: “Suddenly Distance No Longer Matters.” Unfortunately I can’t find a link to this piece. But the point of it was that the era in which long distance communication was expensive was ending. Not only would the Internet make bandwidth very cheap, it would cost no more to communicate with the other side of the Pacific than with the other side of town.

And here we are today in a world in which distance doesn’t matter. Even ten years ago, we dreamed of an Internet with enough bandwidth to allow everyone everywhere to stream the movie of their choice. Today we’re almost there. It’s only those of us who live in rural areas who don’t have enough bandwidth for streaming high-definition movies.

But from the Internet’s beginnings in the 1990s, those with ugly agendas have been developing ways to take advantage of us. They give us free stuff, such as free email, but we don’t stop to think how they are making money off of us. Taking advantage of our innocence was immensely profitable, and many new billionaires were created. Harvesting information about how we spend our money in order to target ads seems relatively benign. But it’s worse than that. As Zeynap Tufekci writes today in the New York Times, “The need to keep users on the site for advertisers has led to design and algorithm choices that increase engagement, often with false, inflammatory or tribalizing content that research shows travels much more easily on social media.”

It’s entirely reasonable, in 2022, to ask the question: If it weren’t for the ways in which cheap bandwidth has been used to monitor us and manipulate us, would democracies today be at risk of takeover by the authoritarian oligarchy? Could Trump have happened?

There are three excellent pieces in the New York Times today about how tech is being used against us:

Tufekci’s piece is: “We Pay an Ugly Cost for Ads on Twitter.”

Brian X. Chen, the lead consumer technology writer for the New York Times, has this piece: “Personal Tech Has Changed. So Must Our Coverage of It: Our tech problems have become more complex, so we are rebooting the Tech Fix column to focus on the societal implications of the tech we use.”

Farhad Monjoo has a bleak progress report on Mark Zuckerburg’s plan to entrap us in his “metaverse,” in order to own us and advertise us to death: “My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg’s V.R.”

I have used “gift” links for the articles above, so you should be able to read the articles without a subscription to the New York Times.

Sometimes I think that we’d all be better off if we could go back to the world of Teletypes and expensive long-distance telephone calls. As Tufekci mentions in the article above, and as I well know from a career in newspapers, publishers once went to great lengths to keep the advertising department out of the newsroom. Those days are over. I was there back in 2000 for the horrible merger of the staffs of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was already understood then that newspapers’ continued existence was endangered, because craigslist had destroyed newspapers’ market for classified advertising. Publishers’ solution was to unleash hordes of “bean counters,” as we called them, on newsrooms to teach journalists that they had to help find ways to “monetize” the news. One of the reasons the New York Times has survived, as Tufekci points out, is that the Times found a way to rely on subscriptions rather than advertising.

I despair of any means ever being found to keep the vast majority of us from being exploited and manipulated by today’s tech giants and how they use costless bandwidth. Some people make fun of me, as though I’m paranoid, for using a VPN, for refusing to use free email, for never having used Twitter, and for taking steps to make sure that Mark Zuckerberg knows as little about me as possible. For years I’ve had the ability to encrypt and sign my emails using a private key, but no one else I know bothers to do that, so encryption isn’t an option for me. We could put an end to spam, to email scams, and to email phishing tomorrow if everyone signed their email with a private encryption key. But that’s the last thing that Internet giants want. Google makes millions by analyzing people’s emails and by tracking who communicates with whom. There is no perfect defense, though, other than going off the grid.

The most dangerous threat, though, from cheap bandwidth is the ability to push out lies and to mass-manipulate people who don’t know any better. There is nothing that we can do for that kind of people. Time and again, I’ve heard people refer to eagerly ingesting conspiracy theories as “doing their own research.” We’re on our own, hanging by the thin thread of hope that enough of us will remain sane to steer clear of the authoritarian dystopia that is being planned for us.

Computers vs. reality: The war to sell it to us is on


Source: Wikimedia Commons

We are fortunate that there is some competition in the market for technology. Even so, you get only two choices for your smartphone — an Apple iPhone or an Android phone. It’s starting to look as though there will be two choices for the next big thing. Facebook calls that next big thing the “Metaverse.” Apple is calling it “augmented reality.” Do the two different terms signal two different visions?

