Still Mortal--After All These Years

. Beginning of life makes being older the goal. I'm not 7, I'm 7 AND A HALF! Can't wait to get a driving permit. Can't wait for that day to come. Then the mad hustle begins, with leaps through phases that make your head spin. Proximity makes clear vision possible--so that the current place far from proximate youth makes youth seem all hazy now. But, the proximate is now the other end of the timeline. Spending time with hospitalized people offers the view of all of the steps that we don't want to know about. The tubes, the beds and especially the aging process. It is even possible to see all the way to the end of the line. Don't stare too long. Medusa is there. -je
. "Lots of people get cranky when they get old, largely because they're dealing with pain and fear. It's a good excuse, certainly--I ain't gonna judge it but Richard's embracing of kindness strikes me as a lot more noble.
. The other thing I learned from Richard: Don't give up. Of course, don't give up jousting with [it] , but raging against the dying of the light is only one part of the process. Don't give up being kindly either. Indeed, be more kindly. See if you can do it. See if you can leave a legacy even larger than the one you already have. And if it turns out that you're alive three years from now, hey, it's all gravy." -Jon Carroll

Process . . . Completion . . .Process Again- -Never Finished

. The act of completion, for artists, provokes profound emotion. The painter Arshile Gorky once said that he never finished a piece but that "I just stop working on it for a while." [Artists] . . . speak to the somewhat artificial lines we draw to pronounce a work of art complete. Though it may be ready for departure, the creator can feel a pull to go on painting forever, the way one would feel pulled to continue nurturing a child.
. Or the way a novelist might feel pulled to reopen a story, even decades after closing it, intent on writing fresh resonance into the characters' world.
. --excerpted from a review of the novel "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" by Oscar Hijuelos. Reviewed and quotation from Carolina De Robertis [Special to The SF Chronicle] Sunday July 11, 2010

Neighbor Saves Scores From The Edge

SYDNEY Australia--In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.

Don Ritchie Keep His Watch In Australia

For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called the Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
. He's saved 160 people according to the official tally. "I'm offering them an alternative, really," Ritchie says. A smile cannot, of course, save everyone. . . But simple kindness can be surprisingly effective.
. Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The man wrote, "If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, I will not jump." Ritchie helps those . . . think beyond the terrible current moment.
. Psychiatrist Gordon Parker: "They often don't want to die, it's more that they want the pain to go away. So anyone that offers kindness or hope has the capacity to help a number of people."
. from The San Francisco Chronicle, Monday June 14, 2010

Tech Stuff: Watson to Debut This Year

This is Watson, the newest supercomputer from IBM. One assumption: Supercomputers are extremely fast. Since they can simulate weather and nuclear explosions their speed and computational power far exceeds ordinary computers. This one has been developed to the stage where it will be tested against humans later this year on television by playing a game of "Jeopardy" against high-ability past Jeopardy champions. See Part II below.

More on Watson

This board contains an experimental algorithm instructing the supercomputer about how to sift through millions of human cultural references in order to compete as "a question-answering machine." The algorithm deals most likely in statistical probabilities as it amasses a short list of correct answers and then selects the answer to give on the Jeopardy game. It is unique in that it is not connected to the Internet; all of its data has been loaded into its machine storage and trained on how to find repeated connections to certain words and phrases that not only match but point to related different words that might constitute the answer. In this, it sifts, sorts and evaluates human references where "natural language" has been used. It must also be able to handle the coy style of Jeopardy questions which heavily use word-play.
. During one game, a category was "All Eddie Before & After" indicating that the clue would hint at two different things that need to be blended together, one of which included the name "Eddie". The $2,000. clue was "A 'Green Acres' star goes existential (& French) as the author of " 'The Fall'." Watson nailed it perfectly: "Who is Eddie Albert Camus?".
Watson's trainer said, "Humans are just--boom!--they're just plowing through this in just seconds," Mr. Ferrucci said excitedly. "They're getting questions, they're breaking them down, they're interpreting them, they're getting the right interpretation, they're looking this up in their memory, they're scoring, they're doing all this just instantly."
. Watson is known for lightning-fast response times and for a lack of emotion or stress. Samantha Boardman, who has played against Watson said, "He plays to win," she said, shaking her head. "He's really not messing around!" Still, humans continue to beat the supercomputer regularly in Jeopardy games so the contest later this year will hold great interest. The buzz-in: An onlline game: test your knowledge of trivia against Watson, IBM's "Jeopardy!"-playing supercomputer. nytimes.com/magazine
- - -from The New York Times Magazine dated June 20, 2010.

She Is a Hostess--These Are Writ Bits (#1)

A Google exec said that electronic books and readers will place book pages so that they can "live in an even more exciting life." [Meaning ads and links] "It's hard to complain about such tools. They are useful. The original genius of the book, as a technology was its profound lack of excitement. On a printed page, there's nothing going on other than words, sentences and paragraphs. The excitement of reading a book lies in our own minds as we get lost in a moving story or wrapped up in a brilliant argument. As lives of books get more exciting, we might discover that our own intellectual lives get a little duller."
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"Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and an expert on the neuroscience of reading, notes that learning to read deeply is a painstaking process, requiring changes deep in our brains. She worries that the shift from immersive page-based reading to distracted screen-based reading could impede the development of the specialized neural circuits that make richly interpretive reading possible."-compiled by Nicholas Carr in an article about Old Media vs. New Media, in the SF Chronicle Sun June 20, 2010
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"There exists a technology that allows me to explore alternate universes, tread gingerly into unknown, dark places in the forest where no one has stepped before and to return safely. This tool allows me to hear voices of others, not only in current time [?] but in ages past whether it be man or woman and also their dialects, with their deeply expressive tones and moods. It helps me to understand, when I thought myself incapable of understanding. It clears and sorts the path for me. This tool is always with me and sits atop my neck." -je