Author: colter

The Moon Landing Was Fake

In several Internet venues (Facebook, Gothamist, Onion AV Club) I’ve seen moon landing deniers crop up. I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person, but I’m more fascinated by the mindset of the theorists than I am by their theories.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the moon landing was fake (or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the Holocaust didn’t happen). Facts and evidence aside, this would require a Herculean effort on the part of hundreds of government employees and private citizens to maintain this secret. I just don’t think humans are up to that job.

Has there ever been a point in our history where dozens or hundreds of people successfully fooled millions of people in the United States? Because that’s what it would take for a hoax of this magnitude. Hundreds of people would have to know the truth, many of them civilians at NASA. I would think it an impossible task to keep that many people permanently silent on such a momentous event. NASA is not a military organization; there is no obligation to keep a secret this large, especially when it is of no importance to national security. I would think that in the last 40 years somebody who was actually there at NASA participating in the hoax would have come forward to expose the lie, or that these things would leak out as they historically have a habit of doing. If Nixon couldn’t keep a basic secret, then who can?

Humans are inquisitive by nature, and this is both the reason why so many doubt the legitimacy of the moon landing, and also why the landing has never been proven demonstrably false. For every person questioning the potentially fake broadcast, there would likely be even more individuals questioning the broadcast had it actually been faked. Possible examples: techs at CBS would question the source of the broadcast feed, astronomers would wonder why there’s a craft sitting in orbit rather than moving on to the moon, ham radio operators would have heard something different in the transmissions, and last but not least…somebody would have made millions writing a book to tell the story.

Humans also have a tendency to jump to the most exciting of possible conclusions. Seen a UFO? The answer must be aliens! Strange lights in Gurdon, Arkansas? It must be ghosts! History is littered with examples of exciting but disproven theories, but the news rarely spreads very far because the results weren’t exciting enough for anyone to care.

In general, I’ve discovered that, given a multitude of possible explanations for unexplained phenomena, the truth tends to lean toward the most boring option. The truth also tends to make its way to the people because lies have a short shelf life. Or maybe I’m just saying that because of all the Big Secrets still being kept. Somehow, I doubt it.

Babies for Obama

Visiting clothing stores around the city, I see kids’ clothes becoming more and more like miniature adults’ clothes. Whether it’s faux vintage concert t-shirts or political slogans or smart couture ensembles, it leaves me with a vague uneasiness. Am I the only person who thinks that children’s clothing should be statement-neutral and distinctly child-like? A child should not be treated as a fashion accessory for expressing a parent’s hipness or politics.

Of course, there is a difference between using children’s clothing to convey simple cuteness and using children’s clothing to broadcast a parent’s socio-political agenda. I just wish I knew how to clearly draw that line.

I realize it’s hard for parents to be aware that a line exists at all. We indoctrinate our kids into every aspect of our lives, and so naturally our mistakes and misconceptions become theirs, too. But as much as we can, we need to be aware that some things should be a choice for the children to make on their own, when they’re ready to do so. Until then, a certain amount of neutrality should be maintained.

I think we can all agree that political slogans on children’s shirts are simply a reflection of a parent using their child as a kind of billboard for their own ideas. It’s a minor injustice, but it’s a telling reminder that more often than not, children take on the worldviews of their parents without really taking the time to examine things for themselves.

If you believe, though, that there are things about which children should be allowed to decide for themselves, and that political t-shirts for kids aren’t a good idea, then neither are religious t-shirts, or religious indoctrination in general. Children are almost never given a free choice to choose their religion, because how many parents would really tolerate that?

So true statement-neutrality is an apparent impossibility for most parents. Maybe, though, we could start by at least leaving the cute political shirts at home.

Hart Island

Just northeast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound there’s an island that is technically the largest cemetery in the United States, and the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world. Almost none of the graves are marked in any conventional fashion because it’s where New York City buries its unclaimed bodies; otherwise known as a “Potter’s Field.”

Hart Island has been used for nearly 200 years as a place where New York does its private business; in addition to being the final resting place of the city’s prisoners, stillborn children and unidentified remains, the island has also held a POW camp, a women’s asylum, and a missle base.

Naturally it’s off limits to the public, but all it takes to get there is a boat and some bravery. I wish I had either.

Wanting No More

Remember a few months back when I was on the fence about a particular guitar? Well, I’m not anymore.

Ibanez PGM100RE and Radius 540R
Ibanez PGM100RE and Radius 540R
I took the plunge and ordered an Ibanez PGM100 reissue from Guitarsmiths in Harrison. I find the blue and pink strangely appealing. For the historical context of this guitar’s appeal for me, you’ll have to watch this video and pretend you’re a 14 year old boy in 1990. Phil at Guitarsmiths gave me a great deal and even sent it to me before taking my credit card number.

The guitar at left is another $150 (with case!) Craigslist bargain. No more guitars for me for quite some time. But then I always say that…

Voices

Sorry for the long radio silence. I’ve been a peculiar combination of relentlessly busy and quietly inactive, neither of which lend themselves to regular blog updates. As per usual, I’ve been taking more pictures than writing words, so try my Flickr stream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the various voices in all our heads. I don’t know about your mind, but mine on any given day seems to contain a constantly shifting committee of advisers. I think they’re even traceable to specific people. Here are some of the people who have successfully uploaded bits of their consciousness into mine, and examples of what they tell me:

Mom – Wash your dishes and clean up after yourself.
Dad – Buy that bargain CD or book. You never know where it’s going to take you.
Heather Gunter – Don’t be a chump.
Natalie Griffin – Relax and be good to yourself.
Heath Harrelson – You’re rationalizing. Stop it.
Katherine Whitworth – Eat something you haven’t eaten before.
DeLaine Ulmer – Say “Yes” to the unknown.

