College is for losers

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To the millions familiar with my writing and wit, it’s well known that I did not go to college. Thus, I always take a certain Schadenfreude upon hearing of the hard times befalling college graduates. The L.A. Times has a recent article on the growing trend of college graduates taking jobs that do not require their degrees. It ain’t pretty…

Because college is so expensive, many students are facing a dilemma: If they go to college, they still might not get a job that requires a college degree, and they’ll be on the hook for big student loan payments. But if they don’t go to college, they might be pushed out of entry-level jobs by overqualified college graduates who can’t find other work.

How does this play out at the individual level? Take Mariah Arcuri’s story.

…Mariah Arcuri paid off all her debts before starting her job in a lab, which required a college degree.

She worked as a bartender in New York, earning about $90,000 a year. She paid for her college education, her graduate school and her wedding with savings from tending bar.

But because she wanted to spend time with her husband, Arcuri eventually stopped bartending and got back her nights and weekends. She now works in a lab and makes only about two-thirds of what she did as a bartender, despite her master’s degree in biochemistry.

“I went to grad school to make more money, and then I realized that you don’t make more money,” Arcuri said. “Now I feel like I’m poor.”

We’ve been told for years that the high cost of a college education eventually repays itself. I wonder if that will continue to be the case.

AuthorHouse a scam operation?

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Readers may be aware that several years ago I published a collection of my acid logic articles using the self-publishing outfit AuthorHouse. (Book available from Amazon here.) Over the years I’ve heard the AuthorHouse brand being maligned but never really got the gist of the complaints until I read through some posts on David Gaughran’s blog. Here’s a good one in which Gaughran describes an AuthorHouse practice of dubious morality.

Author Solutions – and their various subsidiaries, including Palibrio, Trafford, iUniverse, Xlibris, and AuthorHouse – has emailed customers pimping a unique opportunity to get your book in front of thousands of readers at the Miami Book Fair this coming November.

For $3,999 you can have a one hour slot at the Author Solutions booth to sign some books. You’ll have to cover your own airfare, hotel, and food, but you will get some free copies to sign, and some bookmarks to give away… if anyone shows up.

The experience of twiddling your thumbs for an hour, looking forlornly at a pile of poorly produced books, is likely to be so memorable that you will deeply regret not swinging for the premium package. For just $7,999 you get to do the book signing and get a 60 second video to treasure forever.

This is likely to be profitable for Author Solutions. In 2011, it had over 50 authors signing books, netting at least $199,950. The following year was even better with more than 60 authors participating, bringing in at least $239,940.

Those numbers don’t even take into account the 400 authors who shelled out $799 each to be in a “new title showcase” that nobody will look at, netting Author Solutions a further $319,600.

In total, Author Solutions made over half a million dollars from the 2012 Miami Book Fair. That’s a pretty good return when booths are going for just $1,000.

I will say, I’ve never had any issue during my AuthorHouse experience. My basic goal was to collect my work in an attractive package I could be proud of, and sell at least a couple hundred, and I succeeded. I was always wary of and disinterested in their various attempts to upsell me expanded packages.

Nonetheless, it’s a little disturbing to realize how much of what AuthorHouse and like minded companies sell is not basic self-publishing tools (like printing and editing services) but a dream. The dream of being a respected and accomplished author. While I certainly don’t think AuthorHouse’s actions are anywhere near criminal, they’re certainly designed to take advantage of authors with stars in their eyes.

Become the owl!

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For years I’ve suffered from a problem my Dad has mentioned struggling with. I wake up in the morning and in that half asleep state worry about all my problems. This doesn’t happen every morning, but occasionally. Lately, when I find myself doing this I try to refocus my brain on something positive or at least neutral. I often think of animals because I like them. For instance this morning I found myself visualizing an owl. He had that strange expression owls often wear and I could see him flying around in a forest.

