Fitness Milestone: 3000 Miles

My legs, 3000 miles later

 

Endomondo Summary, showing total distance I've tracked.

 



Two weeks ago, I logged into Endomondo to see how our activity for this year was comparing to last year. Back in June during the Warrior Dash, Cheryl seriously bruised her tailbone, which kept us off bikes all the rest of the month. We've hustled during July to make up miles, but summer heat keeps us from making really long bike rides. We've logged a lot of miles via kayak, but kayak miles are much, much slower than bike miles. Fortunately, we've had two weeks of vacation, so lots of little trips do add up, and we're back on track to reach our goal of 1200 miles for the year.

However, when I logged into Endomondo to look at my stats, I noticed for the first time the "Total Distance" stat. At the time, I was sitting at 2950 miles. I was stunned to realize I was about to reach 3000 miles of travel as tracked by Endomondo. I started using the app in December 2012, only logging 12 miles that month. So, it's taken me two years and eight months to travel 3000 miles in a combination of biking, hiking, running, kayaking, and just plain walking. Endomondo helpfully tells me how far I've travelled toward the Moon, but I thought it would sound more impressive to say that I've travelled from my house to Los Angeles via my own power. However, it turns out that I passed LA some time back, since that's only 2500 miles from my house. So I looked at the furthest point I could reach in the contiguous United States, and it turns out I've even managed to propel myself past Seattle, a mere 2839 miles away. Thanks to kayaking, I could now be sitting about 170 miles out into the Pacific!

With Endomondo, I only track actual exercise. I know some people use FitBits or other tracking to monitor their total steps during the day. I'm actually on my feet a good part of my normal work day, but worry that if I counted the miles I log as part of my regular movement, it might demotivate me to log exercise miles.

Three years ago, I hadn't heard of Endomondo. Three years ago, I was a couch potato who thought that moving 100 miles in a year via hiking and biking was an insane amount of exercise. 100 miles a month wasn't even conceivable. Running 100 yards was out of the question, let alone running 5k. And at the time, I thought of myself as relatively active. We'd occasionally go on two mile hikes, or go out and bike for three or four miles. We just didn't know how our world was about to change.

A few random thoughts on being active:

First, Cheryl and I often go out and push ourselves with long bike rides (40 miles plus) or long hikes (10 miles plus). But our health benefits kicked in with much more modest activities. One and two mile walks around the neighborhood are the backbone that supports the more ambitious activities. By sheer luck, we bought a house that's exactly one mile from the nearest shopping center with a grocery store, a few restaurants, and our gym. Walking there and back a few times a week really adds up.

Second, the physical benefits are nice, but the mental benefits are astonishing. Study after study shows that physical activity improves mental health, and I can testify that, compared to who I was three years ago, I'm now more optimistic, less stressed, and much more confident. If we've developed any unpleasant mental traits, I would say that we both now have a tendency to feel a bit smug when we're out biking, thinking about all the people we know who are probably sitting in front of a television as we zoom past trees.

Third, for the first time in my five decades on the planet, I feel like an actual part of nature. Nature used to be a place I'd occasionally visit, but I spent the vast majority of my waking life under a roof. I'm sure in terms of actual hours, I'm still inside more than outside, but now I've journeyed to the tops of mountains, I've kayaked into the depths of swamps, I've seen rivers and meadows and forests that I could never reach via automobile. We've gotten familiar with the sky. We schedule our lives around sunsets and full moons and good breezes. We've learned to handle heat and sun, how to hike through snow, and we've discovered that hours in the rain will not melt us.

Fourth, a word of caution: When Cheryl and I started our fitness kick a few years ago, our primary objective was to lose weight. One thing I believed at the time was that exercise was more important than diet. If I went out and biked 50 miles, that would certainly offset any number of Whoppers, right? Heck, if you look at the Endomondo stats, it even shows how many burgers I've burned with all my exercise. But I logged over 170 miles of activity in July, and still gained 10 pounds, because while on vacation for two weeks I pigged out on ice cream and soft drinks and junk food. Soda was an especially weak spot for me. I don't keep any at my house, so in my normal life I can usually avoid it, but the refrigerators were full of it on both vacations. I'd come in from kayaking and think, eh, I just burned a thousand calories, a can of Mountain Dew isn't going to hurt me. Or, I just biked ten miles, so let's splurge and have a milkshake. The truth is, exercise doesn't protect you from excessive sugar. Fortunately, now that we're back home, I can resume more sensible eating habits and hopefully shed the pounds as quickly as I picked them up.

Happy Independence Day! Let's talk about freedom...

I woke up this 4th of July thinking about freedom, and whether the word still holds any true meaning at all after so many years of being debased by politicians and demagogues. So many current political debates seem to be driven by conflicting, and sometimes warped, views about freedom. For instance, I’ve seen more people waving the Confederate flag in the last two weeks than I have in the last decade. I defend the idea that they should and do have the freedom to do so, but remain puzzled that anyone would find it honorable to defend the notion of the Confederacy. A lot of the flag wavers say the flag has nothing to do with slavery, apparently having never actually read the Confederate Constitution that the flag symbolizes. It specifically denied all states within the Confederacy the power to abolish slavery, ever. If there’s still one person in America who thinks, wow, wouldn’t the world be better off if the Confederates had won… well, I don’t know their hearts well enough to label them racist, but I know enough of their brains to shake my head at their ignorance.

Another issue related to freedom is gay marriage. I don’t think that most conservatives understand how fundamentally conservative the Supreme Court’s ruling was. It’s a central premise of conservatism that government doesn’t create or grant rights. Instead, rights are innate to people, something they are born with. Basically, you have the right to do whatever you wish to do, wherever and whenever you wish to do it, as long as it doesn’t endanger or inconvenience others or our shared living space. There are rights you possess that our founding fathers never dreamed of. For example, they never imagined you’d have the right to wear the Confederate Flag on your hat. Or, more seriously, they never imagined that women had the right to vote. But, in the conservative framing, women always had the inalienable right to vote. It wasn’t a right given to them by the state. It was a right the state unjustly denied them, until the day it stopped doing so. So, for conservatives who keep saying that the right to same sex marriage isn’t found in the constitution, they’re right, but rights don’t flow from the constitution. The central question wasn’t whether the government should grant homosexual couple the right to marry. Instead, homosexuals possess the same innate rights to pair up and call it marriage as anyone else, and the central question was whether there was any plausible governmental case to deny them this right. Do they harm or even inconvenience others by their marriage? No. My preference would have been for the majority to come to their senses and recognize the right legislatively, even if this took several more years, but in the end, I think the Supreme Court made the right call.

Finally, thanks to Donald Trump, there’s been a lot of talk about illegal immigration this week. He’s taken a lot of heat for his comments, but intellectually, I’m willing to concede some of the points of his argument, assuming his meandering babble can be called an argument. By many, many metrics, Mexico isn’t sending us their “best” citizens, at least as measured in terms of economic and educational status. Mexico does have middle class, even wealthy citizens, but it’s pretty unlikely that an executive in the oil business or the owner of a chain of supermarkets in Mexico City is going to sneak across the desert in the middle of the night to live as an undocumented construction worker. If you’re a Mexican with a college education who knows computer programming, say, or architecture, you probably have legal avenues you can use if you’d like to come to America, but can probably also make a pretty decent living in your homeland. The people who sneak across the border are, on average, quite poor and likely poorly educated. The argument that our crime rates are higher than they would otherwise be without illegal immigration seems to be supported by the evidence (though, it can also be noted that our actual crime rates across the board have been falling during the same decades that illegal immigration has been rising). I’m also mostly in agreement that the presence of so many low-skilled workers depresses wages, and that large corporations favor an influx of immigrants as a way of keeping their payrolls low. If you’ve read the Grapes of Wrath, you’ll be aware that this trick has been around for a long time. Get enough poor people competing for a job, and you can pay them pennies. If the wages get too low for them, there are more desperate people waiting in line for their job.

Weighed against these arguments is the Statue of Liberty. Yes, I recognize that the poem inscribed upon her isn’t a legally binding document, but the aspiration should hold true: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” The American call to freedom wasn’t sent out to only wealthy, educated, elite citizens of other nations. We might welcome great musicians and financiers and scientists, but which country on this planet doesn’t want that sort of immigrant? Some of the people most opposed to the influx of immigrants are some of the same people who are quick to proclaim that America is a Christian nation. But, isn’t it a central tenet of Christianity that you invite the beggar at the door into your home and treat him like a long-lost brother?

