It seems the demise of print newspapers is alarming old loons.  The world is a-changing.

A 23 year old student was telling me today about how shocking it is to consider that her 19 year old sister has never known a world without the internet.  Mind you, I’m pretty sure my student doesn’t really recall the pre-internet times, either.

I then told her that I was born before man walked on the Moon.  This literally horrified her as her jaw fell agape.  Yes, it makes me feel old.  But I’m also rather proud to be of a generation that both pre-dates and created the digital, modern world.  I like to remind people that the Apollo spacecraft had less computing power than most peoples’ wristwatches.  Well, I used to say that, back when people wore wristwatches.  Now, I guess I have to say cell phones.

I also used to say that half the world has yet to make a phone call.  This was, of course, before the mobile phone revolution.  (Mind you, the stat is debatable.)  That’s right, kids: there was a time before you were able to make a phone call or send a message at your convenience.

I was also chatting with a friend’s 16 year old daughter this past week, explaining to her what life was like when I was 16.  It’s both depressing and inspiring to consider the ways in which technology has profoundly changed they ways in which we live, as quickly as a few decades.

When I was 16, it wasn’t unusual to have but one phone in each house.  Usually, that phone was in a central part of the house, so everyone could hear your business.  In most cities, only the caller could end the conversation; if you called someone and didn’t hang up, the other party couldn’t just hang up and end the call.  This was nightmarish for homes with teenagers, since teens thrive on their social contact.  If you have to talk to your friends, or call a girl, you have to wait until the phone was free… and then you had to time it so that the girl’s phone was also free!  Remember: no email, no texting, no cell phones; this was our only option!

In times of extreme need, we’d run across the street to use the pay phone.  But even those were often in use!  Oh… and there used to be pay phones on every corner!

One time, my future girlfriend was waiting for a call from me.  Meanwhile, I was building up the nerve to call her.  Of course, I had to wait for my home phone to be free before I could make the call.  But then, when I finally did, her line was always busy!  Turns out, her Dad was on the phone and she was begging him to get off, without telling him that “a boy might be calling.”  Predictably, he got off the phone for 30 minutes and told her, “Okay, I’m off.  Make your call.”  In retrospect, I sympathize with her frustration as she wanted to scream at him, “It doesn’t work like that!”

If you were really stressed out, you could call the Operator and ask for an “emergency breakthrough”.  She would interrrupt a call in progress and tell the parties that a third party wanted in.  Yes, most of us teens did this at least once.

Oh, and because the house had but a single line, you could never be sure your parents or siblings weren’t eavesdropping on your conversation.  (This became possible when they finally made additional phones available on the same line, sometime in the late 70s, I think.)  You always had to listen for that “click” that meant your parent had put the phone down before you started your private conversation.

Mind you, from a societal perspective, this might not have been a bad thing.  It ensured that a parent was usually aware when their teenager was receiving a call, and usually ensured that parents knew who their kids’ friends were.  These days, they rely on Facebook for that!

Additional phones became widely available (again on the same line, or number) sometime in the 1980s, as I recall.  That’s when they started installing “jacks” so you could plug your phone into the wall.  Before then, we had to wire the phones directly into the wall by screwing the right wires to the right poles.  As a kid, I used to play with the phone wiring a lot, trying to figure out which wires were responsible for what aspects of the signal.  I learned a lot about electronics and telecommunications that way.

The lack of email and cell phones meant that when you made plans to meet your friends, you had to abide by those plans!  There were no last minute changes, or texts/emails with, “I’m running late!”  You had to show up and trust that your plans held up.  This was the source of much confusion, miscommunication and frustration, especially when trying to coordinate group activities.

(Don’t get me started on the revolution of ATM machines!  Prior to their arrival, again sometime in the mid-1980s, you had to rely on whatever cash you happened to have on hand.  This meant planning your weekend expenditures well in advance, since banks were never open on Saturdays.  And, of course, no one had a credit card, and the debit card had yet to be invented!  In retrospect, this was a good system for saving money, or at least for avoiding extraneous expenditures..)

Answering machines became prevalent in the early 80s.  Electronic voicemail about a decade later.  Before this development, you had to wait by the phone if you were expecting important information.    In other words, the phone compelled geographic stagnancy!

Okay, I’m droning on.  Next, I’ll be complaining about them dang kids in my yard with their boogie-woogie music.

