1. The current calculus curriculum I am enrolled in at the U of M is not for tech grads. It is for liberal arts students. It does not use computers or graphing calculators per the Math Department policy, which avoids discriminating against those who can't afford the $100 or so that a Computer Algebra System or HP-83 costs. (I doubt that this policy will stay in place much longer with the $100-semester CLA "technology" fee each student pays with their tuition...the irony is just too great).
2. Calculus is a spatial discipline taught with linear methods. In other words, calculus has to do with rates of change in position, area, volume, speed, etc...all things that have to do with objects that occupy space. The methods used are typically linear symbolic representations of quantities and their relationships. Current teaching methods as far as I can tell emphasize the linear symbolic manipulation as the content of the course, and treat the spatial materials as an illustration of the symbolic principles. I have stated this with prejudice, obviously. (I am using linear in the sense of language skill and sequential processing, not linear algebra.)
3. I am not aware of too many efforts to teach the spatial math subjects with intrinsicly spatial methods. I have a box called the Math Kit that I bought for my son in the early 90's. It has pop-ups and paper engineering devices designed to teach several math concepts physically and spatially, including derivatives and integration. In the late 1960's two professors at the University of Leeds created an interactive computer station that represented work optimization problems as spatial puzzles. In other words, the subject had to arrange colored blocks in an efficient pattern: the blocks represented work crews, job sites, deadlines, and material availability.
Experienced supervisors in the construction field, foremen, laborers, University instructors and students, random townspeople and a few children were the subjects of the experiment. The experienced supervisors did the worst, while the best optimization was performed by an 11 year old girl who simply played with the visual patterns. Apparently the supervisors were inhibited and confused by the representation of a task they already understood in different terms, while the 11 year old girl had the greatest freedom to just deal with the spatial play, color coded objects, and dependencies (rules). The girl was "doing" calculus. Could she have extracted the second derivative of a function in order to establish the unique solution of the absolute minimum value in the function range? Of course not. Could she use her ability in other problem sets? Of course she could. Should 11 year old girls be scheduling work crews for construction companies? No, but they could certainly be showing us something about learning calculus.
The advent of the internet and Java applets should be putting a lot of demonstration programs into the hands of interested students and amateurs. But a Computer Algebra System is not easy to program or learn. You can watch simple illustrations of tangents and other trig and algebra functions if you search hard enough, but there isn't a coherent system available that would work as well for the 11 year old girl and the 40 year old construction contractor and everyone in between. Mathematica and MathLab sure won't do it.
4. Does calculus have to be so hard?
This problem is actually several problems. I will break them down:
a. The University certifies competence. That is its primary product. If it allows the product to be compromised, it goes out of business. It might take 100 years, and it might be happening now, but it is not okay. In order to keep its cred as an institution, the U must make calculus as hard as their competition does. This is a primary concern for the curriculum committees: they don't want to be perceived as shoddy or soft. The up side of this is a pride in craft: if the U said you passed their calculus curriculum, then it means something. The down side of this is a huge inertia. No one wants to both do the work of rethinking existing methods AND take the risk of being seen as shoddy or soft. Bottom line-- it is going to be a long, hard process for the U to insitute meaningful change in its calculus curriclum, absent a real champion with the reckless need to provoke change.
b. Calculus straddles the border between linear, symbolic language and spatial operation. The beauty of this is that it requires, and rewards, a high degree of integration of right and left brain skills. Calculus is one form of math that should be at least as attractive to women as to men. The sad fact is that most of the calculus course is taken up with Algebra -- simplificatons, factoring, etc, and they are pretty much hard core left brain materials, the kind of stuff that inspires the term "math anxiety." The emphasis on algebra could be reduced without compromising the mastery of calculus. Conversely, the algebra skills could be taught with more of a coaching/mastery emphasis, as performance. Just watch "Stand and Deliver" to see what that would look like. Edward James Olmos teaches pre-calculus and calculus to a class of poor kids. The results are amazing. But the process sure doesn't look like a contemporary math class in the U of M. Olmos works like a baseball coach, identifying weaknesses in each players grasp of the fundamentals, then drilling them until they are rock solid.
I guess that in a typical math class, the teacher lectures to the confident upper 30% of the class, and lets the others try to keep up as best they can. The physical drop-out rate in my class is alarming. There were over 40 students at the beginning, and it seems that fewer than 20 come on a regular basis. You couldn't run a business or a ball team with that kind of attrition. The emotional and intellectual drop-out rate is even more disturbing to me. The kids who don't come back will never touch the subject again. The ones who stick it out doggedly and still get a D or F are even worse off...their entire outlook on themselves and their interest in learning is scarred. For what? Who picks up the tab for this casual waste of human resources? In this case, Calculus is hard, not because it is intrinsically hard, but because the politics of the classroom make it hard, and reward the proficient while punishing the student who struggles.
c. Finally, how hard is calculus, really? By using spatial methods, you can teach fifth graders the entire canon of basic principles in three months. I would bet my job on it. Then you can ground them in the basics. You can make them proficient in the underlying trig and algebra in two years. Bet my job on it. I think you could have a curriculum with the right tools and teaching methods that could crank out proficient calculus practitioners with the requisite trig, algebra, geometry by 11th grade with no problem. These should be required of all graduates, with different levels of complexity available. Every high school graduate in the country should be able to follow the basic science in a discussion of the Challenger disaster failure, or follow the basic financial models in a discussion of impact of development on a city tax base using different approaches to wetland conservancy.
If this sounds crazy now, read it again in fifty years.
9.11.04
3.11.04
Do not attempt to adjust your picture....
We have taken control of your televisions. We have taken control of your phones. We have taken control of your tooth-whitening strips, your tampons and car auto-start devices. We have taken control of your headlines, your anxieties, your impressions of your fellow men.
We have taken control.
We have banged your head against the brick wall of our promises. We have taken you to the woodshed of our beliefs, and your backside is reddened with our wisdom.
We have taken control of your peripheral vision, of your eyeglass styles, of the pigment in your skin. We have taken control of your parents moods before you were born, and the shape of the galaxies that wheel in the void of your death.
We have you by the short hairs. We have your short hairs over a barrel.
You have become the skirt that hides our eden. You have become our discarded seed, our lapsed subscription to the Geneva Accords.
You have become the last sounding note in our dirge of freedom.
We are the voters.
You are the vote.
Do not attempt to adjust your picture. We are the subject, you are the object. We have bought up all the verbs, even the ones named after the honored members of your family, and we sell them back to you at a profit. We are the sentence in which your fate is pronounced, and we are the lips that pronounce the sentence.
We have taken control of your interface. We have taken control.
Do not attempt.
Do not.
We have taken control.
We have banged your head against the brick wall of our promises. We have taken you to the woodshed of our beliefs, and your backside is reddened with our wisdom.
We have taken control of your peripheral vision, of your eyeglass styles, of the pigment in your skin. We have taken control of your parents moods before you were born, and the shape of the galaxies that wheel in the void of your death.
We have you by the short hairs. We have your short hairs over a barrel.
You have become the skirt that hides our eden. You have become our discarded seed, our lapsed subscription to the Geneva Accords.
You have become the last sounding note in our dirge of freedom.
We are the voters.
You are the vote.
Do not attempt to adjust your picture. We are the subject, you are the object. We have bought up all the verbs, even the ones named after the honored members of your family, and we sell them back to you at a profit. We are the sentence in which your fate is pronounced, and we are the lips that pronounce the sentence.
We have taken control of your interface. We have taken control.
Do not attempt.
Do not.
28.10.04
The Big Deal Zeitguy Election Prediction
Kerry will win by under 5 points. The election will be contested for two months. It won't have to go to the supreme court, but will be settled in a surprise ruling from the Federal District Court with authority over Wisconsin. The Republicans, shamed by news of their efforts to simply throw a monkey wrench into the election, will choose not to contest the outcome. Bush will disappear for a few months, then will come back into national attention in the Summer of 2005 when he serves as an informal diplomat with the Asian bloc for Kerry.
Kerry's first crisis will be a domestic problem with a major Southeast city on the verge of bankruptcy erupting in riots over housing. His adroit use of the National Guard will earn him some credibility with the disaffected right. Unemployment will continue to go up, and the first signs of a major scandal in the housing finance market will keep tensions high.
Iraq will not be the big issue everyone expects. Problems with Afghanistan and increased Palestenian problems will send Iraq into the background while Kerry tries to draw down the American presence there, and build up allies support. It will be discovered that the resistance in Iraq is coordinated through a tough, deep network of entrenched Baathists who actually had a plan for the eventuality of Hussein's capture and an American occupancy. By the end of the year, there will be a series of meetings between the Baathists and the occupiers, with a drift toward revising the history of the Baath party to make it possible for them to come back into power, sans Hussein.
A family or health crisis for Kerry in late Summer will bring Edwards into the national spotlight. Cheney's memoirs, published in late Fall, cause a sensation. Bush continues to stay in the limelight. Laura Bush starts a cable television show of her own, produced by Oprah Winfrey. It will be dedicated to the plight of American teachers, and will feature exceptional teachers, support for dynamic policy development, and lots of feel good clips about individuals who make a difference in catastrophic school systems.
Kerry's first crisis will be a domestic problem with a major Southeast city on the verge of bankruptcy erupting in riots over housing. His adroit use of the National Guard will earn him some credibility with the disaffected right. Unemployment will continue to go up, and the first signs of a major scandal in the housing finance market will keep tensions high.
Iraq will not be the big issue everyone expects. Problems with Afghanistan and increased Palestenian problems will send Iraq into the background while Kerry tries to draw down the American presence there, and build up allies support. It will be discovered that the resistance in Iraq is coordinated through a tough, deep network of entrenched Baathists who actually had a plan for the eventuality of Hussein's capture and an American occupancy. By the end of the year, there will be a series of meetings between the Baathists and the occupiers, with a drift toward revising the history of the Baath party to make it possible for them to come back into power, sans Hussein.
A family or health crisis for Kerry in late Summer will bring Edwards into the national spotlight. Cheney's memoirs, published in late Fall, cause a sensation. Bush continues to stay in the limelight. Laura Bush starts a cable television show of her own, produced by Oprah Winfrey. It will be dedicated to the plight of American teachers, and will feature exceptional teachers, support for dynamic policy development, and lots of feel good clips about individuals who make a difference in catastrophic school systems.
14.10.04
Why all math teachers are French.
Well, they aren't. But the French have a reputation for being snobs, and it is said that they have little patience for outsiders speaking their language badly.
So there is a parallel. Most math students learn to expect a certain degree of impatience from even the most jovial of math teachers. And within the ranks of mathematicians, there seems to be a fierce pecking order that rewards the highest achievements, such as the Field Medal, with fawning obsequity, while bumbling performance in, say, factoring a third-order equation would insure scorn for the hapless exponent-juggler.
I am finally okay with this stratification after most of a life spent in envy of math. I didn't get any good math as a kid. But I wanted it. I would press my face against the glass store front of trigonometry and look at the shiny sines and cosines inside the way other kids hungered after candy or toys.
Now that I have decided to learn Calculus at the ripe old age of 56, however, I have made some observations about the teaching of this subject in college that I am forced, by my conscience and modesty, to share with everyone.
I am on the other end of the stick, as it were, struggling through some marvelously bad teaching in Calculus. The weird thing is that the teacher is "good" in almost every respect. He has a sense of humor and self deprecation, and when he is on, he is extremely fluent in the dialect of math called Calculus, without being overbearing.
The problem, I believe, is structural. Teaching calculus in American Universities is a culture that we inherit partly from the European model and partly from the United States home-grown methods devised to ramp up to a war in the last century. There is an odd mix of Imperial theory and Royal protocols associated with an equally rough and ready, rolled-up sleeves practicum which knocks the dainty and the insecure on their ass. I find it a particularly ugly hybrid. The upshot of the mass of skills and information they try to cram into short, crowded class sessions is too much emphasis on the student teaching themself in lengthy, arduous homework sessions. To further muddle the mix, the instructor doesn't establish any real working relationship with the class. You get a perfunctory "Well, any questions?" tossed to the glaze-eyed cohort before he proceeds to erase the brambles of equations and start a new forced march into Symbolville.
