Occasionally I’ll crowdsource, as it were, a childhood memory. I was born and grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, living there between 1957 and 1976. Other than brief work-related stays from December 1983 to September 1984, and again from June to September 1992, I haven’t lived there since 1976, some 46 years ago. So when I needed help recalling a particular used and rare books dealer, my go-to place for research was the private Facebook group Vintage Oshawa, which has about 19,400 members and describes itself as “a place to post pictures, memorabilia & share tales of Oshawa past (pre-1980).” After all, 19,400 heads might be better than one in this case, I reasoned. And I had success almost four years ago back in May 2018 when I asked in classic Facebook style “who remembers” Rose Bowl Fish and Chips that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets? More than 200 members of the group either liked the question or responded with a comment.
How we consolidate, access and sometimes geographically transpose locations in long-term memory is a complex process beyond the ken of my knowledge of neuroscience, but here is what I asked earlier today based on what I suspected to be a real but perhaps flawed memory:
“Does anyone recall a used bookstore on Division Street in Oshawa in the 1970s and 1980s, not far from the old General Motors North Plant? Brown brick, I think, like other buildings in the neighbourhood. A bit dingy in terms of lighting inside but not without its charms. I think the name might have started with the letter M, but it was all quite a while ago. Given that we’re talking about 40 or 50 years ago, it’s also possible I’ve conflated the idea of a bookstore on Division Street in the area of the GM North Plant with a health food/Asian vegetable market store in that location and the bookstore was on the west side of Simcoe Street South, near John Street East, not far south of a Pepi’s Pizza location on that corner. I still have fond, though distant memories of my friend Mike Byrne, working there as a cook in high school circa 1973-74, and wrangling his friends the odd late-night pie … the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.
The mention of Pepi’s Pizza was perhaps not essential to answering the question, given the focus is on a bookstore and Asian grocery store, but mentioning a favourite childhood eatery in Oshawa, be it Pepi’s or Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, or perhaps Red Barn or Burger Chef, always is a good memory prompt for any even tangentially related story I’ve found as a writer.
So what did I learn today from folks in Vintage Oshawa? When I said, I think the name might have started with the letter M,” turns out I was correct as dozens of readers spelled it out for me as Morgan Self, which I instantly knew as correct. But commenters went well beyond that in their help. Apparently, there were two Morgan Selfs who were proprietors of their … err … self-named bookstore, father and son. And they lived on Shakespeare Avenue another commenter noted (their bookstore was at 84 Simcoe St. S.) Now, I confess my fact-checking skills as a blogger aren’t perhaps as well-honed as they had to be as a pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia copy editor on the rim at daily newspapers, but I just had to Google Shakespeare Avenue to make sure this was by the book and there was such a street in Oshawa (I didn’t recall it) and I wasn’t being audaciously pranked on social media prior to April 1. Turns out to be legit. There is such a street. Whether the book-selling Selfs lived on it would take more verification for a newspaper back in the day, but for us present-day bloggers, not so much. Editors in their day were the last-line-of-defence fact checkers. When you wear a writer’s hat, you are a storyteller and there’s an admonition that a writer should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. This was true even before 2017 when Sean Spicer came along and elevated the notion to high principle. That said, the photograph accompanying this post is admittedly for illustration purposes only. It is not the inside of the long-gone Morgan Self bookstore in Oshawa. At least I think it’s not.
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Tag Archives: Google
Google Search is a writer’s friend: Primo spell checker
For years now I’ve used Google Search as my go-to-spell checker on the internet for words that stump Microsoft Word’s spell checker (which is unfortunately a pretty low bar … “no spelling suggestions” and red underlined words are a pretty common occurrence. I may get one yet writing this sentence).
A spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, e-mail client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
“The spell checker scans the text and extracts the words contained in it, comparing each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes,” Wikipedia tells me.
“An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.”