I just wanted to take the time to say thanks to those folks for being part of my brain trust.

12th Century Wisdom

I found this quotation recently on Andrew Sullivan’s blog from 12th century theologian-philosopher Hugo St. Victor:

The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his.

This came as a reassuring message to me, as I’ve always felt like something of a stranger in a strange land. I’m from Harrison, Arkansas, but not of it. I live in New York City but it’s just as foreign to me.

The same statement could be applied to race and religion. Race, place and religion are the primary causes of war. While I lament the homogenization of America, the loss of native languages and cultural practices, I realize that for everything we lose culturally, we gain peace.

What divides us is what defines us. As in my previous post, if I say, “I’m an Arkansan,” then that’s 49 implied statements about the states I’m not from[1]. Ideally, we should not give objective preference to any one place or race (or religion but that’s much harder to do); we should only recognize them as subjective preferences, personal to our life experiences. Pride of race, place or religion may help give people confidence and identity, but they lose a greater understanding of the world at large in the process.

1.) Plus all the lovely inferences and assumptions that come with making that statement.

The Mechanics of Statements

This thought occurred to me on the subway yesterday: every declarative statement implies hundreds of opposites.

For example, if I say, “this chair is blue,” then the following statements have been implied:

The chair is not red.
The chair is not yellow.
The chair is not green.
The chair is not orange.
The chair is not purple.
The chair is not brown.
The chair is not black.
The chair is not white.

I found this peculiar, because while I’m acquainted with the notion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the idea that every statement has hundreds, thousands, or even an infinity of opposite reactions to be mind-boggling.

In much the same way, a statement like “God Bless America” implies that God should favor us over others, that God should not bless France or Eritrea or every other nation in the world. Why would he do that? Why would we want him to, but out of selfishness and arrogance?

Another example: you sit down at a table of women, and you greet one of them by saying she looks beautiful. In doing so, you’ve effectively stated that the other women at the table are not beautiful.

Language is dangerous.

Know Your Subway Cars

I tripped over a fun series of Wikipedia entries today – the various types of New York subway cars.

R32 – The tin cans from the 1960’s favored by the C line. Built by the lowest bidder in 1964 for the paltry sum of $117,000 per car!

R42 – The popular, all shiny gray interior trains with poles perfect for pole-dancing. From 1969.

R46 and R44 – The funky 70’s orange and yellow interior cars, the ones we F line travelers know so well.

R62 – Still funky 70’s colors, but with all the seats pointing the same way. From 1983, when train cars cost $918,293 each.

R142, R143, R160A and R160B – The fancy new trains with all the digital displays and automated announcements. Built by Kawasaki for a cool 1.2 million dollars each. The B article contains the information I’ve long been wondering about: the distinctive stepped-pitch whine that these cars make.

Most of the older cars were rebuilt and refurbished in the 1990’s. The names indicate the contracts under which they were purchased. There are even more articles on decommissioned trains like the R9, for example.

I love Wikipedia. It’s a place where expert trainspotters can share their vast wealth of useless minutiae. For those who want to dig even deeper into the trainspotting obsession, here is a deeper breakdown at nycsubway.org.

Twitter Love and Twitter Hate

I keep hearing people hating on the Twitter. Maureen Dowd wrote a nasty little interview with the founders (parodied here to genius levels), and my friend Mark is convinced that Twitter is the event horizon of the coming Idiocracy.

I tend to side with the cautiously optimistic. I can see the potential for a vast wasteland of irrelevancies broadcast amongst the foolish, and I can also see the value in knowing what my friends and heroes are up to in something approximating real time. Living in New York, it’s uniquely fantastic when someone like Imogen Heap tweets that she’s headed to Apple Store, so that I might have a chance to bump into her (I missed her), or when my friend Tom tells everybody the admission price to his latest show dropped to ten bucks. It’s also nice to be entertained by John Mayer, who clearly wishes he were a standup comedian.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, there’s Ashton Kutcher. He really thinks Twitter is the logical evolution of radio to telephone to TV to web to tweet, and that its founders are to be enshrined alongside the names Marconi, Farnsworth, and Bell.

Maybe. One thing I’ve noticed, though, about life-changing inventions in my lifetime is that almost none of them have individual inventors. No one person can be credited with inventing the Internet, the cell phone or the personal computer as we know it. As the Master Control Program says in Tron, “No one User wrote me. I’m worth millions of their man-years.” The real lasting value of something like Twitter will take a decade or two to determine. After all, what is Twitter but a MySpace or Facebook status update? And what will come along in 5 more years that might replace it? The Internet makes so much collaboration possible that I wonder if the next hundred years of inventions will be defined by networked team efforts rather than individual genius.

For now, we have Twitter to play with. Maybe it will go away as people get bored with it, but it seems to be of enough value that it will never truly die. Like MySpace, which nearly everyone I know as all but abandoned, persists because its vast musical platform continues to provide value for musicians. As long as it provides a service people enjoy, it will continue to exist in some shape.

Video never really killed radio. So why should MySpace or Twitter be any different?