16 March 2007
Nod and a Wink
They say that cats and women will do what they want, and men and dogs should just get used to it.
I think that is an outrageous oversimplification, which reinforce outmoded stereotypes. Both felines and females are simply operating in accordance with the principles of the natural world, but on frequencies that are higher up on the spectrum, and hence not detectable by the coarser senses of men and dogs. They operate on the weather band, which is sufficient to detect the falling of the rain, and convey the notion that they should get in out of it.
I am, by nature, quite capable of determining whether it is raining or not, but had to trade dryness for ambient noise. I was on the phone with a media outlet in the Midwest , in front of the Shirlington outlet of the Capital City Brewery. The Third Thursday Group meets with no particular urgency on that day, at a not particularly inconvenient location with parking that is not impossible.
The beer is good and cool, brewed in tall stainless casks behind a glass wall, and the company is convivial. There are not many of us in uniform any more, though there were a few.
The loose network is focused on a group of retired Spooks who share common interests in providing very special services to the Government, or have in fact returned to manage the enterprise itself. Everyone knows the secret handshakes, and can communicate in a variety of media, including the wink and the nod.
Shirlington is a compromise location, but a good one. It is low point on the Four Mile Run's course down to the Potomac, and once was the site of a Civil War earthen fort that was bulldozed by the Virginia Department of transportation in 1954 as part of Richmond's continuing campaign to remove the evidence of the Union occupation.
Night was falling, just like the rain. This was the front edge of a massive storm chock-filled with moisture moving north in the process of being embraced by the chilly fingers of the jet stream. The rain and the temperature were predicted to fall through the weekend. At some point things would solidify, and the snow would come down again in a moist cold blanket.
Eighty degrees the other day, and below freezing tonight. Traffic was snarled on the highway that now bisects the neighborhood, commuters bound for points far to the south.
There were important concepts that the radio host wanted to cover, and for whatever reason, he seemed to think that the location conveyed a certain authenticity. I was happy to oblige, since I know that proximity can help reception on those unique multi-path frequencies utilized by the men and women of the government.
Translating that into energy transmission was a neat trick that we take for granted. Out cell phones are actually little radios, and work sufficiently well for men and women to misunderstand one another. There are two components, of course, those being frequency and time, which can be manipulated to permit optimal use of available spectrum.
In order to spread the possibility of misunderstandings as widely as possible, the wizards of technology have sliced nature's ether in ever more efficient means. Division by frequency results in Frequency Division Multiple Access, or FDMA. Division by time results in Time Division Multiple Access, or TDMA. The preponderant technology deployed in America to permit wide-area misunderstanding utilizes Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, by using digital codes to identify connections between handsets.
The network to which I subscribe is one of those, operated by the friendly people at Verizon. I was spreading my version of reality on the 850 Mhz band in CDMA, which is useful here, but it is by no means a universal solution. I would be unable to communicate at any level of comprehension in Europe , and most of Asia, which utilize the Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM, which is a narrow-band TDMA technology. The options of using a CDMA device internationally are limited, perhaps not surprisingly, to those areas with strong relations to the United States, i.e., the Western hemisphere, Israel and South Korea .
To my knowledge there are no phones of any kind in North Korea . They were all eaten long ago.
I'd prefer to migrate to Third Generation technology, to take advantage of the higher data-rates, but as you know, both evolution and migration are topics fraught with much misunderstanding these days. Besides, my Motorola brand MPX200 slimline handset depends on a lithium ion battery, and that is the pivot point on the capability to talk to either men or women. The brochure claimed that the battery would provide over three hours of active communications on a full charge, with a standby capability of nearly three days.
That, of course, was complete nonsense. The battery is not sufficient to address the controversy over Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the nature of the Burmese Dictatorship, or the likely prospects of third-tier presidential prospects in the endless campaign for the 2008 elections.
We almost covered all three topics, and I was rising to some flash of damp insight when I noticed I was speaking only to the wet pavement. I stood there with the suddenly impotent device in my hand, nothing transmitting at all on the brought back to the concrete reality of the street and the rain and the pedestrians running by with newspapers clasped to their heads.
I felt as drained as the battery by the experience. I put the phone in my pocket and took the Bluetooth headset off my ear. Perhaps there was a synergy in the battery drain, since the handset was forced to communicate not only with the cell tower on the hill, but with my ear. The general tumult in near the bar echoed under the high industrial ceiling. It was multi-path and high in volume. The Spooks were getting a little rowdy, but seemed to be communicating well not withstanding, men and women alike.
After all, a nod is as good as a wink, sometimes. Neither require batteries or frequency, just a little time.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com