Albert Einstein

May I offer a corollary to the famous quote used in the title: The most taxing activity in the world is doing one’s taxes.

Many people would guess the Professor dislikes taxes because they fund wars, but that is not likely to be true. Much as he separated the abuse of the (technological) fruits of science from the religious experience of pursuing knowledge of the cosmos, he would separate taxation from the common usage (abuse?) of the funds. Civilization must be funded and we should not begrudge donating our share, and he would also be solidly behind proper use of tax revenue to truly help people. His protest would be more with the system than the fact of taxes. I have beaten home the point that the Professor never liked anything complicating his life, so he surely would prefer to pay a bit more as long as he never would have to spend time thinking about it!

Among Einstein’s most quoted thoughts is “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This was said referring to understanding the laws of nature, but he lived his life this way. He would surely prefer a more linear tax rate that was initially lower in exchange for removal of the deduction process. Just start with a real income number (net after true expenses of earning the money, a short and simple list when we’re honest about things) and leave it at that. The amount we’d pay would be a bit higher, but if you figure what time, effort (and stress) is worth we’d save money. The government would not only make a bit more, they’d save tons on their part of the tax work.
Here’s a mind boggling puzzle: What percentage of tax revenue is needed only to fund the act of taxation?

Did Einstein ever really sit down and work on a tax form for himself? He did (allegedly) say “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” That definitely sounds like something used to confuse a “revenuer.” Perhaps he was referring to tax auditors when he said “Force always attracts men of low morality.”

For such a famous and important man he had little use for money or material things, and he did not amass nearly what he could have. This would have seemed suspicious, and we know the FBI loved to make files about him, it stands to reason they would have asked the treasury department to do the same. Eliott Ness would have grilled him personally!

Eliott Ness
Mr. Einstein, do you deny that it is possible that you made mistakes in your calculation?

Albert Einstein
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

Eliott Ness
Am I supposed to believe that these figures reflect the reality of your situation?

Albert Einstein
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Eliott Ness
Nobody shows the real records. I’m sure a guy like you writes down everything. Let me see your real books.

Albert Einstein
I don’t keep books, records, recordings of anything. That’s too complicated.

Eliott Ness
Really? You must record your scientific thoughts. Could I see the book where you jot down all of your great ideas?

Albert Einstein
“You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.”

Eliott Ness
Come on Mr. Einstein, even false modesty has its limits. I can’t trust anyone who forgets that.

Albert Einstein
By all means it has limits, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” As far as the latter, when you figure out how to tax stupidity the budget will be balanced forever.

Eliott Ness
Let me get to the point, we have great men in government working hard on the country’s, even the world’s problems, and they need money to do it. Now I’m just a regular guy, but even I know great intellectuals solving problems like that deserve our backing.

Albert Einstein
Waste of money, “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”

Eliott Ness
Are you saying you filled out this form honestly, no fudging the numbers?

Albert Einstein
“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

On the other hand, we know he didn’t have a clue what is is like for us filling out 21st Century tax forms, because then he would have never said to anyone else “Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”

“Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer: because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.”

So responded Albert E to some question meant to challenge the role of science and technology, with a dash of insulting conspicuous consumerism. While writing a post on gadgets during the gadget buying season (AKA, “Da Holidays”) this kind of idea sprang up several times, but it deserved its own time and space to unfold, which brings us to now. Personally I have made it clear that I love a proper dose of conspicuous consumerism, providing one knows the art and technique behind the activity. When you live just to accumulate stuff or worse, to compete for the most stuff bought so the only use the stuff really has is fulfilled in the act of buying, displaying and storing, you really aren’t living. In there somewhere it is implicit that a little acquiring of stuff can be great, too much almost by definition can’t work. Stuff can be the spice but not the substance.

That’s all great, but why is that? Is the answer to making the “sensible use” of which the Professor spoke simply keeping it to a low dose, or must it stay to a low dose only because we haven’t found a sensible use? I propose the second choice is the answer.

Now proposing is great, if you get down on one knee, do it with style and grace, and know what you’re getting into, but it shouldn’t be done without good reason. Fortunately, I have one. If we haven’t made sensible use yet, we need answers. And here is an important lesson about answers: Answers are never the answer, good questions are. If you need a solution, formulate the right question and the rest is just mop up duty.