Look, I get that there are shared societal and economic costs to opening our arms to anyone willing to ignore our laws in order to sneak in. I understand there are dangers to doing anything that encourages people to make the trek illegally. Women and children die in the desert, abandoned by criminals who they’ve paid their last few coins to take them across the border. People come here and live in fear, and get exploited by people who feel like they’re doing them a favor by paying them cash under the table at substandard wages. I get that many of them don’t speak English, and can’t read or write, and sometimes have children here that are entitled to tax-payer supported government handouts. And, I will acknowledge that there are health risks, importing large numbers of poor people who may not be vaccinated against diseases we've mostly wiped out in this country.

But you know what? They’ve proven that they had the courage to take a chance to go after a better life. They’ve proven that they actually want to be here just by coming here. Meanwhile, I know people born in this country living on taxpayer dollars who won’t get off their couches in order to take a low wage job, let alone walk miles across a desert at night. I know Americans who’ve graduated from high school who live within a mile of a library yet haven’t touched a book since the day they escaped from education. I’ve worked with American born college graduates who didn’t have enough command of the English language to draft an email that showed even a passing familiarity with the rules of spelling or grammar. There are beloved celebrities loudly telling Americans it's dangerous to vaccinate our children. And I know people born in the United States who glorify the traitorous Confederacy, and view breaking away from our constitution and our values as a worthy and noble cause. When they visit Civil War battlefields, perhaps they think wistfully, "If only more American soldiers had perished, today we might be living under a better flag!" They get to be American by accident of birth, but we want to turn away people who actually respect our country just because they were born a few thousand miles too far south?

Ninety percent of the troubles caused by illegal immigration are actually troubles caused by our confused and broken immigration policies. We could design a fairer, better system, one designed to integrate people into our society in a way that causes less harm to them or to our legal and economic systems. With our heads, we can and should debate how to reform our laws. With our hearts, we should welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. Let them breathe free.

The Superhero Inside Us All

Next week on Wednesday, June 10, I'll be at the North Regional Library in Raleigh at 6:30 p.m. to lead a discussion called "The Superhero Inside Us All."

I've always been fascinated by superheroes. My interest spans several mental domains. First, I'm a big old geeky fanboy who has a massive accumulation of superhero comic books. It's been twenty years since I last made a serious attempt at organizing and cataloging my collection, and I owned about 10,000 books then. My wall of long boxes has only gotten bigger over the years. Most of my collection is dominated by DC. For a long time, well into the 1980s, they had simpler, more episodic issues. Since I frequently bought my comic books used at flea markets, odds were excellent that if I picked up a single random issue of a DC comic, I'd get a complete story, while a single random issue of a Marvel comic, at least since then early 70s, would be only part of a larger story arc that might be difficult to cobble together. Of course, things changed with the rise of comic book shops in the 80s and 90s. Then, it was possible to find all the back issues you needed to read a complete story, and by the 2000s, any story of significance from DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, etc. was going to be collected into graphic novels. Ironically, the rise of graphic novels was a big factor in cutting me loose from my local comic store, which I used to visit with the regularity of church. Now, why bother collecting a story in bits and pieces? Wait six months or a year, and you can read it all at once for less than the sum of all the parts.

But, I'm getting distracted by the once dominant medium of superheroics, and neglecting to talk about the content. The scientific part of my mind is intrigued that superheroes have any hold on our imaginations at all. Evolution should have us programmed to understand the limits of a human body. We know we can't run faster than a car, know there's no use trying to pick up that car and throw it, and know that if a car is coming at us, we seriously need to get out of the way, since it's not just going to bounce off us. We know that we can't jump hard enough to launch into flight, and no matter how hard we stare at a wall, we're not going to see through to the other side. Yet, we accept all of these attributes in our superheroes. Tell a four year old that Superman can fly, and odds are good he'll believe you on the first try. Why? Even if we consciously reject the possibility of these things being possible, why are we so easily drawn in, so ready and willing to believe?

At the risk of getting overly metaphysical, I suspect that superheroes and religion share neural pathways in our minds. We've evolved to recognize patterns, even when none exist. If an old woman says she can make it rain by shaking a rattle at the sky, and it rains even once, we can be convinced there's something to it. This isn't just a habit of primitive minds. Even the most rational-minded people among us hold onto beliefs that they can control the uncontrollable with certain ritualistic behaviors. This primitive pattern recognition didn't evolve to recognize a difference between the natural and the supernatural, and, before the rise of the scientific method, it once must have made perfect sense that there were supernatural forces controlling everything. You didn't just want to accept that it was chance that determined if you were going to catch fish on any given morning. There must be river spirits who controlled such things. And, since we are excellent at projecting human characteristics onto inhuman things, it probably wasn't a big leap to think that the river spirits had vaguely human shapes, even if we never caught a glimpse of them. River spirits, cloud spirits, earth spirits, fire spirits... the world was controlled by powerful entities who chose to remain out of sight under most situations. But, we still felt in our gut that they were there, and this gut instinct now makes it possible for us to accept superheroes on a subconscious level.

Superhumans have always played a major role in the mythology of every culture I've ever studied. The Greeks, the Norse, Navajos, Egyptians, the Japanese... name a culture, past or present, and I'll find you some well loved hero with superhuman powers.

Of course, not many of them will be wearing capes, tights, and masks. This version of the superhero arose in the 1930's in America and quickly became the dominant shared myth of our nation. While I have no actual research to back me up, I suspect more people can name five founding members of the Justice League than can name our first five presidents.

How did the caped crusader style of hero come to such cultural prominence? It's easy to look to the spectacle, the bright colorful costumes, the violent adventures, the catchy code names. Flash! Spiderman!  Wonder Woman! All decked out in clothing indistinguishable from body paint, the products of our id escaping into daylight. But, I would argue that the real reason that the superhero template formed before World War II has endured has little to do with spectacle, and a lot to do with spectacles.

The genius of Superman was that he had a secret identity. When he wasn't fighting Lex Luthor, he was just plain old Clark Kent. Clark was kind of nerdy and clumsy. Ladies didn't give him the time of day. He wasn't rich; unlike Bruce Wayne, he had a day job. He paid rent, he paid taxes. He got yelled at by his boss. People ask, why bother being Clark Kent when you can be Superman? But Clark Kent isn't a disguise Superman wears. Superman is a disguise Clark wears, a coping mechanism that allows him to have a normal life. Clark isn't a god hiding among men. He's a kid from the mid-west, raised on middle class, middle American values. He's modest, he's honest, he's hardworking, and he's a team player. He's a journalist because he believes that a free press is vital to a democracy, and he's believes in democracy because he's an American in his soul. He had no desire to conquer the world, no desire to rule. He had the same fundamental power to change the world than any American has... he can vote, and I suspect he never misses an election.

Yes, he has amazing powers. Yes, he can fly. But he lives in the city, riding the subway, eating at lunch counters, because that's how normal people spend their days. And when rude people jump in front of him as he's racing to catch the elevator, or when his boss is nagging him about deadlines, and when for the hundredth time Lois has rolled her eyes when he asks him out on a date, he knows, deep down, that there's something inside his shirt that would make everyone see him differently, but he's just not ready to show it. I think this is the ultimate reason Superman (and other working class heroes like Spiderman or the Flash) resonates with us. As we put up with all the hassle of daily life, we can calmly smile, thinking, it's okay. These people don't know the real me. They don't know my secrets my true potential.

It's not the cape. It's not the invulnerability. It's the faith that, if the world truly knew the real you, they would be amazed. Deep inside, everyone has a little Clark Kent in their soul.

The Million Step Journey to a Brand New World

 April 2010

 

 

April 2015

 

Last weekend, Cheryl and I drove up to Virginia. Our travels took us past places we'd visited five years earlier, on a road trip we'd taken when we first became a couple. The trip five years ago was a pleasant drive. Highway 58 through the Appalachians is a twisty road that rewards you with mile after mile of breathtaking views. Stick a camera out your window and take a random shot, and odds are good it would make a decent post card.

 

Our first road trip was purely an adventure in driving. It was a bit like watching television. We sat the whole time, looking at passing images through a sheet of glass. Save for the occasional stop to get out and stretch our legs, we didn't interact much with the environment beyond just looking at it. From our seated position, we saw hints that other people had a different experience with the surroundings. In Galax, we drove past the head of the New River Trail and saw people unloading bikes. We saw dozens of places to rent kayaks, and passed numerous entrances for trails, including the Appalachian Trail. In Damascus, we got out to take a picture of a railroad bridge that had been converted into a bike path and were almost run over by the bikes coming down the mountain on what we later learned was the Virginia Creeper Trail.

 

Zooming down the mountain on a bike sure looked like fun, but, let's face it, it was the kind of fun other people had. People who were younger, healthier, and, to be blunt, a lot thinner. Cheryl and I occasionally did hikes. We were good for a few miles along the Eno or on Occanneechee Mountain, but the hike to Moore's Wall in Hanging Rock wiped us out. As for biking, three miles around the abandoned golf course near our vacation spot in Myrtle Beach was a real work out. We liked getting outside, but liked getting back indoors to air conditioning just a tiny bit more.

