Month: October 2022

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.

My take on colonial onion pie

Three days after I got home from Williamsburg, I couldn’t stop thinking about the onion pie at Chowning’s Tavern. So I made an onion pie.

I used the concept from the recipe below. I didn’t use any eggs, though. I included a couple of Morningstar’s vegetarian breakfast sausage.

Recipe for Williamsburg onion pie

Though sliced boiled eggs inside the pie doesn’t sound terrible, I think that the next time I make onion pie I’ll include some grated Gruyère, the better to bind the layers of apples and vegetables. I was afraid that the pie would be dry, but the liquid that the apples and potatoes lost during cooking took care of that. A very slight dusting of potato starch inside the pie might also be an improvement.

Except for the calories in the crust, there’s nothing at all unhealthy about onion pie. With a little tweaking, this kind of old-fashioned cooking could be just as healthy as the Mediterranean cooking that has become a kind of international standard for travelers. Our ancestors were right — mace and nutmeg are the perfect seasoning for this pie. While the pie was baking, my house smelled just like Chowning’s Tavern.

Williamsburg

Williamsburg, if you haven’t been there, is worth the trip. It’s hard to get to, way out on the Virginia coast. It’s very expensive. And it’s not child friendly. But they’re very serious about re-creating the earliest moments of American colonial history, not just as a still life, but in motion, including the sounds and the tastes.

Ken was there to speak at the College of William & Mary. I went as a tourist, not least because I suspected (and it’s true) that some of the most authentic colonial cookery — now considered obsolete by urban foodies — is to be found there. The Rockefeller Room at the Williamsburg Inn clearly has well trained and up-to-date chefs, but everything in the Rockefeller Room has a traditional spin. The menus in the taverns are brilliant. The ales are superb.

Williamsburg onion pie


Onion pie with brown ale, Chowning’s Tavern, Williamsburg

I’m back home after a couple of very nice days in Colonial Williamsburg with Ken. Mostly I shot video rather than photos. I’ll post a video after I get the editing done.

Onion pie, it seems, is a Williamsburg specialty. The recipe in the link below calls for boiled eggs sliced into the pie. The version of onion pie that we had at Chowning’s Tavern, however, had a fried egg on top of the pie but no egg inside the pie. I think that would be my preference. I’ll make an onion pie some chilly day and use Chowning’s Tavern’s method. I would assume that this pie was an English favorite that the American colonists brought with them.

Recipe for Williamsburg onion pie

The recipe above is based on an 18th Century recipe:

Wash and pare some potatoes and cut them in slices, peel some onions, cut them in slices, pare some apples and slice them, make a good crust, cover your dish, lay a quarter of a pound of butter all over, take a quarter of an ounce of mace beat fine, a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of beaten pepper, three tea-spoonfuls of salt; mix all together, strew some over the butter, lay a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions, a layer of apples, and a layer of eggs, and so on till you have filled your pie, strewing a little of the seasoning between each layer, and a quarter of a pound of butter in bits, and six spoonfuls of water; close your pie, and bake it an hour and a half. A pound of potatoes, a pound of onions, a pound of apples, and twelve eggs will do.

— Glasse, Hannah, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, page 259

Making persimmon pudding

Two years ago, I wrote thorough post on making persimmon pudding from wild persimmons. This year, Ken and I have made a video.

That was yesterday. I’d be ashamed to tell you how much persimmon pudding is left this morning.

Oligarchs and the rest of us

Politico has a must-read piece today, an interview with Fiona Hill: Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin.’ Part of what makes this interview a must-read is how it exposes the media’s inadequacy in trying to cover something as complicated as Putin’s war against Ukraine. Only a specialist and academic like Fiona Hill can see very far beneath the surface. This interview should have been in the New York Times, not in a secondary source such as Politico.

