Category — Uncategorized

I am smitten by the story that ran in Gizmodo (as well as other places) about the time capsule message from Gregory Lee Youngman who wrote:

I am dead. I go to Montgomery School. That is the olden school name. I was born 1900. You auto now I dead. My favorite subject is spooking the police. I play the guitar. In case you don’t know what it is, it is board with strings on then. I am 10 years old. See you later savages.

Of course, this message wouldn’t be nearly as amusing if the writer was actually dead, but a quick Google search for Gregory L Youngman yields a person who is very much alive and living in Anchorage, AK. He’s 58, which also fits since the author of the note was born in 1958. It seems like it would be a little too coincidental to have two Gregory L Youngman’s who are 58, right?

So working on the assumption that Gregory Lee Youngman is not actually dead, I love this because I was such a serious kid.  I would have never used my one time capsule contribution to write anything like this.  I would have been too scared, thinking that by writing it, it would come true.  That I would be dead by the time the capsule was opened and there would be no one left on earth who knew about guitars.

But, moreover, I would have worried that this would be the way people remembered me; that they wouldn’t get that it was a joke in the moment but think it was who I was as a whole.  So I would have played it safe and maybe a little bit boring.

I wonder if Greg Youngman is still like that 10-year-old version of himself, or if he looks back at it and wonders what he was thinking.

Eighteen years ago, I set up a cloud-based email account.  My boyfriend at the time talked me into it, saying we could use these cloud-based accounts to keep in touch while I was on a research trip.  Up until that point, all of my email was downloaded to an email client on my computer.

I kept using the account after I got back; in fact, I used it until the day the kids started school.

I recently had to go back into that old account to search for an old email, and while I was there, I decided to download all of the emails and save them to my computer.  I spent an hour clicking around, re-reading old notes that I had either sent or received.  There were emails back and forth with friends overseas after the Bush-Gore election as we were all trying to figure out who was president.  There were all of the emails I sent on September 11th when we were trying to account for everyone who worked in the Pentagon.  And then there were the personal moments; birth announcements for kids who are now in high school, telling people about our engagement, my own failed cycles, and finally the birth of the twins.

But my favourite emails to revisit were the first few emails I sent back and forth with Josh.  Yes, I have the first emails that we sent each other as well as the ones I sent my friends dissecting every early date, phone call, and interaction with Mr. Ford.  I was so nervous!  Rightfully so since I only know that everything worked out in retrospect, but still, so nervous and excited.  I loved getting to revisit those moments.

I downloaded over 12,000 emails, so I’ve only scratched the surface, returning to dates that bubbled up to the top of my mind.  I set the emails aside as a good snow day activity, delving into the past and seeing who I was back then.  Ready for the next blizzard.

Do you still have access to your old emails?  How far back can you go accessing messages?

I have a deep, abiding love for BBC programming, so when an email arrived from a producer with the subject line “BBC request,” my first thought was, “Oh my G-d, they totally know how I feel about them and it’s muuuuuutuuuuuual.”  Like we were middle schoolers and the BBC had asked me out and I had said yes so now we were going steady.

Except being their one and only was not the request.  The producer just needed me to be on a panel.  Oh.  Yeah.  No, I get it.  This love is one-sided.

Story of my life, BBC, story of my life.

The producer, who had the greatest accent of all time (I know because we ended up jumping on the phone), asked me to be on a panel for The Food Chain, to speak about being a lifelong vegetarian raising meat eaters.  He found me due to an old blog post about explaining my vegetarianism to the kids.

So I went down to a nearby iHeartRadio station and they patched me into London.  It was my first time being in a recording studio, and the kind man at iHeartRadio had a lot of misplaced faith in my ability to choose the correct buttons on the enormous computer board.  But I got through it and hopefully said smart-sounding things.

Afterward, the guy at iHeartRadio gave me a tour of the station, which was a lot of fun because they have a ton of machines with colourful cords and flashing lights.  It was just cool to see the space where shows are being produced and then drive home listening to said shows.

If you would like to listen to the episode, it was released yesterday so you can grab it on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts (the episode is called “Vegan Babies: Should You Restrict Your Child’s Diet?”), or you can listen on the BBC site.  You know, the BBC (my boyfriend).

I am pro-third party candidates.  More choices mean more viewpoints, and frankly, there are a lot of ways we could positively run this country.  Democrats and Republicans don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.

But this election is different, and I’m going to ask you not to vote for a third party candidate when it comes to the presidency.  I know there is a feeling of “if not now, when,” but I repeat that it’s this election: It’s different.  Please hear me out.

Imagine your teacher says that your class can have an ice cream party, but you need to vote and decide on a single flavour of ice cream.  The choices are chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.

Image: Joy via Flickr via Creative Commons license

4 kids vote for chocolate, 4 kids vote for vanilla, and 1 kid votes for strawberry, which is what you really want.  Maybe you think, “Well, I don’t mind chocolate, though I really want strawberry.  I will vote for strawberry to show them that I really want strawberry and that will affect the next time we get ice cream.”  Or maybe you think, “I don’t like chocolate or vanilla, so I will vote for strawberry because that’s what I like and eat whichever one wins because who really cares if it can’t be strawberry.”

If we were voting between chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, I would not be writing this.  But we’re not talking about three equal but different ice cream flavours.

This is what this election is like: 4 kids vote for chocolate, 4 kids vote for salmonella-poisoned ice cream, and 1 kid votes for strawberry.  You may not like chocolate, but I think we can all agree that voting for salmonella-laced ice cream is not a healthy decision.  It has the potential to make the class very ill, and if nothing else, the class will be filled with dread while they wait to find out if the ice cream they knowingly consumed is going to harm them.

While that strawberry ice cream looks really good, and it’s what you actually want, your vote will not get the class that desired strawberry treat but could get the class the salmonella-laced ice cream.

So I’m going to ask you a favour to keep America healthy, and I ask this knowing full well that there will be a time when you will ask me to help you get strawberry as the flavour winner: Please vote for Hillary Clinton.

There will be future elections where we’re not fighting to keep bacteria out of our ice cream bowls, and there are many other positions of power in which to elect third party candidates this November.

Please make your vote count this election, and stand together with reason and capability.  It’s a huge ask, and I know that it is not easy to cast a vote for a candidate that doesn’t match your ideology.  But the only way to keep bacteria from spreading is to wash our hands of it.

The most interesting things I’ve read in a long time is an article in the Verge about a woman who built a bot out of her friend’s old text messages.  It is subtitled: “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”

So begin there.

Photographers may try to remember people with images, and writers may jot down all of the stories, but Eugenia Kuyda — the “her” in the story — is an inventor of bots, so it makes sense that she would use her chosen art form to memorialize her friend.  But in memorializing him, she was able to sort of… speak… with him again, for lack of a better word.

Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.

She set aside for a moment the questions that were already beginning to nag at her.

What if it didn’t sound like him?

What if it did?

I’ll admit that I read this article because I love this idea.  I’ve written before about Bina48 and similar projects.  I have a hard time with goodbyes and letting go, so this intermediary step feels like an insurance plan, a way to still connect with the person after they’re gone.  Even if it isn’t totally “them” in the sense that you are communicating in real time with the actual person.  Except… you sort of are, right?

As the article points out: “Modern life all but ensures that we leave behind vast digital archives — text messages, photos, posts on social media — and we are only beginning to consider what role they should play in mourning.”  What do we do with all the digital pieces of our personality that we leave behind?

I would want this.  Even if it extended the mourning period.  Even if it was painful at times.  I would want something like this very badly.

What are your thoughts?