This weekend was Boston’s first book festival. I purchased The Little Money Book by David Boyle (“What is money? What is it really worth? Who decides?”). The following is from the opening chapter (“Why publish this book?”) and is a speech delivered to European heads of state by a representative of South American indigenous communities:

I, Guaicaipuro Cuatemoc, have come to meet with the participants of this meeting.

Here I, descendant of those who have lived in America for 40,000 years, have come to meet those who met us 500 years ago.

My brother, the European usuurer, asks me to repay a debt of treachery from a Judas I never authorized to put me up for collateral.

My brother, the European hypocrite, explains to me that all debts must be paid with interest even while he buys and sells Human beings and entire countries without their consent.

I have been discovering these things. I too claim payment and I too claim interest.

Proven it is, in the archives of native peoples, by paper upon paper, receipt upon receipt, and signature upon signature, that between the years 1503 and 1660 there arrived at San Lucas de Barrameda 185,000 kilos of gold and 16,000,000 kilos of silver from the Americas.

Those 185,000 kilos of gold and 16,000,000 kilos of silver should be seen as the first of many, many friendly loans from the Americas towards European development. The contrary would be to assume war crimes and not only immediate recompense, but indemnity for damages, pain and suffering.

Such a fabulous transfer of capitol was no less than the beginning of a ‘Marshall Tesuma’ plan, to guarantee the reconstruction of a barbaric Europe, ruined by wars against (a very civilised) Islam.

So. To celebrate the Fifth Centennial of the IOU, we can ask: have our European brothers made rational, responsible or even productive use of these amounts so generously advanced by the International Indo-American Fund?

Sadly the answer is —‘no’. In the campaigns they squandered it — in the battles of Lepanto, in invincible armadas, in third reichs, in every form of mutual extermination.

They have been unable, despite a 500 year moratorium, to repay the principal and interest, let alone to live free of the further dividends, the raw materials and cheap energy exported and continually provided to them by all the ‘third world.’

This deplorable vista corroborates Milton Friedman’s view that a subsidised economy can never function and obliges us, for their own good, to demand payment of the principal and interest that we have waited so generously for all these centuries to reclaim. Let it be clear that we do not stoop to charging the villainous leech rates of 20% and up to 30% that our European brothers charge the peoples of the third world. We merely require the return of the precious metals advanced, plus the modest accumulated interest of 10% for a period of 300 years with a two hundred year period of grace.

On this basis, and applying the European formula for compound interest, we advice our (discoverers) that they owe us, as initial payment on the debt, a mass of 185, 000 kilos of gold and 16,000,000 kilos of silver. As for the interest, we are owed 440, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 kilos of gold and 38, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 kilos of silver (or 1% of the mass of the Moon). At the rates of mid 2002 that equates to a total of $391, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

To infer that Europe, in half a millennium, has not been able to generate sufficient wealth to pay off this modest interest, would be to admit the abject failure of its financial system and the demented irrationality of the premises of capitalism.

Such metaphysical questions, however, do not disturb us Indo-americans.

But, what if we were to require the signing of a Letter of Intent to discipline the indebted peoples of the Old World, and to oblige them to fulfill their obligations by means of rapid privatisations and fiscal restraint, as the first step in payment of this historic debt….

This speech is heavily reprinted in Spanish, but not in English (other than a NSFW MySpace page with an ass-on-plexiglass background)

The following is from the 1824 edition of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator on Island 94:

No. 94, Stack or Crow’s nest Island, six miles below 93,

Has been sunk by the earthquake, or swept off by the floods; but just below where it stood is a high sandbar, covered with young willows, and is about the middle of the river. This bar may grow into another Crow’s, but it is to be hoped, not into another Rogue’s nest. The river here bears hard against the head of the bar, and also against the right hand bank–channel right side near to the island, thence draws toward the right hand shore.

The creek empties in on the right side, just above the two settlements. The Washita heads not far from this place, on which is a considerable settlement, 40 miles distant, and to which from hence is a cut road. It is thirty miles to Moorehouse’s settlement on that river.

Crows’s nest or Stack island was very small, and stood in about the middle of the Nine Mile reach. A large bar had formed just below where the island stood, but it also has given way to the current, and is no more.

Four miles below this island (No. 94,) is a sandbar in a right hand bend–channel on the left of it.