A few days ago, Greg Josniak, an Apple vice president, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. When asked about the metaverse, Josniak replied that the word “metaverse” is “a word I’ll never use.” In an interview in Europe last month, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, used the term “augmented reality”:

“Like I said, we are really going to look back and think about how we once lived without AR…. It’s something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used in a good way. But I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way. VR is for set periods, but not a way to communicate well. So I’m not against it, but that’s how I look at it.”

Zuckerberg took a swing at Apple, saying that the metaverse should be “open,” as opposed to a closed ecosystem like Apple’s iPhone. He said that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in a “philosophical competition” with Apple on virtual reality. “The things that they’re doing [Apple] are not as altruistic as they claim them to be,” Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg’s Meta, it seems, is working with Microsoft, Autodesk, and Accenture on its “open” metaverse.

We know from their histories just how “open” and altruistic Facebook, Microsoft, and Autodesk have been. As for Accenture, I don’t even know what they do, other than avoid taxes. Google wants in on this, too.

Has Mark Zuckerberg ever given us any reason to trust him, or his vision? Remember how Facebook was supposed to bring the world together and make everything better?

Back in the 1980s, most people couldn’t imagine why they’d ever want a computer, or what they’d do with it if they had one. Today, most of us can’t imagine — or at least can’t easily imagine — ever putting on a virtual reality headset. But we probably will. And Tim Cook is probably right. Before long we’ll probably wonder how we lived without it.

If there’s going to be a philosophical competition in the market for virtual reality, then I’ve already made up my mind. The “philosophy” of Microsoft and Facebook, unless competition prevents it, is to own us and exploit us with inferior stuff, without regard to any harm done. Whereas — as I see it — the only harm done to us by Apple is the harm done by being so expensive. I like the Apple ecosystem. And Apple’s technology is just plain superior, especially now that Jony Ive is gone and we’re starting to get informative interfaces rather than “clean” ones. (Now will Apple please stop hiding all the controls in iMovie, so that we don’t have to Google to figure it out?)

Tim Cook, I think, has dropped a big hint. “But I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way,” he said. The implication is that total ownership is just what Mark Zuckerberg wants.

I dread the day, though, when people are walking around in public wearing cyber headsets and special glasses. Everyone staring at their phones is bad enough. If I ever wear a cyber headset outside my own home, someone please shoot me.

How much does cursive matter anymore?


⬆︎ Spencerian script, 1884. This was the ideal in business correspondence. Source: Wikipedia.

The Atlantic has an interesting piece this morning by a former Harvard president: “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive: How will they interpret the past?” The article mentions that learning to write in cursive was dropped from the standard American curriculum in 2010. This new generation, now in college, “represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.”

To my surprise, as a lover of classic literature and obsolete technologies (such as typewriters), I find myself wondering if this is really such a bad thing. The ability to read and write cursive is a fine ability to have, certainly. But the question is, given that today’s young people need to learn so much to have a chance in the modern world, is cursive really worth the effort? I think not. There just isn’t time. Keyboards are ubiquitous now.

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, keyboards existed. But students in elementary school were not allowed to touch them. There was a typewriter in the school office, of course. And there was a typewriter in a workroom that teachers could use to type stencils for the mimeograph machine. Typing class was not offered until the ninth grade or later.

I was in the sixth or seventh grade when, after months of begging, I got my first typewriter. Though there weren’t a lot of books in the house other than a set of encyclopedias, my father had a copy of 20th Century Typewriting. I used that book to teach myself to type correctly. The book was a classic that went through several editions. I came across a reference to the book recently in a discussion of typewriters, and I immediately bought a copy from an online bookseller, because in retrospect it clearly was one of the most important books of my childhood.