It’s often said that our society has progressed to a point where intellectual achievement is not as celebrated as it used to be, superseded by semi-literate entertainers and other attention-seekers.  And so it is doubly sad when those who are among the precious few well known public intellectuals slip from mortal existence.

This week we famously lost Christopher Hitchens, who finally succumbed after a year long battle with Cancer.

And now, less than hour ago, news has come that playwright, revolutionary and Czech leader Vaclav Havel has died.  Havel has always been an inspiration to me, and I am a tad troubled that he is dead, more so because he is 4 years younger than my beloved father (who is, of course, the greatest inspiration to me).

I’m not one for citing famous quotations.  But I make an exception for one of Havel’s, which I have taken to giving to my global health class on the final lecture of every year. It is this:

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth; run from those who have found it.”

RIP, Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011

Item #1

Taught my first statistics class today.  I had prepared examples of sampling the class to make generalizations about the university population as a whole.  Specifcally, I’d intended to use the class’s sex ratio as an estimator of the sex ratio for the entire campus population.  Then I walked into class… and found a room filled with 120 students, about 6 of whom were men.  Hey, I’m not complaining, but how does one get an almost all-female statistics class?  Weird.

Item #2

Remember this?  And its follow-up?  Weird things seem to happen to me at night.  Two nights ago, I went to bed at 4:AM (as is my wont) and woke up at 9:AM.  I live in a tiny, spotless condo, and I hate and avoid clutter.  So you’ll imagine my surprise when I woke up to find a mysterious object lying on my living room floor.  It was most definitely not there when I went to bed:

The next night, I went to sleep at 5:AM and woke up again at 9:AM. This time, I was greeted with a strange red line on my floor:

(The quarter was added for scale.)

So what’s happening?  Well, after 30 minutes of scratching my head, I figured out that the weird object was in fact part of a clock that had silently exploded overnight.  Mind you, why a clock would just explode is another mystery.

No clue yet about what that red line means.

I’ll let you know in the morning what the aliens do to me tonight.

Item #3

In today’s class, I talked about the revolution of statistics.  About 200-300 years ago, the modern science of statistics was born.  In the subsequent centuries, the science matured very fast indeed.  Since the 1950s, with the advent of computers, a veritable new revolution has occurred, with mass computations and the evolution of subtle new techniques.

And that got me thinking about other revolutions.  So I ended up congitating on the evolution and revolution of the martial arts.

Quite a segue, no?

As has been well established, I’m a huge MMA (mixed martial arts) fan.  For those not in the know, MMA arose only about 2 decades ago, with the rise of the UFC as a going concern.  The UFC was itself created by Brazil’s Gracie family as a showcase for their style of Jiujitsu (now called Brazilian Jiujitsu, or BJJ), showing how it can be used to defeat any other style of unarmed combat, in a no-rules tournament format.  What the Gracies did not anticipate was that they would inadvertently create a whole new sport, and possibly even a whole new martial art.

The history of what we consider to be the martial arts goes back many centuries.  Legend has it that the Buddhist Indian monk Bodhidharma was the first to combine spiritual moving meditation with the physical act of boxing for fitness, and thus created the first Oriental martial art.  Of course, fighting systems have probably existed literally for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

The modern arts evolved as Bodhidharma’s teachings spread from India to China, then to Korea and Japan, and eventually to Europe and the Americas.  At the same time, in parallel, each nation was developing its own indigenous arts; for example, savate in France and Capoeira in Brazil.  Wars spawned masters who had to refine their skills to simply survive.  In those climates, different schools arose to embrace different fighting philosophies and technologies.  The arts splintered into disparate styles.  The most obvious break was between the stand-up striking arts, like karate, and the ground and grappling arts, like judo.

Literally, centuries of refinement passed, which allowed some techniques to be perfected, and others to become arcane and wrapped in obfuscating nonsense.

But since the rise of MMA 20 years ago, the revolution of practicality has transformed the martial arts yet again.  What took centuries to do originally has been recreated in mere decades, a single lifetime.

Some say it began with Mitsuyo Maeda, the so-called “Count Combat”, a Japanese judo expert who made his home in Brazil.  Maeda was among the first to point out the different phases of a fight: the striking phase, the grappling phase, etc.  Most notably, Maeda taught Carlos Gracie, stressing a philosophy of practicality: do what works.  Carlos and his younger brother Helio would go on to found Brazilian Jiujitsu, which became the bedrock of the UFC and thus triggered the revolution of MMA.