There’s another important element. Why should a rich American naïf and idiot like Elon Musk figure into this interview? Just what interests do Musk and Putin have in common? Just how often do they talk, and why? This begs a question about another rich American naïf and idiot: Donald Trump. We have never really learned what interests Trump and Putin have in common. How often have Trump and Putin used secret back-channels of communication, and why? Here we could make a long list of the world’s oligarchs, some of whom control countries such as China and Iran, and others who control “countries of particular concern” such as Hungary, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These oligarchs know each other. Otherwise only the banks know who most of them are. They live in a golden bubble that we common folk cannot penetrate. Only occasionally do we get scraps of information about what they do and the power they have over world events. When their interference with democratic governments is noticed, they pull out all the stops to obstruct our view, as with the matter of Russia’s interference with the American election of 2016.

Here one must speculate. Can there be any doubt that much of what drives world events occurs out of our sight, far beneath the surface, visible only to the very rich and the very powerful? Only occasionally do we see the tip of an iceberg, such as the connection between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

My speculation is that the fundamental conflict driving world events today boils down to oligarchs (who can flourish only under corrupt authoritarian governments) versus the people (who can flourish only in democracies). If this is true, then it begs another question: Why do so many ordinary people, who could never possibly gain admittance to the golden bubble in which oligarchs live, admire these oligarchs and take the oligarchs’ side in this global struggle? There is nothing in it for ordinary people other than misery, exploitation, and loss of liberty, once oligarchs are sufficiently entrenched to be untouchable by the people’s power, with elections made obsolete. Deception and propaganda, of course, are the biggest part of the answer. The oligarchs not only have mastered the art of deception, they even make a profit from it. For every five of us who are pretty good at recognizing the truth, there are another five of us who are willing to pay to be deceived.

The interview with Fiona Hill should raise our awareness not only of the great danger in Europe, but also the great danger here in the United States, where a Republican Party that serves the interests of the global oligarchy might succeed in legally taking control of the United States for the purpose of corrupting the American democracy and handing the country over to the oligarchs. That this was (and is) Trump’s purpose is now completely obvious. The Republican Party is all in. A shocking percentage of the American people actually believe that they would gain from this. They’d barely have a pot to piss in unless they could get a piece of the corruption, but at least they’d own the libs. It’s a pity that we can’t send them on a visit to Russia or Iran or North Korea to get a preview of what’s in store even for those who carry water for the oligarchs. For those of us who resisted, it would be much, much worse.

No more chaos on the book shelves

What do two nerds do on a rainy day? They empty all the bookshelves, stack the books on the floor, scan all the titles into a database, and put the books back onto the shelves, in alphabetical order by category. Including the scanning that I had done before Ken’s visit, this was a total of about 30 hours of work. This gives me a whole new appreciation of what librarians do. Now the abbey’s seven bookshelves are all in order.

The database is an app that runs on smartphones named BookBuddy. If a book has a scannable ISBN number, then the app will do all the work. If the book has an ISBN number but no scannable bar code, then the app will recognize the title and lots of other information after the ISBN number is keyed in. For older books with no ISBN number, the app can search by title and identify most books, even books more than a hundred years old.

All of Ken’s books — or at least all of Ken’s books in the U.S. as opposed to his current home in Scotland — are here at the abbey. Ken’s books and mine are remarkably compatible and complementary, as might be expected of literary confederates and former housemates in a house where six books have been written in the last ten years and nursed through the publication process. As for the books that Ken has written, you can find out more at his web site.

Ken is on a speaking tour in the U.S. When he arrived here from Scotland, he brought me bottle of GlenDronach Scotch. That Scotch is from Forgue, 35 miles north of Aberdeen.

Ken’s story lives on …

In many ways, it seems like just yesterday that Ken’s Walden on Wheels was published. That was May 14, 2013. The book continues to sell well. The book earned back Ken’s advance from the publisher several years ago and continues to bring in money for Ken. Ken wrote Walden on Wheels here at Acorn Abbey. I’ll never forget the day I finished reading Ken’s second draft, after he had made some revisions to the ending. He was working in the garden that morning. I walked up to the garden, quite aware that it was a beautiful book that would do well. As I recall, I said to Ken, “I can’t believe that I just walked up the hill and spoke to the person who wrote that book.”