 

This year when we went back to Virginia, it was a very different trip. Those places we drove past five years ago? Now, we got to experience them fully. On Saturday, we biked 50+ miles from Galax to Pulaski along the New River Trail. It took us 9 hours to make the journey, and my butt is still sore five days later, but we saw vistas that would have been forever hidden if we hadn't left our car miles behind. On Sunday, it was off to Grayson Highlands, to tackle two different hikes, one taking us up to the highest pinnacles in the park, another to take us up to the grassy ridges where wild ponies munched lazily on new spring growth.

 

Monday, we returned to the New River Trail for an 8 mile bike ride along a spur we'd skipped on Saturday. Then, on our drive home, we stopped by Hanging Rock and did two short trails we'd never done before, to the upper and lower cascades, discovering amazing waterfalls we'd passed by a dozen times without knowing what we were missing.

 

There's truly no comparison between the two trips. Five years ago, we experienced the world mainly with our eyes, and the vast majority of the things we saw had a strip of asphalt right down the center. This year, we experienced the world with six senses. We saw things we'd never have seen from a car, we heard waterfalls and birds and the crunch of leaves under our boots, we smelled blossoming trees and the lingering creosote of old rail beds. We felt the sun and the wind and the rough coolness of stone as we climbed boulders to get a better view of our surroundings. As for taste, you don't really appreciate just how good plain water tastes until you're about thirty miles in on your fifty mile bike ride. As for the sixth sense, it's proprioception, the internal sense of the positioning of your body, the relative position of all your limbs, and the amount of energy flowing to each muscle to keep you upright on a bike as you're bouncing along a rough downhill trail, or keeping you balanced as you ascend an impossibly steep wall of steps leading up to the peak of a mountain. It's not a sense that kicks in much when you're sitting on a couch, but when this sense is fully activated, I can only describe it as an acute and profound sensation that you're exactly where you're supposed to be in the world.

 

 

What changed in the intervening five years? We did. It didn't happen overnight. We didn't wake up one morning and think, hey, let's go ride 50 miles and then did it because we had the willpower. There wasn't an easy, five step plan to get us from couch potato to mountain climber. Instead, we've been on a million step plan. Results will vary based on the size of your stride, of course, but a million steps would take most people somewhere between 400 and 500 miles. To cover that in a year breaks down to roughly 8 to 10 miles per week on your feet, propelling your body forward across space with nothing but your own muscles. It's not easy at first. I won't even tell you it's easy later. Cheryl and I live a mile from where we have gym memberships, and we try to walk there when we can, but there are times when we just hop in the car, because it's too hot, or too cold, or we're just running short on time and have too much to do give up fifty minutes of our live to walking a mile there and back.

 

Fortunately, more often than not, we put on our walking shoes and hit the pavement. Every step adds up. The reward isn't just hikes in the highlands, or long bike trips between distant towns. The real reward is our triumph over those thoughts that haunted us when those bikes flew past us five years ago. I no longer feel too old to have new adventures, or too fat to accomplish amazing things. A million steps a year can reshape your body. More importantly, it will carry your mind to a brand new world.

 

 

That world is waiting. Take the first step.  

ORANGE COUNTY ARTS COMMISSION NAMES 2015 PIEDMONT LAUREATE

 

ORANGE COUNTY, NC (January 12, 2015)—The Orange County Arts Commission is pleased to announce James Maxey, a speculative fiction author from Hillsborough, as the region's 2015 Piedmont Laureate.

Mr. Maxey will appear at workshops, reading programs and speaking engagements throughout Durham, Orange and Wake counties, giving the public an opportunity to meet him and learn more about his body of work. He writes fast-paced, action-driven pulp fiction with strong emphasis on character growth and world building, dealing with larger-than-life characters adventuring in exotic worlds.

The Piedmont Laureate Program is dedicated to building a literary bridge for residents to come together and celebrate the art of writing. Co-sponsored by the Orange County Arts Commission, City of Raleigh Arts Commission, Durham Arts Council, and United Arts Council of Raleigh & Wake County, the program’s mission is to promote awareness and heighten appreciation for excellence in the literary arts throughout the Piedmont region. A different literary form is recognized each year– 2015 is speculative fiction.

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror fiction, weird fiction, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature.

As Piedmont Laureate, Maxey will receive an honorarium and serve until December 31, 2015. His duties will include presenting public readings and workshops, participating at select public functions and creating at least one original activity to expand appreciation of speculative fiction. A schedule of the Laureate’s 2015 activities will be available online at www.piedmontlaureate.com

Readers who delve past the dragons and superheroes on the covers of Maxey’s books will discover stories that explore the deeper aspects of the human condition. In the course of introducing imaginary worlds, Maxey hopes to provoke readers into thinking more deeply about our own world and our shared responsibility to improve it.

Influenced by Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking, Mr. Maxey is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop where he studied with author-in-residence Harlan Ellison, and a graduate of Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. He honed his craft over many years as a member of the Writer’s Group of the Triad and continues to be an active part of the Codex Writers’ online community.

For more information about James Maxey, please visit www.jamesmaxey.net

For more information about the Piedmont Laureate Program, please visit www.piedmontlaureate.com or contact Martha Shannon at 919.968.2011or mshannon@orangecountync.gov or contact any of the other sponsoring agencies.

The Future of Energy

Several years ago, I was a guest on Stephen Euin Cobb's The Future and You and one of the topics we discussed was the likelihood of local solar power generation replacing our present system of centralized power generation via fossil fuels. I was on the show just days after visiting Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks, and I'd seen how the power gets run to the island from the mainland then fed through power lines that run the length of the mostly empty highway. Cheryl and I had gone out to the beach to do some stargazing, far out from the lights of civilization, yet still the night sky was bisected by power lines. It struck me as a somewhat impractical system. Ocracoke seemed like a terrific candidate for wind, solar, and tidal power generation. Why rely on miles of vulnerable cable to deliver something so essential as electricity?

At the time, a second factor made the rise of alternate energy seem just around the corner: I thought we were getting near peak oil. A lot of people did, as little as five or six years ago. We were nowhere near peak coal, but I thought the environmental cost of coal mining was something that would increasingly limit the growth of the industry. The pictures alone would hamper mountaintop removal mining, given that we are now able to summon before and after pictures of affected landscapes with a few keystrokes on Google Maps. The logic was simple: fossil fuels would get more expensive, making alternative energy projects more cost competitive.

Of course, today the price of oil is falling, and experts are saying there's vast reserves of accessible oil under America. Presumably, the fracking techniques we're using to free up previously inaccessible oil under our landscapes can be transferred to other countries. Not so long ago, I thought we might run out of affordable oil inside of twenty years. Now, I suspect technological advances will keep oil flowing for at least a century.

My hunch is that there will be no popular political movement to limit our use of fossil fuels. There might be a few hardcore environmentalists who are viewing our falling gas prices with a sense of terror, but I suspect the vast majority of voters are pretty happy to pay less to fill up their tank, and won't be eager to vote for someone who even hints at the possibility of implementing changes that will make prices go higher.

Despite the probable abundance of oil, I suspect we'll see prices go through many boom and bust cycles in coming years. As oil gets expensive, a lot of people are going to want to drill for it. But as a lot of people drill for it, there will be a glut, and prices will fall, and people will cut back on drilling. Then, prices will rise again, and so on.

What will finally get us off the roller coaster? I still suspect solar will be increasingly cheap and easy in coming years. I don't think plug in electric cars have much a future, nor will plug in hybrids. The impracticality of having enough charging stations to let everyone in the parking lot a the mall will keep plug in vehicles from being anything more than a niche market. But, what if solar panels can be sprayed directly onto a car like paint, and your hybrid charges anytime it's in sunlight? Just sitting in the parking lot at work, it could be getting enough of a charge to get you home without having to run your gasoline engine.

I'm already seeing a lot of tablet sized solar panels in camping stores made to charge cell phones while you're out camping or hiking. As we start carrying more and more smart devices that require charging, a lot of people will be glad to carry around portable panels to keep their gear running rather than constantly be on the hunt for the next outlet. Right now, when Cheryl and I go on long hikes or bike rides, we usually carry portable batteries. But, give me a solar panel with enough power to actually charge a phone and small enough to mount on handlebars, get the price down to where it's cheaper than the portable batteries, and I'll start using it. It won't require any tax subsidies to encourage me. I want to be mobile, and I want electricity, and I'll pay a fair price to have it.

