Fifty Shades of Black (20 page)

 

 

Older but Dumber

H
ere's a sobering thought: we are all, collectively, dumber than we were three millennia ago.

Not my idea—it belongs to Gerald Crabtree, a research geneti­cist at Stanford University. Dr. Crabtree posits that if an average citizen from the city of Athens, circa 1000 BC, were to be dropped,
Star Trek
teleportation-style, into modern-day life “he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.”

What? Ancient Greeks were smarter than twenty-first-century citizens? Impossible! Consider the relative levels of sophistication. We modern
Homo
s
apiens
have eighteen-wheel semis, iPads and waterproof Tilley safari jackets. The ancient Greeks rode donkeys, wrote on wax tablets and wore bed sheets.

On the other hand, those old Greeks had Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. We have Donald Trump, Rob Ford and Sarah Palin.

Dr. Crabtree says we're dumber today because we no longer need to be smart the way we used to. Back in the Bad Old Days, if you didn't figure out a way to keep the sabre-toothed tiger out of your cave or ensure that your family was warm and well-fed the results were, um, profound. Back then, to be dumb was to be dead. Mother Nature, unsentimental matriarch that she is, had no qualms about pruning deadwood from the family tree.

“A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died,” says Crabtree, “whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate.”

Case in point: the aforementioned Mr. Trump, a blow-dried baboon who's been bankrupt more times than Lindsay Lohan's been arrested, has his own TV show and a personal line of cologne.

Some people want to
smell
like Donald Trump?? Explain that, Darwin.

But, ancient Athenian or contemporary Canuck, there's no question that we are, for better or worse, the dominant species on Planet Earth. And how did we pull that off? We can't soar like eagles, run like cheetahs, swim like orcas or out-wrestle a grizzly. Physically we are comparatively pallid, puny and more than a little pathetic. So what do we have that our fellow earth tenants lack? What do we do that they don't do?

Simple. We cook.

Heating food—be it meat or vegetable—breaks down the cellular structure, which speeds up chewing and digestion. That means the human body absorbs more nutrition with each bite. Watch a cow or a robin or a gopher for a while. They spend most of their time chewing or pecking or grazing whatever they can find to chew, peck or graze. Other creatures are forced to eat or look for food virtually all their waking hours, but not us. About two million years ago some anonymous caveman accidentally dropped a bleeding chunk of mammoth haunch into the fire and discovered the secret of cooking. That changed everything. Researchers reckon that had our
Homo erectus
ancestors eaten only a raw food diet they would have had to spend more than nine hours every day just eating and digesting food to feed their over-large brains.

So, nine hours for digestion, say, eight hours for sleep, and enough other hours every day to build fires, avoid predators, find shelter, forage for food . . .

That doesn't leave much time to invent the wheel.

Fortunately, we stumbled upon the concept of cooking. That bought us time—time to invent language and art and science and . . . and . . .

Have you met the Segway? It was invented in our lifetime—only unveiled in 2001, as a matter of fact. The experts promised it would revolutionize transportation around the world.

It's a two-wheeled scooter built along the lines of a push lawn mower. You stand on it, tilt the handle in the direction you want to travel and off you go, at a stately ten miles per hour. The Segway is compact, environmentally friendly, very safe (George W. Bush fell off his, but . . .) and cheap.

Well, pretty cheap. I saw one on eBay for six grand.

Yep, the Segway is a transportation dream come true—except hardly anyone likes them. Because when you stand on a Segway you look like a dork.

I know I'm going to get emails from the eleven Segway owners in Canada saying that I've maligned the vehicle and it's really a sexy ride.

I respect your position. All I'm saying is Socrates would have thought you looked ridiculous.

 

 

Rule Britannica! Not

I
f there was any skepticism about the digital information tsunami we're currently dog-paddling through, surely it was swept away by the terse announcement that recently appeared in newspapers, magazines—and inevitably on iPads and laptop screens around the world. I'm referring to the one telling us that after 244 years of publishing,
Encyclopedia Britannica
would no longer be putting out a print edition.

No more
Encyclopedia Britannica
? No more of those glossy-paged, gold-embossed, hernia-inducing, faux-leather volumes that have anchored libraries, private and public, since . . . since Oliver Goldsmith scribbled, William Hogarth doodled and Catherine the Great diddled?

