Brainstorming next year’s PC: “A year and a half from now, desktops and notebooks should be noticeably different.

Intel, in conjunction with PC and component makers, is trying to usher in design standards for computers that, ideally, would result in more stylish and versatile machines, according to executives at the Intel Developer Forum here. Wireless networking, for instance, will likely be a standard feature in mainstream computers by the second half of 2003, and both notebooks and desktops will be smaller and lighter by then.” CNET

G. Pascal Zachary (former staff correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 12 years and currently a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism):

The Lesson of Daniel Pearl’s Death: “Instead of asking journalists to toe the Pentagon’s line, our

government must allow reporters to keep their impartial

distance — or more men like Daniel Pearl may end up dead.” AlterNet

And, from Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, The Death of Daniel Pearl: “…(I)t was without rancor that I noted the platitudinous manner in which Daniel Pearl’s superiors at The Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann and Paul Steiger, responded to the shocking news of his murder. They reached for what the emotional folkways of America could give them. Their statement of February 22 strived for dignity. It surpassed its objective: what Kann and Steiger said was excessively dignified, in a way that might be harmful to a proper analysis of the outrage in Karachi.”

Have iPod, Will Secretly Bootleg: ‘When Apple introduced the iPod, the company was aware that people might use it to rip off music from the Net or friends’ machines… But it is unlikely that Apple imagined people would walk into computer stores, plug their iPod into display computers and use it to copy software off the hard drives.’ Wired

Doomsday clock moved closer

The hands of the Doomsday Clock, for 55 years a symbol of nuclear danger, were moved two minutes closer to midnight Wednesday, reflecting the possibility of terrorism, relations between India and Pakistan, and other threats.

The symbolic clock, kept by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, had been set at 11:51 since 1998. It was moved to 11:53 p.m.

George A. Lopez, the publication’s chairman of the board, said it has never been moved in response to a single event.

Still, he said, the attacks of Sept. 11 combined with evidence that terrorists were attempting to obtain the materials for a crude nuclear weapon should have served as a wake-up call to the world. He said the world has focused on short-term security rather than solving long-term problems. Salon

Many thanks to randomWalks for pointing me to this essay about Wasabi, the prized Japanese condiment. Once tasted, you will never be content with the inferior horseradish-based imitation used in American sushi restaurants. It appears that it offers not only a transcendent culinary experience but may have transcendent medicinal properties as well.

A Sober Documentary About an Intoxicating Life: New York Times review of a new film biography of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). I haven’t seen the film yet but, from the review, it’s hard to understand if it’s the filmmaker or the reviewer who hasn’t understood Ram Dass’ life. As would be the temptation in a film about him, it appears that it gives in to three sorts of superficial spectacle — that of the “vanished time” of “long- haired youths cavorting on the family golf course while the beaming, bearded guru strolls shirtless among his initiates, gingerly adjusting the ankles of those standing on their heads”; of Alpert’s current post-stroke (diminished? one would really want to know, from a reliable source…) presence; and of his grief-counseling work .

Remarkably, the film appears not to touch upon the significance of Be Here Now at all. The reviewer appears to use this point as an excuse for a tangential reflection on how

…”BE HERE NOW” is, in essence, a simple description of what movies do, 24 frames a second. What other medium gives you access to such rapturous nowness — the quality of sustained immediacy, an immersion in the moment, reality revealed as a weave of subjective sensation? Being here now is the primary miracle drawing us to the most exciting documentary films…

which leads him to a misguided comparison with a film on “another quixotic, modern-day near- saint, the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist”. That’s what you get, I suppose, when you let a filmmaker rather than a cultural historian or a philosopher do such a review.

Ram Dass’ life deserves to be viewed through the lens of spiritual quest and both the psychological and sociological tensions that develop between an attempt at wholesale devotion and the late-20th century American social context that both nurtured and devalued that quest. For example, thinking about him as someone who had “one guru” instead of a succession of influences might have led to the film’s apparent failure to grapple with one of the most important episodes in Ram Dass’ public life — his complicated prostration at the feet of a spiritual leader named Joya who had been a Queens, NY housewife and whom he ultimately repudiated as a sham — which would have yielded documentary riches about yearning, credulity, and humility, about the dialectic between ego and transcendence.

Speaking of humility, it is not even clear if the film understands the arc from a quest to find a way to be here now to the radical devotion to the alleviation of suffering Ram Dass has practiced, the Ram Dass of later books like How Can I Help? (which I searched for on the net but does not appear to be in print any longer). What is the significance of such compassion? How possible is it? How genuine? How selfless? How much does it matter? (As an aside, did Ram Dass manage to survive the American spiritual epidemic of pseudo-humble but ego-ridden spiritual leaders falling in disgrace to scandal when the discrepancy betwen their deeds and their words became clear?)

And finally, given his dedication to grief counseling and preparing people for their mortality, how does Ram Dass face the end of his own life after a near-fatal stroke? Does the film, or the reviewer (as it appears from reading this essay), irresponsibly suggest that Ram Dass’ hallucinogen use contributed to his stroke? And, by the way, what in hindsight is the relationship between psychedelic exploration and Eastern spirituality?

Perhaps I’m expecting too much from a film. Grappling with these themes might only be done justice in a print biography. But, of course, I’m totally offbase commenting without having seen the film. If, despite the review, it shows a sophisticated, interwoven and reverent grasp of Ram Dass, I’d be pleased and surprised.