Ultimately, I think that portability is going to be the real path to ubiquity for solar power. As vast as our power grid is, it doesn't go everywhere. Neither does the sun, but it goes a lot more places than a power line. Gasoline is also portable power, of course... but it's too heavy for a person to carry around a gasoline powered generator and gallons of gas. To supply a demand for cheap, mobile electricity for today's wired users who also like being outdoors, solar cells will continuously get smaller and more efficient. My hunch is that in a decade, solar power won't just be cost competitive with fossil fuels, it will be so cheap that consumers will flock to it for the most sensible reason of all: it saves them a boatload of money.

While I think there's a consumer market for portable solar, America and Europe will probably be the last places to have widespread adoption of solar power for houses and businesses. The problem is, we became wealthy on a fossil fuel grid and there's going to be a lot of inertia that keeps a lot of the country on that grid even after better alternatives arise. You see the pattern with cell phones. In a lot of poorer countries, cell phones far outnumber landlines, because it was easier to build a few cell towers than to run lines to every building. In America, I know lots of people who still have landlines, even though they make 99% of their calls on their cell phones.

In emerging nations that don't already have a widespread electric grid, it's going to be easier to build a house with cheap solar panels and energy efficient designs that make the house self sufficient than it will be to build a reliable grid to hook the house to. In the US, it will be much more difficult to retrofit old houses to take advantage of the new technologies. My own dwelling wasn't built with a south facing roof. Turning the house 90 degrees seems like more of an expense than it's worth. But, houses built a decade from now may well incorporate maximum solar exposure into the design plans.

Saving the planet is nice, but saving money is where you'll get actual behavioral change. I'm still hoping that, in the long run, we'll collectively be cheapskates enough to leave most of the fossil fuels remaining in the ground.

The Future of Books

Picking back up where I left off a month ago on my predictions, today I'm going to talk about what books might look like five years, ten years, a hundred years out.

E-book growth has recently leveled off and print books are showing resilience, for now. Still, print books do face one major obstacle, which is the continued struggle of brick and mortar bookstores. Best sellers will continue to appear in big box stores like Walmart and Target, and romance and mystery novels can still be found in grocery stores and bookstores. But less popular genres, and books without proven track records, are going to struggle to find shelf space in print.

E-books will never replace print books, but e-books will become the launching platform for most new authors. Publisher's will likely grow conservative as shelf space becomes more precious, and rather than taking a gamble on a complete unknown, they'll be looking for indy authors who've built a fan base online to move into the mainstream.

The good news is that indy authors have tools available to them that big publisher's lack. While I originally published Bitterwood through a mainstream publisher, I retained the e-book rights, and have been managing them myself. Sales were pretty good for a while, then okay, then terrible. When sales of Bitterwood fell into single digits at Amazon, I figured, oh well, I guess I might as well give it away. So, I set the price to free, and in a one month period gave away almost 45,000 copies of the e-book. This has greatly revived the sales of the other books in the series, so that in one month I've sold more copies than I had for all the previous year. Mainstream publishers, in my experience, are reluctant to chase pricing to the bottom. Once you get to free, where's the profit? But for me, the boost in readership and reviews that comes from giving away my work leads to greater sales down the line.

Of course, I know I'm not the only author discovering that there's a vast pool of readers eager to read free books. Over the next few years, I think you'll see tremendous downward pressure on the price of ebooks, especially the first books in series. You see it already in music--Amazon Prime now lets me download thousands of albums for free (or, rather, for a one time annual fee.) I'm discovering new artists I hadn't tried before who I'm now willing to pay money for. Authors will soon have a similar mix of free and paid catalogs.

Which brings me to a prediction: Within five years, you'll start seeing in-text purchases available in books. You'll be reading a free murder mystery, get involved with a character who is obviously lying, and at the end of the chapter there will be a link saying, "Want to find out what Jack was really up to when he told his wife he was working late? Read his story for only 25 cents!" Just as gamers are willing to shell out micro payments for extra lives, I predict readers will be willing to pay small amounts to get bonus material, especially on popular series.

And publishers will know with great detail the material you want to read. Many smartphones and tablets already have sensors that can detect a viewers eye movements. Amazon already knows which sections of Kindle books readers zip through, and where they get bogged down, or abandon a book altogether. Soon, e-readers tracking readers eyes will be able to report what most engages readers, and what loses their attention. Eventually, I can foresee books that rewrite themselves automatically to match the tastes of the reader. Suppose you're reading a book on quantum mechanics written for a general audience. The book sees that you're skimming over all the passages with a lot of math or highly technical terms. So, the book suppresses the math and the specialized language and explains things in more general terms. Conversely, it might sense you're bored, and know from your reading history you prefer denser, difficult prose. Moving forward, it could present you with the most advanced version of the book in it's data base.

In the future, maybe as little as ten years out, readers will read books, and the books will read them back.

But what about the more distant future? Will it still be necessary to read? Or, if I want to know the text of Beowulf, will I just be able to place a mental request to a virtual library and have the book instantly streamed into my brain? I'll be able to remember every word of the manuscript without ever having my eyes gaze upon a single line of text, either on paper or on screen. But will instant delivery of knowledge equate to learning the material, or knowing it? Or will we just be recording media, able to recite back any bit of trivia we've absorbed without actually comprehending its deeper meaning?

It's almost scary to think about. But, it was probably scary for the monks copying manuscripts with quills the first time they saw a printed book. The printed word has been quick to adapt new technologies. I can't imagine that the paper book is mankind's final, best technology for storing and spreading stories.

Fitness update: Two years later

James and Cheryl 2014

 

 James and Cheryl 2012

Endomondo Training stats as of 9-6-2014

 

Two years ago, Cheryl and I decided it was time to alter our bodies. Doing so meant altering our lives. We started using a program called MyFitnessPal* to track the calories we ate each day. A few months later, we started using a program called Endomondo to track our exercise.

 

When we first started, our primary goal was to lose weight, and MyFitnessPal was the program we thought of as most essential to achieving that end. But, something curious happened last summer, a little before we reached the one year anniversary of our weight loss plans. That summer, we started really pushing ourselves on out exercise goals. When we began in 2012, walking for one mile on a treadmill was strenuous exercise. By the summer of 2013, hikes of five to seven miles were more suited to our fitness levels, and we'd sneak in 12 or 15 mile bike rides once a week in the evening after work. This year, all the orange you see is our new biking agenda. A 12 mile ride is still a decent workout, but if we have the chance, we'd much rather sneak in a 30 mile ride, or longer. On my 50th birthday this year, we did our longest single day ride up to that point, 50 miles in a single day. A few months later, over the Memorial Day weekend, we rode 100 miles in three days. Last weekend, we decided to ride the entirety of the Neuse River Trail, plus a few side trips down spur trails, for a single day's ride of 75 miles.

 

As a result, with a bike ride yesterday, I'd tracked 1000 miles of movement for the year. Last year, I didn't reach that goal until just before Christmas. I suspect we'll see a slowdown on our activity level in the coming months due to growing shortness of days, but it seems a not unrealistic goal to reach 1200 miles this year.

 

While Cheryl and I are thinner than we once were, being thin is no longer the driving force behind our activities. We've stopped being concerned about what our bodies look like and started being obsessed with what our bodies can do. We scour websites for State Parks and greenways, looking for our next big adventure. Being fit has let us see things that would previously have been beyond our grasp. The rolling, open fields just outside of Raleigh. The beautiful wetlands near the southern end of the American Tobacco Trail. The five peaks of Hanging Rock State Park, or the remote beaches of Sandy Island, which you can't reach by car. We've kayaked down rivers lined with eagle nests, we've witnessed ospreys flying mere yards overhead with a fresh caught fish in its talons, we've had deer cross the trail in front of us so close we can almost touch them, and its' impossible to catalog all the turtles and frogs and lizards and weird bugs and neon mushrooms and exuberant flowers we've passed among. We've lingered on still water watching the sun sink over marshes, scrambled over slick rocks to feel the spray of waterfalls, and craned our necks up to the peaks of rocky mountains, knowing we'd soon be standing upon them, looking out ten, twenty, thirty miles over our surroundings, where the horizon vanished in the haze of the summer heat.



 

In  2012, before we started getting fit, we attempted a 5 mile ride on the American Tobacco Trail. I'm not talking 5 miles out and back, for 10. I mean we were just riding from Herndon Park down to the next road and back. It almost killed me. There's a very slight grade coming back up the Herndon Park, and I had to get off my bike and push it back to the car. When I reached the car, I had to rest for twenty minutes before I had the energy to load the bikes. I honestly felt worse after that ride than I did last week after 75. How could I have let myself get so out of shape? You only get one body in this life. If you don't keep it tuned up, you've no one to blame but yourself.

