Cody’s Books in Berkeley is closing its last store. I can’t tell you how sad that makes me and how vitally important Cody’s was to my time in Berkeley, as well as how big a drain it was on my wallet.  For three years, I lived right across the street from their flag ship store at the corner of Telegraph and Haste. I had a ritual every pay day – go get dinner, then head over to Cody’s Books and “browse”.

I put that in quotes because, even when I was struggling to pay the rent, I was always able to justify the purchase of a book or two. I positively loved Cody’s. The range of topics their bookshelves covered was amazing. When I was in my folklore phase, I found dozens of books that discussed the myths and stories from cultures I hadn’t even heard of. When I was learning to program, their computer section always had the most cutting edge stuff, keeping me just one step ahead of the curve. And their magazine racks – wow! I started reading foreign magazines because of them.

If I was in a good mood and wanted to celebrate, I went to Cody’s. If I was depressed and needed to pick myself up, I went to Cody’s. If I was lonely or pining or simply bored, I went to Cody’s. And the number of books taking up valuable space on my bookshelves and in my garage is a testament to Cody’s importance to me. I kind of wonder whether it’s a coincidence that their decline started about the time I moved from Berkeley…

I have always loved bookstores and still find myself drawn to them in times of flux. I love the idea of cracking a book and opening my mind to the store of knowledge within. When I moved to Menlo Park, I frequented Kepler’s on El Camino and Printers Inc. in Palo Alto. I’d browse the shelves and, inevitably, walk away with a new book or magazine, head on over to the cafe nearby and just let the day flow away lost in some new read. I learned Java at the cafe next to Keplers and soaked up all I could about photography at Printers Inc. (They had a second store conveniently located near Keeble and Shuchat, my favorite photography store). I have yet to find such a great store here in Concord, but whenever I go to the City to see a client, I always make a point to stop into Stacey’s Books on Market. Both Stacey’s and Kepler’s are still around, but struggling. Printers Inc. succumbed in 2001.

There’s a unique vibe to an independant bookstore that Borders and Barnes and Noble just can’t duplicate, try as they might. Borders and B&N feel like businesses; independant bookstores feel like resources. Even after I moved away from Berkeley, Cody’s was always on my itinerary when I headed back for any reason. After they closed the store on Telegraph, I stopped going – the Fourth Street store, though nice, just didn’t have the same feel.

It’s easy to mourn the loss of such places, but difficult to justify keeping them alive. The loss of these bookstores is an indication of a huge shift in culture. Amazon has made it incredibly difficult to run a bookstore these days, and there does seem to be a significant decline in book readership outside the bestseller list. Cody’s had a rather quirky inventory, highlighting the kinds of books I wouldn’t necessarily find on the New York Times list but found more enjoyable. In other words, they relied on what we now call the Long Tail. As the Internet and media become more invasive, it becomes more difficult to rise above the din. There’s now so much information and so little time that filtering it all is a huge hassle. I no longer have the time to take the risk on a book that may not pan out – I don’t want to divert my precious time toward something I may not enjoy or learn from. I speak of “me” in this scenario, but I feel this is becoming the prevailing attitude. As a result, we rely more and more on filters – recommendations made by those we trust. The popularity of the Oprah Book Club is an indicator of this, as is the bump given to books featured on The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. When I walk into a book store these days, I want to find the books that came recommended to me by someone else because they are no longer an unknown quantity – someone I trust and like has already given it their approval, so it must be worth my time.

I’m rather ashamed to admit all that, but it’s the truth. And I believe this is what is killing the independant bookstore. Cody’s, Stacey’s and the others thrive on those who come in, browse for a book and walk out with a new discovery. They tend to be more expensive and a little less convenient than the big book stores, and certainly less convenient than Amazon. When time is short and books are commoditized the way they have become, it makes more sense to drive to my nearest big name bookstore and pick up a copy for 20% off the list price (or buy it at Costco) than comb through the racks at the local independant, who will sell it to me at the list price. Or, better yet, buy it online for 30% off and have it shipped straight to my door – after all, I already know what I want, so why bother driving all the way to the bookstore?

