Leamington

What I did on my summer holidays, Part One

By John Taylor; 22 August, 2005

"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -Calvin
and Hobbes

This summer we retraced vacation ground covered two years ago, same
season, same place, point of destination Leamington, town of a million
tomatoes, with its Heinz ketchup factory smack dab in the middle of
its downtown. If the town fathers here thought as they did in
Petrolia, the Ontario town where oil was discovered and drilled for
the first time in North America, they would have called it not
Leamington but "ketchupia" or "Heinzia" or "Tomatolia." You drive by
the factory and watch as one tractor trailer after the next wheels
into the yard, piled high with red and orangey tomatoes in open
containers. Some are literally tractors dragging behind two trailer
loads of tomatoes, others are the bigger 18 wheeler type of tractor
trailer. Now I understand why they bred those indestructible cardboard
tomatoes now called "hothouse tomatoes."

I had heard that hard tomatoes made shipping them cheaper and I
pictured in my mind neatly packed crates, piled one on the next, not
these huge loads dumped loose into open containers. If you happened to
be standing in one of those bins and they dumped the load of tomatoes
on top of you it would be you who turned to ketchup while the modern
super tomatoes, it seems, retain their shape under tons and tons of
pressure. And man, you could throw any object, no matter what, onto
those wagon loads and it would end up in our ketchup, no matter how
repulsive or contaminated that projectile might be. Not that I tried
that; I just blanched at the thought.

There were differences from two years ago. This time we camped in
tents, we did not rent a trailer. Thomas is older now, and we were
able to swim almost every morning in the artificial lake at "Leisure
Lake Camp," ideally situated a few country blocks away from Jitka's
place of residence, known as "Polish House," where non-Hispanic
foreign laborers anonymously maintain residence. In the swimming area,
I always played the heavy chasing after strange Pokeman creatures that
Silvie and Thomas take on in their role playing adventures. I shot my
hypno-rays and my flamethrower attacks at them while they valiantly
defended the stones and shoes that I was intent on kidnapping. Schools
of famished sunfish literally nipped at our heels when we stayed still
too long.

My new gazpacho dietary regime had barely begun and I had to stop it
for the week away, not having brought our blender along, but my
strength increased nonetheless. It rained the first few days, and we
were wet and miserable in our damp tents on the cold ground. I was
still drinking gallons of water a day, and had hardly a trace of
migraine the whole time. One pain became pleasure as I woke in the wee
hours to relieve myself at the shower and bathroom building about a
hundred meters away; as soon as the weather cleared about the third
day I saw every night the orange planet Mars, brightest object in a
clear, moonless sky splayed with stars.

The first five days I slowly and leisurely read through, "Brainmakers,
How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the
Human Brain," by Discover Magazine writer David Freedman. It was
glorious to read and think about what may one day be called "applied
epistemology," as I looked out of the open rec centre room at the kids
playing spontaneously in the playground. I had an idea as I watched,
nothing grand like the "open systems" revelation I had there two years
ago, but an interesting extension.

I thought: why cannot adults do what these kids do so easily and
naturally? They just go out to these play structures and make up ad
hoc amusements to suit their temper; if they feel energetic, they run
about furiously; if they are in a tranquil mood they sit and dabble in
the sand. They play until they are tired or tired of it, and then they
simply go home, content. And what do adults do? We have an insane need
to specialize, to excel, to go it alone; we buy exercise machines to
work our bodies into what we want them to be. We forget how to play,
to exercise while we play, and how to make both into a social,
pleasurable experience; we want to do everything alone, without
reference to other people. We obsess, we work narrow goals and hope
somehow out of that to gain broad objectives. And inevitably, the
elaborate exercise equipment ends up in a corner or in a garage sale,
still unused and in new condition, and our bodies balloon into
grotesque caricatures of the human body. Just take a look at any crowd
of over forties, three quarters are fat. They streamed into that rec
center as I read my book intent on their bingo and poker games, games
void of variety or intellectual stimulus, gambling, mathematical
whoring, all the while smoking, boozing and slowly dying before my
very eyes. Before death, ugliness comes as herald.

When I got back home I came across the apothegm to this essay, from
the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, "I propose we leave math to the
machines and go play outside," which expresses best what I had been
thinking, that machine intelligence is good at calculations while
humans do play best. When we truly master computers, we will teach
them to act as aids in doing just that, playing, that is, they will
work our hedonic calculations as we balance work, play, exercise and
socializing. If our body is in need of more exercise, we will go to
the park and play pickup sports with others who, their physiology
monitored by sensors, are told that they are falling behind on the
optimum amount of exercise.

Some studies are finding that it is not the activity itself that
staves off brain declining diseases like Alzheimer's, it is the
variety of activity. Those who play different card and board games,
for instance, may not get aerobic points but their brains are better
protected by the variety than are, say, marathon runners pushing their
limits in only one direction. So, if we need more variety, our
personal mind and body monitoring computers will surely one day match
make us with other game players, and then nudge us when to start to
play, when to stop, and when to try something new. Avid, expert
players can act as neighborhood hosts to a certain game or activity,
and be invisibly paid nominal amounts for the service by the
participants' computers. Most neighbors would act as guests and play
until their interest flags, then move on. Much more could be done to
make us "different flowers in the garden" than mixing races and
cultures, games and sports and play will all come into service in the
name of change and variety.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com