Koby’s Kaos

I’m lucky. When I woke up to the world around me the Beats were gone but the Existentialists were still cool. The late sixties were rushing in like an avalanche but Jimmy Hendrix and the Grateful Dead carried in yoga and meditation as well as all night guitar solos. There was still space in between to ponder what connected and why. Now thumb-powered hot media sucks away souls as we try to keep our tweets more interesting than our lives, lest our audience realizes who we really are and moves on.

As consumers we expect constant connection, as engineers we’re tied to those expectations, as if every device has to do everything, only faster better and cheaper—or else our paychecks won’t feed our own connection habit.

When technical editors meet we first pull out our personal electronics and talk about our tweets. You can find me in the corner reading a newspaper and sipping a beer, waiting until the other codgers tire of punching plastic and stagger into substance.

I am, of course, a fake myself. And hanging back with a sniper scope is a coward’s way to face the future. There is the chance that our wearable devices will become extensions of our consciousness, interconnections as complex and changing as our own neurons, enabling us to think outside and beyond our biological limitations.

Yet a sign of grey matter maturity is the paring away of connections. You snooze, you lose, and yet you gain. One physical mark of autism may be an excess of interconnection, until the wiring triumphs over content.

However, why was the internet first funded? An insurance against disaster!  Not only an interconnection of research and imagination, but one that was hubless. So that when the unthinkable occurs, what survives can go on. Able to regenerate function, like the brain enabled to recover from severe injury, radiation or gunshot wound. Though not, as Sci-Fi authors remind us, necessarily a recreation of what was.

Devices? When the Big One next comes (earthquake, eruption, storm, wave, disease, ecological disaster, asteroid and/or All), will our technology actually be able to bear us through the next flint age? Well…

Maybe it is time to turn off the classic rock and get the next genius-phone. Maybe me and my devices, we’re going places.

Remembering Tom Lehrer–

Part of my job is to go over technical news feeds, searching out news to feature (i.e. “one’s you actually need to know about”) on our websites and chucking the rest. Not often does one send me ricocheting down memory lane as far as NXP Semiconductors’ press release “NXP Technology Aids ‘No Sponge Left Behind’ in Surgical Procedures, RFID-Based SmartSponge System Helps Prevent Retained Foreign Objects in Surgical Patients.”

Now I think the announcement is great news, because items really can be left behind after surgery, and it’s not exactly healthy (which sparked my alternate solution, disposable dissolvable sponge structures spun out of Stuff That Is Good For You, like Pro-Biotically-Enriched Whole Grain Brewer’s Yeast Snapple, though that never got past the imbibing stage). According to the news release, the SmartSponge® System consists of RFID-enabled surgical sponges; an embedded RFID reader within an automated software system; an accompanying SmartWand to detect sponges accidently retained within the body; and a smart disposal system that tracks discarded sponges. I assume system for scalpels, clamps, gloves, and golf tees can’t be far behind.

The statistics quoted cite items left behind in 1 out of every 5,500 surgeries, higher in abdominal surgeries, and suggest that any messy, time-critical, multiple surgeries would also raise the odds. While I’ll concede this might raise your health care costs, as closer inspections of 737-300 fuselage skins would raise your travel costs, if it saves my life, it’s a good investment.

But what kicked me back was remembering the ex-poet phase of my professional life, when I fifth wheeled many a good meal from supportive friends (i.e. I wouldn’t leave until they fed me). A good month financially meant I made enough from paying gigs, like “Hanging Loose” magazine, to almost cover postage costs. One of the ways my total career can be described is Physics major turned poet turned Science Writer.

That kicked me further back, to think of other science turncoats over the years, especially Tom Lehrer, who can be described as a mathematician, turned singer-song writer, turned mathematician. Being a Renaissance Man during the Renaissance was probably easier—oh, you had to be high born, independently wealthy (or a really good sponge), fast enough with a sword to get away with being eccentric, and a host of other things that neither of us are—but there wasn’t that much to know (evil grin). Nor were there iPhones, iPads, and iAmGoingPrazies to suck up all time, along with consumer gadget debt and data plans to ever stop following high tech oxen with smartphone, mouse-enabled plows. Few of us can depart from cubicle surfing long enough to make any difference in life; Tom did.

Thomas Andrew “Tom” Lehrer will be unknown to most of you. His output of pithy, weird, happily deadpan satirical songs was recorded in the 1950’s and 1960’s. His humor has been repeated in hundreds of engineers I’ve known over the years, but few of his talents. Or perhaps more correctly, his willingness to step outside the profession use of his analytical skills to decapitate social, cultural and political dogma. That meant self-recording and peddling his albums for three bucks on campuses, since intelligence was too controversial for radio.

He had already returned to teaching math before I first heard his songs. My straight-laced world view was delightfully punctured. Later the highlight of helping to clear junk from Boneyard Creek in Champaign, Illinois, was pulling a 45 copy of his song “Pollution” from the mud. (Fifty of us spent the day playing ecologists and the only sign of aquatic life found was a tiny turtle, which had probably just escaped from a goldfish bowel.)

Perhaps the Tom Lehrer’s of any time don’t really change anything. He won’t be taught in school and didn’t build any bridges or monuments. If anything he demolished them. We probably won’t name any craters on Mercury’s dark side for him, though it has my vote. He characteristically downplayed himself saying, “I don’t think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted… I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

Nevertheless, the example of Tom and the few sciences types who however briefly applied their slide rules to compute real life, inspired me to apply the scientific method to English literature and similar stunts. I discovered a world of logical and illogical connections, even if it drove my professors to drink (not a long walk for many of them). Later it helped me see design team wizards as creative artists (and great artists as scientific geniuses) and to fall back to a career of defending them to managers, bean counters and marketeers, often translating between warring factions, like other engineers.

Tom Lehrer will be (or would be) 83 on April 9^th. You can celebrate his memory just by staying awake, actually listening to your spouse or coworkers, looking for other points of view, and enjoying how all things connect.