Feb. 16, 1854 - By this time in the winter I do not look for those clear sparkling mornings and delicate leaf frosts which seem to belong to the earlier part of winter, as if the air were somewhat tarnished and debauched, had lost its virgin purity. -- Henry D. Thoreau

Journal of a Sabbatical

February 16, 1999

subverting the post-hominid future

When Nancy called me this afternoon to read me a passage from the introduction to an ethnomusicology tome she just bought (Merengue : Dominican Music and Dominican Identity by Paul Austerlitz), the threat of a post-hominid future was the furthest thing from my mind. Not that I've never thought about the specter of our becoming more like machines. Pundits writing about the Internet are always bringing it up, and the AI pundits too. Philosophers have been sounding the alarm loud and clear for the last 5 years at least. But I've never taken it seriously because, well, we have music and poetry and mystical experiences and and and... So knowing that merengue will subvert the threat of a post-hominid future is a great comfort.

I have enough trouble being human that I might even welcome turning into a machine. This morning I went to therapy as I always do on Tuesday mornings. I could not articulate or even connect to my feelings. I felt like I was struggling to surface from quicksand. No topic that my therapist probed elicited much of anything. I felt like there was a veil between me and the world. I just never felt engaged with her, society at large, myself, her dog, anybody. I am a little tired but this is ridiculous.

I managed to wake up enough after lunch and coffee, so I could find my way to the Boston Public Library for the fabled grant research CD. I got there before Zsolt and was all set up with FC Search when he got there. Oddly, he didn't recognize me sitting there. The librarian came up to me and said there was someone else waiting to use the CD so could I give it up in half an hour. I said sure but did this other person by any chance have a Hungarian accent? She said he did have an accent but she didn't know from Hungarian. Eventually, he came back into the Social Sciences room and we connected.

The foundation search database is pretty cool but I'm glad I didn't shell out $1000 to buy it. We entered our search criteria, ran the thing and got our results in minutes. We did three separate searches, plus a 4th one for another project that I'm not involved with, printed out the results, loaded the results onto diskettes - a copy of each search result for each of us - and all told only spent about an hour. Even including the time for finding the Social Sciences room, applying for a library card, signing up for the computer, etc. we only used up about an hour and a half of the afternoon. Of course, getting to and from Boston added another couple of hours, but it was still worth it to do this at the library rather than buying the thing.

At the end of the day my wrist hurt from using the mouse on the library's computer. The chair and desk heights are not adjustable - they're old wooden furniture - and hence not set up for someone my height. I was surprised though that such a short period of unergonomic computer use could reactivate the Scrivener's palsy but it did. I like my track pad and keyboard and of course my Anthrocart assembled at the correct height for me me me and nobody else. Take that post-hominid futurists!