Then the test is administered, and it is sadistic. Instead of providing a foundation set of questions to assess the student's basic grasp of the main principles, every single one of the questions pivots on extremely difficult, obscure, multiple encrustrations of operators operating on operators with similar but different effects. In a class of 30,3 people finished half an hour before the 2 hour session was up, and over half were still writing and erasing when the class was over.
I understand the ideas behind this kind of presentation. It seems like an efficient way to cover the sheer quantity of material that needs to be presented. In the whole semester we barely cover the substance of 4 chapters in a book with some 20 chapters, while touching on high points of about 3 others.
But does it really cover the material? And is there really that much material?
It doesn't "cover the material" if 80% of the class gets 70% or less of the material, with 30% of the class getting 40% or less of the material. Only one or two individuals achieve true mastery, and they usually come into this with some background or skills lacking in the other students, something like a parent who teaches or practices in the field, or a great high school experience.
In the military, this might be okay, with each class only needing to provide the engineers with a few highly competent individuals while the rest are diverted into more maintenance and support roles.
If I was a business owner paying to have my staff skills upgraded, I would fire the company that used this teaching method and sue them for fraud.
There is no reason that 100% of the students can't master 100% of the fundamentals, and 100% of the main ideas in the subject.
It would require a major overhaul of the class structure, but it could be done with the available personel and scheduling.
My proposal is as follows:
The first two weeks is exclusively devoted to assessment and drill in fundamentals. No one should go to the first rung of calculus without a complete grasp of logarithm, exponenst, functions, trigonometry, etc. Anyone who can't get up to speed in two weeks of the class should be diverted to the appropriate pre-calculus, or algebra class no matter what their transcript says.
From two weeks on, the class should be arranged so that every student has a drill partnership responsible for their mastering each theorem, law, rule, principle, basic equation, etc with flash cards. Drill partners would have the option of changing their partners the first week to accomodate major personality clashes, etc.
Every class period would have a time for drill/warm up, a time for lecture demonstration, and a time for student demonstration. The drill/warmups could be given the first 15 minutes while papers were handed out and business was taken care of by the instructor. Student demonstrations would involve rotating teams demonstrating homework problems on the board alternating with challenge questions from the instructor that were designed to stimulate, not humiliate, the students. The last half of the class could be lectures.
There should be homework which applies to the lectures done before the lecture, and turned in at the beginning of the next class period. This would make sure the questions, pace and focus of the lectures met the needs of the class, and it would ensure the class did the appropriate amount of work in a timely fashion...with the chance to correct and expand on problem areas in a non-punitive manner.
If people were unable or unwilling to perform to this degree of support, they should be excused from further involvement without penalty.
As it is, you are suckered into a semester of unknown difficulty, with all tuition due whether you drop the class or not, before the first test is given. You are dragged behind an unresponsive vehicle of instruction whose pace and capacity is set by the curriculum committee, not the actual capacity of the students themselves. And in doing this, the committees who are so absent from the classroom almost guarentee the emnity of the real students in the classroom. Or a substantial fraction of the them.
My plan elimnates some of the logjams and disconnects between understanding, demonstration, and performance. Ultimately math, like a language, is a matter of performance, not of simple matching or recognition skills. And like language, it is best learned speaking among natives in a congenial setting, with a fair sense of cause and effect, action and consequence.
The mystique of Royal Academy snobbishness and the crude efficacy of G.I. training clash in our classrooms of higher math. In the meantime, there is a dramatic need for an informed citizenship who can tackle the increasing demands of a technical culture with some confidence and math skills.
My plan addresses this need.
Vote for me.
So there is a parallel. Most math students learn to expect a certain degree of impatience from even the most jovial of math teachers. And within the ranks of mathematicians, there seems to be a fierce pecking order that rewards the highest achievements, such as the Field Medal, with fawning obsequity, while bumbling performance in, say, factoring a third-order equation would insure scorn for the hapless exponent-juggler.
I am finally okay with this stratification after most of a life spent in envy of math. I didn't get any good math as a kid. But I wanted it. I would press my face against the glass store front of trigonometry and look at the shiny sines and cosines inside the way other kids hungered after candy or toys.
Now that I have decided to learn Calculus at the ripe old age of 56, however, I have made some observations about the teaching of this subject in college that I am forced, by my conscience and modesty, to share with everyone.
I am on the other end of the stick, as it were, struggling through some marvelously bad teaching in Calculus. The weird thing is that the teacher is "good" in almost every respect. He has a sense of humor and self deprecation, and when he is on, he is extremely fluent in the dialect of math called Calculus, without being overbearing.
The problem, I believe, is structural. Teaching calculus in American Universities is a culture that we inherit partly from the European model and partly from the United States home-grown methods devised to ramp up to a war in the last century. There is an odd mix of Imperial theory and Royal protocols associated with an equally rough and ready, rolled-up sleeves practicum which knocks the dainty and the insecure on their ass. I find it a particularly ugly hybrid. The upshot of the mass of skills and information they try to cram into short, crowded class sessions is too much emphasis on the student teaching themself in lengthy, arduous homework sessions. To further muddle the mix, the instructor doesn't establish any real working relationship with the class. You get a perfunctory "Well, any questions?" tossed to the glaze-eyed cohort before he proceeds to erase the brambles of equations and start a new forced march into Symbolville.
Then the test is administered, and it is sadistic. Instead of providing a foundation set of questions to assess the student's basic grasp of the main principles, every single one of the questions pivots on extremely difficult, obscure, multiple encrustrations of operators operating on operators with similar but different effects. In a class of 30,3 people finished half an hour before the 2 hour session was up, and over half were still writing and erasing when the class was over.
I understand the ideas behind this kind of presentation. It seems like an efficient way to cover the sheer quantity of material that needs to be presented. In the whole semester we barely cover the substance of 4 chapters in a book with some 20 chapters, while touching on high points of about 3 others.
But does it really cover the material? And is there really that much material?
It doesn't "cover the material" if 80% of the class gets 70% or less of the material, with 30% of the class getting 40% or less of the material. Only one or two individuals achieve true mastery, and they usually come into this with some background or skills lacking in the other students, something like a parent who teaches or practices in the field, or a great high school experience.
In the military, this might be okay, with each class only needing to provide the engineers with a few highly competent individuals while the rest are diverted into more maintenance and support roles.
If I was a business owner paying to have my staff skills upgraded, I would fire the company that used this teaching method and sue them for fraud.
There is no reason that 100% of the students can't master 100% of the fundamentals, and 100% of the main ideas in the subject.
It would require a major overhaul of the class structure, but it could be done with the available personel and scheduling.
My proposal is as follows:
The first two weeks is exclusively devoted to assessment and drill in fundamentals. No one should go to the first rung of calculus without a complete grasp of logarithm, exponenst, functions, trigonometry, etc. Anyone who can't get up to speed in two weeks of the class should be diverted to the appropriate pre-calculus, or algebra class no matter what their transcript says.
From two weeks on, the class should be arranged so that every student has a drill partnership responsible for their mastering each theorem, law, rule, principle, basic equation, etc with flash cards. Drill partners would have the option of changing their partners the first week to accomodate major personality clashes, etc.
Every class period would have a time for drill/warm up, a time for lecture demonstration, and a time for student demonstration. The drill/warmups could be given the first 15 minutes while papers were handed out and business was taken care of by the instructor. Student demonstrations would involve rotating teams demonstrating homework problems on the board alternating with challenge questions from the instructor that were designed to stimulate, not humiliate, the students. The last half of the class could be lectures.
There should be homework which applies to the lectures done before the lecture, and turned in at the beginning of the next class period. This would make sure the questions, pace and focus of the lectures met the needs of the class, and it would ensure the class did the appropriate amount of work in a timely fashion...with the chance to correct and expand on problem areas in a non-punitive manner.
If people were unable or unwilling to perform to this degree of support, they should be excused from further involvement without penalty.
As it is, you are suckered into a semester of unknown difficulty, with all tuition due whether you drop the class or not, before the first test is given. You are dragged behind an unresponsive vehicle of instruction whose pace and capacity is set by the curriculum committee, not the actual capacity of the students themselves. And in doing this, the committees who are so absent from the classroom almost guarentee the emnity of the real students in the classroom. Or a substantial fraction of the them.
My plan elimnates some of the logjams and disconnects between understanding, demonstration, and performance. Ultimately math, like a language, is a matter of performance, not of simple matching or recognition skills. And like language, it is best learned speaking among natives in a congenial setting, with a fair sense of cause and effect, action and consequence.
The mystique of Royal Academy snobbishness and the crude efficacy of G.I. training clash in our classrooms of higher math. In the meantime, there is a dramatic need for an informed citizenship who can tackle the increasing demands of a technical culture with some confidence and math skills.
My plan addresses this need.
Vote for me.
Last AND least: the final debate, then beyond.
Kerry and Bush almost hugged last night.
They both got laughs at their own expense in reference to the assets of their wives.
Neither one of them were capable of presenting a picture of the current state of the United States that really included the darks and lights of the moment in which we live.
Kerry seems to have given up on nailing Bush to the wall. His recitation of the facts of "95% of cargo containers coming into this country don't get inspected" etc was in fact a litany of complaints. I don't know where Bush got that line but it was uncomfortably spot on. Actually, Bush said "A plan is not a litany of complaints."
Bush started out balanced and strong. He rarely sank to his bafflegab wandering hoo-ha that has characterized key moments of every public speech in his administration. Bush was still preaching to the choir, however. He made no effort to liberalize his message in the hopes of swiping a few more undecided votes into his column. He seemed to be making an heroic effort to raise the level of discourse by referring to Kerry as "The Senator from Massachussets" instead of the "Weasel Waffle Dispensing Obsessive Spender", and Kerry only called Bush a damn liar maybe twice.
Kerry should have been a lot better about domestic issues. He couldn't paint a clear picture of what he would do, however. It seemed as though the hard jabs from the right over the last few weeks have weakened him, but it might be that he really doesn't know what he would do if he had the reins of the country. He is good at spewing out the shortcomings of the Bush administration, and they are legion, and need to be taken more seriously. But when it came to explaining what exactly he would do for the schools, the hospitals, the unemployed, nothing really stood out as a new or workable alternative.
Kerry stayed too close to his point of the 87 billion dollar tax cut to the rich, as though that in itself was a skyhook which would lift him to victory. Bush refused to be baited, and continually reassured his believers that he wasn't an idiot or bumbling moron. That is all the reassurance they need, apparently.
Bush is not a bad guy. I sensed that early on, even when I felt the outcome of the Florida debacle was a national nightmare. Kerry is probably one of the most decent and courageous men we could have for a president from among all the candidates in the last hundred years. But he seems to be missing a gear when it comes to economics. He leans too hard on the taxes, doesn't seem to really understand the national bloodbath that occured with the dotcom crisis.
Both candidates are preening in the rear view mirror. And they probably are addressing an electorate that doesn't know how to look even a few months ahead,much less several years. We don't have any voices in this country that are trying to figure out what the hell is really going on.
The wound in Iraq is festering and infecting a lot of other areas. It threatens global equilibrium. The Islamists are not going to topple the major regimes in the world, but the Muslim unrest and reaction to Iraq contibutes to the teetering of dozens of regimes, and makes it more likely that other conflicts and problems will surface more quickly. That is a major problem that neither Kerry nor Bush are dealing with.
The devastation in Florida from the hurricanes revealed the shortcomings of our national emergency relief systems, and the vulnerability of our cities and regions to sustained disruption. Instead of bringing that forward, the disasters were kept off the front page and forgotten as soon as half the insurance claims had been filed.
Homeland security has gone from a novelty to a decadent morass of political infighting without going through a mature, productive phase. It is another porkbarrel.
The school systems are collapsing. They aren't just in trouble. They are falling down and crushing people in their ruins. They will not be fixed tomorrow with a band-aid today. Bush seems to think that by cheerleading for the idea of education he is actually doing something. Kerry doesn't have any insights into the problem. The culture of teaching in our country has received blow after blow from the demands created by budget shortfalls; from laws protecting the expensive and difficult to teach; and a generally hostile and leaderless community at odds with itself along racial and gender lines.