Ken subsequently published two other books, with three books under his belt by the age of 35. He’s a lucky dog, living the life of a successful author. Ken is on another college speaking tour at present. A couple of stops are nearby — N.C. State University in Raleigh, and the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He’ll also be here at the abbey for five or six days. I have long wanted to visit Williamsburg, so I plan to meet up with Ken there. We’ll have a long and bookish discussion agenda for his visit, and probably a litle Scotch to go with it. Knowing Ken, he’ll probably also clean up my messy garden.

The video above was made by an online content producer, Seen Stories.

Oliver Cromwell: Villain or hero?


Source: Wikimedia Commons

What’s remarkable about Oliver Cromwell, 350 years after he died, is that he is still a touchy subject. Why should that be? I would propose that it’s because the conflicts of the 17th Century have not really been settled: What kind of government is best, and what should religion have to do with it? In many ways, we’re still fighting the English Civil War, just as we are still fighting the American Civil War.

Cromwell is on my mind because I just finished reading Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock, in which Cromwell is a character, as well as the future King Charles II. And Hilary Mantel, who wrote Wolf Hall, died last month.

I am by no means qualified to make any sort of historical argument about Cromwell. I can only throw up my hands and say that it’s clearly complicated. Historians are still arguing about Cromwell and writing about Cromwell. In November, Blackwell’s will release a pricey new tome, volume 2 of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Volume II, February 1649 to December 1653. A recent article in the Guardian about this book asks the question, “Has history got it wrong about Oliver Cromwell’s persecution of Catholics?”

Sir Walter Scott, though he was a royalist, does not demonize his Cromwell character. Scott’s Cromwell is pompous and menacing, but he’s also rational, and he’s not gratuitously cruel.

As for Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell in Wolf Hall, I don’t know, except that according to the reviews I’ve read she is highly sympathetic to Cromwell. I tried to read Wolf Hall but could not get beyond the second page. It was some of the most atrocious writing I’ve ever tried to read, and I made the remark at the time that it’s a wonder that some writers aren’t killed by their editors. I was not the only one. According to Wikipedia, Susan Bassnet wrote in Times Higher Education, “[D]readfully badly written… Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon.” For no reason other than her horrible writing, I am highly skeptical of Hilary Mantel’s take on history.

As for what makes the question complicated, we might start by saying that it depended on where one lived. The English, the Scottish, and the Irish all had good reasons for seeing Cromwell differently. As for the doctrinal and political questions, they’re still argued today. Cromwell was a Puritan, and for that reason alone I can’t imagine that I could like him. In Waller R. Newell’s book Tyrants, Newell writes that “it would be hard to know whether to describe him as a Puritan Machiavellian or a Machavellian Puritan.” Here Newell does not intend the term “Machiavellian” as an insult; rather, he has in mind “the heart of Machiavelli’s dual endorsement of ‘princes’ and ‘peoples.'”

Whatever material historians may recently have uncovered that suggests that Cromwell was more tolerant of Catholics than was previously known, there is no disputing what Cromwell did in Ireland, where, according to Wikipedia, 15 to 50 percent of the population died from Cromwell’s war and the famine and plague that followed.

Here I confess a personal grudge against Cromwell, though it is purely speculative. My paternal ancestors arrived in Virginia at the very tail of the 17th Century. No one has been able to precisely determine where they came from, but the Y-DNA genetic evidence available today strongly suggests that they came from Ireland, not from England. The speculative theory of mine is that those two young brothers left Ireland because of the devastation and redistribution of property caused by Cromwell. They saw no future for themselves in Ireland.

There are grudges aplenty today as the old civil wars continue. We know what happened to King Charles I, and it seems that King Charles II was a pretty good guy. Just yesterday, King Charles III appeared in Scotland’s Dunfermline for some royal duties. According to the media, Charles III and his consort were cheered by the large crowd waiting to see them. When Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, appeared, there were boos along with the cheers. This surprises me, but it also shows how the complexities of the 17th Century live on. According to the Daily Mail, quoting a woman in the crowd:

“Remarking on the booing of Nicola Sturgeon she said: ‘That doesn’t surprise me. She thinks she is Queen of Scotland and doesn’t realise how many people dislike her. We are very happy with the Royal Family we have and with the union, thank you.’”

