OverMatter

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Only in America

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The End of Time

"Time of day calling it quits at AT&T
August 29 2007, by David Lazarus: Consumer Confidential

It's the end of time, at least as far as AT&T is concerned.

The brief note in customers' bills hardly does justice to the momentousness of the decision. "Service withdrawal," it blandly declares. "Effective September 2007, Time of Day information service will be discontinued."

What that means is that people throughout Southern California will no longer be able to call 853-1212 to hear a woman's recorded voice state that "at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . ." with the recording automatically updating at 10-second intervals.

"Times change," said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman. "In today's world, there are just too many other ways to get this information. You can look at your cellphone or your computer. You no longer have to pick up the telephone."

Indeed, time already has stopped in 48 other states, he said. California and Nevada are the two remaining holdouts.

In Northern California, the prefix for calling time is 767, or P-O-P on a telephone keypad. For decades, locals up there have dialed POPCORN any time they have had to reset their watches or reprogram electronic gadgets after a power failure.

"In California, our equipment has gotten old," Britton said. "It's reached the end of its life span."

Time's up statewide Sept. 19. Britton said Nevada service would live on borrowed time for an unspecified period, until the equipment in that state similarly starts breaking down.

One upside: AT&T says doing away with time would enable the creation of about 300,000 new phone numbers in California beginning with the 853 or 767 prefixes. (No such numbers have been issued to date because, when coupled with any four other digits, you get time.)

To be sure, time marches on. Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

"It was always there," said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell's (and subsequently SBC's) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building. "Everybody knew the number."

Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly.

"The people who worked on it took it very seriously," Frenkiel, 64, recalled. "They took a lot of pride in it."

In a twist of historical irony, Frenkiel went on to play a leading role in development of the technology that makes cellphones possible -- the very device that's now instrumental in killing time.

Phone companies have been providing the time to callers since the 1920s. In the early days, live operators read the time off clocks on the wall.

In the 1930s, an Atlanta company called Audichron devised a system for the time to be provided automatically. Audichron leased its technology to phone companies nationwide, often with sponsorship from local businesses.

Time ladies -- and a few gentlemen -- came and went over the years. Then, in the 1950s, a woman named Mary Moore emerged as the nation's leading time-teller.

Her reading of hours, minutes and seconds was delivered in a distinctive if somewhat prissy tone. Moore's odd pronunciation of the numbers 5 ("fiyev") and 9 ("niyun") influenced a generation of operators, much as flying ace Chuck Yeager's West Virginia drawl is said to have been adopted by innumerable airline pilots.

By far the most prominent time lady was Jane Barbe, who succeeded Moore at Audichron in the 1960s. A former big band singer, Barbe (pronounced "Barbie") went on to become the voice of recorded telephone messages in the 1970s and '80s in the United States and elsewhere.

Along with her interpretations of the time and current temperature, Barbe delivered the bad news too, telling you that circuits in a specific area were busy, please try again later, or that your call cannot be completed as dialed.

And who will ever forget her heartbreaking rendition of "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service"?

Barbe died of cancer-related complications in 2003 at age 74. It's estimated that at the height of her fame, Barbe's voice was heard worldwide about 40 million times a day.

AT&T's Britton said the company started using Audichron's machines in 1948 and then switched to a different system manufactured by rival Weatherchron, also of Atlanta, in the 1960s. He was unable to identify the current time lady, saying that perhaps no one at AT&T knows who she is.

Ellis Bryant, the 83-year-old president of Weatherchron, also was unsure whose voice Californians hear when they call time. So he dialed 853-1212 and listened to the recording.

"Oh, that's Joanne," Bryant said without hesitation. "Joanne Daniels. No doubt about it."

He said Daniels started recording the time for Weatherchron about 25 years ago. At some point after Pacific Bell switched to his company's system, Daniels became California's time lady.

Reached at her Atlanta home, Daniels, 65, estimated that her reach was once nearly as extensive as that of Barbe, who was a friend. Daniels is now retired.

"I've done the time in many areas -- Eastern Standard Time, central time, Pacific time," she said. "The fun part was doing the temperatures for places like Alaska."

Daniels switched to her professional voice, her soft Southern accent instantly vanishing. "At the tone," she said, "the temperature is minus 12 degrees." She laughed and her accent returned. "I liked that."

