Car Pay Diem

The first new car my parents ever bought was a 1962 Rambler American. (Their previous car, acquired when they moved our family from the Bronx to the suburbs, had been a used ’56 Chevy.) The Rambler, despite being an “economy” model, was pretty up-to-date: It had a stylish, compact design, high (for the time) gas mileage, and an automatic transmission controlled by push buttons on the dashboard.

One thing it didn’t have, however, was seat belts. (The US government would not mandate seat belts in new cars until 1964.) My parents eventually had aftermarket seat belts installed — non-retractable lap belts that were inelegantly bolted to the floor. They also sprang for an aftermarket windshield washer, which the driver could operate by stepping on an air-filled rubber bulb. The total cost of the car, so far as I can determine now, was about $2,500 — equivalent to about $24,700 in today’s dollars.

The Rambler comes to mind because my wife and I have recently been shopping for a new car, which in our case is a Toyota Prius. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for a 2022 Prius L Eco, the lowest trim level, is about $25,000, which is not that much higher than what my parents paid for their ’62 Rambler. Unlike the Rambler, however, the Prius comes equipped with power steering, power mirrors, anti-lock brakes, a digital “infotainment” system, driver and passenger airbags, air conditioning, cruise control, a back-up camera, lane-keeping assistance, a wifi hotspot, and (or course) a fuel-saving, environmentally friendly hybrid engine.

Debra and I elected to go with the next-higher trim level, the LE, which — for an extra $1,500 — gives us blind-spot monitoring,  a cross-traffic alert, front and rear parking sensors, and parking assistance. (These were our chief reasons for wanting a new car in the first place, since we both have vision problems, and having additional safety features becomes all the more important as we age.)

What stands out for me is how high Americans’ expectations have risen for what a car is supposed to do. In 1962, a car was basically a box on wheels, a means for reliably getting from one place to another. Now, sixty years later, we expect a car to be an insulated, protected, immersive environment that not only transports us, but does as much as possible of the work for us. And yet, in constant dollars, the price of a car hasn’t really changed much.

In our various trips to Europe over the years, including our most recent one to the UK, we’ve visited a number of medieval castles and royal palaces. My reaction is always one of wonder at how far we’ve come: Most of us have a quality of life that’s safer, more comfortable, and more convenient than that of any historical lord or king. (Even in the case of going to the bathroom, I’d rather use a modern toilet than whatever Henry VIII had to sit on.) And the price of that comfort is vastly less than whatever it cost the rich and powerful to maintain their quality of life. I come away feeling fortunate and grateful.

Debra, interestingly, has a different reaction. She looks at the primitive conditions under which medieval royalty lived and recognizes that they, in their time, thought that they were living in the greatest possible comfort. People hundreds of years in the future, she says, will marvel at the crude conditions that we’re content to live under. In that context, we’re no better off than were the occupants of those dark and drafty castles.

And I suppose she’s right. In 1962, the year my parents bought our new Rambler, they also bought our first solid-state TV, a portable model that didn’t need time to warm up. John Glenn orbited the earth for the first time, and NASA launched Telstar, the satellite that made international broadcasting possible. My mother abandoned her eyeglasses for contact lenses — tiny, curved pieces of hard plastic that you could put directly in your eye! A few years later, I got my first tape recorder, and my friend Carl’s family got a color TV. My uncle bought a Polaroid camera that made photos available instantly. The Ranger VII space probe radioed back the first closeup photos of the surface of the moon. My neighbor gave me his used transistor radio, not much larger than a pack of cigarettes.

I was still a child, but I was certain that there was no greater time to be alive. And at the time, there wasn’t.

Posted January 24, 2023 by Mark S
Category: Technology
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Rock of Ages

Nothing much ever happened in the suburban housing tract where I grew up. About the only source of stimulation was the jingling Good Humor truck that occasionally made surprise appearances on summer days. I was part of the generation of “free-range children” who were sent outside in the afternoon and told to return by dinnertime, and pretty much did what we wanted in between. We could go anywhere our bicycles could take us, unsupervised. If there was an unoccupied construction site nearby, we’d be climbing over the equipment and sifting through the dirt. If there was a fire or auto accident, we’d be there in a matter of minutes, watching the crews handle the emergency.

Most of the time, though, there was nothing special to do, so we’d be hanging out in front of our houses, playing street games or shooting the breeze. It was always during one of those idle times that the street pavers came around. The first sign was always a distant rumble accompanied by an acrid smell. Eventually the truck itself would appear, spewing black smoke as it crawled up the street and laid down a gooey layer of tar. Another truck would follow not far behind, depositing a heavy layer of gravel atop the hot tar.

As I remember it, there was no warning that the paving was going to happen. Whatever cars were parked on the street remained there as the trucks did their work. (I’m not sure how those curbside shoulders were maintained — perhaps since they didn’t host moving traffic, they didn’t need frequent repaving.) The tandem trucks, never stopping, lumbered into the distance, leaving behind a sea of loose gravel.