 

Will you ever see me posting here about riding 100 miles in a single day? Probably not. 75 might be our practical limit, since we ran out of daylight and had to ride the last three miles in the dark, where we rode through a literal whirlwind of flying, biting insects. I suppose if we attempted the trip on the spring solstice, we might conceivably have enough daylight to make it without the bug apocalypse. Similarly, a few weeks back we hiked 15 miles in a single day, and that's very likely the longest one day hike we're likely to make. 15 miles hiking is much more draining than 75 miles biking, and accomplishing it uses up most available daylight. Cheryl is getting a lot of exercise running each week, and I wonder if she'll work her way up to marathons one day. I suspect I won't; running is definitely my least favorite exercise. Up do this point, I've been driven by outdoing myself. I just biked 20 miles, can I bike 25, can I bike 30, and so on. Now that I'm reaching the upper limits of what I can accomplish in a single day, I do wonder what's next. I've been mainly doing road biking, albeit more on greenways than actual roads. Last night, I found myself looking longingly at trail bike. Perhaps there are some off-road bike adventures in my future.

*On a side note, after two years of using MyFitnessPal, both Cheryl and I have decided to stop using it. It's useful for altering your eating habits, but it's algorithms for how much you can eat produce some ridiculous numbers once you start tackling 20+ mile bike rides and 10+ mile hikes. For instance, on the day of our 75 mile bike ride, I think it said we could eat 10,000 calories. I'm not sure that's even feasible. That's 12 large McDonald's milkshakes! Or 19 Big Macs! At this point, the keys to eating well are pretty much memorized. Don't eat a lot of starches or refined sugars, eat more vegetables, fruits, and lean meats, and stay away from empty calories like potato chips or soda. If you want to run a calorie deficit to lose weight, a calorie tracking tool like MyFitnessPal is pretty swell. If you just want to maintain a healthy weight while living an active lifestyle, it's not important to follow every calorie you eat, just don't eat crap.

Prediction 4: Our Cyborg Future

A loose definition of a cyborg is a blending of a biological entity with mechanical devices that enhance strength, toughness, intelligence, etc.

By this definition, I'm already a cyborg. I don't have hardware actually embedded in my body, but, via my smartphone, I have enhanced memory and data retrieval capabilities. I have Superman like powers to zoom overhead and get an aerial view of my surroundings. (Yesterday, while we were kayaking on the Haw, we wondered how much further we had to go to reach a resting point. A quick check of Google maps showed where we were and where the  next rocky island was a half mile ahead of us.) I have communication abilities just one notch shy of telepathy. (Again, in the middle of a river, when I had my phone out to look at the map, I was also seeing email and facebook messages from friends, plus a message from the bike shop telling me my bike was ready to be picked up.)

More importantly to my health, the tiny computer I carry around helps me regulate my body. It lets me know how many calories I've eaten each day, and how many calories I should be eating in order to maintain my weight. It keeps track of how many miles I've traveled in a day, an month, a year, which gives me a motivational boost to keep moving to turn my personal odometer. I know I'll be hitting 1000 miles traveled via my own power soon, which means that I'm always planning my next opportunity to log some mile biking, hiking, or kayaking to get me closer to that goal.

I don't own a FitBit, but if I did it could keep track of not only my mileage, but my heart rate and sleeping habits. Of course, I already have technological assistance for sleeping, since I've now been using a CPAP for two full years.

The data revolution for our bodies is only beginning. Already, the technology to monitor blood sugar levels in real time is being perfected. Soon, we won't need to go to our doctor once or twice a year to get blood work done. A few simple sensors under the skin will be able to keep track of all aspects of our metabolism. Blood pressure, blood sugar, temperature, pulse... these won't be something we have to go out of our way to learn. We'll be able to access that data just by glancing at our phone. Assuming we even bother with something so crude as a phone. More likely, the data will just be floating in front of us anytime we want it, at first via devices like Google Glass, which will almost certainly soon be miniaturized into a contact lens, and later into ocular implants.

For people squeamish about the idea of implanting devices in their bodies, I suspect that cellphones will soon be miniaturized into patches that adhere to our skin.

The question is: Will all this technology actually make us healthier? Or will it just be an expensive distraction that keeps us from doing the things that really make us healthier? As mentioned, yesterday, in the middle of a river, instead of looking at the nature around me, I spent ten minutes reading my phone. I know a lot of people who spend more hours in a day on Facebook than they spend in a week on exercise.

Staying healthy into your golden years isn't all that complicated. Don't eat crap and keep active. I'm aware that formula won't prevent genetic illnesses or injuries or random diseases from striking you down, but it can forestall heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, and a whole host of other medical conditions.

I'm looking forward to increasing my use of high tech health related gadgetry. I would gladly agree to implant subdermal sensors to monitor my bodily functions. A chart of how many calories I actually burn on my bike rides would be fascinating. (I'm aware my phone can only do crude estimates.) A long term trendline showing how many hours of deep sleep I'm getting each night could definitely help me choose between reading one more article on the internet at night or turning off the light and going to bed. And life and intelligence could be preserved if monitors could alert emergency personal instantly if my real time vital signs showed I'd just been in a car wreck, or were in the early stages of a stroke.

But the technological investment that has had the greatest impact on my health? A good pair of boots.

For thousands of years, we've used clothing technology to regulate our temperatures, shield us from radiation, and to protect our feet from a wide range of hazardous terrains. Our cyborg future will merely be an extension of our cyborg past.

Prediction Three: Our jobless future

I've been with my current employer for almost 19 years. I won't specify who I work for; you can see my last post for various reasons why I think it's a bad idea to publicly discuss your current employer online. But, I'm going to mention my current job obliquely because I think there's an important data point. I was present when my workplace opened its doors. At the time, we had 21 full time employees. Today, we have 7 full time employees, and the threshold for being full time is 30 hours a week, not 40.

Where did two thirds of our staff go? Part of our staff was lost due to a changing business climate. I work in an industry built around printing stuff, and print is dying. Fewer companies print catalogues or employee manuals, and marketing is done more online than via direct mail. But, we also lost a lot of need for warm bodies because our technology became more sophisticated. We used to need several cashiers on hand to manage transactions. Now, people can pay with a credit card without standing in line. Customers also don't need to come into the store to place orders. They can order stuff online, pay for it, and have it delivered without ever interacting with our store. Other jobs that were once done in house are outsourced to a larger production network that works because computer technology lets the work flow around to fill available capacity. Computers have made my workplace a lot leaner and more efficient.

You see it everywhere. When I go grocery shopping, I aim toward the self checkout lanes, since they often move faster. Here in Hillsborough, there's still one gas station that has full service attendants. I never go there, preferring to save a few cents by pumping my own gas, and save time by paying at the pump. One gas station I shop at, Sheetz, lets me order subs from a touch screen. $4 foot longs, toasted on pretzel buns, made to order, very tasty. That price point is probably possible because they don't have to pay cashiers. They've shifted some of the work load to the consumer. If the added work brings lower prices, I'm a fan.

Cheryl and I often go biking through a really nice neighborhood, and it's common to see landscaping crews working in the yard. A few weeks ago, we saw a solar powered robotic lawnmower working the front yard of one of the houses.

Robots will mow our lawns. They'll also soon be delivering our packages, or at least driving the trucks. Yes, robotic trucks will have accidents that will lead to expensive lawsuits. But, guess what? Human drivers also have accidents that lead to expensive lawsuits. Robotic truck drivers will be able to drive all night and won't ever be intoxicated distracted by phone calls. They won't have lead foots, and will get much better gas mileage than human drivers. They'll probably drive slower, obeying posted speed limits, but will make up by never needing to take lunches or pit stops to empty bladders. Once insurance companies start giving companies price breaks for using robotic drivers, humans will only be on trucks to help unload... though, of course, the technology for a truck loading and unloading robot is probably already being marketed.

Maybe you're thinking that your job is too highly skilled for you to ever be replaced by a machine. Maybe. But, I predict that within twenty years, human surgeons will be obsolete, replaced by machines far more nimble and precise, seeing what they're doing with senses far superior to human sight and touch. Sure, someone will have to build those databases and maintain them. But the educated labor forces will increasingly be drawn from countries with far lower wages.

Of course, there are some jobs that machines probably can't do as well as humans. I like to think that writing novels is one of these jobs. But, that doesn't mean I have job security in the face of ever evolving technology. E-books have already disrupted publishing, providing strong downward pressure on pricing. Now, there are services that allow you to read an unlimited number of books each month for one fixed price. Authors do get royalties if their books are read, just as musicians get some small payment if their song is streamed on Spotify. But, with all things digital, the price trends keep pushing toward free, and it's hard to make a profit when you're producing content that no one pays for. If you don't offer free books, there are tens of thousands of writers eager to be read who will gladly give away their work to build name recognition, trusting that they'll figure out how to make money at what they're doing later in the process.