Well, pardon the hysteria. This is a death notice that was not exactly unexpected. Truth is,
Britannica
's been on the endangered list since at least 1990 when the company declared bankruptcy, only to be temporarily rescued by a Swiss businessman. Even before that,
Encyclopedia Britannica
was coasting on the fumes of an inflated reputation. The information its volumes contained was often outdated before they were printed. The latest (and last) print edition, published in 2010, was
twenty-five years
in the making.

But it wasn't just the information lag that doomed the print version of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Consider: if you were one of the eight thousand customers who purchased the latest edition, you would have thirty-two volumes that would take up a wall of your house, weigh 130 pounds and set you back nearly $1,400.

Or, for seventy bucks a year, you could subscribe to the web edition and enjoy instant access in your bedroom, a bus terminal or an Internet café.

But that's today. Back in the days when we weren't in a perpetual rush and portability wasn't a concern,
Encyclopedia Britannica
ruled.

Ruled the middle class, anyway. And it never really was about information; it was about social status. Families that boasted a set of EBs in their parlour ascended automatically to the mandarin class. And it didn't matter whether anyone actually
opened
a volume. The books just had to be there, where visitors could see them. When people purchased
Britannicas
they weren't just buying information; they were buying a dream.

I know. I used to sell that dream.

I was once a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. On my first evening, clad in an ill-fitting sports jacket and tie, I tagged along behind a seasoned salesman who would show me the ropes. By “seasoned” I mean sleazy. This guy was a weasel in a suit. We knocked on every door in a large downtown high-rise. I lugged a satchel full of sales gimmickry. Weasel did the talking.

Virtually all of the doors we knocked on were either unanswered or curtly slammed in our faces. But finally, some poor, kind soul whose mother taught her not to be rude to strangers invited us in.

Big mistake.

The weasel had a polished line of patter that bordered on hypnotic. He dazzled the little old dear like a cobra bewitching a sparrow. Before an hour was gone she had signed up not only for an overpriced set of
Britannicas
but also for a bookcase, a reading lamp and a subscription for an annual update volume.

We were operating inside the law, but just barely. And morally what we were doing sucked large granite boulders. I was just a kid then, and not nearly brave enough to stand up and shout, “Close your chequebook, lady—it's a scam!” But I often wish I had. My encyclopedia sales career began and ended that same night. The experience soured me on what I had considered to be a noble institution. After all, how noble could
Encyclopedia Britannica
be if it employed two-bit hustlers like us?

I don't believe I've cracked the spine on a volume of
Encyclopedia Britannica
since.

But then, neither have lots of people who bought the whole set.

 

 

Whatever Happened to Email?

I
t's safe to assume that no one alive has ever seen a quagga. The last specimen died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Quaggas, a kind of half-zebra, half-horse combo, used to roam southern Africa in huge, dense herds but they're extinct now, just like T. Rex, the dodo and email.

Beg pardon? Email? Extinct? Well, almost, according to Atos, Europe's largest information technology firm. The company claims that 90 percent of email messages sent among its employees are a waste of time and money. Accordingly, Atos employees—all seventy-four thousand of them—have been ordered to ditch the email and go back to the telephone. Email was supposed to boost office productivity; in fact, it's behaved like cholesterol, clogging the arteries of the business machine. Think of all the crap emails you get. Think of the millions of people who, like you, take time out to at least glance at their crap emails. Studies show useless emails can cost a company of one thousand employees as much as ten million dollars a year.

Ah, well. We're getting used to extinctions these days. Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorized the river valleys of Western Canada for a couple of million years during the Upper Cretaceous period before flaming out, whereas, say, the Polaroid Land Camera barely lasted sixty years (1948–2007) before being flung into the Landfill of History.

And remember the pager? Back in the 1980s it was hard to find a doctor or a salesman who didn't have one clipped on his or her belt. One or two rappers even went briefly pager-crazy in their performances. Then along came the mobile phone to gobble it up. RIP, noble pager.

And who doesn't have a Sony Walkman gathering dust at the back of a drawer? When they first appeared in the early '80s Walkmans drove a stake through the heart (or the centre hole) of phonograph LPs. Then, just a few years ago, along came a mutation called the iPod, and the Sony Walkman went straight to the Museum of Quaint Artifacts.