The theory with cursive was that it made writing faster, because it wasn’t necessary to lift the pen. But some studies have shown that, at least today, people can print as fast as they can write in cursive. I think the argument is a sound one: We don’t need to learn to write cursive anymore. Whether we need to learn to read it is a separate question. But I also wonder if it’s truly that difficult to read cursive, even if you can’t write it. We recognize many fonts, after all, including cursive fonts. I am skeptical of the claim that cursive looks like hieroglyphs to Generation Z. Next time I run into a Gen Z’er, I’ll do the experiment.

Back in the days when handwriting was a constant form of communication, we recognized each other’s handwriting. That, to be sure, is a sad thing to lose. But society is not going to fall apart because of that.

As writing in cursive has become obsolete, learning to type well, I would argue, has become even more important — to social lives as well as to careers. When people avoid email and instead want to talk on the phone, I always suspect that it’s because they’re poor typists. Tough. I still refuse to talk on the phone.

Show me a person who types well, and I will show you a person who very probably lives well. It’s typing (even with the thumbs) that now provides our social glue and that enables the world’s machinery to keep turning.


⬆︎ Notice the similarity between my mother’s signature and the teacher’s handwriting on the front of the report card. The shape of the letters was standardized, of course. And I’m pretty sure that Luna Sutphin also was one of my mother’s teachers. My grades averaged out to straight A’s for the school year, but look at that pesky B+ in arithmetic. Mathematics has always been my intellectual weakness, and it only got worse as the math got harder. Calculators to the rescue!

The Royal family (of writing instruments)


⬆︎ A Parker Duofold Centenntial fountain pen, first bought in London in 1995, now in my hands

Earlier today, Henry, who frequently comments here, sent me a link to a Washington Post story that I had almost missed. It’s “Beyond the keyboard: Fountain pen collectors find beauty in ink.” I was about three weeks ahead of them! It was with this post of mine, “Ink’s place in the retro movement.” But retro minds think alike. To the Washington Post’s excellent observations about fountain pens, I would add one more observation: Fountain pens and typewriters belong together. They are a dyad, both technologically and aesthetically.

By coincidence today, an old friend of mine who collects fountain pens as well as typewriters sent me a classic fountain pen that he no longer uses and wanted me to have. It arrived in the mail today. It’s a Parker Duofold Centennial that he bought in London in 1995. He has moved up to even more luxurious fountain pens, saying that he has found that he prefers a more flexible nib. Well, I like this fountain pen’s nib just the way it is. And why shouldn’t I? I am too frugal to justify the cost of one of these pens. They don’t lose their value if they are in good condition. It’s about what I’d consider paying for a fancy roto-tiller or a dental crown.

As for collectible typewriters, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s the full-size office machines that thrill me. Most collectors today prefer the “cute” portables, especially if they’re in pastel colors. But it’s the massive corporate workhorses that I like, because they’re the kind of typewriters I used when I was a newspaper copy boy starting back in 1966.

It’s easy enough to use typewriters for actual writing these days, as long as you have a scanner and OCR software handy. It seems I have so many typewriters these days that I have to rotate them to give them exercise. But I have been getting a lot of writing done, and of course that writing ends up in the computer, in an application named Scrivener that I have used for all my writing projects for years. Retro writing systems are far from obsolete, even when our words end up in our computers.


⬆︎ The nib on this pen is medium width — fairly broad, really


⬆︎The Parker nib


⬆︎My Royal 440 office machine, 1969


⬆︎My Royal FP office machine, 1961


⬆︎My Royal HH office machine, 1953. Internally, these Royals changed very little over a period of 25 to 30 years. The exterior design, though, changed to fit the tastes of the times. I like to compare the 1969 Royal with an Oldsmobile Toronado, the 1961 machine (a model which started some years earlier) with a 1955 Chevrolet, and the 1953 machine with a 1952 Chevrolet. There are clearly parallels between automobile styles and typewriter styles, though I’m still waiting for someone to write a book about it.

Another forever home for another typewriter

I have written here in the past about empathy for mechanical things. The syndrome must surely be related to the feelings — should I call them moral intuitions? — that cause us to adopt homeless cats. The mechanical version is the conviction that beautiful old machines ought to have a home. They ought to be maintained. And they ought not to be abused or put down.