I know all of this sounds a bit gloomy. However, a lot of the jobs we're losing are jobs that made more use of human bodies than human minds. The same technology that disrupts industries also opens up possibilities. Studio time for a musician used to be expensive, disturbing albums difficult and costly. Now, you can record, edit, and distribute from your home computer. The odds of making money have declined, but the cost of making yourself heard have also declined, giving more people a shot at making it big than ever before. I personally know a dozen authors who never passed the arbitrary threshold of finding a publisher willing to pay an advance on their novels who now manage catalogues of a dozen self published works, all of which are making at least some money. It's not just writers and musicians who have lower initial costs to launching a career. For almost any talent you care to develop, there are instructional videos on YouTube. While college costs sky \rocket, the amount of free and useful information increases online. And you no longer have to wait for a class to be taught every other semester in order to get the knowledge you're hungry for. The lectures and study material are probably a few keystrokes away. One day, it won't matter what degree you have, only what skills and know-how you have.

We may be on the cusp of a golden age of human creativity and productivity. Or, we may be about to spiral into an abyss where we're all so broke and depressed about a machine taking our job that we won't even leave our houses. The future will come down to a million individual decisions about how we're going to adapt and respond to our rapidly changing world. My own choice: Find some small way to improve myself each day, and keep moving forward.

Prediction Two: Privacy

Orwell was right. We now live in a world where we're constantly watched. It's not just grainy black and white footage captured by security cameras in banks and supermarkets. With a few keystrokes, I can find color photographs of tens of millions of people doing very personal things, like hanging out with friends and family, going on dates, drinking, or just goofing around. I can see wedding photos, birthday photos, and photos of people at science fiction conventions dressed in costumes that do not flatter them.

What Orwell didn't guess was that we'd be the ones recording our own lives in detail and sharing things willingly, even eagerly.

Some people are outraged by the fact that the NSA is collecting data on their phone calls, intercepting emails, and doing other sinister stuff behind your back, like seeing what you're reading on Kindle. But, we think nothing of signing contracts with corporations to gather data on us for commercial exploitation. Google searches through your emails on g-mail for keywords they can use to target you with advertising. Facebook mines your relationships and likes not just for advertising, but to identify larger trends that might prove valuable. Amazon has a pretty good guess about the next album you might purchase. When you shop at a lot of real world stores, you agree to let them keep a data base of your purchases in exchange for discounts and coupons. Instead of being creeped out that there are major corporations who know what underwear you have on, we're glad that we can buy their products at ten percent off.

We have strict laws about what medical information can be shared and who it can be shared with, but every day when I sign onto Facebook I learn that someone or their sister or their best friend has just been diagnosed with cancer. We announce who we're sleeping with by linking that we're in a relationship, and the whole world gets informed when we stop sleeping with them.

We'd never think of going to a job interview in a bathing suit, but fill web pages with photos of ourselves sunning by the pool.

Most people wouldn't like it if they were constantly followed around by police. But, most people with cell phones really appreciate that the phone company can keep track of them as they travel. With my GPS enabled smart phone, I'll sometimes be out hiking and suddenly get a text from Cheryl commenting on the scenery surrounding me, since she can watch the progress of my hike on Endomondo and see via satellite photo where I am. Rather than find this unnerving, I feel an extra sense of security knowing that I can go into remote places and not be in danger of falling and breaking a leg and languishing away where no one can find me.

Judging from the current state of things, it would seem like we didn't value privacy all that much. We'll trade it away for convenience and coupons and credit cards, for free apps and 15 seconds of fame--or 15 words on twitter.

Of course, some people do care about their privacy. They do care about the information that's available about their health, relationships, and finances. It's going to be a tough life for these people, since they will increasingly find themselves locked out of the modern economy. In an age of streaming, you won't even be able to become a TV watching recluse disconnected from the rest of the world. Netflix is going to know 1000 secrets about you by your viewing choices.

All this sharing will come with consequences. Right now, I don't think employers have yet taken full advantage of all the information that's available to them. I imagine we're heading for a day when a comprehensive web search will be routine before you can be hired. I saw a Facebook post the other day where someone reviewed an episode of Game of Thrones as being an experience comparable to anal rape. This is the sort of crazy hyperbole that can be funny between friends. But, say you're hiring for a position in a service industry. Do you want to take a chance on someone who finds rape jokes acceptable in a public forum?

Every day, I see people post strong political commentary. I post strong political commentary. Today, there are numerous examples of prominent people who have lost jobs and/or fans because of political opinions that weren't particularly radical up until the moment that they were. Every opinion we type down is going to be fair game for employers. Some of it will be a wash. If you're conservative, and applying to work in a gun store, you're in luck. A liberal applying for a job at a health food store? Probably not much of a problem. But, increasingly, we'll find that every thing we've ever put onto the internet is going to be available to employers, and I suspect we'll start seeing a new class of unemployable people. Don't like your present job and complain about it online? A potential employer is going to want to avoid working with a griper. Does posting your health woes bring waves to sympathy and support? Yay, but a potential employer might secretly consider whether its worth hiring someone still fighting cancer. It might be illegal to even consider this, but if the information is out there, I suspect not everyone will be strong enough to avoid the temptation of peeking at stuff you've made public.

I predict that as employers begin to make more aggressive use of social media data in hiring decisions, we'll see a return to an almost neo-Victorian era of politeness. We'll be aware that anything we might say online--in a public forum or even an email we assumed to be private--could become a permanent stain on our reputation. We'll recognize that, even if we try to keep our lives offline, there are a thousand people around us will cell phones aimed at us the second we do anything remotely interesting. I could be wrong, of course. It may be that baser human instincts will prevail, and fifty years from now so many people will have embarrassing photos or loudmouthed, poorly punctuated rants floating around that we'll all just shrug and figure that's part of the human condition. No one will be judged for such behavior. But, we might also see a growing machinery of outrage, interest groups ready to pounce on the slightest transgression, so that we'll all be thinking twice about what we say and do. It won't be just big brother watching. Everyone from here to the end of time will be watching.

So, watch out.

Predictions for the future (a series): 1. Climate Catastrophes

I'm heading to a science fiction convention in a few hours and will be on a few panels where I'll probably wind up talking about the future. Tonight, for instance, I have a panel on the future of artificial intelligence. Why does being a science fiction writer qualify me to talk about the future? It doesn't. All I can do is guess like everyone else. Still, the speculation is fun, and, as an author, it's often rich fuel for future stories. So, this will be the first in a series where I make predictions about how the world is going to change in coming years.

First up: Climate Change!

I admit to being on the fence as to whether or not burning fossil fuels is a significant source of warming. I am not on the fence as to whether or not humans can alter the environment unintentionally, usually with negative consequences. We've helped create deserts with careless farming and grazing practices. Our water management practices have erased countless miles of shoreline, flooded millions of square miles of previously dry land, and turned previously wet places into dry hell holes. (Google the Aral and Salton seas for examples.) Our industrial monoculture farming has destroyed native prairies, and our promiscuous use of fertilizers have created giant dead zones in the ocean where no fish can survive. Where our fertilizers haven't wiped out fish, we've helped mess up the ecosystem by overfishing, and, whether or not the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere warms it or not, it is definitely turning the oceans more acidic. Our consumer culture wipes out old growth forests and our fills our oceans with ever growing continents of plastic. To fuel it all, we bulldoze mountains flat, dig up tracts of land large enough to be seen from space, and accept the risk of contamination that goes along with drilling at sea.

I consider myself an environmentalist, and, despite my libertarian leanings, am mostly in favor of governmental practices that protect the environment, like limits on dangerous chemicals going out of smokestacks and tail pipes or tough laws against contaminating ground water.

That said, I'm not in a panic about carbon dioxide even if it does lead to significant global warming. I support things like higher fuel standards and transitioning our power grid away from coal, but for other reasons than fear of runaway warming. Do I think global warming might lead to catastrophes like powerful storms, widespread drought, and rising sea levels? Absolutely.

So what?

If you look at history, catastrophes don't seem all that apocalyptic. Consider how many major cities have been wiped by earthquakes, fires, storms, and war. If catastrophes were any real barrier to humans, there wouldn't be a Chicago or a New Orleans, there wouldn't be a San Francisco or an Atlanta. For that matter, people wouldn't live in Europe, since, statistically, it was pretty much depopulated by the plague a few centuries ago.

Of course, people do live in Europe. They also live in Charleston, SC, a city flattened multiple times by a massive earthquake, by hurricanes, and by the Civil War.