There’s no question in my mind that we’re losing something here, and I’m certainly one of the folks wringing my hands about it. But there’s still opportunity for those independants. Were I Cody’s, I’d compete with Amazon right where they live – online. I’d turn all of my focus on providing the same level of service and community found in the brick and mortar store by building a community of booklovers online. I’d focus on selling books I know my customers will love and allow them to make suggestions to one another to highlight books overlooked by Oprah, Stewart and Colbert. It would be a purely niche play, an online bookstore for book lovers. It wouldn’t make anyone wealthy, but it would satisfy those who are seeking solace from the big box, commoditization of the wealth of human knowledge. Powell’s Books has been doing this for years with great success.

So, yes, I’m saddened by the loss of these great bookstores. But there’s still hope and opportunity, and I am excited to see what comes next.

I just posted the following on the recent Fark Thread regarding offshore drilling:

I’ve completely drank the algal fuel Kool-Aid (Mmmm… green and slimey…)

If companies like GreenFuel (new window), Sapphire (new window) and others get the technology worked out, not only will we have huge supplies of biofuels that do not require us to compromise world food production, we may not even have to replace our current oil infrastructure to do it! Sapphire, for example, claims to have created a “green crude” that can be converted to gasoline that is almost chemically identical to current unleaded gasoline. If that actually pans out, no one would have to replace their engines, gas stations would not have to retrofit anything and we could completely ween ourselves from foreign oil with very little compromise.

Algae is, at worst, carbon neutral – the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by burning fuel produced from it is taken back up by the algae in production. “Bioreactors” containing algae connected to the exhausts of many industrial plants – including breweries! – can absorb as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide those plants produce. That algae can then be turned around and used to create fuel. Agricultural runoff – nitrogen heavy from the use of artificial fertilizers and considered the cause of the huge “Dead Zones” (“Dead” because the algae there has so bloomed as to knock out all other competing life) – can be fed through an algal farm where it can be cleaned and put to good use creating – yes! – more algae for fuel production.

Right now, the technology is expensive and some estimates have it at approximately $5-$6/ gallon of gas. With my local station charging $4.30 per gallon, this really doesn’t sound unreasonable to me, especially since it will reduce the price of food crops and potentially reduce my tax burden as our country finds fewer reasons to charge into war. In time, the technology will drop in price, competition will emerge (face it – drilling encourages monopolies) and that will all be reflected in a drop in the price to consumers. More jobs will be created, improving our economy, and the US could regain its reputation as a technical powerhouse.

Third world countries will experience a new industrial revolution, and the prices of our manufactured goods will no doubt drop as well while improving life for those in such countries. The biofuels and wastes produced using algae can also be applied to plastics and other petroleum-based products. Whatever is left over at the end of the process can be used as fertilizer.

Though the potential of algae as fuel has been known for years (the Carter administration researched it in 1978 and concluded algae could produce 10 – 100 times more biofuels than just about any other crop researched, including corn, soybeans and switchgrass) the technology is still young. GreenFuel, a creator of bioreactors, recently had a success-failure in the Arizona desert. Their setup there produced far more algae than expected, more than they could process. It also turns out their method of collection was twice as expensive as expected. All told, these are relatively minor problems than can be ironed out.

Most estimates have the viability of algal fuels at roughly 5-10 years. Most research and work is being done by privately held companies funded by venture capital – very few of your tax dollars are going in to research this. While I think tax stimulus packages for this kind of research will help further it along faster, it looks to me like government intervention in this area is, at this point, moot.

With all the gloom and doom going on these days with global climate change, peak oil, food price increases, etc., the promise of algal fuel is the only thing I can really find myself getting excited about. I have yet to hear any criticisms against it that I don’t think will be mitigated over time. By the time these offshore drilling platforms being proposed start producing, we may very well be in a position to not even need them. More drilling is simply the wrong solution.

The number I assigned is entirely arbitrary – it’s actually higher up on the list – but I haven’t actually sat down and enumerated my list of fears quite yet, so we’ll just have to guess.