So the question to the answer would be “what would be a sensible use?” and to lead us to that we can ask “is there an intrinsic reason that applied science doesn’t seem to lead to sensible use directly?”

Let u break down the elements to answer the second question first. Living beings make technology for their own purposes, yet this technology somehow can’t increase their perceived quality of life. We know the technology does it’s jobs, it keeps us fed, clean, warm, healthy, mobile, entertained, safer than we were living in the wild and it can even give us emotional boosts directly to our egos when it makes us look good or we can show it off. A conversation piece is not just about conversation, it’s about being the center of interest by having the conversation piece! Humans are happier when hunger turns to fullness, boredom turns to interest, cold turns to cozy or feeling outcast turns to gaining (positive) attention. Obviously each individual piece of technology can make us happy. Yet people with constant doses of this happiness aren’t necessarily happy. What gives?

We can conclude it’s not the fault of our technology, it’s everything it is supposed to be. Ahh, but the other side of the equation; living beings. Technology is designed for a purpose, life adapts to an environment. Life needs a challenge. Granted, with too much of a challenge life withers, but with too little it becomes a couch potato and withers faster, even without the technology to literally provide the couch. So here’s the thing: There you were, a fairly content species with short but challenging lives and you came up with a little technology to extend and improve those lives. Then you made so much technology that it’s not just the clothes you covered yourself with and the spear you carried, it’s the world. You went and built an infrastructure, and you keep changing it. Your ancestors took millennia to adapt to small changes in their worlds, you deal with bigger changes every decade. Each piece of technology can make you happy, but even the work saving machines add up to a changing world you can’t adapt to quickly enough. Of course you’re not happy dealing with it. Sure, if you could have IPods to bring your own little comfort zone with you and the internet to tell you what you need to know it’s great, but when everyone else has these same things you have to deal information overload and other people being rude because they’re lost in their worlds just as you are in yours, so of course you have to get more lost to ignore them but you can’t because your cell phone keeps you available and…

The answer to the question is obvious: We have used the applied science properly for specific purposes, but until an infrastructure so advanced exists that it can no longer be significantly altered by new pieces of technology within it, and people have had enough time to adapt to this infrastructure, technology will continue to work in the small picture and fail in the big picture. Or, to quote (loosely) Ricardo Montalban, “Kirk, your technology has advanced, but man is the the same. But when you change man, ahh…” So the problem is not in our technology, but in ourselves, we should look to improve us once in a while. Or just get some soft Corinthian leather to sit in for a nice drive.

About the title: Almost a John Lennon quote, and guns are prime examples of technology that serves a purpose and feeds people’s egos to the point of changing their self image. However, the Professor is not enamored of gadgets of violence so we looked for a good replacement word. We considered quoting that great philosopher, statesman and dog of the people, Snoopy and use “warm puppy,” but then who can resist glub. It not only is a great word for some new wonder product, it is the right word if you’re up on your trivia. If not, watch “Take The Money and Run,” the bank robbing scene with the badly written note!

I have held back my holiday shopper’s review for two reasons. The first reason is philosophical. As long as one isn’t tied to superstitious beliefs why not have one’s day of celebration and gift giving fall later, say mid January. That way one can avoid the pre-holiday sales where you get 15% off of items that were just marked up 70%. Maybe hold the holiday even later, when sold out items are back in stock. This doesn’t prevent you from fighting to buy things that are in limited supply when everyone else does, but when you fail the stress of the deadline is lowered. Best of all, you can get reviews of products from real people you know who got stuck with them. You’ll also hear about great new things whose existence got lost in the overload of the holiday advertising clutter. And better than best of all, you know what Santa (or his parallel figures for the Festivus-rest-of-us) forgot to bring. You can become the best gift-giver if not a outright hero this way.

Of course the real reason this post is timed this way is that this year’s new gift items were an extreme letdown. There were a few amusing items such as spider looking camera tripods or pre-made “Broken Meter” signs in case you have nothing to write on in the car and can’t figure out that you can write your own in advance and have it at the ready in your car without buying these. But there were no breakthrough gotta-haves, or even a breakthrough may-as-well-at-least-it’s-new. All the big news and advertising concerned things getting better, more features, more complicated. These all fit into a few categories, New and nouveau Ipods , Smart-phones, GPS’s and portable memory for computers or the other devices listed. Earrings that hold 2-gigs my dear? Perhaps Agent 99 can wear those as Max fiddles with the Smart Phone that is his shoe. Then there are combinations of the devices already listed.