I now have five typewriters in working condition. Four of them are electric. I promised myself that I would stop bringing home homeless typewriters after I acquired just one more machine. That machine would be a manual typewriter. It also would need to be a full-size office machine. And it would need to be a fairly late machine that well represents the highest evolution of non-electric typewriters. I was looking for an Underwood, because I used to have an Underwood that served me well for many years. But no suitable Underwood showed up on eBay. My next choice was a Royal FP. That’s what I bought.

Based on an on-line database of typewriter serial numbers, this typewriter was made in 1961. The eBay photos showed it to be very dirty, but I couldn’t see any damage or rust. I kind of liked that it was green. Typewriters with colored panels seem to be in demand by collectors these days. When the typewriter arrived, I was horrified to see that the carriage was jammed, hard. The carriage also was out of position by about 3/8 inch. It would have taken a very heavy blow to knock the carriage off its rails. The shipping box was not damaged. My suspicion is that the eBay seller knew the machine was damaged, even though he said in the description that the machine was working.

The seller would have allowed me to return the typewriter. But my empathy for mechanical things had already kicked in. This machine was eminently restorable except for the derailed carriage. I knew that, if I returned the machine, it probably would end up being junked with no hope of ever being repaired. Removing the carriage on most typewriters is one of the last things you want to do. But after watching a couple of YouTube videos on repairing old Royals, I decided to remove the carriage and see if repair was possible. Hail Mary surgery was, I reasoned, this particular typewriter’s only hope. If I failed, I would at least learn and know that I tried.

To my surprise, after removing many screws and with only two screws left to go, the carriage popped back onto its tracks and started moving smoothly again. I stopped disassembling at that point and put everything back together. This old typewriter has a will to live. Then again, all old typewriters do.

Many people who collect typewriters these days — including lots of young people — have no early experience with typewriters that makes them sentimental about typewriters. But I got my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My first part-time job, during high school, was as a newspaper copy boy (1966). Not only did I look after the routine needs of a roomful of beautiful (and noisy) Teletype machines, I also worked in a newsroom full of typewriters. Over the years, as I moved up the food chain in the newspaper world, I used many models of typewriters. They were mostly Royals, and some of them were Royal FP’s like this one. (Computers started taking over newsrooms in the mid-1980s.) I found that my hands still have a memory of using the controls on the Royal FP, including its “Magic Margin.” How long has it been since you held a kitten? Even if it has been many years, if you pick up a kitten your hands will remember.

And speaking of newspapers, I retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, where a famous Royal FP is still on display in the Chronicle lobby, as far as I know. The Chronicle columnist Herb Caen often referred to his “loyal Royal.” There’s a picture of Caen’s last loyal Royal in the Wikipedia article on Herb Caen.


Click here to expand

A stupid new book about Apple


Inside an Apple store

First of all, I have not read this book, and I’m not going to read it. In fact, it won’t be released until two days from now. But this morning in the New York Times, the book’s author has an utterly stupid little collection of misleading anecdotes under the headline “How Technocrats Triumphed at Apple.” The book is After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, by Tripp Mickle, a New York Times reporter. Good grief. Apple hasn’t lost its soul. It only lost the fancy-pants designer and professional snob Jony Ive. And good danged riddance.

The Times article — and clearly the book as well — is a hagiographical fanboy piece about Ive, who, had he stayed at Apple, would have designed Apple into the dirt. True nerds and computer lovers cheered when Ive finally left Apple. It’s to Ive that we owe the era of Apple computers getting thinner and thinner to the point of fragility — unrepairable, and fastened together with, I kid you not, glue. (Screws aren’t pretty, you see.) Phones were so sleek that they’d squirt right out of your hands. Ive’s design notions were lipstick for the software, too. Ive thought that we wanted our screens to be “uncluttered,” even if we couldn’t find anything or had to click six screens deep to get to a function we needed.

The promotional copy about this book on Amazon sounds intentionally deceptive. It says that Ive “designed” the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. But Ive designed only the look, the skin, of those devices. He had nothing to do with the engineering. The promotional copy calls Ive “a London-born genius.” By contrast, Tim Cook is called “the product of a small Alabama town.” That’s precisely the kind of sneering, class-conscious snobbery that would have ruined Apple if it had continued.