There is no leadership in this country for education, health, the military, community infrastructures, national emergency readiness. There is no leadership in this country that can heal the street-level conflicts of diversity and poverty.
Without that leadership, we are in a pot coming to a boil. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs it.
In my last post I said elect KerryBush: the Yalie. I was slightly amused by that. Today I am not amused.
Today I respect the men who talked earnestly and at length about our country last night. They showed that they respect each other and the voters of this country. And they showed that the political leadership in this nation has reached the brink of insolvency when it comes to real ideas about what is wrong, what is right, and what to do.
Complexity is overtaking our bromides and stereotypes. The intransigence of the world itself is pulling the pulling the tablecloth out from under our meal of middle class hash.
But you know what? I am not that pessimistic. Sure, I don't think the guys running for President can deliver anything they promise. Bush won't win the war or peace in Iraq. If he is reelected, he will ride the shambles of the war to defeat in a few years, and pull all our forces out with even less grace than the retreat from Viet Nam. If Kerry wins, the inner city schools and the economy will provide their own scenario of domestic reality, a scenario with no room for Kerry's edits. If he is a quick enough study he might be able to improvise fast enough to prevent riots and insurrections, and the complete melt down of whole regions.
But I am not that pessimistic.
In the early 19th century cities around the world started to explode in slow motion from the steroid-like growth of industrialization. Manchester England ballooned from 30,000 to close to 400,000 people in 40 years. Minneapolis Minnesota grew from 17,000 to close to 300,000 people in 30 years. We can't imagine the mayhem this caused for millions of people. In 1917 the influenza epidemic wiped out over 20,000,000 people in the world. Even as I write that number I can't believe it.
Humanity has survived unbelievable disruptions of "the ordinary." Some philosophers might assert that there is no such thing as ordinary life, or ordinary people, (Judith Guest's irony noted here).
In the few weeks I have been back in school studying the subect of cities, it has finally gotten through to me that human complexity is, finally, self-healing. All the plans and promises of all the leaders in history amount to a few pages of footnotes against the massive encyclopedia of fixes and work arounds the common people of the world have devised. And often enough they have devised these fixes to fix the shambles of some leader's plan.
Humanity has shown an unlimited appetite for growth, and a rage for chaos that defeats faith and order over and over again.
Even greater than these forces, however, is the force for healing. We are born ready to be injured and recover. We are educated being wounded and insulted, but absorbing the injury. Bones knit. Skin grows back. There are scars, but there is healing. There is fear, and sometimes holes in our hearts that can never be filled again.
But we do heal. Families heal or spin off and become new and fall and get up again. Children remind us that healing is the first principle of life, not a commodity on the market of the health industry.
Today I am cut and bleed. Tomorrow I am reaching out my hand to the same knife or kitten claws that betrayed me today.
We heal. Complexity heals itself. We are complex, and there are forces at work in our society beyond the knowledge of any school or political party. There is darkness in the human day and something shines in the human night.
You may take away my freedom. You may take away my illusions. But you can't tax or imprison my ability to heal.
I respect both candidates, with a growing sense of detachment. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs the pot as it comes to a boil. I know that we are born to err, and that everyone who dies has spent more time healing than dying, more time repairing things than breaking them, more time active in hope than paralyzed in the grip of hopelessness.
Where is the party of healing? They will get my vote.
They both got laughs at their own expense in reference to the assets of their wives.
Neither one of them were capable of presenting a picture of the current state of the United States that really included the darks and lights of the moment in which we live.
Kerry seems to have given up on nailing Bush to the wall. His recitation of the facts of "95% of cargo containers coming into this country don't get inspected" etc was in fact a litany of complaints. I don't know where Bush got that line but it was uncomfortably spot on. Actually, Bush said "A plan is not a litany of complaints."
Bush started out balanced and strong. He rarely sank to his bafflegab wandering hoo-ha that has characterized key moments of every public speech in his administration. Bush was still preaching to the choir, however. He made no effort to liberalize his message in the hopes of swiping a few more undecided votes into his column. He seemed to be making an heroic effort to raise the level of discourse by referring to Kerry as "The Senator from Massachussets" instead of the "Weasel Waffle Dispensing Obsessive Spender", and Kerry only called Bush a damn liar maybe twice.
Kerry should have been a lot better about domestic issues. He couldn't paint a clear picture of what he would do, however. It seemed as though the hard jabs from the right over the last few weeks have weakened him, but it might be that he really doesn't know what he would do if he had the reins of the country. He is good at spewing out the shortcomings of the Bush administration, and they are legion, and need to be taken more seriously. But when it came to explaining what exactly he would do for the schools, the hospitals, the unemployed, nothing really stood out as a new or workable alternative.
Kerry stayed too close to his point of the 87 billion dollar tax cut to the rich, as though that in itself was a skyhook which would lift him to victory. Bush refused to be baited, and continually reassured his believers that he wasn't an idiot or bumbling moron. That is all the reassurance they need, apparently.
Bush is not a bad guy. I sensed that early on, even when I felt the outcome of the Florida debacle was a national nightmare. Kerry is probably one of the most decent and courageous men we could have for a president from among all the candidates in the last hundred years. But he seems to be missing a gear when it comes to economics. He leans too hard on the taxes, doesn't seem to really understand the national bloodbath that occured with the dotcom crisis.
Both candidates are preening in the rear view mirror. And they probably are addressing an electorate that doesn't know how to look even a few months ahead,much less several years. We don't have any voices in this country that are trying to figure out what the hell is really going on.
The wound in Iraq is festering and infecting a lot of other areas. It threatens global equilibrium. The Islamists are not going to topple the major regimes in the world, but the Muslim unrest and reaction to Iraq contibutes to the teetering of dozens of regimes, and makes it more likely that other conflicts and problems will surface more quickly. That is a major problem that neither Kerry nor Bush are dealing with.
The devastation in Florida from the hurricanes revealed the shortcomings of our national emergency relief systems, and the vulnerability of our cities and regions to sustained disruption. Instead of bringing that forward, the disasters were kept off the front page and forgotten as soon as half the insurance claims had been filed.
Homeland security has gone from a novelty to a decadent morass of political infighting without going through a mature, productive phase. It is another porkbarrel.
The school systems are collapsing. They aren't just in trouble. They are falling down and crushing people in their ruins. They will not be fixed tomorrow with a band-aid today. Bush seems to think that by cheerleading for the idea of education he is actually doing something. Kerry doesn't have any insights into the problem. The culture of teaching in our country has received blow after blow from the demands created by budget shortfalls; from laws protecting the expensive and difficult to teach; and a generally hostile and leaderless community at odds with itself along racial and gender lines.
There is no leadership in this country for education, health, the military, community infrastructures, national emergency readiness. There is no leadership in this country that can heal the street-level conflicts of diversity and poverty.
Without that leadership, we are in a pot coming to a boil. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs it.
In my last post I said elect KerryBush: the Yalie. I was slightly amused by that. Today I am not amused.
Today I respect the men who talked earnestly and at length about our country last night. They showed that they respect each other and the voters of this country. And they showed that the political leadership in this nation has reached the brink of insolvency when it comes to real ideas about what is wrong, what is right, and what to do.
Complexity is overtaking our bromides and stereotypes. The intransigence of the world itself is pulling the pulling the tablecloth out from under our meal of middle class hash.
But you know what? I am not that pessimistic. Sure, I don't think the guys running for President can deliver anything they promise. Bush won't win the war or peace in Iraq. If he is reelected, he will ride the shambles of the war to defeat in a few years, and pull all our forces out with even less grace than the retreat from Viet Nam. If Kerry wins, the inner city schools and the economy will provide their own scenario of domestic reality, a scenario with no room for Kerry's edits. If he is a quick enough study he might be able to improvise fast enough to prevent riots and insurrections, and the complete melt down of whole regions.
But I am not that pessimistic.
In the early 19th century cities around the world started to explode in slow motion from the steroid-like growth of industrialization. Manchester England ballooned from 30,000 to close to 400,000 people in 40 years. Minneapolis Minnesota grew from 17,000 to close to 300,000 people in 30 years. We can't imagine the mayhem this caused for millions of people. In 1917 the influenza epidemic wiped out over 20,000,000 people in the world. Even as I write that number I can't believe it.
Humanity has survived unbelievable disruptions of "the ordinary." Some philosophers might assert that there is no such thing as ordinary life, or ordinary people, (Judith Guest's irony noted here).
In the few weeks I have been back in school studying the subect of cities, it has finally gotten through to me that human complexity is, finally, self-healing. All the plans and promises of all the leaders in history amount to a few pages of footnotes against the massive encyclopedia of fixes and work arounds the common people of the world have devised. And often enough they have devised these fixes to fix the shambles of some leader's plan.
Humanity has shown an unlimited appetite for growth, and a rage for chaos that defeats faith and order over and over again.
Even greater than these forces, however, is the force for healing. We are born ready to be injured and recover. We are educated being wounded and insulted, but absorbing the injury. Bones knit. Skin grows back. There are scars, but there is healing. There is fear, and sometimes holes in our hearts that can never be filled again.
But we do heal. Families heal or spin off and become new and fall and get up again. Children remind us that healing is the first principle of life, not a commodity on the market of the health industry.
Today I am cut and bleed. Tomorrow I am reaching out my hand to the same knife or kitten claws that betrayed me today.
We heal. Complexity heals itself. We are complex, and there are forces at work in our society beyond the knowledge of any school or political party. There is darkness in the human day and something shines in the human night.
You may take away my freedom. You may take away my illusions. But you can't tax or imprison my ability to heal.
I respect both candidates, with a growing sense of detachment. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs the pot as it comes to a boil. I know that we are born to err, and that everyone who dies has spent more time healing than dying, more time repairing things than breaking them, more time active in hope than paralyzed in the grip of hopelessness.
Where is the party of healing? They will get my vote.
12.10.04
The remains of the daydream: the second debate
Sara and I snuggled down on the couch in the basement with popcorn and snacks, as though this was our Friday night movie cocoon date. After the first twenty minutes of watching Bush act as though his animal tranquilizer dosage had been doubled, I wanted to get up and go clip my nails or something.
Bush was aroused. It was primary arousal, not the b-team wariness and snarkiness he sent in to represent him at the first debate.
Kerry was firmer than usual, confrontational, and succinct.
As I watched both men sustain a level of verbal jousting that never quite achieved inspiration or mayhem, I was reminded of my most boring marital spats. Yadda Yadda.
And then I realized this was the prime time pilot for the most daring mainstream programming yet: a gay guy becomes president, and the first lady is a guy...and they argue all the time. Except sometimes they make fun of each other, or reminisce about the good old days in college. They come close to embracing, then rip into another face-off, name calling, lachymose apostrophes to old loves and what could have been. What could your mother have done to make you like this? Why do you still try to prove yourself to your father? Why can't you care about me? Why don't you love me anymore?
BushKerry is one persona speaking from two different sides of the head. There is no news here. There is no real escape from the escalating systems of self-indulgence and self-destruction that are undermining our country. There is no future here.
The future waits in the wings, watching the Punch and Judy show. The puppets wear each other's ties as a sign of devotion.
The future waits in the wings, spoiling. It is a man in a suit covered with fishhooks, and each hook dangles a mackeral, and they are rotting. The future is a city with no working sewers. The future is a candybar wrapper in the fist of a child who has starved to death.
"Why do you spend all your weekends playing paintball with those guys!"
"First you said you wanted me to get implants. Then you said you didn't. Then you said you did. Make up your damn mind!"
Boo hoo hoo.
It isn't Bush and Kerry's fault that their presentation to the nation is reduced to fractured fortune cookie invective and 15-second spot ad copy promises. It isn't our fault that we have surrendered the only hope the world had of seeing a democracy grow wise as it grew older.
There are too many transitions going on all at once. We are emerging from the chaos of the Industrial and Urban revolutions. We are staggering under the distraction of the Information explosion. We have all become wired and bankrupt, frantic with the will to score while hating our own games.
I want a leader who will tell me to sit down and shut up. And then follow his own advice. I want a leader who will send the neighbors away for a while while he cleans up his own messy house. I want a leader who can hear his own voice, who has a sense of modesty about his own capacity. Leaders like that don't make it through the play-offs.