There wasn’t the next cool item as the Ipod was a few years back, there wasn’t even the soulless marketing monster toy that did nothing but make kids cry because of the intentionally limited supply. Needless to say, there was no simple yet amazing toy to tickle the imagination of children of all ages. Just improvements and complications to what we already have. True, a GPS can tell me 6 million places to go, but what’s the point if there’s nothing worth buying at any of those stores. Then there’s the deeper question when buying things just to have (or give) things despite the lack of anything worth having: Can a GPS tell you where to go when you’ve lost all direction in life?

Now I’m going to make a fantastic statement, then defend it brilliantly. There was absolutely no technology available this year. None, zip. To the untrained eye it was all and only technology, but that’s why this blog is here to expand your vision. A very wise friend of mine who routinely fixed everyone’s computers once explained that the trouble with technology was hidden in the true definition of technology: “If it works, it’s no longer technology!” My regular phone works even when the world itself is falling apart, but no matter how many bells and whistles we put on it, it’s, it’s, what’s the word, QUAINT. Might as well have Sheriff Andy pick it up and ask to be connected to Aunt Bee. My cell phone drops calls like there was an extra gravitational field beneath it, but it’s not quaint. I have been known to take a walk with a transistor radio so I can listen to a ballgame on AM radio. Oh sure, the transistors are really small, as if they were actually no longer transistors at all, but the antenna still draws stares as if I beamed down from Mars. A quaint old fashioned Mars. Face it, just using Mars in the metaphor is quaint, should have said Kronos (Klingon home world for those too quaint to know).
A couple years ago the idea of an AM radio to hear a game amazed kids, but now they just want to know why I don’t have XM. Really, buy an iffy gadget and pay a monthly fee for reception and dependability that, considering even a long walk stays within the local broadcast area, can’t compare.

Okay, let’s make this simple. Quill pens were technology in their day. Ball points aren’t. Computers are technology today. Even super advanced “space” pens, are not technology. The difference? When your computer crashes and you look through hand written notes to put your life or project back together, you’ll see the light.

So everything available this season was better versions of the items that wowed us over the last decade or so. True, they don’t work as reliably as a pen or a transistor radio, so they are still “technological,” and they certainly can cause headaches. But if you like technology you probably already have an Ipod, a GPS, a computer, a cell phone, a Gameboy etc. If you are buying one mainly because it works so much better then you are buying it for “anti-technology” motives.

I am in this category presently. I was an early GPS user. It was great in its day, and the wow factor was exhilarating. It was almost worth picking up that ax wielding hitch hiker just to show it off. Unfortunately, the fact that it keeps instructing turns that are no longer there, then takes so long to recalculate the course that you keep making new mistakes, causing it to start over, until you finally pull over and wait. So it’s time for modern processor speeds. So I started to compare GPS models. Even if you eliminate GPS as part of a cell phone or laptop and keep it to dedicated units, it seems like there are billions and billions to choose from. If you figure out that you want to limit it to units with a feature such as live traffic data, do you want to pay for a dedicated service, pay for a satellite radio feature, wait for the internet based types, or get a unit that gets traffic info from an FM source. It’s very difficult to navigate the GPS maze.

That’s when I got the tap on the shoulder, or at least the voice in my head: “Let the force guide you…” While I pondered if that meant let it guide my choice, or guide me instead of machinery such as a GPS (and why has nobody named a GPS unit “The Force”?) But it was the Professor’s voice playing with me. As much as he loves the cleverness of the entire GPS setup, and that it uses so many of his discoveries, including General Relativity, it is a complication. Now that the process of buying has become its own complication, he really thinks its more trouble than its worth. Besides, his walks might have lost their inspiring nuance if he didn’t risk getting lost as he got lost in his thoughts. He did once call Princeton to ask for Einstein’s address. When they refused he explained “This is Professor Einstein, I took a walk and can’t find my way back.” And for you whipper snappers, that call was made on something called a pay phone, (unless he knocked on a stranger’s door to use their phone) Cell phones wouldn’t have worked even if he had an advanced preview model in the 1950’s. They are dependent on an infrastructure, another drawback typical of technology.

Hmm, that could be the start of another posting…

PS : I’m still buying a GPS, but I’ll wait until I have no time, then do it quickly, like ripping off a bandage.

“Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of striving to fulfill wishes of the material kind. The goal is to raise the spiritual values of society.”

Hmmm, so we enter what is for a huge percentage of the world’s population the most spiritual time of the year, and spirituality can only be achieved, or at least inspired, or at the very least made somewhat worthy of interest, by being linked to the point of replacement by sheer materialism. Considering how spiritual the professor, despite being a genuine atheist, was, it makes one wonder if religious faith has become the pill one takes to feel better about lacking spirituality.

Now I don’t want to put down materialism, I love many objects, but when that becomes all there is to fill the void something is amiss.
Now we can logically go on three different routes from here. The first is the obvious inspection of the nature of spirituality as opposed to religiousness: Can one completely deny supernatural deities, be purely non-superstitious, yet still be spiritual? The second route is to start with the question of filling the emptiness, or more simply finding meaning. But the third route is more timely, so stay tuned for Albert Einstein’s (virtual) commentary on good gadgets to give or get this holiday season.

The first posts on this site included a discourse on whether Albert Einstein would blog, or even use a computer. Much of his success was due to simplicity, both in thought and in lifestyle. If he could get by without something, no matter how essential others might consider this thing to be, he would do without it. Although he often was so fixated that he’d forget to eat or to put on clothes if summoned to eat, that was not why he went without socks: His feet were protected by shoes making socks less than crucial, so why clutter his life with such a luxury! He would not own a computer and certainly wouldn’t blog unless there was no other way to get his work done.

A few months ago the computer used for blogging to this site went down, along with its backup drive, taking the links, codes and passwords with it, so the question has resurfaced. Einstein wouldn’t have committed to the extraneous work of posting in the first place, much less have had the requisite equipment to go blogging because such complicated technology is bound to eat up time when things go right, not even to mention when things go wrong. So if I take the Professor’s advice I’d quit now. Of course I already borrowed his habit of not being swayed by anyone else’s opinion when I have confidence in my own, so with the laptop temporarily serving as the main computer, and the task of re-acquiring the links and the codes behind me, away we go.

In the interest of total disclosure I should point out that I have been less than attentive to this blog for a bit longer than I have been “beyond access.” For a good part of this past year my time has been consumed by work on my Einstein project (Frankeinstein Presents: “Thought Experiments” WWW.frankeinstein.org ) Leading up to a taping of a demo piece we faced a multitude of complications. Half of them were people related, half of them were technical difficulties. Although Albert always had a staff to allow him the freedom to concentrate on his work, he kept it small. The more people involved, no matter how well chosen, the more complications. To summarize a long story, despite half a year of preparation, including multiple series of sets of rehearsals, there were so many forced changes that several performers did not even meet until the actual filming. As far as the technical difficulties, Einstein would certainly laugh at a show about his works stalled by such complications. So of course the main computer handling everything died, along with it’s backup drive, in one fantastic episode days before the taping.

Experts will tell you that when bringing a computer back to life via an external backup drive that the backup is safe; blanked hard drives don’t have viruses and things aren’t traveling in that direction anyway. The thing is, when a computer is damaged just the right way it can, at least according to my recent empirical evidence, do strange things, no matter how many times it’s guts have been erased and reformatted. Face it, we have made such complicated systems that we, the designers, are unaware of the depths of the possibilities of what our systems can do and what can go wrong. It is all the more amazing that we have managed to acquire the small bit of understanding of the workings of the universe whose complications came without an owner’s manual. As The Professor said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”

Real scientists don’t believe in curses, so when a fantastic series of coincidences ruins everything time and time again, instead of whining about one’s fate and how “they’re” out to get you, it’s best to be able to step back and laugh. The rules of entropy assure us that everything that can be influenced by sheer chance will tend to go wrong, so every project is likely to be a bumpy ride. Fortunately, Relativity guarantees that every perspective is equally valid, so at least you are always justified when taking a step back to laugh at your own predicament. If anything you are more correct than those who figure the knee-jerk reactions of anger, sadness, resentment and disillusionment are the way to go.

Still, during this fantastic series of “things to laugh at” I sat back several times with thoughts of joining Albert in his banishment of complications. Perhaps I could pick him up (should mention that of course several unrelated but humorously timed car problems added to the fun) and take a road trip to visit Thoreau. We’ll hash out the rest of this idea and finish blogging later… Hmmm, do you think they have web access from Walden’s Pond?