Most of the time I do know how to spell the word triggering the red alert, but even my largely two-index fingers typing has a tendency to overrun my typing on the page when I am composing something quickly in my head, as I write (err … type), and sometimes it is just as fast, when it is more than one word, to copy-and-paste the sentence into Google Search rather than to individually correct several suspect words. Sometimes, of course, I correct the word in Word just to make sure I really do remember how to spell it. Sort of like doing math in your head, or at least on paper with a pen or pencil, rather than using a calculator. We pretty much all figure we should be able to do those things manually; we just don’t want to overdo it.
This got me thinking the other day, wondering why Google Search is so much better at correcting my spelling in sentences, almost as an afterthought, while it completes a search that may or may not be additionally helpful in and of itself. Google Search will often finish a sentence correctly for me, even if I only paste or type a part of the sentence into the search box or bar.
My first hunch was that it had something to do with the vast amount of data Google Search processes with over three billion searches a day, and developing algorithms and other proprietary tools based on that.
My second hunch was that if I was pondering this other people have thought about it, researched it, and likely written about it before me.
My intuition for both hunches turned out to be correct.
Intuition, in fact, is what Google Search is all about. What makes it intuitive? Context. Context rules.
John Breeden II, the Washington, D.C. chief executive officer of Tech Writers Bureau, who formerly was the laboratory director and senior technology analyst for Government Computer News (GCN), where he reviewed thousands of products aimed at the U.S. federal government – everything from notebooks to high-end servers – and at the same time decoded highly technical topics for broad audiences, wrote about the topic in an Nov. 18, 2011 article for GCN.
“My biggest problem with Word is that there are some words that simply trip it up,” Breeden wrote. “When writing about temperature for our many rugged reviews, I always put ‘Farenheight,’ which Word thinks should be changed to ‘Fare height.’ That doesn’t help at all.
“However, when the same misspelled word is pasted into Google, it says, ‘showing results for Fahrenheit instead.’ There are quite a few other words that confuse Word but not Google. They are not difficult to find.
“I have to wonder why Google is so smart when it comes to figuring out what word a user wants to use. My guess is that the database Google is pulling from is so massive that it’s probably seen a lot of the same basic spelling mistakes. There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to search for Fahrenheit but typed in ‘Farenheight’ instead. Nice to know that I’ve got company.
“You would think it would be simple for word processors to use the same type of technology to improve their accuracy, but I suppose that would involve capturing data from their users and then making the connections between common mistakes and the accurate spelling.
“I thought that is what spell check was supposed to do, but instead I think it just matches the misspelling with words that are somewhat close to what you’ve typed. And Google obviously goes beyond that to associate common mistakes with actual words.”
An anonymous poster at Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, wrote on Sept. 1, 2012 in response to the question, “How is google so good at correcting spelling mistakes in searches?”:
“Google (search engines in general) has clusters processing tons (TB’s) query logs, which try to learn the transformation from original misspelled sentence to the corrected one. These transformation schemes are fed into the front end servers which serve the auto completion (and/or corrections to queries). “Also these servers have lot more processing power and memory and disk space of course will not be an issue at all (for the learned transformations). “Also since Google crawls the entire web regularly it will learn new words and suggest corrections Word can’t do till next release.”
Quora also aggregates questions and answers to topics.
“Desktop software usually have tight constraints on processing power, memory or disk space they could use to run compared to that of server based applications and usually are expected to keep the internet usage to a minimum (at least for MS Word.) “They use static resources (dictionary that might only be current at the time of launch) and can’t employ complex algorithms due to the above said restrictions and hence employ heuristic algorithms which may not [be] very predictive of the correct word.”
Cosmin Negruseri, vice-president of engineering at Addepar, an investment management technology company, formerly worked at Google (both companies are based in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California) as an engineer, working on ads, search and Google Code Jam, an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google, replied the same day, writing: “The main insight in modern spell correctors is using context. For example New Yorp is a misspelling of New York with a high probability.”