Apple’s true genius is in its engineering, both in its software and its hardware. Consider the new iMac Studio, which actually looks like a computer, a lovely little box. Ive would never have allowed all those USB ports and Thunderbolt ports because they’d be “clutter.” But those ports are what iMac users actually want and need. Ive had nothing to do with Apple’s advanced engineering, such as the new M1 chips, which freed Apple from Intel’s stagnation.

Lost its soul indeed. Apple makes computers, not garb and bling for hipsters.

That the dude who wrote this stuff works for the New York Times is disturbing. This kind of wrongheadedness is yet another sign that the New York Times inhabits an abstract, imaginary world that, in a different way, is as delusional as MAGA world. It’s the kind of wrongheadedness that begs for a parody about how the New York Times would have covered the rise of Hitler — in an “objective,” take-no-sides, ivory tower sort of way that would have been just fine printing op-eds by Joseph Goebbels as though it was fair speech to be taken seriously. This is a whole different subject for another time, but I attribute the New York Times’ break with reality to its management. I cheered when Dean Baquet left the New York Times, just as I cheered when Jony Ive left Apple. But I fear that Baquet’s successor, Joe Kahn, will be just as bad. At Apple, however, there is no new Jony Ive. Let’s hear it for engineers and technocrats.

Update 1: It seems quite a few readers of the New York Times agreed with my comment there, which quickly made the “Readers’ Picks” category.

Update 2: Twenty-four hours after the New York Times posted this piece, it appears from the comments (about 550 at this point) that the piece has backfired all over the fanboy NYT reporter and the now-discredited design czar Jony Ive. Virtually everyone has piled on against Ive and in favor of function versus overdone styling. Apple, no doubt, is following those comments, which amount to a million dollars worth of market research for free. Macrumors.com posted a link to the New York Times piece, and the comments there went the same way. Let’s hope this episode reinforces Apple’s commitment to function — computers as computers rather than fashion statements.

Twitter, schmitter. And Musk, schmusk.


A breakdown of Twitter content. Source: Wikipedia.

From its beginning, the whole idea of Twitter seemed ridiculous to me. How could 140 characters possibly convey anything useful or meaningful? Surely the contemporary attention span can handle at least 190 characters! And (glory be!) now we’re up to a breathtaking 280 characters, doubling the speed at which world peace, universal understanding, and techno-utopia can be attained.

And yet Twitter took off. I have a friend (to be a little more honest, a former friend) who insists that there is no source of news better than a “well curated” Twitter feed. He was not sparing in his disdain — I would even say sneering disdain — for the fact that I still read newspapers. I was horrified when, around 2015 or so, Paul Krugman stopped blogging and moved to Twitter. (Krugman still writes his twice-weekly column in the New York Times.) It is frequently said that Twitter killed blogging almost overnight and that blogging “is so 2010.”

But what do I know, given that I’m so 2010? People flocked to Twitter and its 140 characters. Even those of us who were left behind in 2010 had to figure out what “#” and “@” meant. According to Omnicore, whoever that is, Twitter today has 217 million “monetizable” daily active users. And yet, back in 2020, a study by Carnegie Mellon University estimated that 45 percent of the tweets about the Covid virus came from bots. Many of the real people who had flocked to Twitter couldn’t tell the difference (or didn’t care), which says a lot about the real people who flocked to Twitter. By the American election of 2016, Twitter had become a creepy pit of disinformation and manipulation. There were Trump bots by the gazillions, no doubt. And there was “the real Donald Trump,” so’s we could distinguish his disinformation from that of the bots.