What about fears of widespread drought? I suspect there will be long term shifts in weather that will render some areas unsuitable for farming. It certainly happened in the Sahara, for instance. It may be happening in the American southwest even now. West Texas is about as bone dry as it's ever been. Yet, we aren't reading stories about the massive starvation occurring in Texas. Drought doesn't equate to death in a global economy. If food doesn't grow one place, it grows another. If you look at the IPCC maps on projected rainfall due to global warming, you'll find that for every place that is expected to see a decline in rainfalls, there are other areas projected to see an increase. Heat doesn't equal drought. Very hot places are often quite fruitful agriculturally. Buy any produce from Florida lately?

Of course, you won't be buying produce from Florida if the state's underwater thanks to rising seas. And, yes, there's a real possibility of that happening, almost overnight on a geological timescale.

Fortunately, humans don't live on geological timescales. Let's take a wildly unlikely scenario where sea levels rise ten feet in a century. That's going to suck for a lot of people who lose property. But, as a practical level, a century is plenty of time to get out of the way. Rising sea levels likely won't result in any significant loss of life, at least not measured as a percentage of the total population. Humans are pretty experienced with dealing with rising sea levels. Since the end of the last ice age, sea levels have risen by roughly 400 feet. 400 feet! Yet, somehow, humans have managed to survive this massive global flooding. It's true that, in recent centuries, sea levels have been relatively stable and many large cities have grown on our coastlines. Many currently standing buildings may be wiped out. All the evidence shows that we'll shrug, move back, and build again.

What gets rebuilt will likely be stronger and better. It used to be that hurricanes would devastate coastal cities on a frequent basis. As a resident of North Carolina, I can testify that this is a state that regularly gets walloped by big storms. It used to be that a big storm would mean massive property loss and widespread death. But, death tolls have fallen dramatically thanks to improved accuracy of storm tracking. People have learned to get out of the way of killer storms. When storms do wipe out buildings, zoning codes require the structures that replace them to have more secure foundations, better roofs, better protected utilities, etc. If global warming does bring an uptick in powerful storms, it will also bring an uptick in better constructed buildings along coastlines.

Or not. Because one reason we have so many buildings along coastlines is that governments step in to insure buildings that private companies won't. This means tax dollars subsidize construction in environmentally risky areas. The best thing the government could do to keep people from building in the areas where they are most likely to be hit by high winds and storm surges is absolutely nothing. Just stop subsidizing the insurance. Without the insurance, banks aren't going to lend money to build on coastlines. We'll have to move inland, and give our crowded coastlines a bit of breathing space.

Do I believe the world is warming? There is a tremendous amount of data showing that it is. The people who argue there hasn't been any warming in the last fifteen years are kind of missing the big picture. On the flip side, the people who get panicked by the prospect of warming are also missing the big picture. The world will change.  It would be impossible to lock our global thermostat on what it is today. The world is probably going to get hotter. It will lead to widespread flooding, widespread drought, widespread population movements.

In other words, more of the same stuff we've been putting up with since we climbed down from the trees and lit our first fire. My prediction: We'll muddle through.

A devil's advocate argument for Intelligent Design

At ConCarolina's last weekend, I was on a panel to discuss Creationism/Intelligent Design vs Evolution. I had a hunch the panel would be dominated by the evolution side. I dislike lopsided debates, so I wanted to come in with the strongest argument for Intelligent Design I could muster.

This wasn't easy, since most of Intelligent Design arguments boil down to three unconvincing ideas:

1. We know things are designed because they look designed.
2.  Many biological systems are irreducibly complex. There's no point in developing half a wing, the argument goes, and random gradual mutation couldn't get you from wingless to winged in a single generation.
3. The universe is fine tuned. Change the physical variants even slightly and none of existence is possible. The odds of such a finely tuned universe randomly coming into existence are very close to infinity to one against it.

You can Google the various refutations of these arguments. They've been pretty thoroughly shredded by more powerful thinkers than me.

So, I wanted to go into the panel with an argument that didn't have premade counterarguments. This is it:

It seems irrefutable that the intelligent design of organisms goes on around us every day. Broccoli, poodles, and corn wouldn't exist in their present configurations without the intervention of human intelligence. On a more advanced level, we're now manipulating living things genetically, creating disease resistant fruits and vegetables, and cows that have certain valuable proteins in their milk. And, for some reason, glow in the dark mice. Because, why not?

We also are fluent in generating artificial worlds within computers, complete with simulated ecosystems. There are games where creatures designed by users evolve over time in a process mimicking natural selection. But creatures with computers for brains aren't just found on our laptops and smartphones. We'll soon own self driving cars. Robots will likely build those cars. They already vacuum floors, make coffee, serve as bank tellers and fly long distances autonomously. Fifty years from now, the idea that human hands once performed surgery will seem like barbarism.

Many, many very smart people believe that we are only a decade or two from designing artificial intelligences capable of self awareness. It's also commonly believed that, once these digital intelligences come into existence, they'll be capable of designing a next generation that's even smarter, and after that, a generation even smarter, in a runaway process that creates beings we aren't even capable of imagining.

But, let's say that there's some physical law we're unaware of that prevents etched silicone from ever gaining self awareness, and only biological entities prove capable of intelligence. I would argue that, as we understand the human genetic code in finer and finer detail, we will be unable to resist the temptation to design better, smarter, stronger humans, humans who are immortal perhaps, or humans blended with machines that make them capable of surviving in environments that would kill us today. Our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren may flit around on Mars on wings of flesh, drawing power from sunlight through photosynthesis. Or, if we don't want to alter ourselves that radically, nothing in the laws of physics prevents us from changing Mars to our liking. We could capture comets to bring Mars water, use enormous nuclear generators to provide a particle shield to protect the atmosphere from the solar wind, and seed the barren soil with microbes designed to turn Mars into an Eden over the course of a few million years. Such time scales seem absurd and impractical to us now, but what if we're capable of bioengineering immortality? We'll need extravagant hobbies to fill up the eons, and lots and lots of room to sprawl.

Natural selection is a pretty good method of making organisms. But, even its biggest proponents admit the raw material for the process consist of a lot of random variables. Turning a blue green algae into a multi-celled ape-like organism capable of understanding its past involves a lot of long odds and good luck. But, assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the near future, we are almost on the verge of a self-sustaining process where every future generation of intelligent beings comes about through careful, deliberate design. Our world is the only one in our solar system showing evidence of life, but check back in a million years, and probably every solid surface from here to Pluto will contain some sort of biosphere designed by our descendants to exploit and tame now hostile environments.

Assuming this vision of the future is accurate, then intelligent design will be the dominating force crafting organisms and worlds moving forward, from tomorrow until the last star winks out of the sky. If this is true (and, yes, that's a big if), then there will only one intelligent life form that comes about as a result of natural selection, and a near infinity of offspring designed to fit their environments. Thus, by simple math, we can see that intelligent design will be the primary cause of intelligent life in the total universe, while randomly evolved intelligence is such a rarity that, statistically, we may as well say it's impossible.

As far as I'm aware, my argument violates no laws of physics, biology, or cosmology. Intelligent design is how the inhabited universe will eventually be put together.

If there's a hole in my argument, I'm eager to hear it.

Now, let me add this: Even if my argument proves accurate a billion years from today, would I want it taught in classrooms today? No. What I'm engaged in here is speculation. Speculation is not science. Just because something is plausible doesn't mean it's proven. What I'm presenting here isn't a scientific theory, it's mere daydreaming, simple what ifs built on a foundation of what we know, but, at its heart, just a lot of guesswork held together with a lot of hand-waving. Do I believe it? Kind of. I don't think we're the products of intelligent design, but far, far in the future, a child may ask, "Where did we come from?" and his parent will say, "From the designer." And the kid will ask, "and who designed the designer?" The answer will be, "an earlier designer." "And who designed him?" The parent will shrug. "Kid, it's designers all the way down."

Even if they aren't scientific, daydreams and guesses have their own value. I'd even say that these are important foundations of human intelligence, and probably the biggest barrier to developing artificial intelligences. A machine that believed things that have no factual basis would be frightening driving your car or operating on your heart. But a human who believed in unproven things would hold the potential for creating new worlds.

JamesMaxey.net launches!

So, it turns out this world wide web thing might not be a fad after all. Despite having two blogs and a Facebook page, I've never taken the time to actually set up a website devoted to my writing. I'm happy to announce that changes today. With the help of my friend Jesse Bernier, I'm launching a site that will consolidate both my blog feeds, provide a handy billboard for upcoming events, and give a more organized way of finding out information on all my books. Right now, there are links to buy the books, both physically and electronically, from various retailers. Soon, we'll have ecommerce set up so you can purchase books directly from me, including signed copies of the print books.

There's also still plenty of formatting and tweaking to be done. Right now we're trying to figure out why my blogs feed in with red text. So far, GoDaddy's tech support hasn't been very helpful on this. Still, small snags like that are no reason not to go live.