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Tipping points and blogging by the numbers
I have been blogging at soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) for about a year and a half now. Recently I reached some kind of magical tipping point where I no longer have to write anything, at least for the foreseeable future, to garner more than 100 readers a day on average. It’s got so easy, I missed marking the few days it took to go from 49,000 readers to 50,000 readers because I hadn’t been looking at my stats much (the bane of every self-respecting blogger, or so it seems anyway) because I hadn’t written anything new since Feb. 16.
Not that it really matters much. Even if they were inclined to disclose such proprietary information, which they’re not for the most part, I’m not mathematically enough gifted to really understand how various Google and Facebook algorithms work, so I can’t explain why this is so.
I do know this: About 75 per cent of the daily views right now on the almost 200 posts I’ve written since September 2014 come from my home or landing page on the blog, with a handful of stories, or blog posts, if you will, garnering views of at least one or two readers somewhere in the world every day.
I’m delighted to say “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) one of my early posts from Sept. 13, 2014 joined that rarefied company of posts recently. On an ordinary day, readers in about a dozen or more countries around the globe read what I have written here. The makeup of the countries changes somewhat but the overall number of 12 or slightly more on a daily basis, has been the same almost from the beginning. It doesn’t go up or down much.
It seems that the majority of the stories being read right now, where a reader goes to a specific story rather than my homepage, come disproportionally from my earlier work, say between September 2014 and last May. Is that because I wrote better stuff back then? Possibly. But I think it more likely has a lot to do with the mysteries of Google search and how things cycle around the World Wide Web (WWW) on the Internet. I expect perhaps that in six months from now, some of the stories I’ve penned more recently will find their stride.
Along the way, I’ve learned a few tricks, of course. Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement last year and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.
The other thing I’ve learned is a bit about the value of tags and search engine optimization. And what I’ve learned, I must confess, is not exactly high culture or high-minded for that matter. Sex sells. Sizzle sells. Self-referential sells. Surprise!
My leading search engine terms today are: “hot tub high school; Lauren German hot tub school; MKO audit; Red Barn restaurant; LBJ sworn in” and “hot tub high school movie.” If you detect a theme, it is actually from a more recent story Jan. 29 headlined, “Fox TV’s Lucifer Morningstar and normalizing evil: Does the devil get any cuddlier?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/fox-tvs-lucifer-morningstar-and-normalizing-evil-does-the-devil-get-any-cuddlier/) where I wrote, “Multiple references by Morningstar to Dancer about her briefly being a B-list actress, best known for her topless scenes in a movie called Hot Tub High School, before she became a cop, like her dad, are not accompanied by flashbacks, although Neil Genzlinger in his New York Times review, described the devil in Lucifer as having the “sexist, salacious mind-set of a 14-year-old boy” when it comes to Chloe.”
Perhaps destined to join the ranks of stories read daily in a few months?
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Maps and Mercator
I’ve always liked maps of the world, atlases and globes. As a kid, I could spend hours lost in them and the real places they could take me in an imaginary way. I’m certainly not a cartographer and my high school geography teachers would probably rate me as only so-so, doing better in the social aspects of geography than the physical sciences aspect.
Sharpies $$$ Store in Southwood Shopping Plaza in Thompson is pretty much right behind the area of Juniper Drive I live on. Last fall, Jeanette and me wandered in on a Saturday afternoon and emerged each with $2 roll-down The World Political Atlantic Centred HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. wall maps from 2012. Mine is hanging over my desk at home as I write this. The HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. Mercator projection map carries several disclaimers. The most general one in the fine print is that “boundary representation is not necessarily authoritative.”
Interestingly, but perhaps not very surprising since the map was made in New Delhi, India tops the list when it comes to acknowledgements, including a 2011 copyright, in the bottom right hand corner of the map: “The Topographical details within India are based upon Survey of India map with the permission of the Surveyor General or India.” And “the territorial waters of India extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate base line.” Or the External Boundary and Coast-Line of India on the map agrees with the RecordMaster copy certified by the Survey of India.”