By the time my son is 13 years old, I anticipate all phones to have a user interface similar to that of the iPhone. Web 3.0 (ubiquity) will already be on the way out in favor of whatever the hell Web 4.0 will be (telepathy?) and the speed of the networks that carry it will be at an all time high. The promise of convergence will be absolutely delivered and we’ll all have one little device that will be easy to use, easy to carry and, thanks to its fold out screen, easy to read. It will be a personal computer, media center and communications device all wrapped up into one. With it will come the delivery of another promise made decades ago – live, hand-held video conferencing. Like text messaging, this will be something the older generation rarely uses but that my kids will immediately glom onto.

And that’s where my fear comes in. I got to thinking about this all the other day when I was daydreaming about the joys and pains of being the father of a boy. How will I handle it when he first falls in love? How cool will I be if it turns out to be with another boy? What about the traditional heterosexual male things, like little league and such? Then I got to thinking about how I’d handle certain situations, like how cool will I be when I stumble on the stack of Playboys he hides under his bed?

But, wait a minute – I’m pretty sure I can say with certainty that this will never be an issue. My son will never read Playboy Magazine. Not because I’ve instilled in him some anti-porn lame-ass “objectification of women” argument (it’s called biological imperative, and women obsess over the same sexual things when you let them) but because Playboy Magazine, assuming it even exists in paper form in 13 years, will be far more difficult to get a hold of than any number of the porn websites already on the Internet. And, with the introduction of faster networks and better interfaces, I won’t be able to monitor his Internet use by keeping the family desktop in the living room. No, he’ll have everything he needs right in his pocket (think longer on that to get the joke).

I don’t think exposure to porn is in itself a bad thing for young folks, but I do think porn is bad for anyone when taken out of context. And what is the context? Porn exists to entertain and stimulate its viewers sexually. Sometimes it literally ends there. Some use it to enhance their own sexual relationships, to learn something new (seriously – sex education in this country is so crappy that hardcore porn is actually educational to some degree) or to explore their own fantasies in a safe, non-committal, non-threatening way.

Simply exposing a child to porn does not screw them up. It raises questions most parents would rather not address and it does force us to think of our children as potentially sexual beings, which taps in to all kinds of societal taboos that it’s easier to ignore rather than confront. Children are often exposed to adult materials for a number of reasons, but most of the time it’s passed from child to child. Think about this for a second – when were you first exposed to your first Playboy and saw it as something lascivious? I stumbled upon my father’s collection as a very young child and really thought nothing of it at first. It wasn’t until an older cousin also stumbled on it and wanted to share his findings that I got any sense of its real “naughtiness”. And where did he learn it? Well, he had an older brother who, no doubt, had either another family member or kid at school first show him some pictures and teach him about their prurience. It becomes learned behavior – “Oooo… look at the naked woman. She’s hot!” At seven years old I had no idea what “hot” even meant, but I certainly repeated it when I was subsequently shown such images by the kids at school.

My parents knew nothing about any of this and, unless they’re reading this, will never know. I was exposed to quite a bit of adult material as a child despite my parents’ best efforts. It had nothing to do with them and everything to do with the otherwise innocent seeming kids I saw at school or played with in the neighborhood every day. It didn’t turn me into a bad person, though it may have messed up my sense of beauty for a while. There is a good argument in there about adult materials creating an unrealistic expectation of beauty for impressionable individuals. I was fortunate, though, to have people in my life who consistently worked, whether intentionally or not, to break me of those expectations.

So what does any of this have to do with my son? When adult materials are so easy to acquire that I can view them at my leisure in a public setting while riding BART with a reasonable assurance that no one is really able to see what I’m looking at, I know they’ve become too easy for anyone to acquire. It concerns me that my son will be born into a world where his consumption of information – not just porn but ANYTHING, including political information, science facts, religion, etc. – will be so great, pretty much from birth, that my wife and I will have little ability to filter and control it. Sure, at first we can, but the second we unleash this kid onto the world, he’ll be inundated with so much data that intelligently sifting through it will become a huge challenge. The best I can hope for is to spend those formative years preparing him for that onslaught by focusing on critical thinking skills at as early an age as possible.

