| Thursday,
November 21, 2002 I am writing up my COMDEX report which
will be on the BYTE site. Mark Eppley held a party entitled "The End
of COMDEX as we know it," and that was a common sentiment: this was
the last one of this kind.
The rumor remains that Sheldon Adelson will buy it back, restructure it
starting with a smaller event in the Sands, and build it back to its
former glory.
Another possibility is that CES will eat COMDEX's lunch and COMDEX will
vanish. Another is that CEBIT will buy COMDEX. We will see....
I have lots of pictures which I'll send to BYTE and later will do a
page of them here. And I'll have up more puppy pictures. Right now I am
coming up for air...
=====
I have in the past day or so wasted some of my time with a Velikovsky
enthusiast who pretended to be a reasonable person; I should know better.
And when I said I no longer recalled all the details of Velikovsky's
hypotheses because they were wrong, he leaped, of course.
"Are you unaware of how ridiculous that sounds? You don't know
what someone's argument is because it's wrong?" The note of triumph
runs through his letter.
But there's an illustrative point here: some of you may be young enough
to remember everything you ever knew. I assure you that won't last. There
will come a time when you will recall conclusions you reached without
being able to reconstruct the arguments that led to them, or even recall
the data on which they were based. If this happens in your principal
field of work it could be embarrassing, but if it's in something
peripheral like Bronze Age Chronology and the work of Lord and Lady Hankey
on Cretan pottery -- I spent a delightful afternoon at Villa Ariadne with
Lady Vronwy Hankey back in the 70's, and she was kind enough to go over
much of the material; later that month I spent a week with Marinatos at
Akrotira where he had dug up a city.
(Aside: Lady Hankey and Dr. Marinatos were rivals; when I told her I
was about to visit Spyridon Marinatos at his newly discovered palace, she
said "He hasn't got a palace!" Which was at that time
technically correct, but the enthusiasm with which she said it was
instructive: after all, she and her husband had inheritated The Palace of
Minos, and that certainly was a palace....)
But I sure don't recall all the details of why I concluded that
Velikovsky's imaginative reconstruction of the Bronze Age was incorrect,
and I sure don't recall or wish to recall all the details of his wrong
theories. Why should I? I have trouble enough remembering things that are
right. But at one time I knew enough to familiarize myself with the
details. If I cared enough I could tool up to learn it all again, but why
should I? I won't change my conclusions, and if someone doesn't want to
take my word for it, he's welcome to go dig up the details himself. But
there are many who think it intellectually respectable to demand that
someone else do all their research for them.
And of course the burden of proof is always on those who challenge
accepted theories to begin with: my correspondent, like most of those who
rush to the defense of the unorthodox, demands that we refute the
unorthodox theory, generally on its own terms and from inside it...
This chap wanted me to do all that RIGHT NOW, even in the middle of
COMDEX, as if I had some obligation to him: after all, had I not offered
him the opinion that Velikovsky was wrong? How dare I do that and not
prove it? And do that NOW!
That led to this exchange:
Me (in some exasperation) > Why you have decided to be rude to me
after I took the trouble to answer as > best I could given that I have
more to do than I can accomplish, I do not > know, but I see no point
in continuing a trivial correspondence that > consists largely of your
demanding things of me while contributing nothing > whatever.
To which Mr. M replied
"Sorry. I've long held the belief that if a person takes the time
to refute the work of another that he will likewise take the time to show
why he is right and another is wrong, as opposed to indulging in exercises
in tautology. If that makes me appear rude, I apologize."
Ah well.
The moral of this story is that sometimes I forget I am no longer a
professor. I need to remember that every correspondent, even those who can
write decent sentences, is not my student entitled to my time. Some people
ought to be dismissed out of hand.
Sable is growing and getting more civilized. She likes to sleep under
my desk when I work at night. Every now and again she'll open an eye and
see I am still here and go back to sleep. Just now she's clearly dreaming
of chasing something.
And I still haven't written my COMDEX report, and I am supposed to do
an introduction to John Dvorak's latest book; that ought to be fun.
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