Towel Day

Happy (or do you say "Hoopy"?) Towel Day

Update: Sorry to be maudlin, but this seems to be as good a time as any to share something I learned recently about the day Douglas Adams died...

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans will recall that Douglas attributed to the humble towel a miraculous potential for reassurance and utility. ‘There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is,’* the Narrator observes with admiration. The role of the towel traces its lineage back to the summer of 1978 when Douglas and various pals were on holiday in Corfu. Douglas was supposed to be writing, but a certain amount of hedonism and frolicking on the beach also featured.

Douglas’s towel – he needed one the size of a marquee’s groundsheet – was forever going missing. Perhaps it had some homing instinct for the sea, like a baby turtle. Finding it became synonymous with being a really together, cool kind of guy.

You may be touched to learn that, feeling faint from the rigours of the machine, Douglas picked up his towel from Peter and clutched it to him before lying down on a bench. In these circumstances specialists advise that becoming horizontal may not be expedient, but the piercing clarity of retrospect takes no account of the reality of an enormous, sweaty man, probably feeling a little woozy, poised to topple like an
uprooted tree.

He lay down. Peter glanced away for a second. When he looked back he thought that Douglas was messing about. Still holding on to his towel, he had rolled quietly off the bench. He had fainted. Peter called an ambulance, which efficiently speeded Douglas off to hospital. He never regained consciousness.

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A puddle ponders its place

You may have heard around the tubes that today is the opening of the Creation "Museum". May 25 is also Towel Day, in honor of Douglas Adams, so this seems like a fitting time to repost this excerpt from a Douglas Adams lecture:

I mean, there's no other conclusion you can come to. And it's rather like a puddle waking up one morning--I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer (laughter). A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks "Well, this is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact, it fits me *so* neatly, I mean, *really* precise, isn't it? (Laughter) It *must* have been made to have me in it!" And the sun rises, and he's continuing to narrate the story about this hole being made to have him in it. The sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's still thinking, it's still trapped in this idea, that the hole was there *for* it. And if we think that the world is here *for us*, we will continue to destroy it in the way in which we have been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm.

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Remembering Douglas Adams

Six years ago, I was greeted with the shocking and entirely unwelcome headline that Douglas Adams had died. Don't know why I always remember that date, but I do, automatically, every year. So I'm going to go ahead and post a sort of mini-tribute to my favorite author.

Picture of Douglas Adams via this post at synaptic disunion, where you can listen to an audio clip of Douglas Adams reading a bit of Last Chance to See.

Save the Rhino International has an annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture. (Douglas was a Founder Patron of the organization.)

Towel Day is coming up on May 25.

Finally, if you're able to view a YouTube video, you can see Douglas Adams reading a section of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe at a lecture by Richard Dawkins here:



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Douglas Adams on "many to many" communication

This is a fairly lengthy excerpt from a speech by Douglas Adams, but I don't think I can leave any out and give a complete enough picture. It's something I've been thinking about lately, and thought it would be a good thing to share, especially as we try to figure out how to "be the media" rather than being content to let the media talk at us and define reality for us. (Emphases mine.)

Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I'm doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we've got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, 'OK, we're going to go to war' and some may shout back 'No we're not!'—and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!

In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication—boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc.—we get information poured at us from all over the place and it's completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It's curious, but we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help.

Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world. Then there's many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there's not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they're not very good, they will improve dramatically.

But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn't have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It's communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys.

Eventually he figured out, 'Hang on, there's a chip in there and I'm on a computer and there's a network running around the building, so why don't I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I'm going to have a wasted journey or not?' So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet—so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine.

Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn't just say, 'The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty' but had all sorts of information; it said, 'There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that'. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, 'bang!' — there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? — well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away!

Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating.

Click here for the full speech, which was given by Douglas Adams in 1998.

By the way, I've crossposted my thoughts about Hillary and the media at Daily Kos, Booman Tribune, My Left Wing, and ePluribus Media, in case anyone would like to check out some of the responses.

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