Half Changed World

D was speculating on what it would be like to have a personal robot, so I took my parental prerogative to insist on reading some of I, Robot to him.  I had forgotten how old the stories were.  The copy we have was Tony’s mother’s — it’s the first Signet paperback printing, dated 1956, with the cover reading "Man-like machines rule the world! Fascinating tales of a strange tomorrow."  The collection as a whole is copyright 1950, with the first story (Robbie) originally published in 1940 (and supposedly taking place in 1998).

The stories remain quite readable, although the vocabulary is a bit hard going for a 7 year old, even with me reading to him.   Seeing where, and how, Asimov’s predictions were off is fascinating.  While the "primative" nursemaid robot of Robbie remains far out of
reach, the "talking robot" that can answer factual questions is well
within our capacity.

Even beyond the robots, there’s a whole bunch of technologies that he assumed we’d have which we don’t — jet cars and space travel.  But at the same time that he’s predicting these things, the concept of a miniature audio recorder seems to have escaped him: "I was taking it down verbatum on my pocket-recorder, trying not to show the knuckle-motions of my hand.  If you practice a bit, you can get to the point were you can record accurately without taking the little gadget out of your pocket."

Check out Obama’s Flickr photostream.

After an election that was dominated by new media (blogs, youtube, twitter), the end turned out to demand the old media.

We watched the results come in on television, and our guests nearly rioted when at one point T revealed that we were actually ten minutes behind live thanks to TiVo and channel switching.  I had my laptop on, and occasionally looked over to check things like which counties had reported in the states that had only partial results, but the focus was definitely on the big screen. 

And then, yesterday, it seems like everyone wanted a newspaper, the dead tree kind, to hold in their hands and put away in the closet.  Papers all over the country sold out, and people were lined up waiting for the special editions to come out.

When I drained the battery on the car last week, I set off the anti-theft device on the audio system, so I can’t listen to the radio until we manage to get to a dealer.  Listening to the previous day’s podcast works ok for Planet Money and This American Life, less well for the more newsy shows.*

*It’s almost like having a TiVo for the radio.

I don’t usually cry with happiness, but I’ve been tearing up all day.  Because for 22 months, Obama has been telling us that the United States can live up to its highest aspirations, can make real the story that this is a place of unparalleled opportunity, and last night we did it.  So many people feel like they own a piece of this victory, because they volunteered or gave money to the campaign, and that’s something wondrous too.  I keep looking at the pictures of people dancing in the street, or the tears running down Jesse Jackson’s face, and then I well up again.  By 9am today, you couldn’t buy a copy of the Washington Post anywhere downtown because people wanted them as souvenirs.

All day long I’ve been humming Ella’s Song to myself — it’s the Sweet Honey in the Rock song that begins "We who believe in freedom shall not rest until it’s come…." 

Obama’s got a tough job ahead of him, and yes, there’s no way he’s going to make everyone happy who supported him.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be celebrating today.  As Marge Piercy writes:

This is the blessing for a political victory:

Although I shall not forget that things

work in increments and epicycles and sometime

leaps that half the time fall back down,

let’s not relinquish dancing while the music

fits into our hips and bounces our heels.

We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melach haolem, sheheckianu, v’kiemanu, v’higianu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who gave us life, who sustained us, and who enabled us to reach this day.

That’s a neat widget, but so far, I’ve been mostly checking out the results at the New York Times, which lets you drill down by county.
Not much to say yet.

Update: 10:16 pm.  It sure looks like Obama’s won, but the reality of it hasn’t really hit me.  Both boys are asleep on the living room couch.

Virginia’s Presidential race is still too close to call.  It looks like this may be the state where the polls are going to be furthest off.  I’ll be really interested to hear what they think happened.

Wolf appears to be beating Feder by large margins.  Connally appears to be beating Fimian.  Chris Shays has lost, so there are no longer any Republican Representatives from New England.

I should be going to bed, but I found this via Brad DeLong and couldn’t resist.

By the way, DeLong is a wonky economist, and I’ve never seen him post a video before.

24 hours from now, the polls will be closed in several states and we’ll be starting to have a sense of how the election played out.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up early to volunteer at the polls, helping people find parking spots in the dark and helping with the lines.  Then I’ll take a break for a few hours to run the bake sale for the PTA (since the school is a polling site) and to vote myself.  And then I’ll head out to the local organizing site to do whatever they need me to do until the last voters on line get their chance to vote.  I’ll bring folding chairs for those who need a place to sit, and magazines for parents to read to their children.

I’m feeling tired and drained and elated all at once, and I’ve only
been on the margins of the campaign.  One of the things that’s special about this campaign is how many people feel like they own a piece of it.  I can’t imagine how the folks who
have been working 24/7 on this feel, let alone Obama himself, what with
his grandmother dying this morning.

I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to report in, but I’d love to hear from the rest of you.  What are you doing?  Have you voted already?  What sort of lines are you seeing?

And don’t forget, if you see any voting problems, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Since I think I’ll be a bit distracted on Tuesday night, I’m posting this week’s book review tonight.  The book is The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, Charles R. Morris.

Morris wins a huge amount of credit for having written this book last winter, before everyone and her brother was talking about credit derivative swaps.  That said, his crystal ball wasn’t perfect — he spends a fair amount of time worrying about what will happen if other countries decide not to invest in the dollar anymore, while what seems to have happened is that everyone seems to have decided that the US Treasury is the one safe place to put your money in a world gone mad.

I definitely learned some useful things reading this book.  Nothing else I’ve read on the current economic collapse points out that there was a previous crash of collaterized mortgage obligations crash in 1994 when the Fed raised rate by 1/2 a percent.  But even more interesting than reading what Morris thought in February would happen in September would be to find out what he now thinks will be happening next March.

In the rush to get a full-length book out in a matter of months, the editing also suffered a bit.  Morris has some great lines: "That is the Greenspan Put: No matter what goes wrong, the Fed will rescue you by creating enough cheap money to buy you out of your troubles."  But at other times, he falls into a bit of jargon: "Similarly, the notional value of a derivative refers not to the derivative but to the size of the portfolio it is referencing."

Planet Money remains my pick for translating economist-speak into English. 

So far this week:

• I’ve had a severely upset stomach;
• I managed to fall walking out of the house and sprain my ankle;
• I managed to turn on the parking lights on my car without noticing, and so the battery was dead when I went to go to work this morning.

I’m really looking forward to having another 20 or 30 percent of my brain back after next Tuesday.

This post is part of the Write to Marry blog carnival, organized by Dana at Mombian and Mike at PageOneQ.

I’ve been listening to the podcast of the Writer’s Almanac on my way to and from work and today I heard that last Thursday was the 7th anniversary of the iPod.  It made me gape, because they’ve become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it seems unimaginable that they didn’t exist that recently.

Five years ago, the idea that same-sex marriages would be be legally recognized in the United States would have seemed unimaginable to me, such a far off possibility that it didn’t seem like a fight that was worth taking on.  And then Massachusetts opened the doors, and San Francisco followed and I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures of all the happy couples.  And the world shifted.

There’s been some bumps in the road since then.  Four years ago, I was worrying about the referenda against same sex marriage and their impacts on the presidential election, and trying to remember that February warmth.  Two years ago, I was knocking on doors trying (unsuccessfully) to stop a hateful amendment to Virginia’s constitution.  This blog carnival is focused on stopping California’s Proposition 8 which would take away same-sex couples right to marry.

But I truly think the world has changed.  People have seen the couples lining up to marry in California and Massachusetts.  And they’ve seen that the sky hasn’t fallen down.

I’ve posted this poem before, but it seems appropriate again:

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.