From that point on, any car that drove on our street would be accompanied by a loud crackling and pinging as the gravel flew out from under the tires and bounced against the undercarriage. No one seemed to take any notice. It would take a few weeks for the gravel to fully sink down into the tar, restoring the appearance of a smooth road surface.

Two things strike me. The first is just surprise that our streets were paved with tar and gravel. Today, even remote country roads are paved with asphalt, as are the streets in that neighborhood where I grew up. I liked the gravel. It could be picked up, played with, and used in school projects. When I made a diorama showing how the ancient Egyptians carried stone on barges to build the pyramids, the part of the stones was played by gravel from my street.

(As an aside, I remember that we referred to the bits of gravel as “pebbles.” It was only much later in adulthood that I found out that pebbles technically are stones that are worn smooth by the action of water. If they’re not pebbles, I don’t know what those individual pieces of gravel are supposed to be called.)

The other surprising thing is how routine the street paving appears to have been. It happened every four years, with no notice and no fuss. As I said, we neighborhood kids always seemed to be outside when it happened, and although it was fun to watch, it also felt uneventful. Every day, the fire station horn sounds at noon; every week, the newspaper delivery boy comes to collect his fee; and every four years, the road gets repaved. It was simply the rhythm of life in the Long Island suburbs.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a child in the current era, but my sense is that there’s no such sense of steady and dependable rhythm. Family life and the school environment have a tendency to be disturbing and unpredictable, and for me, the assurance that there was an underlying order — even if it revealed itself only once every four years — was somehow comforting. I feel for the kids who no longer even have that small amount of comfort.

As I write this, a one-block segment of our street in Oakland is having a cable laid under it, and the work seems endless — scheduled to last ten days, with constant noise and no street parking. I like to imagine that a plow-like truck could travel up the street, carving a furrow in the roadbed, and another truck could follow behind, laying the cable and filling the furrow with blacktop. I guess we’d need a third truck to tamp down the blacktop, but still, the whole process ought to take about twenty minutes, no? Since kids don’t play outside anymore, no one would even notice.

Posted September 6, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Technology
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Getting the Picture

Building the illustration from Parent-Teacher Association

It’s always puzzled me — and, if I’m going to be honest, troubled me — that no one ever comments on, or even seems to notice, the images that accompany these blog posts. A few of them (generally, the ones that are captioned) are actual photos of actual things, but the rest are painstaking handiworks that may take more time to create than the essays that accompany them. Most of them can be clicked on to be viewed at a larger size. (The exceptions are the animated ones, such as the one displayed here, which would take much too long to display at a higher resolution.)

Back when I first entered the media business, when I was still producing filmstrips and slideshows rather than videos, I was hugely frustrated by my inability to manipulate images — particularly 35-millimeter slides, which were the medium of choice for both audiovisual and print publishing. Whatever the camera photographed was what the slide displayed. It was possible to make a color print of a slide, alter it with ink or paint or pieces of other images, and then rephotograph it, but the result always looked flat and phony. Most of the time, I just had to live with my own helplessness.

I should note that I was never very effective in a production environment — my forte has always been post-production. If I hired a scriptwriter, I could rarely describe exactly what I was looking for (often because I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for), so I would take whatever the writer gave me and end up rewriting it myself. If I was directing a recording session with a voiceover artist, I often had trouble getting the talent to read a line the way I wanted it read; instead, I would edit the tape later, cutting together words and syllables from different takes to get the desired result. I longed for the freedom to do the same thing with images.

Moving into video in the 1980s gave me some of that freedom. It was easy to color-correct footage, superimpose one image on another, or juxtapose them by means of split screens. It was even possible to place people or things in different backgrounds through the chromakey process, which involved shooting against a brightly lit blue or green screen. But shooting chromakey footage was expensive, since it required renting a studio, and the resulting composite — which in those days was achieved through fairly primitive electronics — never looked convincing.

My world changed with the emergence of digital photography and digital video around the end of the last century. Photoshop, the industry-standard image-editing program, was created in 1988 and began to be widely distributed in the early 1990s. Although I had a good Macintosh computer by then, I couldn’t afford genuine Photoshop software, so I bought a cheap knockoff called Color It!, which lacked many of Photoshop’s more advanced capabilities but was otherwise powerful and reliable.

My big breakthrough came when I was working on a fundraising video for Catholic Charities of San Francisco. They had a prized photo of the pope’s visit to the city in 1987, and wanted it included in the video, but there was a problem: The large head of a bald priest, with his back to the camera, was prominent in the foreground. Could I do anything about it? I wasn’t sure, but I scanned the photo, brought it into Color It!, and began to play around with the available tools. I discovered that by selectively copying and pasting bits of the surrounding area, I was able to completely and convincingly obliterate the offending pate. That was my start as a photo manipulator.

