I was in Cooperstown, New York on Thursday night. The drive from Portland was fast and easy, a little rain to begin which quickly cleared up. The highways were clear – not many people traveling on the Mass Pike or the New York Thruway on a spring midweek midday – and the dog and I made the most of the empty parking lots and open fields of the rest stops. I haven’t driven west of Sturbridge in a long time, but memories came back – the long climb into the Berkshires with an old farm barely fifty feet from the eastbound lanes, the drive across the Connecticut River outside Springfield, then across the Hudson south of Albany. The Hudson River bridge was terrifying; the railings are open down to the roadbed, and the bridge carries three lanes with no shoulder on either side. I stuck to the middle lane as my panic level slowly rose, reminding myself that we would get across, talking to the dog and trying to reassure myself while telling him it would be okay.
Understandably so
First, a quick apology. I referred to Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action in my last post as a “lousy book”, and was quickly called out on it by an old friend in the UK who, apparently, wrote his doctoral dissertation on said book. In fairness, the book isn’t lousy; it’s a bit densely written, which is in keeping with it being a work of philosophy by a German author, and I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of the argument within it, but it’s closely reasoned, provocative, and intelligent. And not lousy. This also gives me a chance to link to my friend’s own writing, as the way he writes and what he writes about is worth checking out – please visit. He’s also a wayward banker, so for those of you thinking about concepts of value and credit and their changing essence, you’ll enjoy visiting his work.
A theory of context
The brief paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, written in 1948, is often described as the foundational document of the Internet age. It gave us the term “bit” for the foundational unit of information (a 1 or 0), either in use by a computing process or as a piece of data in transit. The paper is really not about communication as we think about it, that is, the process of people exchanging meaning amongst one another, either instantaneously in conversation as it may occur or across time; rather, a better title would be “A Mathematical Theory of Data Transfer in the Presence of Uncertain Errors in the Transmission Medium”. Not nearly as catchy, of course, but far more accurate, and far less likely to confuse a reader who stumbles across it and thinks about the implications on critical theory and epistemology.
Late flight to the coast
I’ve done this flight what seems like ten scores of times, the evening flight from Newark to Seattle. I used to do it coming back from trips to the bankers and investors and rating agencies, then back from meeting with rating agencies and regulators and increasingly agitated bankers as the old bank failed, then back from depositions and court dates and consulting meetings. Now it’s back from Maine, from parents and working online, to visit my son. There is nothing to do in Seattle any more, and it makes the plane rides themselves far easier – it makes them releases, in their way. I’m off the clock, a clock which ticks slowly when I’m in Maine through job searches, consulting work, writing, reading, waiting; instead I’m in a zone where it’s just about being a father and relishing having a son, being a partner for my ex-wife and feeling appreciated that I’m giving her a break. I’ve done this flight a hundred times but it’s easier now than ever before, even knowing I’m going to do it a hundred times more before he hits middle school.
Prophecy
My first memory isn’t really a memory.