If I glance up just a few inches from writing a post for my blog at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/, I can view a fascinating factbox bar running full length along the bottom of the 27-inch vertical x 37-inch horizontal map, letting me know that the driest place on Earth is not, as I might have guessed, somewhere like the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter desert of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, but rather the Atacama Desert of Chile in South America, with “rainfall barely measurable.”
One afternoon a few months ago I was glancing up just a bit above the factbox at the bottom of the map when my eye was drawn to San Carlos de Bariloche in the province of Río Negro, Argentina, situated in the foothills of the Andes on the southern shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake. A few clicks more and Wikipedia told me that according to the 2010 census the city “has a permanent population of 108,205” and “after development of extensive public works and Alpine-styled architecture,” San Carlos de Bariloche at 41° 9′ 0″ S latitude “emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as a major tourism centre with ski, trekking and mountaineering facilities. In addition, it has numerous restaurants, cafés, and chocolate shops.” Sounds most pleasant, all in all.
Today, of course, marks the 503rd birthday of Gerhard Kremer, who is better known for the Latinized version of his name, Gerardus Mercator. The name Kremer in German, and Cremer in Dutch both mean merchant. The Latin name for a merchant was Mercator.
Mercator is the Flemish mathematician and cartographer, who in 1569 “discovered how to create a flat map that takes into consideration the curvatures of the earth,” writes Kevin McSpadden in TIME magazine online, noting Mercator “has been honored in a new Google doodle.”
Even before Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google in September 1998, the concept of the doodle was born when Page and Brin placed a stick figure drawing behind the second “o” in the word, Google, intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.”
Two years later in 2000, they asked then Google webmaster Dennis Hwang to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. It was so well received by users that Hwang was appointed Google’s “chief doodler” and doodles started showing up more and more regularly on the Google homepage.
“In the beginning,” Google says, “they mostly celebrated familiar holidays; nowadays, they highlight a wide array of events and anniversaries from the 1st Drive-In Movie to the educator Maria Montessori.”
Since 1998 there have been more than 2,000 doodles on Google’s homepage. You can see them all at http://www.google.com/doodles
“Jailed for heresy in 1544, Mercator later revolutionized navigational theory,” McSpadden writes in TIME. “His theory, dubbed the ‘Mercator projection,’ was a major breakthrough for navigation because for the first time sailors could plot a route using straight lines without constantly adjusting their compass readings.
“However, because the projection lengthens the longitudinal parallels, the scale of objects enlarge dramatically as they near the north and south poles and the method becomes unusable at around 70 degrees north/south.
By increasingly inflating the sizes of regions according to their distance from the equator, the Mercator projections results in a representation of Greenland that is larger than Africa, which has a geographic area 14 times greater than Greenland’s. Since much of the Third World lies near the equator, these countries appear smaller on a Mercator projection.
Other major misconceptions based on Mercator projection maps are:
- Alaska is nearly as large as the continental United States;
- Europe (excluding Russia) is only a bit larger than South America;
- Antarctica dwarfs all the continents.
In reality:
- Alaska can fit inside the continental United States about three times;
- South America nearly doubles Europe’s land mass;
- Antarctica looks like the second-smallest continent.
German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’ differential geometry Theorema Egregium (Latin for “Remarkable Theorem”) demonstrates, however, that no planar or flat map of the Earth can be perfect, even for a portion of the Earth’s surface. Every cartographic projection necessarily distorts at least some distances. The Mercator projection preserves angles but fails to preserve area.
The rival Gall–Peters projection, a configurable equal-area map projection, known as the equal-area cylindric or cylindrical equal-area projection, named after 19th century Scottish clergyman James Gall, and 20th century German historian Arno Peters, and unveiled in 1974 as the Peters World Map, is widely used in the British school system and is promoted by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Oxfam, the National Council of Churches, the Mennonite Central Committee and New Internationalist magazine because of its ability to communicate visually the actual relative sizes of the various regions of the planet. While the Peters World Map doesn’t enlarge areas as much as the Mercator projection, certain places appear stretched, horizontally near the poles, and vertically near the Equator.