I wonder how Dean would have done in a debate with Bush. He would have broken Bush's rhythym, never played to his meanness, raised the ante intellectually over and over until Bush's straw stuffing burst out of his suit and set the stage ablaze with shame.
Kerry and Bush should rule the country together. The Two Headed Yalie. They are Better than You, and they Know the Strings to Pull. Vote Yale for President...what other choice is there?
Bush was aroused. It was primary arousal, not the b-team wariness and snarkiness he sent in to represent him at the first debate.
Kerry was firmer than usual, confrontational, and succinct.
As I watched both men sustain a level of verbal jousting that never quite achieved inspiration or mayhem, I was reminded of my most boring marital spats. Yadda Yadda.
And then I realized this was the prime time pilot for the most daring mainstream programming yet: a gay guy becomes president, and the first lady is a guy...and they argue all the time. Except sometimes they make fun of each other, or reminisce about the good old days in college. They come close to embracing, then rip into another face-off, name calling, lachymose apostrophes to old loves and what could have been. What could your mother have done to make you like this? Why do you still try to prove yourself to your father? Why can't you care about me? Why don't you love me anymore?
BushKerry is one persona speaking from two different sides of the head. There is no news here. There is no real escape from the escalating systems of self-indulgence and self-destruction that are undermining our country. There is no future here.
The future waits in the wings, watching the Punch and Judy show. The puppets wear each other's ties as a sign of devotion.
The future waits in the wings, spoiling. It is a man in a suit covered with fishhooks, and each hook dangles a mackeral, and they are rotting. The future is a city with no working sewers. The future is a candybar wrapper in the fist of a child who has starved to death.
"Why do you spend all your weekends playing paintball with those guys!"
"First you said you wanted me to get implants. Then you said you didn't. Then you said you did. Make up your damn mind!"
Boo hoo hoo.
It isn't Bush and Kerry's fault that their presentation to the nation is reduced to fractured fortune cookie invective and 15-second spot ad copy promises. It isn't our fault that we have surrendered the only hope the world had of seeing a democracy grow wise as it grew older.
There are too many transitions going on all at once. We are emerging from the chaos of the Industrial and Urban revolutions. We are staggering under the distraction of the Information explosion. We have all become wired and bankrupt, frantic with the will to score while hating our own games.
I want a leader who will tell me to sit down and shut up. And then follow his own advice. I want a leader who will send the neighbors away for a while while he cleans up his own messy house. I want a leader who can hear his own voice, who has a sense of modesty about his own capacity. Leaders like that don't make it through the play-offs.
I wonder how Dean would have done in a debate with Bush. He would have broken Bush's rhythym, never played to his meanness, raised the ante intellectually over and over until Bush's straw stuffing burst out of his suit and set the stage ablaze with shame.
Kerry and Bush should rule the country together. The Two Headed Yalie. They are Better than You, and they Know the Strings to Pull. Vote Yale for President...what other choice is there?
6.10.04
Sunlight and Moonlight on the National Stage
Most early societies identified solar and lunar influences on personality, society, and the world at large. In watching the Vice-Presidential candidate debate last night, I thought about this aspect of the election.
Solar influences are clearly defined, solid, forthright. They are based on courageous actions undertaken for simple clear outcomes. The sun is active, energetic, supports growth and health. At an extreme, the Solar influences become "too much of a good thing"; i.e. too much aggresion, too much simplification, too much heat. The solar approach takes and gives in clear measure, builds and demolishes in direct proportion to goals.
Lunar influences are soft, shaded, unclear. They are veiled, diaphanous, seductive. Lunar influences act by indirection, suggestion, seduction. They insinuate and imply rather than state clearly. They "network" and entangle, operate in a world where the brightest light isn't much lighter than the shadows. Lunar influences are emotional, appealing to our deepest fears about the security of our homes and health, our loved ones and our fortunes. They also seduce, with hints of passion and longing.
Obviously, no campaign has a lock on either quality. Kerry is becoming more complex and indirect as the campaign progresses, even as he successfully counters charges that he is a "flip-flopper." Bush and Cheney tell us they are strong and solar, but their entanglements in Iraq are very lunar indeed. Edwards is blunt in confronting Cheney about the Administration's lapse in judgment, but becomes vague and suggestive when challenged to state his qualifications for the job of vice president.
The more I considered the situation and the quality of the debates, the more I realized that I was really looking for some sunlight in this election. And it feels as though the sun has set, leaving us all in a Midsummer Night's Dream of illusion, role-playing, hidden craft and manipulative arts.
Edwards is convincing. The old word for putting a spell on someone is to "glamor" them, and Edwards' charm has that quality of glamoring the moment. Kerry is as gaunt and angular as a Giacometti sculpture of Don Quixote. He seems to be wasting away from within, as though he carried a burden too dark and too ancient to be brought into the light of day. The word for Kerry is "Sepulchral": a sepulchre is a monument in a cemetary. Kerry speaks from the grave of innocent young men, in the voice grown dark, dank and hollow with unmeted justices, unbounded sorrows, untellable truths. He is like the ghost of Christmas Past, trying to hold Scrooge accountable for the misdeeds of history. But he doesn't have a clear, sunlit image of the future. He speaks from the memory of a better America, but his plans for dealing with the complex morass of Health Care, Social Security, cities and foreign relations lack a sense of muscular competence. He rides a Harley Davidson, more like a Ring Wraith than a daylit man.
Bush is Bottom...a man with the head of an Ass. When he tries to speak he brays. His idea of persuading people is to assert in loud simple hee-haws, and trust repetition to make up for an absence of reality. Bush is a master of the insider game, speaking to the converted in signals and signs, while using simple scorn to keep the outsiders at bay.
Which leaves Cheney.
Cheney is a solar man who made a pact with the moon, and is visibly showing signs of regretting it. At some point in his life, Cheney developed the capacity for action, for making clear distinctions, for establishing sides and keeping action focussed on taking clear goals. But it didn't get him what he wanted.
He succumbed to a siren in some passage between waters, on some journey that he cannot end. He is a solar man whose sun has abandoned him, leaving him tense and writhing in the lairs of the moon boys and wraiths. He cannot completely leave his lights behind, but his heart is not completely in the shadow play of his cronies.
I didn't know this about him before. But it was written in the blanks where his loyalty to Bush should have been last night, in the effort that was visible as he tried to assert the party line on Hussein one more time. And the Lunar mask fell off completely when the subject of his daughter was broached. He was speechless. He was a father with a strong solar love of his own who could not grovel and pirouette one more time for the damp toads that employed him.
He gathered his cues for one more straight arm in the mush of Edwards before the curtain came down. But it is interesting that the locution that became his verbal logo for the evening was "stand up." He said over and over that we had to "stand up" a strong government in Afghansitan and Iraq, "stand up" free elections, in the rubble of the prey we ran to ground. In his lunar trance he neglected to realize that to be "stood up" means to be abandoned by one's date. And at the end of the dance, Cheney was a solar man in the shadows, alone more than any of the others, too far from his own origins and his own lights to be known.
I felt saddened by this. I never thought I would have a shred of feeling for Cheney, or men like Cheney, who had sold their masculine birthright for the mess of pottage that politics calls "power". But something happened last night that changed that.
If we could figure out what went wrong with Cheney, we could know some part of ourselves that has gone so wrong, so far wrong. He could have been a contender. But he has become a palooka with a sneer and a patchwork heart, boxing in the shadows. No one did it to him. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
Why would any nation do what we have done, to ourselves? That is the question, and no debate moderator is going to ask it. So I ask it, of you and me. Why?
Solar influences are clearly defined, solid, forthright. They are based on courageous actions undertaken for simple clear outcomes. The sun is active, energetic, supports growth and health. At an extreme, the Solar influences become "too much of a good thing"; i.e. too much aggresion, too much simplification, too much heat. The solar approach takes and gives in clear measure, builds and demolishes in direct proportion to goals.
Lunar influences are soft, shaded, unclear. They are veiled, diaphanous, seductive. Lunar influences act by indirection, suggestion, seduction. They insinuate and imply rather than state clearly. They "network" and entangle, operate in a world where the brightest light isn't much lighter than the shadows. Lunar influences are emotional, appealing to our deepest fears about the security of our homes and health, our loved ones and our fortunes. They also seduce, with hints of passion and longing.
Obviously, no campaign has a lock on either quality. Kerry is becoming more complex and indirect as the campaign progresses, even as he successfully counters charges that he is a "flip-flopper." Bush and Cheney tell us they are strong and solar, but their entanglements in Iraq are very lunar indeed. Edwards is blunt in confronting Cheney about the Administration's lapse in judgment, but becomes vague and suggestive when challenged to state his qualifications for the job of vice president.
The more I considered the situation and the quality of the debates, the more I realized that I was really looking for some sunlight in this election. And it feels as though the sun has set, leaving us all in a Midsummer Night's Dream of illusion, role-playing, hidden craft and manipulative arts.
Edwards is convincing. The old word for putting a spell on someone is to "glamor" them, and Edwards' charm has that quality of glamoring the moment. Kerry is as gaunt and angular as a Giacometti sculpture of Don Quixote. He seems to be wasting away from within, as though he carried a burden too dark and too ancient to be brought into the light of day. The word for Kerry is "Sepulchral": a sepulchre is a monument in a cemetary. Kerry speaks from the grave of innocent young men, in the voice grown dark, dank and hollow with unmeted justices, unbounded sorrows, untellable truths. He is like the ghost of Christmas Past, trying to hold Scrooge accountable for the misdeeds of history. But he doesn't have a clear, sunlit image of the future. He speaks from the memory of a better America, but his plans for dealing with the complex morass of Health Care, Social Security, cities and foreign relations lack a sense of muscular competence. He rides a Harley Davidson, more like a Ring Wraith than a daylit man.
Bush is Bottom...a man with the head of an Ass. When he tries to speak he brays. His idea of persuading people is to assert in loud simple hee-haws, and trust repetition to make up for an absence of reality. Bush is a master of the insider game, speaking to the converted in signals and signs, while using simple scorn to keep the outsiders at bay.
Which leaves Cheney.
Cheney is a solar man who made a pact with the moon, and is visibly showing signs of regretting it. At some point in his life, Cheney developed the capacity for action, for making clear distinctions, for establishing sides and keeping action focussed on taking clear goals. But it didn't get him what he wanted.
He succumbed to a siren in some passage between waters, on some journey that he cannot end. He is a solar man whose sun has abandoned him, leaving him tense and writhing in the lairs of the moon boys and wraiths. He cannot completely leave his lights behind, but his heart is not completely in the shadow play of his cronies.
I didn't know this about him before. But it was written in the blanks where his loyalty to Bush should have been last night, in the effort that was visible as he tried to assert the party line on Hussein one more time. And the Lunar mask fell off completely when the subject of his daughter was broached. He was speechless. He was a father with a strong solar love of his own who could not grovel and pirouette one more time for the damp toads that employed him.
He gathered his cues for one more straight arm in the mush of Edwards before the curtain came down. But it is interesting that the locution that became his verbal logo for the evening was "stand up." He said over and over that we had to "stand up" a strong government in Afghansitan and Iraq, "stand up" free elections, in the rubble of the prey we ran to ground. In his lunar trance he neglected to realize that to be "stood up" means to be abandoned by one's date. And at the end of the dance, Cheney was a solar man in the shadows, alone more than any of the others, too far from his own origins and his own lights to be known.
I felt saddened by this. I never thought I would have a shred of feeling for Cheney, or men like Cheney, who had sold their masculine birthright for the mess of pottage that politics calls "power". But something happened last night that changed that.
If we could figure out what went wrong with Cheney, we could know some part of ourselves that has gone so wrong, so far wrong. He could have been a contender. But he has become a palooka with a sneer and a patchwork heart, boxing in the shadows. No one did it to him. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
Why would any nation do what we have done, to ourselves? That is the question, and no debate moderator is going to ask it. So I ask it, of you and me. Why?
1.10.04
Okay Okay the debate already
What is the relationship between a debate and running a country? That should be the question on everyone's minds today.