Another royalist, in Scotland. Yep. It’s complicated. And very little has been settled.

Trump: How will it end?


Authoritarian dreams of global domination. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Salon has an excellent interview today with George Conway, who formerly was a Republican and a Justice Department lawyer. Conway is asked all the right questions. Conway is well positioned to be taken seriously. His answers, I believe, are spot on. Everyone should read this article, but it boils down to this: Yes, Trump is going to be indicted and convicted. But Trump also is going to try to do as much damage to the country as possible as he goes down, just as he did when he was voted out of the White House:

Trump ‘will be convicted of multiple felonies’: George Conway on the bumpy road ahead
Longtime GOP lawyer says Trump won’t take a deal and will call for MAGA violence — but his time is almost up

But even with Trump ruined and silenced, we still will be stuck with the Republican Party. Conway says:

“Trump is also going to cause damage to the Republican Party. The party is finally going to realize that Trump will take them down with him. It is going to be very ugly all around. In the end, though, it will get better. Once Trump is dealt with, there’s the other problem that must be confronted: Trump let all the termites into the basement of the house. The Big Lie and the election deniers and all the assorted lunatics who have taken up residence in the Republican Party and are now its base must be pushed out.”

Conway wisely deflects some of the deeper questions on the grounds that he is not a psychologist. I’m not a psychologist either, but I’m going to stick my neck out.

I think that one of the things that decent and reasonable people must learn, if the United States ever returns to stability and governability, is that about a third of the population are authoritarians, and that authoritarians always damage the social fabric. In more stable times, these people go about their sorry little lives, unorganized yet always doing the damage they always do. But that damage occurs in much smaller spheres — families, communities, and workplaces. But if an uber-authoritarian with a big megaphone comes along with the right lies and stirs up enough rage, then an entire country can find itself in danger. There are only two requirements: A total madman such as Donald Trump, and a megaphone to retail the lies and rage, which the right-wing media and social media have eagerly supplied to Trump and Trumpism.

It is considered shrill and rude to say it, but I believe that it has to be said. That is that the line between authoritarian and “conservative” is thin and vague. The difference is that conservatives retain their decency and moral sanity. Authoritarians do not. George Conway is a conservative, but he is not an authoritarian. Hence Conway eventually saw through Trump and felt shame for having been deceived. The great danger to democracy occurs when authoritarians and conservatives vote the same way. Combined, they come to more than 50 percent, though probably only barely more than 50 percent. It’s probably reasonable to say that about 30 percent of the population are hopeless authoritarians, and about 20 percent are conservatives who, though regressive, racist, and easily deceived, still have a grip on decency and moral sanity.

Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist, would have us believe that conservatives and authoritarians are just as psychologically and morally competetent as the rest of us, but that they just have different “moral foundations.” But love for authority, and the hatred of out-groups, are sorry, and dangerous, moral foundations. As I said, I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that Jonathan Haidt is dangerously wrong and has done great harm by encouraging blindness to the actual nature of authoritarianism. Conservatives teeter between clarity and delusion, as Conway says in the interview when he acknowledges his shame for voting for Trump in 2016 and for not seeing sooner what Trump really is. But authoritarians are not capable of that kind of insight, and they’re not going to change. That’s where we are today: Authoritarians quickly got on board with Trump. The Republican Party brought the easily deceived conservatives on board. Combined, they have enough power to threaten democracy and the rule of law, the barriers that stand in the way of their dream of total authority over the rest of us.

The Republican Party should have kept Trump from running for president back in 2015. One of the purposes of political parties is to screen candidates, keep out the crazies, and field candidates who will promote the party’s principles. But the Republican Party, having abandoned its principles to decay into a Trump cult, has failed again and again to do its job. My guess is that Republicans believe that sticking with Trump is their only hope for the 2022 mid-terms. But if the Republican Party retains any grip on political sanity, it will pivot away from Trump after November 8 and start to cut Trump loose, knowing that Trump is going down and that Trump as a strategy for 2024 would be a recipe for the biggest landslide against Republicans in history. Then the question will be: Will the Republican Party start to recover its political and moral sanity? Or will it find another Trump to ride all the way to hell?