But others say it began with none other than Bruce Lee himself.  Lee famously founded Jeet Kune Do, “the way of the intercepting fist”, which was an expression of his interpretation of the writings of Krishnamurti and others through combat.  Lee always insisted that JKD was not a martial art, but a fighting system.  Its philosophy was simply to do what worked, what ended the fight the fastest, and what maximized your own body’s abilities.

This was a philosophical revolution in the martial arts.  It essentially stated that one should ignore centuries of dogma and embrace modern training techniques, the lessons of competing arts, and to embrace most fully those techniques best suited to one’s personal situation.  JKD was the first organized attempt to bring together the best of karate, kung-fu, jiujitsu, American boxing, wrestling, etc., into one combat system.

This approach seems obvious to us today, but at the time –the early 1970s– it was both revolutionary and heretical.  The masters of the status quo were quite offended by it.  Indeed, even in my own youth, my first masters would be violently offended if I introduced a technique I had picked up in the gym or from sparring with practitioners of other arts.

JKD is convincingly the precursor to MMA, and as thus represents a dramatic paradigm shift in the way we view the martial arts.  The rate at which its refinement has occurred these past 20 years has been simply phenomenal.  Today’s fighters are generations beyond those who fought in the first UFC tournament.  It’s sort of frightening to consider what amazing skills sets await us fans in just 2 or 3 years.

As I hope most of you know, I supposedly have a regular column/blog over at the MicroSoft Canada website.  The problem is that their interns keep turning over, and I have no idea anymore who is responsible for uploading my content!  The last article I wrote for them, and that was published, was in April of 2010.   I wrote another one in August of that year, and sent it to every one of my contacts over at MS Canada… but they all seem to have disappeared.  Or maybe my column/blog has been quietly discontinued.  I have no idea.

But I have other things to do.  So here is the article I wrote on Aug 25, 2010, meant for the MicroSoft Canada website.  I doubt I’ll be writing any more of this kind of stuff:

—

The Human Resource Gap

It’s been a while since I updated this blog.  Sorry about that.  I’ve been traveling a great deal and haven’t found a free moment to organize a thought lucid enough to be worthy of you gentle readers.

One of my recent travels took me on a lecture tour of India.  It was a bit of a game show atmosphere at times, wherein I wasn’t told the topic of lecture until the morning of the event!  But, interestingly, that’s part of what makes a public speaking career so exciting.  It’s also interesting to have actually reached a point in my development as a speaker that I feel comfortable traveling to a foreign country and culture, and delivering a two and a half hour talk to a room full of scholars… on a topic for which I had very little time to prepare.

So how was it?  In a word… fun.

Part of my journey took me to a town called Kakinada in the Indian state of Andrah Pradesh, where I met with Dr Chandra Sankurathri.  If you do a web search for his name, you will learn of his remarkable personal trajectory.  His is a story well covered in various media profiles, so I won’t go over it here.  But suffice it to say that Dr Sankurathri transformed incredible tragedy into public service of a nature that can only be called transcendent.  His foundation has educated hundreds of underprivileged and impoverished young people, and, in the past 7 years, treated almost two million opthalmological patients too poor to have otherwise received such life-changing medical treatments.

The work I’m doing with Dr Sankurathri’s foundation involves the analysis of some of his carefully kept databases.  This requires the extraction of large amounts of selected data from relative databases kept in Access format.  This sounds like a simple process, but it’s actually fairly trying if you don’t have a certain amount of database management expertise.  Luckily, a MicroSoft certified software engineer lives nearby and volunteers his pricey services to the foundation.  Frankly, I can’t imagine how much more difficult simply gaining access to the relevant data would have been, had this gentleman not been available.

More than just a paean to MicroSoft-certified technicians and engineers, this anecdote is a distilled example of a wider concern in the larger world of do-gooders.  It is true that the remarkable work of Dr Sankurathri’s foundation requires funds, and thus its founder spends almost all of his precious time courting donors.  However, his need –and that of almost all philanthropic endeavours in the low-income world– is for human resources.  Yes, both well-meaning students and seasoned Western professionals undergoing mid-life crises alike can be relied upon to donate intermittent swaths of their time to such ventures.  But the long term problem will always be finding well trained local talent to adopt middle management and administrative roles.

It’s a bit of a lesson for small businesses, as well, which, while similarly driven by a singular vision, also often operate on inconstant funding, yet rely on that most temporal of skills sets: the efficient and competent administrator.