Bush looked like someone who had just tasted a caraway seed for the first time during most of Kerry's responses, and Kerry looked like the guy who always had the answer in math class. Kerry was very good. If I was casting the role of president, he would be a strong choice. When you think about it, who do you want to cast for the role of president, assuming he would be just following a script handed to him hours or minutes before each scene?
Most people would vote for their dad. Many people would vote for good teachers or strong captains of sports teams they had played on. Many others would vote for Captain Kirk or George Washington or Hercules...mythical figures far removed from the imperfect men they had known in real life.
What about women? Do strong women governors like Ann Richards or strong women senators like Barbara Boxer fit the imago of a National Leader?
I don't think so...but not because they are women. The Senate is a school yard brawl for people with hair helmets. Governorship is like Junior Woodchuck politics...it rises above the parochial inanity of city Bosses, but not high enough to shed its reek of graft, compromise, opportunism, and accident. At the national level we want someone who wears a cape and has no genitals. Someone who has never had a pimple on their butt or stolen a candy bar. We want a president who doesn't scratch themself or call their spouse profane names in the heat of an argument.
If we wanted to cast a woman, she should look like Judy Dench and talk like a 40 year old Katherine Hepburn. Maybe there is someone in the ranks that fits that description. If you know of them, send me email.
The presidency is a figurative role. It rises above the scuffed shoes and broken nails of actual daily life. George Bush Senior hadn't been in a grocery store for 15 years when he went campaigning against Clinton in 92. Bill Clinton hadn't ended a sentence in a preposition since 7th grade.
Kerry was bright, warm, mellow and well paced as a good single malt scotch whiskey. Bush was small, dogged, disarmingly personal and impossibly blind to the details...the beer and schnapps candidate. Kerry calmed down as Bush got more antsy, and he found the presence of mind to pause meaningfully, end his sentences crisply, no matter how much heat burned beneath the surface of his carefully chosen words. Bush's face was the pretentious restaurant's streetside window...inside everything was overdone and the price wasn't mentioned, while outside the muggings and traffic snarls revealed the true mood of the moment.
So what does debating have to do with National Leadership? We don't know. We hope that there is more to the Presidency than a mere figurehead, a carved wooden decoy hiding the men with their guns in the marsh grass. We hope the president can actually choose a domestic and foreign policy, and that his choices aren't limited to the dictates of a curtained cabal. But we aren't sure anymore.
Who looks like a president? Who talks like a president? Where are the Roosevelts, who tempered their patrician presence with the common man's welfare concerns? Where are the Kennedy's who hid their crippling pain behind an urbane, sexy confidence? The only thing common about Kerry is the spelling of his name. The only thing urbane about Bush is the polish on his shoes when he comes out from behind the lectern.
One commentator said Bush talked to us and Kerry lectured us. That doesn't cut it, really. Bush's folksy vocabulary is constantly belied by the desperate tension in his eyes, the alarming silences between subject and predicate when he must reach so deeply into his programming to find the "know" that follows his sputtered "I." And Kerry is just as programmed. He hasn't had a spontaneous moment untainted by opportunity since he was a virgin. Neither candidate is folk. And they want to wear a suit sewn from the cloth of folklore.
Nobody won last night's debate. We are adrift, in America, in a sea of knowledge and opinion. There is no shore in sight. There is no guide star visible in the darkness that descends upon us.
The neocons are reducing all citizens to two dimensional puzzle pieces that they can move at will. The liberals retreat into their vestigal privelege of culture and education and scorn the very energy that could save their myth of a heart-felt politics.
And in the meantime, we know, like Bush, that war and politics are a hard job. We know because the television showed us.
Bush looked like someone who had just tasted a caraway seed for the first time during most of Kerry's responses, and Kerry looked like the guy who always had the answer in math class. Kerry was very good. If I was casting the role of president, he would be a strong choice. When you think about it, who do you want to cast for the role of president, assuming he would be just following a script handed to him hours or minutes before each scene?
Most people would vote for their dad. Many people would vote for good teachers or strong captains of sports teams they had played on. Many others would vote for Captain Kirk or George Washington or Hercules...mythical figures far removed from the imperfect men they had known in real life.
What about women? Do strong women governors like Ann Richards or strong women senators like Barbara Boxer fit the imago of a National Leader?
I don't think so...but not because they are women. The Senate is a school yard brawl for people with hair helmets. Governorship is like Junior Woodchuck politics...it rises above the parochial inanity of city Bosses, but not high enough to shed its reek of graft, compromise, opportunism, and accident. At the national level we want someone who wears a cape and has no genitals. Someone who has never had a pimple on their butt or stolen a candy bar. We want a president who doesn't scratch themself or call their spouse profane names in the heat of an argument.
If we wanted to cast a woman, she should look like Judy Dench and talk like a 40 year old Katherine Hepburn. Maybe there is someone in the ranks that fits that description. If you know of them, send me email.
The presidency is a figurative role. It rises above the scuffed shoes and broken nails of actual daily life. George Bush Senior hadn't been in a grocery store for 15 years when he went campaigning against Clinton in 92. Bill Clinton hadn't ended a sentence in a preposition since 7th grade.
Kerry was bright, warm, mellow and well paced as a good single malt scotch whiskey. Bush was small, dogged, disarmingly personal and impossibly blind to the details...the beer and schnapps candidate. Kerry calmed down as Bush got more antsy, and he found the presence of mind to pause meaningfully, end his sentences crisply, no matter how much heat burned beneath the surface of his carefully chosen words. Bush's face was the pretentious restaurant's streetside window...inside everything was overdone and the price wasn't mentioned, while outside the muggings and traffic snarls revealed the true mood of the moment.
So what does debating have to do with National Leadership? We don't know. We hope that there is more to the Presidency than a mere figurehead, a carved wooden decoy hiding the men with their guns in the marsh grass. We hope the president can actually choose a domestic and foreign policy, and that his choices aren't limited to the dictates of a curtained cabal. But we aren't sure anymore.
Who looks like a president? Who talks like a president? Where are the Roosevelts, who tempered their patrician presence with the common man's welfare concerns? Where are the Kennedy's who hid their crippling pain behind an urbane, sexy confidence? The only thing common about Kerry is the spelling of his name. The only thing urbane about Bush is the polish on his shoes when he comes out from behind the lectern.
One commentator said Bush talked to us and Kerry lectured us. That doesn't cut it, really. Bush's folksy vocabulary is constantly belied by the desperate tension in his eyes, the alarming silences between subject and predicate when he must reach so deeply into his programming to find the "know" that follows his sputtered "I." And Kerry is just as programmed. He hasn't had a spontaneous moment untainted by opportunity since he was a virgin. Neither candidate is folk. And they want to wear a suit sewn from the cloth of folklore.
Nobody won last night's debate. We are adrift, in America, in a sea of knowledge and opinion. There is no shore in sight. There is no guide star visible in the darkness that descends upon us.
The neocons are reducing all citizens to two dimensional puzzle pieces that they can move at will. The liberals retreat into their vestigal privelege of culture and education and scorn the very energy that could save their myth of a heart-felt politics.
And in the meantime, we know, like Bush, that war and politics are a hard job. We know because the television showed us.
28.9.04
The squeaky wheel gets the spin.
I met with the director of undergraduate math instruction this morning. He wanted to know what specific problem in my homework was giving me trouble. I said it was getting to the tree and bypassing the forest a little too quickly. He insisted he wanted to get to the tree immediately.
In the interest of getting along with the guy, I tried to give an example of the onerous work-outs that characterized the vast majority of homework. He wanted to know what page and what problem I was having problems with. I tried to explain that wasn't the point of my visit. He insisted on seeing a specific problem. I found one that was similar to a problem that sent me scurring through my algebra reviews and flash cards on Saturday. This seemed to satisfy him.
Once he had connected with me at that level, I tried to raise the level of the conversation to the differences in expectation between the liberal arts student and the IT student. He told me I was taking a CLA math class, and that IT students took a different curriculum. That was scary. I suggested there could be a less draconian presentation for, say, 30 urban studies students that were interested in developing their modelling skills or understanding without the equivalent of a military boot camp. I suggested that making eye contact with the students and making sure that at least the average student in the class completely understood the progression of symbolic processes on the blackboard might enhance the experience. This seemed to be loaded territory, as it evinced a defense of the specific professors in question.
Somewhere along the line of the discussion he began to sense that there was no point to our meeting, as far as he could see. He seemed greatly relieved to see me go.
I was half an hour early for my Urban Studies class, so I got a coffee and stared at the sky, wondering if the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow had in fact become a kind of preemptive rationalization for the vasty gulf between the technicians and the policy makers in our society. Doug is a nice guy with a tough job. But the gap in teaching this kind of material to the people who need it is not narrowing because of the advent of personal computers. It needs attention.
I hope I can contribute to that attention in a positive way.
In the interest of getting along with the guy, I tried to give an example of the onerous work-outs that characterized the vast majority of homework. He wanted to know what page and what problem I was having problems with. I tried to explain that wasn't the point of my visit. He insisted on seeing a specific problem. I found one that was similar to a problem that sent me scurring through my algebra reviews and flash cards on Saturday. This seemed to satisfy him.
Once he had connected with me at that level, I tried to raise the level of the conversation to the differences in expectation between the liberal arts student and the IT student. He told me I was taking a CLA math class, and that IT students took a different curriculum. That was scary. I suggested there could be a less draconian presentation for, say, 30 urban studies students that were interested in developing their modelling skills or understanding without the equivalent of a military boot camp. I suggested that making eye contact with the students and making sure that at least the average student in the class completely understood the progression of symbolic processes on the blackboard might enhance the experience. This seemed to be loaded territory, as it evinced a defense of the specific professors in question.
Somewhere along the line of the discussion he began to sense that there was no point to our meeting, as far as he could see. He seemed greatly relieved to see me go.
I was half an hour early for my Urban Studies class, so I got a coffee and stared at the sky, wondering if the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow had in fact become a kind of preemptive rationalization for the vasty gulf between the technicians and the policy makers in our society. Doug is a nice guy with a tough job. But the gap in teaching this kind of material to the people who need it is not narrowing because of the advent of personal computers. It needs attention.
I hope I can contribute to that attention in a positive way.
24.9.04
f''(dialog) lim x-->a = ?
After re-reading the entry below I decided I should do something about this situation. So I sent the following email to Professor Larry Gray, the head of the math department at the U.: (Larry writes publicly about the k-12 math education dilemma, which prompted the digression about my son Sam in this message)
Hi. I am a 56 year old undergraduate at the U taking Calculus 1271. I am an Urban Studies major who is interested in quasi-formal and formal models for solving urban problems. In fact, I am interested in the entire spectrum of modeling issues in public policy and planning. My background is enriched by having worked for 24 years as an information writer for Hennepin County, a full time position I continue to hold.
I am writing you for two reasons. One, my recent experience with intensive precalculus and calculus instruction at the U motivates me to make a few observations about this process. Two, I would like to open a dialog with someone interested in these things in an exploratory mode. Having read some of your writing, I believe you are both committed to the main issues and open minded enough to explore the problems without being defensive or one-dimensional.
I do not represent any camp or ideological point in the spectrum of math education. I am not a member of any group. I have seen two sons go through the gyrations of math curriculum over the last 15 years, and have experienced some of the painful conundrums of the shifting environment. Last year my son was put in Algebra II without experiencing Algebra I. This was justified because South High used a different curriculum than Field School, where Sam was taught until 8th Grade, and the counselor felt that Sam was able to go right into Algebra II. His distress was interpreted as a behavior problem by the teacher and counselor. After an intensive month of investigation and dialog, we got Sam transferred to an Algebra I class, where he proceeded to earn A+ and was considered an exemplary student. The deep human and organizational complexity of these situations humbles me, and despite some of the obvious absurdities that might arise I always proceed from a position of great respect for both the discipline and the persons involved in any conflict situation.
To put it as simply as possible, I believe we could benefit from a return to mastery approaches to basic skills that include drills, memorization, emphasis on mental calculations, development of estimation and judgment, etc, but I also believe that the disparity created by gender and social status in classroom settings is real and can be addressed by curriculum design. I believe that as a society we suffer greatly from the mathematical illiteracy of the voting members of society, but I also believe that there is a culture of technical education that needs to be integrated with an increasingly complicated society. I don't believe that forcing IT people to take dance classes will make them more sensitive to real social problems, and I don't believe that forcing CLA students to sit through what I am experiencing in Calc 1271 is going to be the resolution of a widespread cultural innumeracy that will plague this nation in the coming decades.
