Essays

Alliance for Environmental Technologies? What do you think?

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I wrote this article for possible publication in Nautilus Institute’s NAPSNET newsletter about three months ago. Several individuals who read the manuscript, however, noted that my understanding of the technologies involved was mistaken and also suggested that I had not properly assessed the accident because of rather unreliable materials available on the internet.

I decided not to publish the article, but I do think the concept of an alliance for cooperation in the development of technologies to address environmental threats is worthy of consideration. I am placing the manuscript here in the hope that I may solicit the opinions of everyone.

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Is the United States a threat even if it is just minding its own business?

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Most of us are still a bit vague about where all that money is going to be cut from the federal and state governments of the United States. Perhaps some of the cuts will come out of the bloated military budget, thereby reducing the threats that our troops around the world are subject to, and at the same time also generate. Certainly many who actually serve in the military would welcome such a reduction in spending.

But we need to start thinking about a new and unprecedented security threat on a global massive scale: the United States without safety protocols and effective inspection regimes for the vast range of dangerous materials collected over the last sixty years.

The United States is a pile of chemical waste dumps, aging nuclear power plants, nuclear materials—and weapons—storage facilities, oil rigs, oil pipelines, mines (active and abandoned), armories and any number of railroads and highways that require an enormous investment to maintain safely.

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The Economy of Information

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I wrote this thought piece in April of 2000 at the very beginning of my consideration of the implications of technology for society and globalization. At the time, I was focused primarily on classical literature, but had been exposed to some discussions about technology at University of Illinois. The essay is erroneously titled “The Economy of Information.” It would be tempting to find a new title, but that act would create a historical inaccuracy. This essay is what led to much of my writings about the internet.

Computer Networks Recapitulate the Human Mind that Gave them Birth

The most interesting, and most powerful confluence in technology is the parallel process of genetic research and computer chip design. Perhaps the more appropriate terms are silicon & carbon engineering. At the very same time that the human genome is being mapped out and a one-to-one correspondence between the specific gene and the trait is imagined, increasingly minute wafer fabrication at a microscopic level is conducted at the same scale as the process of DNA replication. Both carbon and silicon engineering at the microscopic level are developing in parallel. Oddly, silicon engineering seems more and more like carbon engineering (DNA) because unlike previous technologies, like the sewing machine, or the automobile, today’s chip could not be readily replaced if the supporting technology for production disappeared.  That is to say, if you destroyed all parts factories and research laboratories in the automobile industry, you could still produce a vehicle rapidly if you knew the principles of manufacturing. If we lost the factories and data behind a modern silicon wafer, however, we could not reduplicate because the previous generation of computer needed to design it, as the generation before that one was employed before it.

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On Murakami Haruki

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A short essay about the time I spent with Murakami Haruki back in the summer of 1993.

 

On Murakami Haruki

 

 

The summer of 1993 followed the very intense period of study that made up my first year at Harvard-a period of readjusting to American society and also American academics. I was selected for a small research grant that allowed me to concentrate on reading in depth the Tale of Genji, the grade medieval Japanese novel, with my advisor for Japanese literature Edwin Cranston. Oki Yasushi, a professor of Chinese literature from University of Tokyo whose classes I had taken previously, was also visiting Harvard. It was a remarkable summer indeed as I remember an unending series of intense discussions about literature and history contemporary society and politics with fellow students and faculty. Harvard over the summer was different than during the year. Graduate ` major institutions around the world poured in.

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On Yoyo Ma

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Yoyo Ma is a close friend of my father’s whom I have known since I was a child. Whenever he visited San Francisco he was certain to stop by our home. He knew me before I could speak a word of Chinese and he met me repeatedly as I learned Chinese, Japanese, and finally Korean.

As a Chinese who has spent his career between the Chinese and Western cultures Yoyo Ma understood my work between cultures better than most people and we are able to communicate with a greater degree of depth than might otherwise be the case. I felt great closeness to Yoyo because we both found ourselves deeply imbedded in more than one culture. Yoyo, as a Chinese who had fully embraced the Western classical music tradition and spent his time at Harvard, and later in life, reading Aristotle and other great thinkers and me as a European who had embraced the Asian tradition and spent so many years trying to understand the classics, both of us had to find a space between the two cultures.

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