0575 - Computation

When you live on Anguilla, you lack a movie theater (and even a theatre [British spelling]), a symphony orchestra, a casino, and various other societal embellishments or detractions. In return you get the best of fresh air, many beaches, the tang of the Anguillian outlook, and both cable TV and Internet connections to the world at large. Cable TV offers daily news, some funny people, rather uninteresting and repetitive drama, and instruction. True, Internet connections lead to several dozen rather embarrassing messages a day, offering to enlarge body parts (male and female) and to show you a lot of stuff you should not wish to see. But still the Internet – we at The Objective Observatory have wireless broadband – lets anyone connect to all the body of knowledge so carefully heaped up by past generations. No word need be undefined, no name unidentified, no bit of knowledge hidden. All praise to Google!

Last week, for example, a book reviewer in the Atlantic spoke of: “... sexual excess of every description (Byron, Shelley, Houellebecq – who not?)” While retaining some vague notion of the behavior of Byron and Shelley, you might well say, who the heck is Houellebecq? A moment with Google and you know. Are you a better person? No, but you are informed, and as informed on Anguilla as you would be in Peoria. Or, perhaps you are an investor. The miracle of the Internet connects you to an on-line broker, and for a mere $5 fee you can trade a thousand shares of Microsoft, and for nothing you can look at the Put and Call option current bid and asks. A few more dollars a month and you have powerful specialized tools at your desk, enabling you to lose your house in ten minutes of trading.

And then, there is the miracle of e-mail. For an Expat, e-mail connects you to all those people you left behind up North (we assume you are a North American Expat; should you be Australian, then you may connect with those back home in a Southerly direction). With a browser and e-mail, you can order every gadget in existence, and have it sent (at some expense) to Anguilla. You can get every new book from Amazon.com, and every somewhat older movie on DVD. All for a price, to be sure, but you remain intimate with all of civilization.

Readers who are attentive will note we have not mentioned newspapers and magazines. Newspapers are of course available on the Net. Magazines arrive here late, and recently they are strangely adorned. Many magazines have adopted the practice of sticking strange objects, or catalogs, or inserts, to their pages with a rubbery cement. The result is thick and heavy, but contains less and less readable content, not counting that CD stuck to the cover. [Note: we do not refer here to The New Yorker, which proudly prints all words, including the improper ones.]

We should not omit to praise the computer for its incredible organizational powers. The physical offices here at the Observatory are messy, littered with notes, scraps of paper, supplies, cables, and some strange stuff from the early Pharaonic days. The storage drives of our computers, though, know how to file, and we can unearth an OO column from any pre-Columbian civilization on this spot. Oh, and did we mention computer games? We don’t like the bloody ones, but what about Goodsol, and its incredible solitaires? There are even poker games, but do not worry; we can beat them almost every time – truth is, the computer lacks heart.

Next time: Location [OO #576]

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