Since I deal with the world through words, I felt as though I should compose something on this anniversary of my generation’s great horror. The eighth anniversary—not an especially significant number in the common measurement of things, yet I find myself feeling this one more than I have in the past.

 

I suspect it will mean more to me with each passing year.

 

I could not—and should not—attempt to encapsulate September Eleventh’s meaning for an entire nation, not even a generation. I can only speak to the day’s effect in my life. Nevertheless, there is, I feel, something to be gained from sharing this self-examination.

 

It was a Tuesday; I remember this because I was in European History when we first heard. Ours was a small boys’ preparatory school atop a large hill in Pennsylvania. Between mineral deposits and tree coverage, our access to broadcast media was sparse at the time. Classrooms did not have individual televisions, and the Internet news was not the comprehensive organism it is today.

 

I was in European History, and Mr. Sanborn, the other history teacher, burst into the room. He was a retired Marine who still remained in contact with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

 

“Did you hear?” he said. “The Twin Towers have been attacked.” He said it matter-of-factly, as though it were in the midst of his everyday job. What we feared most at that instant was just that. We knew if Mr. Sanborn was involved, these were rumors of war. And we knew nothing of war.

 

“Is it real?” said our teacher, Mr. Collins, calm as ever.

 

“It’s real.” Mr. Sanborn left to inform the other teachers.

 

Mr. Collins, turned back to us without missing a beat. Mr. Sanborn’s visage must have told him volumes more than it did us. “Today you will witness history, boys. You will tell your children where you were today.”

 

What I deduced later was that almost every teacher in the school had lived through the Cold War, and had literally drilled for this moment. We would no longer duck and cover under our desks, but the threat of attack on our own soil was not alien to our parents’ generation as it was to us. We were hungry for information, excited, and confused. Speculations ran wild, amongst us and on the television reports. What I remember most was the sheer panic, inflated exponentially by each incoming report. Tower 1. Tower 2. The Pentagon. Flight 93.

 

Classes ended, and we went home afraid. We didn’t discuss it—how could we?—but we for the first time stared into the unknown abyss of war. Would we retaliate? Whom would we fight? Will there be a draft?

 

That one weighed heavily on my mind, though I was only 15. I had always said that should my country call on me as it did my grandfather, I would not hesitate if the cause were just. It was patriotic.

The next image I recall in the days after the Eleventh is a parade of cars flying tiny American flags. Almost everyone had one, or something similar, reaffirming our love of country. My best friend became uneasy at their ubiquity, and in retrospect his unease was well-deserved. In the months following, we both felt that patriotism was mutating into a vile strain of nationalism. A debate on the difference ensued.

 

For myself, I concluded that patriotism means loving one’s country simply because it is yours. Hoping it can be great, and dedication to making it so. Nationalism, however, means loving one’s country because one believes it to be better than another. Or in our case, the “best country in the world.”

 

Whether I believe this is or not has no bearing on my patriotism, so long as I believe my country could be the best country in the world, and I do my part to help it achieve that goal. Patriotism, then, can not be separated from service, while nationalism is inexorably linked to hate of others. While patriotism requires only love, nationalism takes love and perverts it into hate.

 

Such was the result of the debate borne of September Eleventh, Two Thousand and One. Why would I go to the trouble of examining the conclusion’s origins in such detail? For those of my generation, those attacks defined the time in which we received our education. And for me, it never let the concept of patriotism drift far from my thoughts. I remember the good feelings as well as the fear in the days following the attacks. I understood for the first time what it meant to be a country united. Politicians have played on those emotions for their own motives every year since, and I won’t do so here. I mention it simply to explain that while that connected feeling has ebbed, believing myself to be a part of this country has not. And an inability to ignore this nagging feeling that I should be making things better.

 

I have been a teacher; I am hoping soon to be a police officer; I very nearly became an officer in the United States Navy. These I mention not as boasts or methods of making my points more authoritative, only to demonstrate that I cannot help but believe I have to serve my country and make it better.

 

President Obama has called September 11^th a National Day of Service. I can’t help but think this is the appropriate response to memorialize the innocents and heroes who lost their lives eight years ago. The feelings we need to embrace are those of unity. We bled together; we mourned together. And now, like the firefighters and police who gave their lives in their sworn line of duty, we should serve together. Let that be our message to the world on this generation’s saddest day: that Americans, for all the legendary bluster and military might, do more than fire missiles when we are wronged. Every time we are hurt, we rebound stronger, more unified. We respond by joining together to improve that which our enemies would rob. And in doing so, we have already won any war another people should wish to wage on us. We embrace love of country, not hate of others.

 

If we keep it up, we might just be the greatest nation on Earth—not through arsenal or industry, but through service. So today, let us be a nation of willing souls.

 

Do something patriotic today. Serve.

 

What do these illegitimate despots have in common? A hankerin’ for nukes.