If you are interested in corresponding on these issues, I wrote a short essay about my calculus experience which is on my blog at http://www.zeitguy.blogspot.com. I invite a reply. If you prefer a briefer statement I would be happy to condense this for you. I don't expect to change the rules or requirements for getting through this class this semester, but I believe I have something to say and something to offer in effecting change in this process that will benefit others over time.
I was surprised and pleased to see Larry responded immediately:
Dear Jeff,
I read your essay about your experience in calculus class(es). I am
sorry to hear that it is such a struggle, and I am not sure what the
solution might be. In my years of experience working with students, I
find that there are many different reasons why some students struggle
with the class, ranging from a lack of preparation on their part to bad
teaching on the part of the professor or TA. The best way to get to the
bottom of this would be for you to come into our office and talk with
someone so we can evaluate the situation. The best person to talk to
would be our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Prof. David Frank. He
is in charge of all undergraduate math classes. Call his secretary
to make an appoint with him. I'll notify him about your
experiences so he will be expecting to hear from you.
Best wishes,
Larry Gray
Well, I wasn't very clear about my point in writing him, apparently. But it was nice to hear from him in such a friendly manner. Very impressive. Stay tuned for further adventures.
When Sara heard about this, her first question was "Are you going to get your teacher in trouble?" I hope the hell not. That isn't what this is about.
It's about me.
Hi. I am a 56 year old undergraduate at the U taking Calculus 1271. I am an Urban Studies major who is interested in quasi-formal and formal models for solving urban problems. In fact, I am interested in the entire spectrum of modeling issues in public policy and planning. My background is enriched by having worked for 24 years as an information writer for Hennepin County, a full time position I continue to hold.
I am writing you for two reasons. One, my recent experience with intensive precalculus and calculus instruction at the U motivates me to make a few observations about this process. Two, I would like to open a dialog with someone interested in these things in an exploratory mode. Having read some of your writing, I believe you are both committed to the main issues and open minded enough to explore the problems without being defensive or one-dimensional.
I do not represent any camp or ideological point in the spectrum of math education. I am not a member of any group. I have seen two sons go through the gyrations of math curriculum over the last 15 years, and have experienced some of the painful conundrums of the shifting environment. Last year my son was put in Algebra II without experiencing Algebra I. This was justified because South High used a different curriculum than Field School, where Sam was taught until 8th Grade, and the counselor felt that Sam was able to go right into Algebra II. His distress was interpreted as a behavior problem by the teacher and counselor. After an intensive month of investigation and dialog, we got Sam transferred to an Algebra I class, where he proceeded to earn A+ and was considered an exemplary student. The deep human and organizational complexity of these situations humbles me, and despite some of the obvious absurdities that might arise I always proceed from a position of great respect for both the discipline and the persons involved in any conflict situation.
To put it as simply as possible, I believe we could benefit from a return to mastery approaches to basic skills that include drills, memorization, emphasis on mental calculations, development of estimation and judgment, etc, but I also believe that the disparity created by gender and social status in classroom settings is real and can be addressed by curriculum design. I believe that as a society we suffer greatly from the mathematical illiteracy of the voting members of society, but I also believe that there is a culture of technical education that needs to be integrated with an increasingly complicated society. I don't believe that forcing IT people to take dance classes will make them more sensitive to real social problems, and I don't believe that forcing CLA students to sit through what I am experiencing in Calc 1271 is going to be the resolution of a widespread cultural innumeracy that will plague this nation in the coming decades.
If you are interested in corresponding on these issues, I wrote a short essay about my calculus experience which is on my blog at http://www.zeitguy.blogspot.com. I invite a reply. If you prefer a briefer statement I would be happy to condense this for you. I don't expect to change the rules or requirements for getting through this class this semester, but I believe I have something to say and something to offer in effecting change in this process that will benefit others over time.
I was surprised and pleased to see Larry responded immediately:
Dear Jeff,
I read your essay about your experience in calculus class(es). I am
sorry to hear that it is such a struggle, and I am not sure what the
solution might be. In my years of experience working with students, I
find that there are many different reasons why some students struggle
with the class, ranging from a lack of preparation on their part to bad
teaching on the part of the professor or TA. The best way to get to the
bottom of this would be for you to come into our office and talk with
someone so we can evaluate the situation. The best person to talk to
would be our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Prof. David Frank. He
is in charge of all undergraduate math classes. Call his secretary
to make an appoint with him. I'll notify him about your
experiences so he will be expecting to hear from you.
Best wishes,
Larry Gray
Well, I wasn't very clear about my point in writing him, apparently. But it was nice to hear from him in such a friendly manner. Very impressive. Stay tuned for further adventures.
When Sara heard about this, her first question was "Are you going to get your teacher in trouble?" I hope the hell not. That isn't what this is about.
It's about me.
22.9.04
Weapons of Math Destruction
I am studying Calculus in a classroom. It is taught by a qualified University of Minnesota Professor.
Most people I know expect such an experience to be hell.
It surprises me that it is hell.
When I first encountered calculus in the 1960's, it was a mysterious, almost mystical unknown. Only Certain Geeks could approach the temple and few became qualified calculusers. Because of my interest in Science Fiction and scientific approaches to solving social problems, Calculus was never far from any topic I was really interested in. But I always assumed it was, like playing classical piano at the concert level, a skill reserved for a small, deserving minority of people.
Over time, this image of exclusive Olympian existance began to break down. Clues came here and there in articles, stories, conversations. By and large the reputation of Calculus as really hard and unpleasant, reserved for "souless iron-butt repressed drudges" -- the reputation remained intact.
Finally about fifteen years ago I was developing some graphic software, and had learned to code curves and fill areas. By coincidence I came across a short article on calculus that explained it in terms of computer graphics coding. It was an amazing "aha" moment. I knew about slopes of lines and approximating irregular areas with lots of tiny regular areas. I had enough basic geometry and algebra to dimly get the rest of what I was reading.
Calculus was about changing tanget lines along a curve, and approximating the area under the curve with rectangles, in its operational essence. I won't go any deeper into it than that.
After reading the article it felt like a great weight had been lifted from me. I had carried the burden of "not qualified for calculus" around for years as a subtle sabotage of my interest in science. I had attacked the finite maths, such as statistics, probability, set theory, boolean logic, etc, with gusto, because I was qualified for that...I had done well in basic classes and was not impressed with any mystiques.
From time to time after that experience, I would come across something that required thinking a bit in calculus concepts, and I wouldn't be daunted. But I didn't actually tackle the curriculum. I just felt more comfortable, and when the time came to ask questions, I felt as though I could ask them without making a fool of myself.
Recently I decided to bite the bullet. I need operational knowledge of calculus at a much deeper level than before. So I registered for pre-calculus last semester. It consists of trigonometry and the algebra of polynomial and rational functions, for the most part. There are other things. But holy damn, it was hard. I thought my computer experience would serve me in two respects: one, I had written code that created graphic demonstrations of most of the concepts involved, from quadratic equation solutions to animation of sine functions. So I assumed that I would get the concepts easily and could anchor my work on exercises in a secure conceptual understanding.
Not so. The presentation of the detailed aspect of the ideas was never connected to the more abstract level. We marched through horrendous black-board filling exercises in expanding and factoring ugly algebraic expressions. I felt as though I was being dragged behind someone's pick up truck on a chain, and they didn't care if my head was still on when they came to stop five miles down the road.
My romantic notions of the beauty and power of math encountered the ugly truth of math pedagogy. It was taught as a method to separate the class into clear groups: the minority who can function in the hostile environment of rapid, forced manipulation; the majority who can struggle along without raising their heads; and the "unqualified for calculus" who would drop out during the first 10 weeks or so, unable to make any sense or headway in the typhoon of symbols.
After the first two weeks my fascination and infatuation with math was completely scoured out of my little pan of math capacity. All that was left was room enough to fight my way through the increasing pain of homework. Each morning and evening I sat at the dining room table, with index cards, summary sheets, page markers, algebra review books, sheets and sheets of paper scribbled with the scars of a thousand little wounds called "problem solving" by the books and teachers but called torture and indoctrination by the insecure student.
My pride in my programming prowess turned neutral, then to a kind of oblique shame. The class was taught with pencil and paper and, if necessary, cheap math calculators: no graphing or algebraic automation allowed. No computers. We were doing the same drill that students of pre-calculus had done in the 1960's, even the 1930's. No concession was to be made to any social or intellectual shift in attitudes toward the role of math in society. This was meant to be hard. That message was underscored by the stunning rigidity of the class rules. No homework was accepted late, period. No make up tests allowed, period. No excuses were accepted for anything, period.
Since I was struggling so hard to get the problems done, and especially the midterm test problems within the time limits that energetic 19-year olds found daunting, I began to wonder if I would even pass. After my experience of hysterical blindness during the first midterm, and subsequent resignation to handing in half the problems, I was sure I would fail.
But the curve saved me. I had just enough on the ball to be one of the stragglers in the middle group of head-downers. I never quite fell out of the herd, and ended up in fact with a B- despite barely scoring over the mid point of each major test.
The curve saved my participation in math, and allowed me to proceed to the next level of calculus. But the system failed me significantly in not recognizing and responding to my basic problems with algebra.
I have been in calculus for three weeks. The calculus is easy.
The algebra is hell, and there is no relenting from it. It marches like cloned extraterrestrial insect soldiers from Starship Trooper, filling the horizon with its black homicidal whirr of horizontal asymptotes and drone of rationalizing denominators.
Despite my alarmed remarks, the Professor smiles when I say I really need review in Algebra to keep up. "The Calculus is easy, " he grins, "The algebra is hard."
And that is the essence of the situation. Whomever designed this curriculum did not do it from the assumption that a mathematically literate citizen is a better citizen. They designed it to keep the rabble out of the hallowed temples of Math. And as they succeed, and frighten the reasonable, terrorize the faint, and only inspire the unbalanced, they do Math and civilization a great disservice. Keeping an abyss between the math literate and the average educated citizen is not longer an intriguing by-product of our rapid technological ascent in the West, a subject for essays on C.P. Snow's "two cultures". It is a disease. It can be cured.
It might kill me first.
Most people I know expect such an experience to be hell.
It surprises me that it is hell.
When I first encountered calculus in the 1960's, it was a mysterious, almost mystical unknown. Only Certain Geeks could approach the temple and few became qualified calculusers. Because of my interest in Science Fiction and scientific approaches to solving social problems, Calculus was never far from any topic I was really interested in. But I always assumed it was, like playing classical piano at the concert level, a skill reserved for a small, deserving minority of people.
Over time, this image of exclusive Olympian existance began to break down. Clues came here and there in articles, stories, conversations. By and large the reputation of Calculus as really hard and unpleasant, reserved for "souless iron-butt repressed drudges" -- the reputation remained intact.
Finally about fifteen years ago I was developing some graphic software, and had learned to code curves and fill areas. By coincidence I came across a short article on calculus that explained it in terms of computer graphics coding. It was an amazing "aha" moment. I knew about slopes of lines and approximating irregular areas with lots of tiny regular areas. I had enough basic geometry and algebra to dimly get the rest of what I was reading.
Calculus was about changing tanget lines along a curve, and approximating the area under the curve with rectangles, in its operational essence. I won't go any deeper into it than that.
After reading the article it felt like a great weight had been lifted from me. I had carried the burden of "not qualified for calculus" around for years as a subtle sabotage of my interest in science. I had attacked the finite maths, such as statistics, probability, set theory, boolean logic, etc, with gusto, because I was qualified for that...I had done well in basic classes and was not impressed with any mystiques.
From time to time after that experience, I would come across something that required thinking a bit in calculus concepts, and I wouldn't be daunted. But I didn't actually tackle the curriculum. I just felt more comfortable, and when the time came to ask questions, I felt as though I could ask them without making a fool of myself.