The word “monetizable” gives me the creeps. I first heard that word back in 2001 or so, when consultants, who seemed to me like some kind of zombies, were let loose on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle to “monetize” the Chronicle’s “content.” I started making plans for early retirement. But it wasn’t just the monetization that made Twitter so creepy. It was partly the mere look of it on the screen, a dreadful looking typographical stew of babble, incomprehensible abbreviation, smart-alec remarks, and giphies, in which the giphies compete on juvenile silliness. Twitter’s culture is as unattractive as its typography. Even if 3.6 percent of Twitter was news, who’d be able to find it? And because 280 characters was not enough to express the full complexity of some of the thinking to be found on Twitter, the Tweetstorm was invented, quadrupling, quintupling, and even octupling the speed at which world peace, universal understanding, and techno-utopia can be attained.

This morning the Washington Post reports that Twitter’s employees (most of whom are in San Francisco) are in a state of panic and rage that Elon Musk has bought into Twitter and will now be on Twitter’s board. After all, would Musk have bought into Twitter if he hadn’t intended to use it for his own purposes? Clearly, Twitter employees think about as highly of Musk as I do. We’re probably about to witness a grand demonstration of the fruits of Musk’s libertarian philosophy colliding with social media, with a flaming crash like a self-driven Tesla. Right-wingers such as Hugh Hewitt (in the Washington Post) believe that Twitter is a “‘woke’ echo chamber” and that more right-wing and libertarian “diversity of opinion” is just the thing to fix it.

As I see, the reasons for not being on Twitter just quadrupled, and maybe even octupled.

Oil: Why can’t we ever learn?


The 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770 that belonged to Emperor Hirohito. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here we are once again in that most familiar of geopolitical pickles. The advocates of progress and democracy still have the oil leash tight around their necks, jerking them around and holding them back. The other end of the leash is held by oligarchs, despots, and the greediest and most powerful corporations in the world. We could have freed ourselves by now, but we haven’t. We like our oil too much.

I must hasten to confess how much fun it has been to have lived during the Oil Age. Cars! Labor-saving machines! World travel for the middle class! McMansions, heated and cooled! Lots of food! Lots of stuff! It has been a wonderful lifelong party, with oil in the punchbowl. The industrialization made possible by coal certainly changed the world, but it has been oil, more than any other thing, that has shaped the world we live in now and that made possible a precarious global population of 7.75 billion. The price of punch fluctuates, but the bowl is always full, at least in the rich countries. Back in the 1970s when they told us that we were running out of oil, they were wrong, and they probably were lying.

President Jimmy Carter learned what happens to governments that try to wean people off of oil. It’s the only sensible government policy, but people won’t go along with it. Today, as many people see it, one of the chief responsibilities of government is to keep the cheap oil flowing. Republicans, and all the other servants of oligarchs, despots, and greed, are happy to oblige. It’s clear that we’ll never be weaned off of oil until we can keep the party going on some other punch — renewables, we hope.

Normally I stay home and mind my own business. But the computer went haywire in my four-year-old Fiat 500. That took me first to a garage about seven miles from home for a new battery, which I hoped would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I had to take the Fiat to the dealership in Winston-Salem, 25 miles away. (The problem was diagnosed as a bad wheel speed sensor at the left front wheel.) Everywhere I went, people were complaining about the price of gasoline. At the Fiat-Chrysler dealer, there was not a single Fiat on the lot. Americans (unlike Europeans) hate little Fiats, and most models of Fiat are not even sold in the U.S. anymore. Instead, the dealer’s lot was acres of enormous and heavy vehicles — big trucks and SUVs. That’s what most Americans drive these days. The assumption, clearly, is that the cheap gas will keep flowing. Many people, obviously, can afford gasoline (though they still complain about the price of it). Many poor people, on the other hand, spend nearly 20 percent of their income just on gasoline. Oil is one of the key reasons for the sorry state of our politics. Given a choice between progress and cheap gas, cheap gas will get most people’s vote.

Americans, per capita, use at least five time more oil per capita than the people of China or India. That is a geopolitical weakness for America. And just look at the problems that Germany is having at present because of its need for Russian gas.

This is not going to be a feckless lecture on driving smaller cars and using less gasoline. What we do as individuals is a drop in the bucket, which is part of why we feel so powerless. What matters globally is what the advocates of progress and democracy are politically empowered to do, which will require a loosening of the oil leash. As for our love for cars and our dependency on them, electric vehicles and renewable energy may bring new political possibilities by freeing us from the oil leash. That’s a benefit above and beyond the necessity of just going easier on the earth. Just think how our politics could change if oil no longer mattered.

