As Evanescent as a Cloud

Sometimes the Devil offers you a bargain.

Lately I’ve been seeing ads for cloud computing. At first I wondered if it was a new way to predict the weather, or maybe something really abstruse like quantum mechanics. My geek brother said it means that your data is “up in the clouds somewhere.” Finally I figured it out. Businesses and research institutions use it to get more computing power. It is the way your email works, if you use a web-based email program like Yahoo.

What happens is that all your data—and the fancy applications you use to manipulate them—are stored in a cluster of computers owned by somebody else. You pay the cloud computing company for this service. Your machine only stores a simple program that accesses their computers. You save a lot of money, because you purchase a very simple machine without much memory. A large organization doesn’t have to buy expensive computers for each employee and make sure their software is licensed to each computer. They don’t have to spend a wad to repair their computers and keep them up to date.

Kindle is very similar. You own the little machine, but the book is stored on someone else’s computer. You pay Amazon a fee for the right to read an author’s work on your Kindle. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a print copy and you don’t even need a bookshelf. My publisher and my local bookseller tell me that everything is going digital these days.

I didn’t think much about it until I read that Amazon had removed some books from Kindle because the publisher decided they no longer wanted to offer those items in e-book form. (Naturally enough, they were works by George Orwell.) So if you happened to be in the middle of such a book, all of a sudden your screen went blank. You got a refund—but that’s just the same as if your local bookseller came into your house, took a book they’d just sold you off your shelf, and gave you your money back.

Not only that, your payment to Amazon (or any other digital book company) only allows you to read a volume a certain number of times before you no longer have access to it. You’ve got to pay up again. That’s fine if it’s just another silly mystery, but I maintain a small research library that I refer to over and over again.

Now think about all this in the light of our vanishing civil liberties. Imagine a future where physical books have all but disappeared. Where people own computers that are just one step up from dumb terminals. All their personal correspondence, receipts for tax purposes, business records, and databases are kept by cloud computing companies. If the corporatocracy doesn’t want you to read a book, they don’t have to ban it or burn it—they just stop making it available on your digital reader. If they want to put you out of business or squelch your little community organizing group, they just have the cloud computing company refuse to carry you or “inadvertently” erase your data.

So be warned, dear reader. Don’t get sucked up into the world of cloud computing, even at bargain prices. If you think you might care about a book, buy the print version. Otherwise you’ll find that economists like John Maynard Keyes, historians like Howard Zinn, radicals like Emma Goldman, or even novelists like John Steinbeck—or me—have disappeared. And if you try to organize your neighbors into doing something about this “brave new world,” you’d better communicate by carrier pigeon, because if you try the phone or the computer:

Every move you make

Every step you take

They’ll be watching you.

Fun with Oranges and Arabs

The funniest story I read in the past week was the one about a massive dust storm in Arizona. The weathermen dared call it a haboob, which is an Arabic term. Some Arizona residents were outraged. One even wrote, “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?” No returning soldier has complained thus far, but perhaps they are temporarily preoccupied with other issues, such as PTSD, learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, or even finding a job in this economy.

They are bound to notice sooner or later, however. In the interests of making our troops—and civilian Islamophobes—comfortable, we probably should purge the language of Arabic influence. After all, we called sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” during World War I, and when we were miffed at France for not supporting the second Gulf War, we poured French wine down the sink and ate “freedom fries.”

Since we’re starting with food, we need to scrap marzipan and call it almond paste with sugar—uh-oh, sugar comes from Arabic, so let’s say evaporated cane juice instead. That way it even sounds healthier. Oranges are out—yes, it’s also from Arabic. I have no idea how to replace that word, or what to call the color in your child’s crayon box. And speaking of children, you’d better change the sign on your kid’s lemonade stand before you corrupt their little minds with foreign terms. Lemons, limes, and tangerines were named by Arabs.

We’ve got to rewrite our cookbooks, and get rid of artichokes, apricots, caraway seeds, saffron, sherbet, spinach, and tarragon. Hey, we didn’t like spinach anyway. It will be harder to do without coffee and alcohol.

Out of the kitchen and into the living room:  junk the divan, and stop calling that other thing a sofa. Use the word couch, even if it’s from (ugh) French. Check your closets, too. Clean out the sequins, sashes, your damask tablecloth, the gauze in the medicine cabinet, and anything made of cotton or muslin. That last word is a real no-no—it even sounds like “Muslim.”

I’m sure you know that algebra was invented by Arabs. It means “the ciphering,” but we can’t use the term cipher either. The Arabs even invented the numbering system we use, including zero. We should scrap it and return to a good old Western system. Try a problem in long division:  DLXXXIV ÷ XXXII. Oops, the result isn’t a whole number. Anybody know where to put a decimal point in Roman numerals?

The brightest stars in the sky were named by Arabs, but just because astronomers all over the world use those terms doesn’t mean Americans have to. We can auction off the naming rights to the highest bidder:  heavenly bodies such as Altair, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Fomalhaut, and Rigel (the list goes on) might come to be called Exxon, Walmart, Ford, Disney, or even—Goldman-Sachs!

On the other hand, maybe I’ll stick to haboobs.