Recently I decided to bite the bullet. I need operational knowledge of calculus at a much deeper level than before. So I registered for pre-calculus last semester. It consists of trigonometry and the algebra of polynomial and rational functions, for the most part. There are other things. But holy damn, it was hard. I thought my computer experience would serve me in two respects: one, I had written code that created graphic demonstrations of most of the concepts involved, from quadratic equation solutions to animation of sine functions. So I assumed that I would get the concepts easily and could anchor my work on exercises in a secure conceptual understanding.
Not so. The presentation of the detailed aspect of the ideas was never connected to the more abstract level. We marched through horrendous black-board filling exercises in expanding and factoring ugly algebraic expressions. I felt as though I was being dragged behind someone's pick up truck on a chain, and they didn't care if my head was still on when they came to stop five miles down the road.
My romantic notions of the beauty and power of math encountered the ugly truth of math pedagogy. It was taught as a method to separate the class into clear groups: the minority who can function in the hostile environment of rapid, forced manipulation; the majority who can struggle along without raising their heads; and the "unqualified for calculus" who would drop out during the first 10 weeks or so, unable to make any sense or headway in the typhoon of symbols.
After the first two weeks my fascination and infatuation with math was completely scoured out of my little pan of math capacity. All that was left was room enough to fight my way through the increasing pain of homework. Each morning and evening I sat at the dining room table, with index cards, summary sheets, page markers, algebra review books, sheets and sheets of paper scribbled with the scars of a thousand little wounds called "problem solving" by the books and teachers but called torture and indoctrination by the insecure student.
My pride in my programming prowess turned neutral, then to a kind of oblique shame. The class was taught with pencil and paper and, if necessary, cheap math calculators: no graphing or algebraic automation allowed. No computers. We were doing the same drill that students of pre-calculus had done in the 1960's, even the 1930's. No concession was to be made to any social or intellectual shift in attitudes toward the role of math in society. This was meant to be hard. That message was underscored by the stunning rigidity of the class rules. No homework was accepted late, period. No make up tests allowed, period. No excuses were accepted for anything, period.
Since I was struggling so hard to get the problems done, and especially the midterm test problems within the time limits that energetic 19-year olds found daunting, I began to wonder if I would even pass. After my experience of hysterical blindness during the first midterm, and subsequent resignation to handing in half the problems, I was sure I would fail.
But the curve saved me. I had just enough on the ball to be one of the stragglers in the middle group of head-downers. I never quite fell out of the herd, and ended up in fact with a B- despite barely scoring over the mid point of each major test.
The curve saved my participation in math, and allowed me to proceed to the next level of calculus. But the system failed me significantly in not recognizing and responding to my basic problems with algebra.
I have been in calculus for three weeks. The calculus is easy.
The algebra is hell, and there is no relenting from it. It marches like cloned extraterrestrial insect soldiers from Starship Trooper, filling the horizon with its black homicidal whirr of horizontal asymptotes and drone of rationalizing denominators.
Despite my alarmed remarks, the Professor smiles when I say I really need review in Algebra to keep up. "The Calculus is easy, " he grins, "The algebra is hard."
And that is the essence of the situation. Whomever designed this curriculum did not do it from the assumption that a mathematically literate citizen is a better citizen. They designed it to keep the rabble out of the hallowed temples of Math. And as they succeed, and frighten the reasonable, terrorize the faint, and only inspire the unbalanced, they do Math and civilization a great disservice. Keeping an abyss between the math literate and the average educated citizen is not longer an intriguing by-product of our rapid technological ascent in the West, a subject for essays on C.P. Snow's "two cultures". It is a disease. It can be cured.
It might kill me first.
9.9.04
The yoga of fear
Yoga means "yoke." The idea is that the postures, the asanas, integrate the body and not-body parts of ourselves. I say not-body, instead of spirit, mind, or soul, because we don't know what any of the not-body existence really is. We just know it is there. And that it needs to be yoked to the body.
When we get what we want, the body goes one way and the not-body goes the other way, into their own rooms, as it were, to eat from dinner trays and watch their own choice of cable fare.
When we are afraid, suddenly the body and not-body are very interested in each other, both for what they can do for each other, and for more sentimental reasons.
When I sit in Calculus class and can anticipate where the professor is going with the demonstration of, for instance, instantaneous rate of change, my mind wanders off. My body sits in the miserable little desk, and tries to communicate with the outside world through gurgles and twitches.
If the professor suddenly is writing rational functions, i.e. f(x) = 1-(1/x) on the board, fear seizes me. I missed many points on that section in pre-calc. It makes me sweat and tremble. My mind goes blank. I want my mother.
At the moment of greatest fear, my body and not-body are perfectly superimposed, like siblings separated for years and suddenly running into each other in the produce section of the grocers. "Hey!" "Hey, you are looking good!" "Are you still living in Bloomington?" "Looks like we went to the same barbershop." The chitchat masks the great relief, curiosity, and uneasiness occasioned by such chance but profound meetings.
From the back of the mind, the supervisor tells the mind to start taking notes and the body to quit interrupting. The brief moment of rapproachment between body and not-body is over, but it has done its job. For some time afterwards, a melody runs through the chambers of the self, through the shallow blood streams and across the fields of wild identity flowers in bloom. The melody is simple and heartbreaking. When you hear it, you are one. When you don't hear it, you don't know you ever heard it.
No one chooses fear. It is easier to suffer.
When we get what we want, the body goes one way and the not-body goes the other way, into their own rooms, as it were, to eat from dinner trays and watch their own choice of cable fare.
When we are afraid, suddenly the body and not-body are very interested in each other, both for what they can do for each other, and for more sentimental reasons.
When I sit in Calculus class and can anticipate where the professor is going with the demonstration of, for instance, instantaneous rate of change, my mind wanders off. My body sits in the miserable little desk, and tries to communicate with the outside world through gurgles and twitches.
If the professor suddenly is writing rational functions, i.e. f(x) = 1-(1/x) on the board, fear seizes me. I missed many points on that section in pre-calc. It makes me sweat and tremble. My mind goes blank. I want my mother.
At the moment of greatest fear, my body and not-body are perfectly superimposed, like siblings separated for years and suddenly running into each other in the produce section of the grocers. "Hey!" "Hey, you are looking good!" "Are you still living in Bloomington?" "Looks like we went to the same barbershop." The chitchat masks the great relief, curiosity, and uneasiness occasioned by such chance but profound meetings.
From the back of the mind, the supervisor tells the mind to start taking notes and the body to quit interrupting. The brief moment of rapproachment between body and not-body is over, but it has done its job. For some time afterwards, a melody runs through the chambers of the self, through the shallow blood streams and across the fields of wild identity flowers in bloom. The melody is simple and heartbreaking. When you hear it, you are one. When you don't hear it, you don't know you ever heard it.
No one chooses fear. It is easier to suffer.
8.9.04
Urban studies - the surreal version.
In the actinic light of September, pretense is stripped from the face of the city, and a grim truth is revealed: The city is failing. It is failing its first class of the new school year.
It is late for class, running breathless through a quadrangle among the inimical classicism of a hubris-laden patronage. Its pants fall off. It is wearing Mickey Mouse underwear. Micky and Minnie are doing it. Grim grim grim. The caretakers in their black Mao fashions and lidless eyes stare balefully at the city's Mickey Mouse underwear. They make mental notes on their mental clipboards, and their spit becomes even more acidic.
The city is still healthy enough to have a histamine level, to have a pulse and to create by-products. But it is running, in its shorts, without change for the vending machines.
Overhead, giant blimps move in lazy figure-8 patterns over the freeways, each blimp reflecting the traffic plexus below. In the sky, they make a three dimensional map of the freeway interchanges, like giant flaccid push pins indicating the distribution of gridlock among the withering neighborhoods. The conversation drifts to the blimps, with the assumption that the real "meaning" is about the traffic.
Grim people, who may be women, submit to surgery which removes their eyelids. In exchange for the tearless, blinkless condition they are given unlimited shopping rights and many, many lottery chances to win jobs.
Children ignore their expensive toys, and improvise the history of piracy and the opium trade with paper bags. Some of the paper bags have handles, some are shiney, all become punctured in the active play, but none ever are discarded.
Years later the same children are grown, but not committed to surgery. They bring their paper bags with them into the offices and classrooms, and force the powerless employees and students to write summaries of the bag's stories. To react to the bags, the employees and students must get drunk and violently ill. In the aftermath of the drinking bouts, the Great Fear seizes them, and thoughts of rebellion or impudence are banished. Later, they turn in their papers, and hope for positive attention, good grades, and/or the right to reproduce. The lucky few are allowed to reproduce without deformity. Some die.
Across the river, a green plain rolls forever toward a soft horizon. On the plain, bison stand motionless in the sunlight. They might be plaster. When it rains, the color is washed off the bison, and thier serial numbers can be read with the right optical equipment.
Giant paper plates are rolled out when it rains. They are dragged across the parts of the city not covered by the Mickey Mouse underwear. Inside the city's brain, the effort to form words is a constant source of conflict and dissatisfaction among the many neurons. They are not well trained for their jobs. Their supervisors resort to harassment and open derision to keep them in line. The effort to form words intensifies.
But the city is failing.
It is fall, and school is born from its own ashes again.
The people, some might be women, dress in lidless eyes and never stop swallowing things handed to them on small trays. The trays are everywhere, popping out of tree trunks, kiosks on the sidewalks, windows and delivery trucks. No one refuses the morsels. They keep lifting them with dainty fingers, tasting, chewing, constantly swallowing and never digesting. When they go to each other's homes for dinner, they cannot stop taking morsels off the importuning platters.
The real dinners are prepared by alarmed immigrants, who must make appointments to have their ears sewn shut, their fingers sewn together, their thighs sewn together, and their shoulder blades broken and reset at right angles. They must submit to these surgeries if they want to become citizens of the city. They are alarmed by the rites of citizenship. Some try to erase their features with dilute acid from the sap of plants that grow beside the city industries.
The real dinners sit untouched on the long beautiful tables. Eventually mold and flowers grow from them. Only the children, vexed by their bags and bored with the shallow perversity of piracy, enjoy the flowers.
Isn't it always like that?
What do the men do here?
It is late for class, running breathless through a quadrangle among the inimical classicism of a hubris-laden patronage. Its pants fall off. It is wearing Mickey Mouse underwear. Micky and Minnie are doing it. Grim grim grim. The caretakers in their black Mao fashions and lidless eyes stare balefully at the city's Mickey Mouse underwear. They make mental notes on their mental clipboards, and their spit becomes even more acidic.
The city is still healthy enough to have a histamine level, to have a pulse and to create by-products. But it is running, in its shorts, without change for the vending machines.
Overhead, giant blimps move in lazy figure-8 patterns over the freeways, each blimp reflecting the traffic plexus below. In the sky, they make a three dimensional map of the freeway interchanges, like giant flaccid push pins indicating the distribution of gridlock among the withering neighborhoods. The conversation drifts to the blimps, with the assumption that the real "meaning" is about the traffic.
Grim people, who may be women, submit to surgery which removes their eyelids. In exchange for the tearless, blinkless condition they are given unlimited shopping rights and many, many lottery chances to win jobs.
Children ignore their expensive toys, and improvise the history of piracy and the opium trade with paper bags. Some of the paper bags have handles, some are shiney, all become punctured in the active play, but none ever are discarded.
Years later the same children are grown, but not committed to surgery. They bring their paper bags with them into the offices and classrooms, and force the powerless employees and students to write summaries of the bag's stories. To react to the bags, the employees and students must get drunk and violently ill. In the aftermath of the drinking bouts, the Great Fear seizes them, and thoughts of rebellion or impudence are banished. Later, they turn in their papers, and hope for positive attention, good grades, and/or the right to reproduce. The lucky few are allowed to reproduce without deformity. Some die.
Across the river, a green plain rolls forever toward a soft horizon. On the plain, bison stand motionless in the sunlight. They might be plaster. When it rains, the color is washed off the bison, and thier serial numbers can be read with the right optical equipment.
Giant paper plates are rolled out when it rains. They are dragged across the parts of the city not covered by the Mickey Mouse underwear. Inside the city's brain, the effort to form words is a constant source of conflict and dissatisfaction among the many neurons. They are not well trained for their jobs. Their supervisors resort to harassment and open derision to keep them in line. The effort to form words intensifies.