By the time I could afford the real Photoshop, I was already pretty skilled at retouching, restoration, and compositing. With the acquisition of another (now sadly obsolete) program called DeBabelizer — a little-known, professional-grade, automated editing program with an impenetrable interface — I was able to transfer those skills to video. Eventually I graduated to full video editing and motion graphics using software such as Premiere Pro and After Effects, and teaching community-college students how to use these kinds of software.

Although I’m technically retired, I still do a lot of (mostly volunteer) photo and video editing for a variety of clients. When I’m not doing that, I’m writing and illustrating this blog. My blog illustrations, even the ones that look fairly simple, are assembled from bits and pieces of multiple stock photos. (For example, in the recent image of LBJ riding a tortoise, the president’s right hand actually comes from Vladimir Putin’s infamous bare-chested horseback snapshot.) More complicated images, such as the one of the nonconforming sheep from mid-2021, may comprise dozens of separate elements.

In the world of musical theater, there are some songs that make sense only in the context of a show, and others that can stand alone. The latter are the ones that have a chance of becoming popular. I try, when possible, to make images that can have meaning outside of the blog posts they accompany, and therefore might somehow qualify as art. Most of the time, though, they can only be considered illustrations, since they make sense only if you’ve read the post.

I take solace in the fact that Stephen Sondheim rarely wrote a song that could stand alone — the only exception I can think of is “Send in the Clowns” — and yet is still acknowledged as a master of his craft. I’m far from a Stephen Sondheim, but I’d like to think that some of the images I create might make a difference for somebody, if only to provide a few minutes’ enjoyment.

Posted August 2, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Technology
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For Good Measure

Every once in a while, it occurs to me that something about the world that I usually take for granted doesn’t have an immediately obvious explanation. For example, I remember asking my fourth-grade science teacher, “When you get an extension cord and plug multiple appliances into the same electric outlet, why do they all get the full amount of electricity?” Or, much more recently, asking my friend Kate, “Why is it harder to walk uphill?” (Not surprisingly, we were walking uphill at the time.)

The latest thing that I realized that I don’t understand is what a weather forecast means when it quantifies a chance of rain. When I looked this question up online, what I found was a formula for “PoP,” or “probability of precipitation” — but I couldn’t find an explanation of what the results of that formula actually mean.

To get at what bothers me, let’s start with an example having nothing to do with weather or probability: the numbers on the movie-rating site Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not unusual for a movie’s Tomatometer score — its level of approval as expressed in critics’ reviews — to go down as more critics weigh in with their opinions. For instance, the Tomatometer rating for “Wonder Woman 1984” reportedly dropped from 88% to 63% within a few weeks, and the rating for “Joker” dropped from 86% to 69% over a period of months.

I think we can all agree that if a Tomatometer score goes from 80-something to 60-something, that dip doesn’t reflect a change in the quality of the movie — after all, every frame of the movie is the same as it always was. It’s just that as more ratings come in, Rotten Tomatoes has a more comprehensive data set from which to calculate the level of approval. It’s reasonable to expect that the longer one waits after a movie comes out, the more accurately a Tomatometer score will reflect the critical consensus. That’s fine, because Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t claim to know what the ultimate level of approval will be; it just offers a snapshot of what that level currently is.

Where things get more complicated is when probability enters the picture. Probability confuses me, because incredibly unlikely events happen all the time. Supposedly, the chance of any particular person being born is about 1 in 400 trillion. However, if you were to ask me what the chance was of me being born, I would have to say it was 100%, because here I am! “Unlikely” is meaningless when applied to the past, because any past event has achieved the ultimate in likelihood — it actually happened. When we talk about the probability of past events, we’re merely talking about our inability to understand the universe in sufficient detail to predict that the event would happen.

One would think that probability makes more sense when we’re talking about the future. But when the weather forecast says that there’s a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, that’s technically a false statement. Rain is a binary proposition — either it’s going to rain tomorrow, or it isn’t. The chance of rain is either 0% or 100%, but we won’t know which one it is until tomorrow.

As the National Weather Service continually revises the chance of rain for an area, the actual chance of rain isn’t changing at all — the weather systems are playing out just as they would have. What’s changing is the recency of the data on which the forecast is based. Just as the Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie changes as more reviews come in, the weather forecast changes as further observations are made. The chance of rain may originally have been quoted as 30%, but when moisture-laden clouds are seen to be heading toward the area in question, the probability might be raised to 60%, and when the clouds turn heavy and dark, the prediction might become 90%. Eventually, actual drops of water start falling, and the chance of rain becomes 100% — at last, the correct number.