It struck me that maybe this process is similar to the whole Indian Totem animal thing. My understanding is that Indians would meditate (perhaps after consuming peyote or something) on a particular animal and, in some sense, become that animal. I don’t think anything mystical is going on there but I could see the whole process providing a focused sense of energy.

Cats are also good subjects to focus on.

The harmonic convergence

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Music is traditionally thought of as having four components: harmony (chords and counterpoint), melody, rhythm, and timbre (the sound of an instrument.) Music has developed throughout history by experimenting with these components. Bach’s music is relatively simple rhythmically and harmonically (at least compared to, say, Coltrane or Mahler) but very complex melodically; just observe the way his snake-like melodies—sometimes four at a time—interweave amongst themselves.

I want to talk about the component of harmony here. Over time, it has gotten more and more advanced. Baroque music had relatively simple triad harmonies like a major chord (made up of a root note, third, and fifth.) As music changed, more notes were added and we ended up in the realm of Debussy and early 20th century jazz where 13th chords (which contain every note in a scale in one chord) were developed. Chord clusters were also put to work in atonal and “vaguely tonal” music. These are chords containing notes very close together that generate that “cat walking on a piano” sound that’s often used in horror soundtracks.

However, here we are in the modern era and most popular music is again pretty simple harmonically. Chords in pop are generally triads (root, 3rd and 5th) with the occasional 7th chords (root, 3rd, 5th and 7th – four notes total.) One might be tempted to say we are regressing but I suspect we’ve just reached the end point of what we can do to develop harmonies. There’s simply nowhere else to explore, at least that will sound good to most ears.

And pop music is extensively exploring another component of music: timbre. The sounds coming out of guitar effects and synthesizers these days are unusual and revolutionary.

Thus I have spoken.

The girls of Le Roy

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A while back, I mentioned the girls of Le Roy, New York who, several years ago, began showing what appear to be—at least to the experts—symptoms of mass hysteria. The girls began experiencing Tourettes like body tics for which no environmental or biological cause could be found. This sort of thing is not that uncommon and has been reported throughout history.

The Atlantic has an interesting follow up on the story alleging that one women who experienced the symptoms effectively caught them off Facebook – she did not personally know any of the girls but “absorbed” their symptoms by reading about them. The article touches on two themes I often report on here. 1) The subconscious can cause bizarre, debilitating physical symptoms, and 2) We—society, humanity, etc.—are becoming overwhelmed with information. To wit…

Bartholomew said that mass hysteria spreads through sight and sound, and historically, one person would have to be in the same room as somebody exhibiting symptoms to be at risk of “catching” the illness. “Not anymore,” he says, noting that social media—“extensions of our eyes and ears”—speeds and extends the reach of mass hysteria. In a paper, he wrote, “Epidemic hysterias that in earlier periods were self-limited in geography now have free and wide access to the globe in seconds.” He says, “It’s a belief, that’s the power here, and the technology just amplifies the belief, and helps it spread more readily.”

Here’s a Dr. Drew episode featuring some of the girls.

Our defining years

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Though it’s long, this Daily Beast article arguing that the Millennial generation is to the left of even the Democratic Party makes sense to me. Its core argument is that Millennials came of age in a decade of unending economic insecurity and, as a result, expect the hand of government to address this.

The article also makes an interesting point I can relate to psychology and brain science. (I’m sure everyone is excited by that.)

For Mannheim, generations were born from historical disruption. As he argued—and later scholars have confirmed—people are disproportionately influenced by events that occur between their late teens and mid-twenties. During that period—between the time they leave their parents’ home and the time they create a stable home of their own—individuals are most prone to change cities, religions, political parties, brands of toothpaste. After that, lifestyles and attitudes calcify. For Mannheim, what defined a generation was the particular slice of history people experienced during those plastic years. A generation had no set length. A new one could emerge “every year, every thirty, every hundred.” What mattered was whether the events people experienced while at their most malleable were sufficiently different from those experienced by people older or younger than themselves.