I love the slant rhyme humor: “This bar may grow into another Crow’s but it is to be hoped not into another Rogue’s nest.” The print is below.

From the book pile: the graphic above and quote below are from Future Developments in Telecommunications, 2nd edition by James Martin, 1977 (“NEW completely rewritten”).

A given piece of information is conveyed to humans, sometimes using a low transmission capacity and sometimes a large capacity.

If we watch five minutes of a television talk show a message may be conveyed to us. To transit television digitally (with PCM encoding) requires 92.5 million bits per second. The five minutes therefore take 5 x 60 x 92.5 million = 27.5 Billion bits. More compact signal encoding can reduce this somewhat.

The same message may be conveyed in speech in five minutes of conversation over a telephone line. If the line is digital (PCM), operating at 56,00 bits per second, this uses 5x 60 x 56,000 = 16.8 million bits. In fact it uses twice this because a typical PCM telephone transmits in both directions together so that the parties can both talk or hear each other.

Human conversation is highly redundant, and if the person with the message to convey had been better organized he might have spoken it in 120 words, taking one minute. This would have needed 3.36 million bits.

The 120 words could have been sent by data transmission. Using the coding that is typical today, this would need 4800 bits. If a tighter code had been used (5-bit Baudot code instead of 8-bit ASCII) 3000 bits would have sufficed. If message compaction techniques had been used, the message could have been sent in less than 1000 bits.

Apologies for the title of this post.

My boss pointed me to the NY Times obituary of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (a featured radiobituary on Bubbles in the Think Tank):

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church’s compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, **a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax-exempt status, **which had been revoked in 1987.

And yet the IRS claims that “charitable, educational, religious, scientific, literary, fostering national or international sports competi- tion, preventing cruelty to children or animals, and testing for public safety” are the only exempt purposes…

As the 4th anniversary of this blog nears (November 12) I’ve been revisiting research that was near impossible when I began it. The namesake of this blog was Island 94, formerly sitting within the Mississippi River, which I was introduced to through the very excellent book When the Mississippi Ran Backwards by Jay Feldman. When I first started this blog, it was very difficult to find primary sources through the internet. Fortunately, many libraries and archives have worked to digitize their collections and make them available online. Because of that there is a lot more to say about this blog’s namesake and inspiration.

The title page above is from Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator, a navigational aid published when the Mississippi was a navigational challenge—before the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the snags, built the levees and made it all into a generally uninteresting commercial thoroughfare. It is from the 1824 edition published after Cramer’s death and after the absence of the Island 94 for which this blog is named.

As you can tell from the ample account given even on its title page, this book is from a day when to publish something, you had to really mean it.

A great comment from Tom Wolf showed up in my feed reader; left on a quote by Marco Arment on Simon Willison’s blog:

Over a decade ago when I started a program to teach senior citizens how to use computers (Windows 95, WordPerfect, and dial-up internet access :), the first day that I had them at the computer, I encouraged them to do their best to “break” it in order to remove some of their fear about doing just that.

Students who internalized my message of “there’s no way you can screw this up so bad that I can’t fix it” learned much, much faster. I reigned that message back in a bit later in the class so that I didn’t end up sending new users into the world who would click indiscriminately on absolutely everything, but removing the fear of breaking this expensive and mysterious machine was much more important to enhancing the students’ understanding.

What’s even more unfortunate is that this mentality, even when removed in certain arenas (users who regularly use a particular app, often develop a sense of comfort with the product and are more willing to do their own first-level troubleshooting) crops right back up as soon as the user is presented with a perceived “new” situation (even if it’s actually nearly identical).

Finally, the fact that there are hordes of so-called consultants out there who enhance these perceptions and prey on the average users’ lack of understanding to charge outrageous prices for sub-par (or in some cases no) work is incredibly frustrating.

At the Grassroots Use of Technology Conference / National Writers Union Digital Media Conference I got to hear a lot of people bemoan how hard it is to make a buck as a creator in the digital age.

A comparison was made to the Open Source Software movement and I made a very quotable statement ( by Twitter standards): “Journalism is the software upon which democracy runs”.