“Mercator was ahead of his time, not living to see his discovery become fully employed, but ‘by the eighteenth century the projection had been adopted almost universally by European navigators,’” TIME wrote in 2013.
Mercator was born on March 5, 1512, in the town of Rupelmonde in Flanders, which is today part of Belgium. He was educated in the Netherlands and in 1544 was charged with heresy on the basis of his sympathy for Protestantism and suspicions about his frequent travels.
He was held in custody in prison for seven months before the charges were dropped.
Mercator died on Dec. 2, 1594.
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In a sign of the times, RFID (radio frequency identification) chips are now used in workers’ hands for identification at Epicenter in Stockholm to unlock doors and operate photocopiers – and soon to pay for lunch in the cafeteria: Trends forecaster Faith Popcorn calls it ‘augmented humanity’
In June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, I covered a conference in Kingston, Ontario called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.” Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, said it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City.
McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.
While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.
And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day almost 20 years ago has come to pass.
A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning; these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme. I was reminded of this reading about Hannes Sjoblad, of BioNyfiken, a Swedish biohacking group, and the use of small RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, the size of a grain of rice, implanted under the skin of workers hands, embedded by a professional tattoo artist (sometimes at “chip-insertion parties” hosted by a Stockholm tattoo parlor) between their thumb and index finger, to allow Epicenter’s 700 tenants in Stockholm to unlock doors, operate photocopiers or share contact information. You can watch a 1m3s TomoWorld YouTube video of how it works at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUSje_XlzQ4
Epicenter is located between the central streets of Hamngatan, Brunkebergstorg and Regeringsgatan in Stockholm and managed by Result and Sime. It is part of AMF Fastigheter’s project Urban Escape Stockholm.
“We want to be able to understand this technology before big corporates and big government come to us and say everyone should get chipped – the tax authority chip, the Google or Facebook chip,” Sjoblad, Epicenter’s “chief disruption officer” and a member of BioNyfiken, told BBC News technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones last month.
Each RFID chip is encased in a small capsule, which also contains a copper antenna coil and a capacitor. The chip stores a unique binary number that is transmitted to the scanner. Along with allowing entry into the Epicenter, the chip also can open the doors of individual offices and makes the photocopier run. Soon, the RFID microchips, the use of which is voluntary at the moment, will be able to be used by workers to pay for lunch in the cafeteria and similar services.
“We call it augmented humanity,” 67-year-old trends forecaster Faith Popcorn, author of Dictionary of the Future, whose birth name was Faith Plotkin, told Meredith Engel, the online health reporter, of the New York Daily News. “We foresee a future in which everyone will have an implanted chip that will benefit our personal lives as well.” Popcorn, founder and chief executive officer of the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve, is best known for her 1991 book, The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. Since 1974, Popcorn’s BrainReserve has forecast the future for companies including IBM, Bayer and American Express. Her supposed home run in 1991 was predicting the “cocooning” trend, where she forecast a coming penchant for Americans to spend time and money at home, which, in fact, only partially materialized for a time.
Implanted RFID (radio frequency identification) chips … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.
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If ‘Googled’ is a verb that needs no explanation, can there be any doubt the Internet is changing the very way we think?
“Plasticity and the human brain” was my original draft headline for this post. Seemed like a catchy enough way to draw readers in.
But before I could write this column with such a punchy “hed,” I had to do a bit of research. On the Internet from my desk, of course. That’s when I got distracted. Which is rather the story of the Internet. They don’t call it the World Wide Web – with the emphasis on web – for nothing.
Sharon Begley, senior health and science correspondent at Reuters, was the science editor and the science columnist at Newsweek from 2007 to April 2011. In the Jan. 8, 2010 issue of she had an interesting piece called, “Your Brain Online: Does the Web change how we think?” Begley was commenting on Edge Foundation Inc.’s 2010 annual question by John Brockman to 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars, which four years ago was: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Not so much, argued some scholars, including neuroscientist Joshua Greene and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, both of Harvard.