No one had told her that AT&T was about to stop time.

"I think that's very sad," Daniels said. "I was told at one time that my voice would last until well into the 21st century. Now it looks like I'm about to be laid to rest."

When that day comes, Daniels said, she knows what her epitaph will be: "She knew the time.""

(Time of day calling it quits at AT&T - Los Angeles Times)

Holding a Program in One's Head

"Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Perhaps it will help if more people understand that the way programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do. It's not because they're irresponsible that they work in long binges during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that already works. It's not because they're unfriendly that they prefer to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door to say hello. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's head. Whether or not understanding this can help large organizations, it can certainly help their competitors. The weakest point in big companies is that they don't let individual programmers do great work. So if you're a little startup, this is the place to attack them. Take on the kind of problems that have to be solved in one big brain." (paulgraham.com)

Ethnic Cleansing in America

"Of course, the sight of all those Mexicans being off-loaded at the border and forced to walk in long lines across the borders, surrounded by armed American soldiers and police – that's good television. Worldwide.

The outcry against our action is tremendous, but what do we care what the world thinks?

When Serbians ask why we bombed them for trying to expel native Albanians from Kosovo, when we're doing the exact same thing, we don't bother answering. We don't have to answer. We're the world's only superpower, and therefore everything we do is right.

The Serbians keep asking: The Kosovars had a terrorist organization; where were the bombings and killings by illegal Mexican immigrants?

To which we self-righteously reply: The Kosovars were the original inhabitants of the land you were trying to expel them from.

To which they reply: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and parts of several other states – they were all part of Mexico before America invaded and took that land. Don't talk to us about original inhabitants! Where's our apology, now that you're doing ethnic cleansing too?

It's not ethnic cleansing, we carefully reply. It's not because they're Spanish-speaking brown-skinned people that we think they posed a danger to America. It's because they didn't have green cards.

...

It Was the Right Thing

As for all those Americans who had angrily rejected the idea of amnesty for illegal aliens, many of them were certain the right thing was done.

"If you reward them for breaking the law, they'll just break it more," they say.

"But you're paying more for everything," the reporter asks.

"Worth it," they say.

"Why?"

"Because every illegal immigrant was a criminal!"

The reporter nods wisely. "So there's no more crime now."

"Well, no."

"At least the worst criminals were gone. All the murderers, the thieves, the rapists, the child molesters, the drug dealers – they're all gone, right?"

"Well, no. Some of them, but ... look, we're no longer subsidizing the education of their children! They're no longer using public services without paying taxes!"

"Interesting," says the reporter. "And yet poor Americans pay no income taxes, and they use the public schools without paying property taxes, either."

"But their landlords pay property taxes."

"But the landlords of the illegal immigrants paid property taxes. So I guess they weren't being completely subsidized by the American people, after all."

"And we aren't having to pay for all those extra English-as-a-Second-Language classes, right?" goads the reporter.

"Absolutely right! Everything's better! I can look around me and look at the people on the street and it feels like America again. Everybody's talking English! Except for the orientals and the towel-heads, of course, but you've got to take things one step at a time."

And the TV show cuts away.

...

Lawbreakers

On television, yet another Republican spokesman is trying to defend the disastrous expulsion of the illegal immigrants. His opponent on the talk show is one of those fuzzy-headed liberals, of course, so he's hardly worth talking to. But you have to give equal time, right?

"So the higher prices we're all paying, the reduced services, the loss of American jobs, the contempt the whole world feels for American ethnic cleansing – you think it was all worth it?" says the talk-show host.

The Republican spokesman nods wisely. "They broke the law even coming into this country."

"What if it was a stupid law?" asks the liberal.

"It was the law, and they broke it."

"And so they no longer deserved to live in America?" says the liberal.

"They never deserved to live here."

"So lawbreakers don't deserve to live here. Have you ever had a speeding ticket?"

"I'm an American. And I pay my traffic fines."

"But you broke the law."

"I was born here."

"But your ancestors weren't," says the liberal. "Your ancestors, somewhere along the line, were born somewhere else."

"But they came here legally."

"No sir, they did not," says the liberal. "I knew we'd get to this point, so I had your genealogy researched. Here's a list of your German ancestors who broke the law of their German-speaking state by emigrating."