I wonder, though, whether I will ever be able to buy an electric vehicle as efficient and affordable as my little Fiat. I don’t have the slightest need for a hulking 3-ton electric truck or SUV, but it’s likely that that’s what most Americans are going to want. There’s still something very crazy about that.

Update: Slate has posted a good article about this: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?: When it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”

‘Typewriters are haunted’


Tom Hanks in California Typewriter ⬆︎

Twenty years ago, typewriters were headed toward extinction. No new typewriters of any quality were being made. The surviving typewriters were deteriorating, unused and unloved, and many were being junked. Around 2010, typewriters started making a comeback, particularly among young people who were born after the Golden Age of typewriters who were intrigued by the typewriters’ elegance, magic, and retro quality. In 2017, Tom Hanks, who is a typewriter collector, made a beautiful documentary, California Typewriter. That documentary gave new energy to the movement to save, and use, old typewriters.

I acquired my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My career was in newspaper newsrooms, so I have been around typewriters all my life. I confess that, around 1985, fascinated by computers, I stopped using typewriters. But around 1997 I salvaged an IBM Selectric III from the basement of the San Francisco Examiner and had it restored. A couple of weeks ago, while wasting time on eBay, I came across an Adler 21d electric — a huge office machine that weighs almost 45 pounds — and I bought it. It looked almost new, but it needed help. I’d collect typewriters if I could. But, unlike Tom Hanks, I don’t have anywhere to put 250 typewriters. Two or three well chosen, and well loved, typewriters will have to do for me.

California Typewriter interviews a good many people, but it focuses on a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco. It’s horrifying, but the typewriter shop closed in 2017 not long after Tom Hanks made his documentary.

There is a line in the documentary, spoken by a poet or writer, “Typewriters are haunted.” That is it exactly. There is something about old typewriters that is alive, that has a clear personality, a kind of mechanical spirit that is made happy when someone uses them to write. One pushes words into a computer. But a typewriter’s magic is that it pulls the words out. I thought I must have been the only person in the world who sometimes writes on a typewriter, then scans the typewritten page to get the text into a computer. Thanks to California Typewriter, now I see that I’m not the only one.

The biggest problem with owning, using, or collecting typewriters these days is that the number of typewriter shops and typewriter mechanics continues to dwindle. With my IBM Selectric III, I was fortunate to get a full restoration done by a technician trained by IBM who was in his eighties at the time. That was ten years ago, and the Selectric continues to work perfectly. With my Adler 21d electric, I was able to get some help (and a diagnosis of the typewriter’s problems) from Ed at A.B.C. Office Systems near Asheville, North Carolina — the nearest remaining typewriter shop near me. Because I’m mechanically minded and have some pretty good tools, I was able to do much of the work myself to get the Adler typewriter back into working condition.

Manual typewriters are much easier to find and easier to restore. I have a fetish for electric typewriters, though. They’re faster, easier to use for hours at a time, and somehow they seem more alive to me. The electric typewriters made in the 1970s by Adler, in West Germany, particularly fascinate me. I regard those Adler electrics as the apex of typewriter engineering and manufacturing before the IBM Selectrics came out with the “golf ball” typewriters as opposed to the typewriters with little hammers.

As someone in the documentary points out, typewriters — good ones, anyway — will never be made again. The typewriters we have now, and the neglected typewriters that we can save, are the only typewriters we will ever have.

Often even typewriter lovers know very little about the long history of typewriters, or how the office machine industry, through the turn of the century and the world wars, led straight to the development of computers. Below I mention a book that discusses some of this history.


A writer writes, in California Typewriter ⬆︎

California Typewriter trailer, on YouTube ⬆︎


My recently acquired Adler 21d electric typewriter ⬆︎

My video on restoring my Adler 21d typewriter ⬆︎

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. James W. Cortada. Princeton University Press, 1993. 350 pages.

