Destructive Tendencies

Sometimes I wonder if you ever get to a point in your life where you're not surprised by anything at all. When some earth-shattering event occurs, do wise old people shrug their shoulders at the happening, as though it was expected?

I am continually amazed at humanity's capacity for self-destruction. Most recently I have had the opportunity to observe this in my daughter Zoe, who is now seven months old. She is crawling and pulling herself up on things, and getting into things.

Of course it's not things that are safe, oh no. Does she go for the cabinet with the pots and pans? No, the one with the dangerous cleaners, of course. Does she spend time playing with her own feet? Of course not - there are wires to put in her mouth, and electrical outlets to investigate. There are heavy books to pull off of the coffee table.

And oddly to me, one of the things that is the most innocuous actually terrifies her: the springy doorstops. I guess it's the noise they make. She also hates the noise of clanging pots and pans. And the vacuum cleaner.

Another thing that amazes me is how quickly she's learned what 'no' means. When we see her crawling towards something, we say 'no.' She stops, looks back, and you can almost hear the gears turning. Should I turn back? Or should I go onward. Sometimes she goes on, and then we have to pick her up and move her, and of course the waterworks start.

The sad thing is I had foreknowledge, having watched the children of friends and my own niece and nephew. So I don't know why I'm so surprised, other than the typical human response which says, "That won't happen to me."

Perhaps that's part of how wisdom develops - realizing it can happen to you.

How Much Dumber Can We Get?

As a nation, I mean.

Today the Attorney General of the United State, Eric Holder, announced that he's going to try five of the 9/11 co-conspirators in New York, just a few tens of miles from where I live.

Excuse me if I don't jump with joy. Like many Americans, I cannot understand someone who wants to treat terror as a kind of crime. It isn't a crime - it's an act of war. Whether it was the first attack on the World Trade Center, the kidnappings in Iran in 1979, or Oklahoma City in 1996 - terror is war.

I realize many people out there think that humanity is mostly good - that people are born sort of OK and are then ruined by society or their environment. And perhaps that is why they view terror in the same category of human offense as DUI, child abuse, and rape. I think this worldview is tragically flawed, but I have neither the eloquence nor the patience to get into it. Suffice to say this kind of thinking is what allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place.

I'm not clairvoyant, but this seems like a bad move on the administration's part. Holder said he would not have made the move if he didn't think he could get successful convictions on all five of the prisoners. Yet I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how that's going to happen when most of the evidence won't be admissable in court because it was obtained outside the justice system's normal rules.

On a positive note, at least this administration is finally doing something. These guys stopped being useful informants long ago, and the fact that President Bush kept them in a prison, feeding them until they got fat, instead of walking them off a plank is just inexcusable.

Tyranny of the Small Hands

The other day Victoria and I went shopping for her father. He wanted a point-and-shoot camera for Christmas - not a difficult task. So we went to Best Buy and started looking at the two cameras they had.

I say two because, even though there were maybe fifteen different models from all different manufacturers, they were almost all the same size - too small. There was only one (the one we bought - a Canon of some sort) that was large enough for adults to use, and that only just barely.

What's the story here? The last time I went to buy a camera, it was my camera, which sort of sits in between point-and-shoot and a low end SLR. It is plenty big enough for adult hands, and features controls that are fairly simple to use. Those middle range cameras don't even exist anymore.

To be fair, the Canon also has simple controls, as I'm sure the others do. The problem is they all seem made for child sized fingers. Or specifically, Japanese teenage girl fingers. At least that's the impression I got from picking them up and trying them myself.

This makes no sense to me, and seems to be one of those times when the marketing departments at each of these firms got in bed with the engineers. Engineers love to push the boundaries. They love to go to the extremes. In the case of electronic devices, that means smaller. Apparently, the tiny-brained marketers seem to have agreed, and thus we have products for sale in America that are not made for Americans.

I think that's stupid. They would sell way more cameras if they'd make them just a bit bigger - say 5-8% in overall dimensions - and make the controls slightly bigger as well. That would certainly make these devices more comfortable for larger folks to use.

I mean I can't even imagine how a pro football player or someone who works with his hands for a living (say, a lumberjack or a fisherman) is supposed to operate one of these devices. I can barely do it, and though I have long fingers, they are fairly thin.

You know what'll happen, though. Someone will try to "fix" this and make a dumbed-down, featureless camera with giant buttons that looks like it was made for two-year-olds.

And that's equally stupid.