And this is probably going to require a younger than normal education on human sexuality. Not so much getting into the nitty gritty details, but trying to help him understand the idea of boundaries, respect and knowing the difference between reality and fantasy in a world where those lines keep blurring.

My associated fear is that of learning how to properly socialize. Once we have these devices in our pockets that have non-stop, high-level access to the Internet and real-time video, sound and photo sharing, we’ll see tons of new artistic and entertainment endeavors. On the seedier side of these will be on-call, one-on-one “private dances” with women who would be able to accept a credit card through a secure transaction, then set up their device to capture them on video providing instant adult entertainment to the person doing the purchasing. Now, in such a scenario, I think a young child would be hard pressed to talk a grown woman into doing this, even for money. Looking at someone on a live video feed, combined with a credit card in their name, is a reasonably secure version of age verification. That doesn’t concern me. MySpace concerns me.

Who knows what MySpace will be like 13 years from now, again, assuming it still exists. But the current crop of MySpace faux pas, where young women share nude or scantily clad, sexually charged images of themselves with various “friends” then find them “accidentally” spread around the public Internet, clearly demonstrates for me how young people with little impulse control, who are exploring their “adultness” in the only visible ways they know how, can really screw things up for themselves. So what happens when you take away the time necessary to upload such material to the Internet? Any chance of rethinking things goes right out the window. Not that these devices won’t have some kind of built-in recorder so that you can play such videos back whenever you want or even share them and spread them around.

It’s one thing to try to explain sex and adult materials to a kid who stumbles across them or has a friend show them to him. It’s another thing entirely when it’s one of his friends who is the star of this particular piece of material. And, while I can go all Gestapo and look through his phone each night, that creates an atmosphere of distrust and doesn’t actually keep him from gaining access to such materials – he’ll probably wind up so tech savvy that he’ll be able to delete all traces of such activities before I even get a chance to look.

My even greater concern is that all of his social interactions will take place on this device. When gamer kids say they’re going to hang out with their friends, that often means sitting in front of the computer in their room and playing World of Warcraft with them. This is fine as one kind of social interaction, but it is no substitute for getting out of the house, meeting face to face and exploring the real world together. Hunting wombats in Azeroth (can you tell I don’t play WOW?) is fun, but so is hunting for frogs at the local creek, one of the many ways I spent my idyllic Orange County summers. And, yeah, I also spent many an afternoon playing Sega with my best friend Bill, which also did no harm. It’s not about outside vs. inside or reality vs. computer, but about having different experiences that each build up the kinds of skills we need to get by in the world. Socializing online is wholly different than socializing in person, even if they do share some of the same components. I hope I can raise my child to understand this and teach him how to use technology as a tool for creating relationships that exist both online and off.

As with all parenting issues, I can only do my best. As I said, I think my best line of attack is to concentrate on giving my son the critical thinking skills he’ll need to navigate this new world. He’ll see naked boobs as a teenager, this I can’t avoid and I certainly wouldn’t want to keep him from that. That first exposure to the forbidden world of adult sexuality is a hallmark moment of growing up. I suppose I could just out and out expose him to it and completely control that first experience, but that’s not only creepy, it robs him of a sense of secrecy and surprise that I think carries forward when he’s old enough and ready for a mature relationship that actually adds to its excitement. But I hope he’s not overexposed too quickly and, if so, he has the mental and emotional tools necessary to soak it in and not muck around too much with his sense of values. One could make the argument that I simply not expose him to this magical device I keep referring to until he’s much older. I think that’s the same as saying we should just become Amish and shun technology. It’s more or less unavoidable – if his friends get one, he’ll eventually need to have one as well or he’ll be as out of the social loop as those few folks left who don’t have consistent Internet access. It’s a competitive advantage. Having such a device is ultimately a good thing – it’s a window into the whole of human knowledge right in your pocket. But, without the tools to be able to process that knowledge, both good and bad can come of it. I just pray I’m prepared.