Typewriters were an important part of the technologies that led to today’s computers. This book concludes, in fact, that because of the extraordinary demand for efficiently moving data to support the allied armies during World War II, “one could conclude that democracy could not be saved without the typewriter.”

The machines that saved democracy — including typewriters, calculators, and the earliest computers — are in museums now, if they were lucky. Less lucky examples of some very beautiful mechanical technology are waiting for us to find them, preserve them, and even use them. The luckiest old machines of all those that are still being used.

Math education


A rare desktop scientific calculator (Victor Model 230), circa 1978. It works perfectly, though it resolves to only seven decimal places.

If I had children or grandchildren (I don’t), I would take a very keen interest in math education. Things have changed since I was young, and for the better, I think. I was never good at math. Math courses felt like abuse to me. Partly this was because no math teacher, as far as I can remember, ever had a word to say about what math (as opposed to ordinary arithmetic) was good for.

I struggle now to remember anything at all that I learned in required college courses in math. The only memory I can recover is doing interpolation on tables of logarithms. We don’t even use logarithm tables anymore, of course. We just press a key on a scientific calculator. Somewhere I learned, and retained, a low-level competence with algebra and the basic concepts of the properties of right triangles. That’s about it.

Yet as I got older, I increasingly found physics fascinating. Over the years I have read many books on physics. But when I come to the math, in the form of differential equations, I skip over it. The equations might as well be Greek.

Was this my failing, as a student? Or did the educational system fail me? If we have no concept of how to read differential equations, then we will try to read them as algebra. Differential equations are not algebra, though algebra is used to solve some of them. Sure, computers can substitute numbers for the variables in differential equations and make calculations. But in most cases the computer is applying an algorithm (a sort of numerical recipe) rather than doing algebra. Differential equations are neither algebra nor calculus (though an understanding of algebra and calculus must precede an understanding of differential equations). Virtually everything we know about the natural world is expressed in differential equations.

If I were age 19 again, I wouldn’t avoid math the way I did then. That much was my fault. But it’s also true that the educational system failed people of my generation.

I came across an article in Education Week that makes a strong case for teaching calculus in high school. The piece includes this factoid: “Until about 1980, calculus was seen as a higher education course, primarily for those interested in mathematics, physics, or other hard sciences, and only about 30,000 high school students took the course.”

My guess is that liberal arts colleges before the 1980s (and maybe even now, for all I know) don’t put much emphasis on calculus. My guess is that only students on engineering and science tracks, whether in high school or college, get the right kind of instruction in calculus. According to the piece in Education Week, today 15 percent of high school students take calculus — those students who are on an engineering and science track.

There are some disappointing trends here. According to Education Week, quoting Uri Treisman, a math professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

“More than half of students who take calculus in high school come from families with a household income above $100,000 a year, according to a study this month in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. By contrast, only 15 percent of middle-income students and 7 percent of those in the poorest 25 percent of families take the course.

“‘Math is even more important to upward mobility now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, because … it’s seen as related to your general ability to solve problems quickly,’ Treisman said, adding that as a result, ‘there’s general anxiety and panic about equity issues for anything new, even though the current [calculus] pathway is a burial ground for students of color.'”

Most high school students who take calculus are white or Asian. Education Week:

“For example, in 2015-16, black students were 9 percentage points less likely than their white peers to attend a high school that offered calculus and half as likely to take the class if they attended a school that offered it. And if black students did get into a class, their teachers were also less likely to be certified to teach calculus than those of white students, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of federal civil rights data.”

As an adult with strong interests in physics and science, I’m hoping to get better at math and reduce the humiliation of having to skip over the equations in books I read. So far, so good, with the help of the book below. One nice thing that has changed since I was age 19 is that today we can let computers and calculators do the calculations while we humans concentrate on concepts and, hopefully, real insight into how things work in the natural world. Just learning to operate a scientific calculator is educational. Behind each key is an important concept.

As for our young people, surely we should do everything we can to help all them — even our young artists and writers — get a math education that goes beyond algebra to calculus and beyond calculus to a reasonable ability to read and understand differential equations.


For adults and others who evaded calculus or to whom calculus was never even offered