Miscellany
Automation
I was standing near the driver in my bus yesterday, waiting for the light to change so I could get off. When the light turned green, but the car in front of us didn’t move, the driver beeped his horn. I said, “People need to get off their phones,” which earned a laugh from the driver. Then he added something I hadn't recognized about the situation: “Uber drivers are the worst. I thought taxi drivers were bad . . .” I almost quipped something about how automation will soon take care of that, but then thought better of it. Will we lose our bus drivers too?
Today there was this piece on NPR, “As Automation Eliminates Jobs, Tech Entrepreneurs Join Basic Income Movement,” which asks,
When we talk about the economy, we spend a lot of time talking about jobs—how to create more of them and how to replace the ones being lost. But what if we're entering an automated future where there won't be enough jobs for the people who need them?
This is an interesting, if not entirely new question, but also something of a gut punch when I think of all the ordinary human interactions I have in a day. On the other hand, it's possible that the Silicon Valley crowd is informed by more than a little hubris and so can't imagine all the areas of life that cannot—or should not—be automated.
Work Update
Although this blog would seem to indicate otherwise, I am still alive. Here's what I've been up to besides my usual not-blogging:
Archive Seminar
Someone else will be doing the GHI's archive seminar next year. Part of me wishes I was still doing it, because I enjoy working with the students, and I was looking forward to rethinking part of the program. At the same time, I need all the time I can get at the GHI for editing at the moment.
Editing
I'm finishing up the editing for a translated monograph by Annelie Ramsbrock called The Science of Beauty: Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750-1930. It has been a challenge in terms of making the translation more accurate and readable, while at the same time working to keep my inner control freak in check.
Research
I have been revisiting my Groener project, but most of my reading is on gender and war in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Europe as part of a handbook project. I'm enjoying this work, and I'm managing to do it because I'm not teaching this semester—probably not next semester either.
German Handwriting from 98 Years Ago
This evening I pulled out old handwritten sources from 1914 to reexamine some quotes, because I wanted to use them in a different way than I did in my dissertation. To my initial consternation, I found them hard to read. (That's what I get for letting so much time pass without reading that old handwriting.) Fortunately, there are so-called Deutsche Fibel around that children used to learn this handwriting back in the day. I've got a couple of these books that I used to teach myself well over a decade ago, so I pulled one of those out to review.
If you want to learn or practice yourself, I scanned one of these schoolbooks a couple years ago, and someone put a copy on the Internet Archive: A. F. Lorenzen, Deutsche Fibel (Columbus, OH: Lutherische Verlagshandlung, 1901).
Working through More Journals
I've been working through more journals, putting interesting articles and reviews in my bibliography database and reading the things. It might be faster just to search databases for what I'm interested in, which I also have to do, of course, but browsing many issues of a journal offers a helpful overview of what's going on in the scholarship more broadly. I still have to pick and choose from the huge mass of offerings, but at least this way I see things that I likely never would have looked for otherwise.
I'm doing most of my data entry and sorting on my iMac with Bookends from Sonny Software, and I'm reading and reviewing on my iPad though the new Bookends on Tap, which syncs with the Mac nicely. And I've got the Mac database on Dropbox, in case I need to add or reference something from the office.
One valuable benefit of otherwise rather poorly paid adjunct teaching is the access I get to periodical literature online through the university library that is not available through my institute. But I'm finding that I'll still need to visit Lauinger Library at Georgetown for some things, too. Fortunately, that's only a thirty-minute walk from here, half of that through the woods, which can do this sedentary body good.
Still Reading the Dissertation
I am continuing to reread and ponder the dissertation. After getting over its many weaknesses, I see there is lots of good stuff in it, even if it is clearly in no way close to a book (following William Germano). There's also no easy way to extract articles from it. These will have to be conceived and written from scratch, although the dissertation contains plenty of useful building blocks for essays on Groener and the Schlieffen Plan debate, military culture and the General Staff, images of officering and professionalism, and so on. First, however, I have to consider the extent to which I should make general arguments based on Groener versus offer work that focuses more narrowly on him, albeit to foster further work for broader conclusions.
Walking
One small milestone: I told myself I should start walking to my current job in Arlington, and I actually did it today. I walked about a half hour downhill to Key Bridge in Georgetown. Then there was the trip up a hill in Arlington on the other side of the river. The walk in this direction was only 47 minutes, but coming back was closer to an hour, because I took a detour across Georgetown University’s campus, mistakenly believing it was a shortcut. Getting to Arlington with public transport involves two to three busses, depending on my route, so the walk didn’t cost me much extra time. Sure, I couldn’t read the newspaper, but thinking and exercising are more important anyway. Besides, it’s spring.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
My wife has had a handful of volumes from Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful private detective series set in Botswana. I had long wanted to get going on them, but she had loaned out the first volume and we don’t know who has it. Last week I was pleased to find a copy of the first volume in our laundry room, where people in my building sometimes deposit unwanted books. I am so glad I began reading it. I was hoping for detective stories with a harder edge, but that didn’t happen. Instead I got something better. The main character, Mma Precious Ramotswe, “a traditionally built woman,” is the most likeable character I’ve encountered in years. She’s a real woman with real problems, but with rare strength and courage, as well as a fine zest for life. This sounds like a cliche, but I am loathe to go into details for fear of spoiling plots. You can find out more on the author’s website, if you want.
I am almost done with the fourth. Now I have to take a break again, because we’re missing the fifth and sixth, and I don’t want to go straight to the seventh, which we have. Apparently there’s an eighth out now too.
By the way, I enjoy reading mysteries not just for the mystery, but for the milieu they usually reveal to me. Indeed, these books would have been a disappointment if mystery was all I had wanted. The stories are all about the characters and their world in Botswana. Along the way Mma Ramotswe and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, deal with a variety of cases and moral questions.
Nonsmoking Workers Fired in Germany?
There’s a strange story going around that in northern Germany the boss of a computer company fired employees who had requested a non-smoking workspace. To avoid such complaints in future, he has vowed only to hire smoking employees. Other sources say the three employees were fired for other reasons. And then there’s a commenter for the story who says he made it all up. Wherever the truth might lie, the story’s resonance (evidenced by the accompanying comments as well as those on another site that picked it up) points to an interesting circumstance: non-smokers in Germany are increasingly willing to stand up for their right to clean air, and smokers have to defend their supposed right to smoke. This situation is the opposite of what I experienced in the previous two decades. The balance is tipping.