No matter what the chance of rain is originally said to be, further observations will always move the probability upward or downward until it reaches 100% or 0%. But the complex, interacting influences that produce weather still aren’t understood well enough for us to predict, with any accuracy, what those observations will be at any given moment. If that’s the case, what could that original forecast of 30% actually have meant?

So far as I can tell, to say that the chance of rain is 30% means that, at that moment in time, with our limited understanding of the functioning of weather systems, we had only a 30% chance of predicting correctly that it’s going to rain. The statement of probability turns out not to be a statement about rain at all, but a statement about the capabilities of our current science and technology.

Posted March 31, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Technology
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The Machine Age

I know that you’re not interested in hearing about my first computer — an IBM PCjr with a single floppy drive, a 4.77 kHz processor, and 128 kb (yes, that’s kilobytes) of memory. When an old guy like me talks about how rough he had it compared to kids today, you naturally want to tune him out and go back to your phone.

The thing is, though, I didn’t have it rough. I loved my PCjr. How was I to know that it would be totally obsolete in a couple of years? At the time I bought it, it changed my life. I no longer had to remember and process loads of information in my head — I could outsource it to a machine. I could write, edit, and type a finished draft, all at the same time. With the addition of a modem, I was able to communicate with people anywhere in the world, do research, and even buy things without having to leave my studio apartment.

Those of us who grew up before the 1980s tend not to think much about that decade. The 1970s had disco, energy crises, and hard-fought rights for women and gay people; the 1990s had hip-hop, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the World Wide Web. But what did the 1980s have, other than mixtapes and Ronald Reagan? Personally, I passed some important milestones during that decade: I quit my secure publishing job to go freelance; I met and married my wife; I moved with her from the east coast to the west. Putting aside those personal events, however, I think of the 1980s as the time when the technological environment that we now take for granted began to take shape.

In addition to the aforementioned computer, the 1980s brought my first phone-answering machine, my first cable TV, my first VCR, and my first microwave oven.1 For the first time, I was able to get money out of a machine anywhere in the world, instead of having to go to my local grocery store to cash a check. Cash itself was less necessary, as bank-affiliated credit cards had become ubiquitous. Thanks to the same network infrastructure that made ATMs possible, sellers were now able to approve credit card purchases instantly, without having to manually look up deadbeat card numbers in a printed booklet.

Deregulation of the aviation industry made flying affordable to people who were not well-to-do. In some cases, it was more than affordable — an upstart airline named People Express offered flights from New York to Boston or Washington, DC for $29 (sometimes discounted to $19), making it easy to visit distant friends. Flying People Express was an adventure. There were no tickets; passengers would stampede onto the plane until all the seats were taken, at which point the doors would close. Not until the plane was in flight would a flight attendant wheel a cart down the center aisle, taking each passenger’s credit card and printing it through several layers of carbon paper with a satisfying ka-chunk.

I would venture to say that before the 1980s, the average person’s lifestyle would have been comfortably recognizable to someone from the 1950s. By the end of the 1980s, it was entirely different. I remember the day when I suddenly grasped the possibilities of this new era. I was in a city — I don’t recall which one, because my frequent People Express flights have all blurred together — with a friend, and we decided to split up and meet later. But in those days before cell phones, how could either of us let the other know if we’d been delayed, or if we couldn’t find each other?

“I know!” I said. “We can use my phone-answering machine.” It had recently become easy and cheap to make long-distance calls from a pay phone, thanks to the emergence of new networks such as MCI and Sprint. If either of us had an urgent need to contact the other, we could call my machine back in New Jersey and record a message. And if either of us was concerned about the other’s whereabouts, we could call my machine to check whether a message had been left. This was not what answering machines were invented for, but their existence had nevertheless opened the door to something formerly impossible: two people making contact when they couldn’t find each other in a big city. What other previously unimaginable things would we soon be able to do?

Coda: Most of those life-changing innovations from the 1980s are either gone or going away. Nobody uses answering machines anymore. VCRs are a thing of the past, and cable TV is rapidly being eclipsed by streaming services. ATMs are far less necessary, due to the growing reliance on cashless transactions and the ability to deposit checks remotely. Long-distance phone networks such as AT&T, MCI, and Sprint have been supplanted by wireless carriers (although some of those familiar names remain). Even desktop computers — the descendants of my primitive PCjr — are fading in popularity, with many of their functions being taken over by smartphones, tablets, and wearables. Still, many aspects of the way we live now can be traced back to the big technological shift that began forty years ago.

Interestingly, the one thing that still exists virtually unchanged from its 1980s precursor is the microwave oven. It’s hard to remember what life was like before it became a standard kitchen appliance. Come to think of it, it’s not that hard, since my house’s microwave oven recently broke down, and we were at a loss as to how to reheat leftovers. I poured my day-old Chinese food into a pot and impatiently stirred it over a gas flame. The others in the household ate theirs cold.

Posted August 25, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Technology
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