Okay, so I know this blog has been DEAD silent for a while, but I had to write something about Google’s announcement of an in-production operating system today. The company says they’re aiming for netbooks first, and then other laptop releases late 2010. The blogosphere and the Internet at large is all a-flutter (and a-twitter, I’m sure) over this news. I will say I called this in high school. But at that time, it was a logical extrapolation that Internet business had to at some point expand onto the desktop, which in turn leads into OS territory. At the time, I thought Google Desktop was how that would play out. What I never expected was a total reversing of computing and how we think about information. I think I see now where this is going, and Google’s announcement belies an imminent change in information technology and potentially, how we even view ownership of information.

That Google is using their browser, Chrome, as a basis for an operating system is telling. Over the last six years or so, the main computing experience has shifted from the desktop to the browser. Think about it: when is your browser not running? I suspect you see a blank tab more than you see your desktop background. Google first started taking advantage of this shift with iGoogle, which serves as a browser-based desktop. Furthermore, Google Docs serves as a free alternative to Microsoft Office’s applications.

The scent on the cyber-wind is that the Internet can and should be the basis of computing, and that all information can and should be kept there. Mozy tells you that, even though their servers are miles away from your physical location, their Internet backup is safer than a backup drive in your home. For fear of raptors or arsonists or something I guess. But for businesses, profound amounts of storage space are dirt-cheap now. I got a terabyte drive just because it was on sale. I don’t need 1024 gigabytes of extra space, but I have it now! There are server farms so big you cannot comprehend the meaning of the numbers of bytes they can store. Computing is leaving your hard drive, and entering…the cloud. By “cloud” we mean a loose network of servers and computers that lend their space and processors to do work for you. In theory, this could make a netbook as powerful as a desktop beast, acting almost as a vessel for larger computing entities. That means the days of bragging over processor power and hard drive space have come to an end. Have you noticed a slowing of increased processor speeds? It’s happened, despite what Moore’s Law would tell you. Well, it’s happened for regular-buyer desktops. Case in point: review Apple’s processor offerings on their iMac or Macbook models. The truth is, for anything other than gaming, we pretty much have what we need to make us comfortable using a computer; it’s instantaneous enough. If anything, I’d watch for bandwidth increases in Internet connections and in Wifi transmissions. That’s where the real information bottleneck lies. Even so, the Internet is where computing is going.

So too, will your files go. And why? So people can collaborate on content or projects or conferencing. If everyone has access to a document, and everyone has contributed to it, who owns it? I talked about this a bit in my last post, how we’re approaching e-communism. And if that becomes the standard–not just with entertainment media–but with all information, and if we spend more and more time computing in the cloud, I think our society will face some serious questions about ownership and authorship. Exciting questions, and it’s kind of crazy to think that Google will serve as the catalyst for the discussion. Also, possibly, Microsoft’s downfall.

A guy can hope.

As European and Russian astronauts embark on a 105-day mockup Mars mission, I can’t help but once more call into question why we so badly want to put bootprints in that red soil.

The usual arguments for going to Mars go like this:

“Exploring is a human drive!”

Or:

“America needs to assert its technological dominance, just like we did with the Apollo moon missions.”

To the first, I wholeheartedly agree; exploring is a human impulse, one we ought to indulge. I simply wonder if space should be the frontier we conquer—at least for now.

In exploration, there has always been a balance of romance and pragmatism.  Explorers sailed to the New World, for instance, for “Glory, Gold, and God.” Surely, immortality awaited any who planted a flag on this strange and savage continent. But there was also the matter of resources for the European empires funding the expeditions, to say nothing of the desire to convert natives, who would, once imperial citizens using coin, toss a few to the Church’s coffers, keeping Rome happy.

To the second, there was some pragmatism in our moonshot as well. Winning the space race against the USSR seemed like a strategic goal to American policymakers. LBJ famously said, “I do not believe that this generation of Americans is willing to resign itself to going to bed each night by the light of a Communist moon.” Especially when fears ran rampant of Soviet missile platforms on the moon, along with other comic book superscience doomsday schemes.

Well now the Cold War’s over, and the practicality of shooting billions of dollars at the Red Planet eludes me. The only people who have a remotely comparable space program to ours are allies, if tenuous ones.

With a timeframe of 3 years out, 3 years back, the cost/benefit analysis for a Mars mission (especially regarding astronauts’ sanity) doesn’t add up. Nor does, I believe, Nasa’s $127 billion budget.

I do believe a great deal of Nasa’s mission reaps intangible rewards, like the sense of wonder looking upon the Andromeda galaxy, or the heavenly colors of a star nursery. That counts for something, but people aren’t heading off to those destinations for a long time. Until then, perhaps we have closer frontiers to explore.

Perhaps our own oceans. What could NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) do with Nasa’s budget? What secrets does our own Earth yet hide?

A canted-nose test body creates a cavity of air in high-velocity water–the process known as “supercavitation.”