It had lots of company. The PalmPilot, born in 1997, was a wonder of its time. Imagine having all your contacts, an accurate calendar and personal notes in one handy gizmo! With a touch screen and a personal stylus to boot! What could possibly improve on that?

A company named Apple for one. Hello iPhone; adios PalmPilot.

Then there's the Atari 2600. Customers snapped up more than thirty million of those to play video games like Pong, Pitfall and Combat. For all its fame Atari lived for only seven years: 1977–84.

All these techno dinosaurs share two characteristics. Number one: they were each once on the very knife-edge of surging technology, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Number two: their collapse was utter and lightning-swift in evolutionary terms. Thirty years for the Sony Walkman. A decade for the PalmPilot. Seven years for Atari.

And now we're watching the titanic struggles (which look increasingly like death throes) of Canada's own BlackBerry. Just a couple of years ago it was the world leader in smart phones, commanding over 50 percent of the American market alone. That share is now down to 10 percent and circling the drain.

But evolution's like a baseball game: it's not over until the last at-bat. Back in the mid-1990s, a company named Apple was on the ropes too. They appointed a guy named Steve Jobs as CEO.

They did all right.

As for email, the prognosis isn't bright. “The younger generation has all but given up on it,” says a feature story in the
London Daily Mail
—in favour of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Why? Instant messaging feels more “immediate.” Messages don't languish unread in somebody's inbox. In fact with Twitter, it can feel almost like you're having an actual, one-on-one conversation with somebody.

A face-to-face conversation. You can remember what that was like, can't you?

 

 

Riding on Spaceship Earth

E
ver try to make a map? It's a tough assignment that ought to give us that much more respect for pioneers like Marco Polo, Magellan and our own Samuel de Champlain—all dedicated map-makers who took pains to leave a record of where they travelled and what they saw.

Especially given what they had to work with, which wasn't much. Can you imagine trying to draw an accurate representation of the east coast of Canada or the proportions of the Great Lakes, using nothing but seventeenth-century technology? Champlain did it.

Maps have fascinated mankind since . . . pretty well forever, really. The oldest man-made map we know was not of this earth at all. On the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, there is a series of dots that astronomers confirm unmistakably charts three bright stars, Vega, Deneb and Altair, as well as the star cluster we call the Pleiades. Archaeologists say the uncannily accurate map was drawn by cave dwellers nearly nineteen thousand years ago. Just think: our ancestors were mapping the night skies nearly ten thousand years before the New Stone Age began.

Nowadays we're all map-makers—or map facilitators, at least. Anybody with a GPS on their dashboard or a smart phone in their pocket can instantly conjure up the coordinates for a ski chalet in the Rockies or a good sushi restaurant in downtown Tokyo.

It's a far cry from the bulky Mercator projection maps that hung off the blackboard when I was a kid. Those things gave most of us our first look at the wide world around us.

Too bad it wasn't an accurate one. School maps altered our perceptions of the planet we call home and they left us with some peculiar ideas. Empires were assigned colours—the British Empire, I recall, was pink. I still think of the long-vanished renegade state of Rhodesia as rose coloured. Other misconceptions abound. The maps depicted Norway and Iceland as almost the size of continents, and Canada, with all those provincial borders slicing north to south, looked like a colossal pink salami.

A clumsily carved pink salami at that. Oh, BC and the Prairie provinces looked neat enough, but then came Ontario with that chunk of gristle hanging off its chin. And the Maritimes? Forget about the Maritimes. Their borders made them look like some preliminary sketch scribbled by Picasso.

The most astounding map I've seen is technically not a map at all. It's a photo taken on December 7, 1972, from the window of the Apollo 17 spacecraft as it whirled through space forty-five thousand kilometres from earth. You've seen the photo. They call it the Blue Marble because that's what the earth looks like—a wispy blue marble hanging against the inky black backdrop of interstellar space.

It's an amazing photograph—perhaps the most amazing photograph ever taken. It changed the way we see ourselves. There are no borderlines on the Blue Marble. Russia is China is the Pacific is Canada is Earth. Everything we've ever known is in that photo. Everyone we know, everyone we hate, and the millions upon millions we will never know. Everyone who ever was and everyone who ever will be. Kings and carnival barkers; cardinals and courtesans. Everything mankind has ever built; everything we've ever sung, painted or written. All of us together, on a glowing blue marble. Our lifeboat in the sea of space.

I hope we've got somebody aboard who knows how to patch leaks.