Other than the awful mixed metaphors, I think I made a good statement: coding software has a very clear correlation between the work itself and the measurement of the final product at the end. Journalism: not so much. Of course some people do talk about how access to information and analysis from diverse viewpoints is vital to the continued health of our Democracy, but they get shouted down by Glen Beck. Newspapers themselves (or Cable Access TV or whatever is going town the toilet today) are usually discussed as some impalpable, circularly-reasoned necessity rather than put into context as providers of a what __is necessary for the kind of society we want to live in.

Call me progressive, but let’s talk about what we need to build tomorrow, not reinforce today.

Here’s a quote I have trouble disagreeing with from Mark Lloyd’s Communications Policy is a Civil Rights Issue:

…to argue that getting out of the business of regulation is the only constructive role for government to play is as blind as it is disingenuous. The challenge is to create a set of rules that reflects the best nature of our society. As Newton Minow makes clear in Abandoned in the Wasteland, the issue is not really whether the market provides good choices, but whether citizens have a real say in what those choices are. The issue is whether the parent must let his child be a consumer, or, more to the point, a product to be sold to advertisers, or whether the parent has a right as a citizen to demand more.

Two articles came across my desk today that I think are strongly connected. The first is from Danah Boyd on Teaching, nursing and second-wave feminism:

Since the 1970s, the number of brilliant, motivated individuals working as teachers and nurses in particular declined rapidly. Many women left these professions because they had many more opportunities and many men refused to do “women’s work.” Don’t get me wrong - there are some amazing teachers and nurses out there, but sexist constraint meant that the most brilliant, most passionate women inevitably went to these professions while that is no longer the case.

The problem is what has happened since then. I certainly don’t want to go back to the dark ages where women had no choice. But while we’ve opened up doors for women, we haven’t addressed how sexism framed nursing and teaching in ways that are causing us tremendous headaches in society today. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued because we took women’s work for granted. When teaching stopped being women’s work, we didn’t rework our thinking about teaching. As a society, we still have little respect for teachers and nurses and we pay them abysmally. This is deeply rooted in the sexism of the past but the ripple effects today are costly.

The second is from Dan Pallota over at Harvard Business Blogs (more on that in a moment) titled The “Psychic Benefits” of Nonprofit Work Are Overrated:

People often tell me that those who work for nonprofits should work for less because of the psychic benefits of being able to make a difference, work with the poor, and so on…

Don’t fall for this Puritan self-sacrificial psychobabble. It’s not the poor who are asking you to work for less. It’s the donating public, including many a wealthy donor. They’re asking you to end poverty and every other great social problem and to do it for them at a discount. And they’re exploiting the images of the poor to get you to agree. The fact that someone makes a one-time sacrificial gift doesn’t mean you’re obligated to make a lifetime sacrificial career choice. If you do the math and the psychic benefit comes up lacking for you, then ask the people who want you to make the world a better place for another kind of benefit that begins with a “p.” Pay.

I definitely feel the first quote flows into the second, and hence the inflammatory title to this post. I think Pallota’s explanation is wrong (Puritanical self-sacrifice) and Boyd’s is correct (we undervalue the work of women).

I find it very telling that social work is reframed as Social Entreprenuership (thank you Harvard Business School), a rhetorical device that allows men to participate. Giving things away is women’s work; getting people to pay for it, now that’s a job for a man.

Following up on som graphics from the free book pile at the university, above is a graphic from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. There are only 4 plates in this book (it’s the 1975) edition, but each one takes on a very plant-like appearance. (I think this plate is superior to the current reprint because mine uses stipple points rather than hash-lines to show contrast; it’s also typeset in Arial, but that’s just being picky).

Tielhard puts it all within Christian dogma (he was a Jesuit), but the Omega Point is pretty nifty. Briefly from Wikipedia:

The complexification of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more personalization, of which human beings are the highest attained form in the known universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. Teilhard expressly stated that in the Omega Point, when the universe becomes One, human persons will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. This is because the Omega Point unites creation, and the more it unites, the more the universe complexifies and rises in consciousness. Thus, as God creates the universe evolves towards higher forms of complexity, consciousness, and finally with humans, personality, because God, who is drawing the universe towards Him, is a person.

Since I just posted about how social roles affect social values, here’s a scenario we recently had in my Critical Thinking class.

A man and his son are involved in a car crash. The father dies on the scene and the son is rushed to hospital. On arrival the surgeon on duty says “I can’t operate on this boy, he is my son!” How is this possible?

Contextualizing it kind’ve kills the question.