We've also got a nifty quote generator set up with rotating quotes from some of my books and stories, though I really need to add to the collection, since I've only got about ten set up so far. If anyone out there has a favorite line from one of my books, let me know and I'll add it to the rotation.

Oh! It would probably help to mention the name of the website: JAMESMAXEY.NET.

Because we're insane... 100 miles in 3 days. Plus, thoughts on body/mind duality.

Cheryl and I are constantly thinking about what our next physical challenge should be. A fifty mile bike ride? Been there, done that. Hiking to all 5 peaks in Hanging Rock on the same day? Checked off the list. Run in 5ks? Done it, have the t-shirts. Ocean kayaking all around Murrells Inlet? Not nearly as tough as we thought it might be.

Now, because we're insane, in about an hour we'll be leaving the house with the goal of biking 100 miles in three days. The weather this weekend is pretty much perfect for the challenge. Hot, but not yet dangerously hot, with clear skies forecast every day. The goal is to break it down as a 40 mile ride today and tomorrow, with a 20 mile ride on Monday. None of the individual distances worry us, but how we'll handle it without long recovery periods afterwards is where the difficulty lies. Honestly, I think there's a genuine possibility this could be beyond our grasp. Today's 40, no problem at all. And I'm sure we'll be able to get on the bike's tomorrow. It's how far we make it tomorrow before our bodies start insisting that we have better things to do that I'm most worried about.

When we started all this exercise, the goal was primarily to lose weight. Then the focus gradually shifted to overall fitness. Our waistlines didn't matter as much as the fact that we were healthy enough to do things that had once seemed out of our reach.

Now, there's yet another benefit to the exercise I've discovered. Many people think of humans as a sort of trinity. There's a body, a mind, and a spirit, existing in harmony but somehow independent of one another. As an atheist, I throw out the spirit part of the equation, and tend to think of humans in a dualistic way. We're part body, part mind. For the most part, I put these into two separate mental boxes. I bike and avoid soft drinks to improve my body. I read books and write to improve my mind.

But, on a deeper level, the duality is an illusion. There is only body. Mind might appear to be a separate entity, but in reality its only a function of the body. The evidence is pretty simple. If mind weren't a function of body, you wouldn't be able to get drunk. Anesthesia wouldn't be able to switch off your mind for surgery. Mind is only a persistent illusion, an important illusion, a necessary one even. But since I believe it is only an outgrowth of your physical form, it logically follows that, if you want to improve your mind, it helps to improve your body.

I used to think I didn't have time to exercise. What I really meant when I said this was that I was giving priority to mental activities, like writing books or (more frequently) hanging out on the internet talking about stuff. Exercise seemed boring, purely physical, a low priority to the brainier stuff I enjoyed. What I've since discovered is that making my body healthier has made my mind healthier. I'm less prone to depression, less haunted by doubts. I'm able to handle stress better. And, my imagination is more active than ever. Getting outside on a bike for three or four hours gets me away from computers and TV and even off my cell phone. I might pause to take pictures and post to instagram, but when I'm peddling, I'm peddling, and thinking.

Can exercise solve every problem you have in life? Definitely not. But if you ever feel stuck in a rut, unable to grow intellectually, give it a shot. Improved physical health definitely leads to improved mental health. And, if you happen to believe you have a spirit, I suspect it gets a boost as well.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig when I was in college. At the time, it had a big impact of my thinking. I think that, even today, I'm able to see solutions to problems that others get hung up on because of attitudes I found in this book. In a key scene, a friend's handle bars are slipping and the author offers to shim them tight with a sliver of old beer can. The friend is appalled; he's driving an expensive motorcycle, and the author is proposing to "fix" it with a piece of discarded trash. The key lesson of the scene is not to get hung up on the labels attached to things, but to look beyond to see the underlying forms and functions. His friend saw a piece of trash, but the discarded beer can was actually a sheet of thin aluminum, oxidized to resist further corrosion, of exactly the right thickness, and soft enough to be cut to the right shape with a pocket knife. It was the perfect solution, once you could see the thing for what it was, not merely as what it was called.

I've had plenty of chances to put this way of looking at things to the test. Once, my radiator hose burst right where it joined with the radiator. I had no tools but a screwdriver, and this was in the days before cell phones, and I was fifty miles from the nearest person I knew.

Fortunately, there was a broken beer bottle on the side of the road. And, one inch down, the radiator hose was still intact. It was only where it clamped on that it had ruptured. So, I used the broken bottle to cut off the last inch of busted hose, used the screwdriver to clamp it back on, filled up the radiator with water I was lucky enough to have on hand and drove back home.

At work, I'm well known as a troubleshooter, willing to try new things, to see outside the "correct" channels of doing stuff in order to see the path that will actually get the job done. I don't know that the book gets full credit for this. I had a tinkering nature even from childhood. But, Zen and the Art did resonate with me, made me feel that my way of looking at the world was worth nurturing.

The last few weeks, I've been rereading the book. Alas, from my perspective as a 50 year old, the philosophy no longer looks quite as clever as it did when I was 20. In the book, the narrator argues that quality is the primary generator of reality, existing both outside the object and the observer. He states that quality can't be defined, but everyone knows what it is, at least if they have eyes to see it. He laments that too often we get fooled into thinking that style is quality. Cars are built with attractive curves and fancy features, but are mechanically lemons, for instance. He goes on to argue that quality can't be defined because it's all encompassing. It's almost like God. Any attempt to describe it must by definition fail, since the concept is just to big and omnipresent to ever be contained in mere words.

To quote Orwell, some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.

Pirsig's failure to define quality is based mainly on his unwillingness to accept that quality is completely subjective. Also, while insisting quality can't be defined, he continually attempts to define it as one big concept that covers everything.

He completely overlooks the following possibilities.

First, there is no universal standard of quality that applies equally to writing, motorcycles, and architecture. The things that make a book good have pretty much nothing to do with what makes a good hamburger. Instead of a universal ideal, we have a zillion ideals based on the things being judged.

Second, Pirsig rejects the notion that quality is purely subjective. As evidence, he has his class judge writing samples. As a group, they tend to agree on which writing samples are best. He takes this as evidence that there's a universal standard they're keyed into, even if they can't define it.

He overlooks that he's in a class of people very close in age, ethnicity, and educational background. He's teaching  a college class, after all. By the time this class has got to him, they've had years to be taught what's good writing and what's bad writing. The class is also connected by the culture of their era. Pirsig is a child of the 50s, and uses quite a bit of "beat" vocabulary, like calling some people "square." While he doesn't state it, he probably admires the writing of Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Indeed, he's writing a novel about being On the Road, full of observations about the people and towns he sees. It's difficult for me not to think that he didn't regard Jack Kerouac's writing as being high in quality. But, if so, I think he's mistaking quality for fashion. Kerouac's writing had its moment, but if the same novel first appeared today, would it have any kind of cultural impact at all? The good writing of 1950 isn't quite like the good writing of 1850, and the writing of 2150 will be judged by factors we can't even guess at. Quality changes with cultural context.

Think of food. I ate lunch at a Thai restaurant today. The primary condiment of Thai cuisine is a fermented fish sauce. To most American tongues, the stuff is foul. Who the hell wants to eat the run off juice of fermented fish? Or think about kim chi in Korean cooking. It's spoiled cabbage spiced to the point that many people find it inedible. Yet, in their own cultures, in the right context, these foods are of the highest quality.

Does that mean that quality is completely subjective? Not necessarily. From an evolutionary perspective, we probably all have built in receptors to find certain things attractive. Most of us like fatty, sweet foods because they are high in calories. In today's world of abundance, this leads to obesity, but in our ancestors world of scarcity these taste receptors helped us survive. Similarly, while our distant ancestors weren't expressing themselves as much in writing as we do today, I'm guessing there was a sexual selection bias that made people who could express themselves clearly and confidently attractive to the opposite sex. A gift for eloquence was a clue that the mate had good intelligence and could pass on good genes. That's why us writers get all the action.

My point is that there can be underlying biological urges driving us toward finding certain objects, actions, and appearances pleasing. These get overlaid with culture; if your Dad liked country music, you have a better chance of liking country music. If he listened to opera, you have better odds of liking opera. What's considered quality varies from socio-economic class and geography. At the risk of stereotyping my own state, many men from my neck of the woods and from my economic strata probably find NASCAR racing to be an art form. Give them tickets to a Broadway musical, however, and they'd feel a deep, deep dread at the thought that they might actually have to go.

Back to Zen: Strip away this core concept of universal quality, and it would seem like the book should fall apart. It doesn't. It's still an excellent narrative about a long road trip, and a touching story about a father trying to save his son from mental illness.

That's one of the weird things about quality literature. It doesn't have to make a damn bit of sense to still be good.