Others held a dystopian view. Communications scholar Howard Rheingold argued the Internet fosters “shallowness, credulity, distraction” and as a result that minds struggle “to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu.” Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, who studies the political effects of the Internet, says, “Our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts … our ability to look back and engage with the past is one unfortunate victim.”
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University writes that the ubiquity of information makes us “less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet.” The information is de-contextualized and satisfies our immediate research needs at the expense of deeper understanding, Csikszentmihalyi argues.
This is not exactly a new argument. Nicholas Carr wrote a similar piece in the July/August 2008 issue of Atlantic magazine with the genuinely catchy title: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He argued the online world has made it much harder to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas.
Carr wrote: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”
Carr followed up that 2008 magazine article with a book two years later, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain.
I could go on, but truth is I got distracted around this point in my research. That happens with the Internet – a lot. My mind was soon enough recalling Quantum Leap, starring Dean Stockwell, as Al Calavicci, and Scott Bakula, as Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who becomes lost in time following a botched experiment.
It aired from March 1989 to March 1993 originally, a quick detour to Wikipedia confirmed for me. “I thought it was quite good at the time for the sociology more than the science,” I was soon explaining in an e-mail. “Interesting though because it is one of the last shows of its type to air before the Internet was just about to take off in a big way. There was e-mail in 1993 and a very early World Wide Web (WWW), but few people were ‘wired.’”
That might have been OK if that was as far as it went. But soon I was doing some comparative research on Wikipedia for the mid-1980s to mid-1990s sci-fi era. “I also quite enjoyed some of the episodes of Sliders, starring Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, which ran from from 1995 to 2000, focusing on alternate histories and social norms as the group of travellers “slide” between parallel parallel worlds by use of a wormhole referred to as an “Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge,” I helpfully added after my brief mention of Quantum Leap.
“There was also a series called Max Headroom that aired briefly in 1987 and 1988. Edison Carter, played by Matt Frewer, who actually grew up in Peterborough, was a hard-hitting reporter for “Network 23,” who sometimes uncovered things that his superiors in the network would have preferred to keep private. Eventually, one of these instances required him to flee his workspace, upon which he was injured in a motorcycle accident in a parkade. Bryce Lynch downloaded a copy of his mind into a computer, giving birth to the character Max Headroom, as the last words seen by Carter before impact were “Max Headroom”, specifying vehicle clearance height in the parkade.
“Max Headroom also appeared as a stylized head in some TV ads against primary colour rotating-line backgrounds. He was known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, delivering the slogan “Catch the wave!” (in his trademark staccato, stuttered digital sampling playback as “Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-catch the wave”) in the rather disastrous Coca-Cola venture in the mid-to-late-1980s with “New Coke.”
An hour or so has now passed.
I agree heartily with Carr that the web “has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes … a few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.”
But the fact is that at about this point in reading Carr’s thoughtful treatise, Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s magic Google search engine somehow transported me to Don Terry’s article, “Lou and Me: ‘We work at a newspaper, a real newspaper’” in the January/February 2010 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which you can be transported to as well via http://www.cjr.org/feature/lou_and_me.php?page=all.
Ah, yes. Lou Grant, the character played by actor Ed Asner in the show of the same name. Editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. Moved from television news in Minneapolis, after being laid off supposedly after 10 years as Mary Tyler Moore’s boss on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, back into newspapers. But on another television show, if you can follow the thread. Debuted Sept. 20, 1977, Terry helpfully reminds me. That’s good to know since time can play tricks and get telescoped with age, I find.
By now, I’m thoroughly absorbed in the reverie of memory and have to remind myself I’m writing a column based on the plasticity of the human brain and how technology can change the very act of how we think and construct reality.
Take typewriters, like I used in journalism school. Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter in 1882 and his style of writing changed, long before the World Wide Web and Google.
His already terse prose became even tighter and more telegraphic. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” Nietzsche observed.
How do I know this? I “Googled” it.
soundingsjohnbarker 