On one hand this is hardly news – it’s well known that a person’s (or generation’s) character is largely defined by the culture of their late teens to mid-twenties. I, for example, will always be defined by and partial to the music of Guns-n-Roses, Nirvana (even if I’m not a fan) and movies like “Die Hard” or “Pulp Fiction.” The article is simply carrying idea this over to politics, making the claim that political events that occur in your teen/twenty-something years have a stronger effect than political events that occur earlier or later. (This makes sense. Whenever I hear people older than me ranting about Reagan I think, “Jesus, get over it!”)

But there’s an interesting question here: Why? Why are our tastes and politics defined by experiences in our teens and twenties? I would argue it’s because that is a period when our brain is primed to most richly experience life. At that point our brains have become sharpened in the sense that we’ve learned much of what we need to become adults, but we still have an active emotional system (the somewhat controversial limbic system.) We are thinking and reasoning better than we ever have, but we are also enjoying the emotional depth of life in ways we will likely lose in coming years. Because of these brain changes, life is exciting and thus the events of those years – personal, cultural, historical and political events – have a pronounced effect on us. As a result, when we get older and jaded and tired, we don’t fully appreciate how the current teen/twentysomething generation is reacting to events.

Wide, not deep, attention spans

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Over the weekend I did a little music gig as a side man at a restaurant. In the crowd were these annoying twentysomethings who were loudly playing music on their phone while we were performing. On one hand, I found this very annoying and was wishing the restaurant staff would come out and torture these cretins to death (but to do it somewhere away from where we were playing so the cries of agony wouldn’t interrupt the music.) On the other hand, I suspect this sort of behavior is going to become more common.

As I’ve ranted about in the past, I think the advent of endless entertainment options is preventing people from being able to focus on one thing. It used to be that you could go to a restaurant and you can talk to friends or listen to the musicians. That was about it. (You could also eat of course.) Now you can surf the web, post on facebook, watch youtube videos, stream Spotify, look at monkey porn… the possibilities are endless! I suspect the generation raised in this madness is developing an attention span that is wide (in the sense that they can keep a lot of balls in the air) but not deep (e.g. they can’t really focus on the rich detail of any one thing.)

I’ve found myself guilty of this behavior. I try to pop on to soundcloud every other day or so to see what music my virtual friends are posting. The other day I had 5 minutes in between doing some cooking and found an interesting new piece a great jazz clarinetist I know had posted. But while I was listening to it my mind was counting down to when I had to be back in the kitchen. The piece was boring me. But I realized I wasn’t really listening to it; I was simply filling time with an activity. I refocused, listened to the music and found it quite interesting (not the greatest thing ever, but more engaging than when my mind was wandering.) My point being that even a brain as great as mine can be corrupted by this culture of wide-not-deep thinking. There can be no hope for anyone else.

We are all aliens!!!

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For years we’ve heard the theory that life on earth may have come from space. Here’s a bit more evidence*. Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites from Space.

* This is admittedly several years old, but is news to me.

The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.

A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.
…
Lab experiments showed that chemical reactions of ammonia and cyanide, compounds that are common in space, could generate nucleobases and nucleobase analogs very similar to those found in the carbonaceous chondrites. However, the relative abundances of these molecules between the experiments and the meteorites differed, which might be due to further chemical and thermal influences from space.

This findings reveal that meteorites may have been molecular tool kits, providing the essential building blocks for life on Earth, Cleaves said. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

Computer creativity

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I just stumbled across the work of Harold Cohen. Cohen, a hybrid artist/scientist, created AARON, a computer program that makes visual art, some of it quite appealing. (Much of it reminds me of the 20th century Viennese artist Egon Schiele.)

Here’s a link to a google search with a lot of AARON’s images.

The question, of course, is who is the artist here—Cohen or AARON? And does it even matter? Humanists will want to believe that it’s something intrinsic to humans that creates art. But I suspect that those assumptions are going to be damaged in coming years. Perhaps we will even see the complete destruction of the human ego. And then we will rightly worship our robot masters.