"Those weren't American laws, so they weren't criminals here."

"And here are your Puritan New England ancestors, who came here as criminals because of their defiance of the laws concerning religion in England."

"They wanted freedom of religion."

"But they broke the law. And look – here are your Scotch-Irish and German ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania and North Carolina without getting legal title to their lands. They were all law-breaking squatters, and they kept getting caught farming on other people's land and had to move on."

"It was wide-open country then, and the laws were different –"

"And look – here are your ancestors who crossed over the Appalachian Mountains like Daniel Boone, into areas that the federal government absolutely declared off-limits to white settlers. Then when the Indians attacked them for illegally trespassing, they demanded that the US Army come and kill Indians so your ancestors could keep their illegally occupied land."

"I know the Indians were badly treated, but –"

"In fact, through most of the territory of the US, the first settlers were illegal immigrants, weren't they? US treaties supersede all other laws except the Constitution. So what about it? Do you favor the expulsion of all these white illegal immigrants to restore the land to the legal titleholders by US treaty?"

"That was a long time ago."

"Oh, so these Mexican immigrants – their problem was they just didn't stay long enough."

"If you give amnesty, you just get more of the same crime."

"But if you give amnesty and then change the laws so it isn't a crime anymore, then you won't get more of the same crime."

"That's giving in to the criminals!"

"Look," says the fuzzy-headed liberal, "we made up these laws. It's not like murder or theft or rape, where one person is infringing the rights of another. We just decided, arbitrarily, which people could come into our country and which could not. Our rules favored the rich; the poor in other countries weren't welcome.

"But there they were, starving in their own country," the bleeding-heart liberal goes on. "And the only thing holding them back from feeding their children was a border and a set of completely arbitrary rules. Stupid, needless rules that kept the workers in one country from getting the jobs that were waiting for them in another."

"Those are good laws! We don't want the riff-raff of other countries!"

"But we weren't getting the riff-raff, sir! We were getting the bravest, the hardest-working, the most determined to feed their families. We were getting the ones who scraped together the money to pay the illegal smugglers to get them across the border."

"There, you see? Criminals!"

"Vicious, terrible criminals – doing a job that only made money because of your immigration law. And when the immigrants got here, they worked hard."

"And used up welfare money and state services and all without paying taxes!"

"But if we had let them in legally, or let them stay once they were here and allowed them to change their status, they would have paid taxes. In fact, they already did pay sales taxes and property taxes. The only taxes they didn't pay were income taxes, and we paid them so little that even if they were citizens, they wouldn't have owed a dime."

"But they were endangering our culture –"

"Our culture has always tolerated thousands and millions of people who spoke other languages and clung together in memory of the old country. And then, a few generations later, we were all Americans together. Your fear of these immigrants merely shows your complete ignorance of American history.

"Hyphenate us all you want," the arrogant liberal continues, "go to whatever ethnic pride parades you want, but we're all Americans. We changed each other – the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Black slaves, the Russian Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, they all came here and changed the way we talk and think and dress and sing and dance and read and write and it was always still America. Until now."

"What do you mean, until now?"

"Because it's time to take down the Statue of Liberty, sir. We no longer accept the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We no longer lift a lamp beside the golden door. The door is steel, and we've shut it tight. This isn't America anymore."

"That's treasonous!"

"No, sir, you are the traitor. You're the one who declared that America was no longer a nation built around an idea, which accepted all who embraced that idea. Now it's just like any other nation on Earth. It stands for nothing except for holding on to what we've got and making sure there's no room for the people most desperate to come and join us."

"They didn't want to live under our laws!"

"Yes they did. All we had to do was change a law that made far less sense than the traffic laws Americans break or bend all the time! If you make breathing a crime, then yes, all the breathers are criminals, but the people who made the laws are the stupid ones."

"How dare you! We're the ones who wanted to keep America American!"

"America is a nation that thrived because of a constant infusion of eager new citizens. You have closed the door against the best and bravest of them. You have cut off the lifeblood."

"At least we're still speaking English!"

"That's right," says the fuzzy-headed liberal. "It takes a lot of brains and determination to learn to speak two languages fluently. We kicked out six million people who were willing to try to do that. And what we have left is ... you.""

Rhinotimes.com Greensboro: Ethnic Cleansing or “Amnesty” by Orson Scott Card"