But the city is failing.
It is fall, and school is born from its own ashes again.
The people, some might be women, dress in lidless eyes and never stop swallowing things handed to them on small trays. The trays are everywhere, popping out of tree trunks, kiosks on the sidewalks, windows and delivery trucks. No one refuses the morsels. They keep lifting them with dainty fingers, tasting, chewing, constantly swallowing and never digesting. When they go to each other's homes for dinner, they cannot stop taking morsels off the importuning platters.
The real dinners are prepared by alarmed immigrants, who must make appointments to have their ears sewn shut, their fingers sewn together, their thighs sewn together, and their shoulder blades broken and reset at right angles. They must submit to these surgeries if they want to become citizens of the city. They are alarmed by the rites of citizenship. Some try to erase their features with dilute acid from the sap of plants that grow beside the city industries.
The real dinners sit untouched on the long beautiful tables. Eventually mold and flowers grow from them. Only the children, vexed by their bags and bored with the shallow perversity of piracy, enjoy the flowers.
Isn't it always like that?
What do the men do here?
30.8.04
The end of what and the beginning of how.
Maggie almost died. At one point her red blood cell count was so low that it was half the level that the emergency vet automatically authorized a complete blood transfusion. We didn't give her the transfusion because it would have cost around $2000 and it would only have been a palliative, not a cure. Instead we brought her home wrapped in a blanket, and force fed her Science Diet fishmeal, chlorophyll from algae, prednisone, water and some baby foods to give her a break from the horrors of a medical diet. I stayed home three days from work, spent a dozen nights with sleep interrupted by any sound that might have been her moan or death rattle. Last Monday she meowed for the first time in two weeks. Tuesday she made it down a few stairs on her own, and Wednesday she went to the bathroom by herself. I noticed that the sunlight and fresh air made a visible improvement in her tone...the rustle of chipmunks and the songs of birds made her lift her head and stare through eyes deepened into blank, black holes by the war ravaging her immune system and bone marrow.
The vet had administered three vaccines at once. As he was preparing to do it, I was alarmed that Maggie's 11 year old system might not handle such a load all at once. I asked him, and he reassured me that one cat in a million had a bad reaction.
I should have told him Maggie was a cat in a million.
We found her as a kitten, her head almost bitten off by a dog, her sides layed open, her muzzle flayed and bleeding. She was huddled in the corner of a dirt-floored garage at the duplex I was moving into. I was a fresh emigrant from marriage, immigrant to separation, neophyte to divorce, and full of myself. Sam heard her mewl, a weak but insistant cry. I found a flashlight and he found her. We took her to the vet immediately, and he gave her less than a 50 percent chance of surviving the night. Later he said her survival was the most amazing thing he had witnessed in his career at that point. She was one in a million.
Today she still needs to be force fed, because unlike other cats on prednisone she doesn't take water or food copiously. She seems revolted by water and food, in fact, and it takes superhuman effort on my part to hold her down and squirt the grey-green stinking pablum into the back of her throat. I didn't know her eyes could open in horror that wide, that desperately, as when she tastes the stuff.
Despite the debacle of mealtimes, she still comes to me and climbs on my lap. I pet her frazzled looking fur, and talk to her. I remind her of some of the funny and harrowing times we have had together. I don't mention the times she was my only friend after the divorce, when my family and others had faded into the embarassed distance of victim's kin who cannot broach the silence or injustice of a terrible time. I think about those times, when I would lie alone in the upstairs bedroom, the streetlight casting shadows on the ceiling that looked like the webs of human-sized spiders. Maggie would climb up on my chest and position herself so she could look into my eyes. She seemed to say "Hey, get over it. You may miss your kids more than you would your own liver if it was cut out with a rusty knife, but you get them back half the time. You may fear a world that can rip your life open with both hands just for its amusement. But I've seen worse. I've seen the inside of my own face hanging off my skull, buddy, and you were there for me. So get over it. I got your back."
I think about these times. But I can't remind her, because the words get stuck in my throat. The tears were there a few times for her, but she wouldn't want them. She's way too tough for that. She just wants my knee when she wants it, and no more of the damn medical diet.
Not a very sentimental broad for someone who probably saved my life when the human sized spiders spun their webs, in the dark, outside my window. But her heart is in the right place, and it seems to have enough red blood cells for now. That'll do for me.
The vet had administered three vaccines at once. As he was preparing to do it, I was alarmed that Maggie's 11 year old system might not handle such a load all at once. I asked him, and he reassured me that one cat in a million had a bad reaction.
I should have told him Maggie was a cat in a million.
We found her as a kitten, her head almost bitten off by a dog, her sides layed open, her muzzle flayed and bleeding. She was huddled in the corner of a dirt-floored garage at the duplex I was moving into. I was a fresh emigrant from marriage, immigrant to separation, neophyte to divorce, and full of myself. Sam heard her mewl, a weak but insistant cry. I found a flashlight and he found her. We took her to the vet immediately, and he gave her less than a 50 percent chance of surviving the night. Later he said her survival was the most amazing thing he had witnessed in his career at that point. She was one in a million.
Today she still needs to be force fed, because unlike other cats on prednisone she doesn't take water or food copiously. She seems revolted by water and food, in fact, and it takes superhuman effort on my part to hold her down and squirt the grey-green stinking pablum into the back of her throat. I didn't know her eyes could open in horror that wide, that desperately, as when she tastes the stuff.
Despite the debacle of mealtimes, she still comes to me and climbs on my lap. I pet her frazzled looking fur, and talk to her. I remind her of some of the funny and harrowing times we have had together. I don't mention the times she was my only friend after the divorce, when my family and others had faded into the embarassed distance of victim's kin who cannot broach the silence or injustice of a terrible time. I think about those times, when I would lie alone in the upstairs bedroom, the streetlight casting shadows on the ceiling that looked like the webs of human-sized spiders. Maggie would climb up on my chest and position herself so she could look into my eyes. She seemed to say "Hey, get over it. You may miss your kids more than you would your own liver if it was cut out with a rusty knife, but you get them back half the time. You may fear a world that can rip your life open with both hands just for its amusement. But I've seen worse. I've seen the inside of my own face hanging off my skull, buddy, and you were there for me. So get over it. I got your back."
I think about these times. But I can't remind her, because the words get stuck in my throat. The tears were there a few times for her, but she wouldn't want them. She's way too tough for that. She just wants my knee when she wants it, and no more of the damn medical diet.
Not a very sentimental broad for someone who probably saved my life when the human sized spiders spun their webs, in the dark, outside my window. But her heart is in the right place, and it seems to have enough red blood cells for now. That'll do for me.
10.8.04
Craziness, wonder, kittens and steel
The 1000-lb IBM mainframe computer I bought last week on eBay is slowly flattening the tires on my Mercury Villager van as I try to figure out how to get it out without killing or maiming anyone. The kittens are shredding the new $2000 living room set. We covered the sofa and chair with sheets, so the the atomic runts take turns, one running under the sheets while the other pounces on the moving lump. Then they both go under, come out from different ends, look around and run head first into each other, claws out, mewling and slam-hugging like WWF stars. At work yesterday someone said we had to foil the upholstery. I thought but did not say we really needed to foil the kittens.
My neck hurts so bad I can't turn my head, and Maggie, (the elder cat who has been plagued by the kittens) is sick, stunned into a lethargy by either the vaccinations we gave her Saturday morning or by the realization that these frenetic hairballs will be with her until she flings her last enraged hiss at the encroaching mewing mini-demons of her personal void.
My son is sleepless, driven by visions of truth and beauty that can't be contained in a 16 year old's normal waking routines. I am divided between my concerns as a caretaker and pride as a father watching him get strung out while he struggles to translate the visions that cut Plato and the Alchemists from their herds in their day, into language that might fit alternative rock lyrics in our material midnight.
Sara is a constant beacon of sanity, care, humor as I fragment and bounce like a thousand pachinko balls among the glittering pins of my various imperatives. God give us grace and rest. Amen.
My neck hurts so bad I can't turn my head, and Maggie, (the elder cat who has been plagued by the kittens) is sick, stunned into a lethargy by either the vaccinations we gave her Saturday morning or by the realization that these frenetic hairballs will be with her until she flings her last enraged hiss at the encroaching mewing mini-demons of her personal void.
My son is sleepless, driven by visions of truth and beauty that can't be contained in a 16 year old's normal waking routines. I am divided between my concerns as a caretaker and pride as a father watching him get strung out while he struggles to translate the visions that cut Plato and the Alchemists from their herds in their day, into language that might fit alternative rock lyrics in our material midnight.
Sara is a constant beacon of sanity, care, humor as I fragment and bounce like a thousand pachinko balls among the glittering pins of my various imperatives. God give us grace and rest. Amen.
5.8.04
What does it say...
Control Language Programming for the AS/400 (2nd Edition) is a primer for the main language that my new personal mainframe speaks.
That, combined with another book introducing the other aspects of the AS/400, costs $120.
That is almost 20 times what I paid for the minicomputer in the first place.
What does this tell us about economics in the 21st century? What does it say about me if I shell out that $120 for the information required to use a $6 tool? What does it say about our governments and businesses that spend tens of thousands of dollars for every generation of information tool and then scrap them when it is time to change?
Hmmm. I know you have ideas about these things. Send them to me at Jeff@zeitguide.org.
That, combined with another book introducing the other aspects of the AS/400, costs $120.
That is almost 20 times what I paid for the minicomputer in the first place.
What does this tell us about economics in the 21st century? What does it say about me if I shell out that $120 for the information required to use a $6 tool? What does it say about our governments and businesses that spend tens of thousands of dollars for every generation of information tool and then scrap them when it is time to change?
Hmmm. I know you have ideas about these things. Send them to me at Jeff@zeitguide.org.
My home PC can beat up your whole neighborhood's home PCs
The IBM as/400 minicomputer was introduced in 1988. It offered its programming code libraries and application program interface to business IT shops as a quick and powerful way to develop custom applications. It facilitated hardware expansion and evolution without changes to the software layers. You could spend $12,000 or $2,000,000 for the system, and be up and running quickly. By the mid 90's the high powered PC was putting most minicomputers out of business, but the AS/400 survived because of its adaptability and solid business profile.
Yesterday I bought one for my basement.
It stands 61" high, and is 24" wide, and 3 feet deep. It runs on 240 volt current on a power buss that is two inches in diameter (that is the plug and power cord>) It probably weighs close to 900 lbs, considering it rack mounts two 9733 hard drives that weigh over 100 lbs apiece, in addition to about a dozen "feature cards" and a cpu cage the size of a toaster oven. I am guessing about 2000 watts minimum.
It isn't pretty to look at. Doesn't seem to have any design sense at all, in fact, in its plain vanilla box with no real blinking lights to speak of.
I hope it works. I am finding that I can download a terminal emulator for windows from SourceForge that will have me speaking to the monster in its own language fairly quickly. It just needs to work. If it lights up and the OS is still installed and boots, I might be talking to it in a week or so.
I do write data analysis programs for fun, and compose computer music. I have no idea at this time what I am going to do with the AS/400 if it works. It probably has two processors that are 32 bit CISC cpus running around 20 mhz, which means it was outpaced in sheer throughput by the first pentiums available in late 1996, if I remember correctly. I have a small, old, happy pentium 90 running windows 98 in the studio that I use strictly for midi utilities that talk to old synths from that era, and it might be more powerful than the AS/400.
If that is the case, why bother schlepping a half ton of high quality engineering and spending dozens of hours retrofitting an interface into an obsolete operating system in order to program in a clumsy, integer only environment with limited or non existant graphics output while paying the electric bill on a housefull of appliances for one big bland toy?
I guess you had to be there.
I guess you had to sit in night school for 13 months learning to write code for the IBM 360 mainframe on punch cards. I guess you had to learn RPG and Sperry Terminal language by filling in mimeographed grids and flow-chart templates in pizza joints at midnight in your thirties, when you had just gotten married and were seized with a vision of computer science that burned in your head like a halogen bulb. I guess you had to struggle for two decades to see the vision realized partially on a 20 pound box that contained more computing power than the entire united states armed forces had at its disposal in 1968, and had to lose the physical sense of that effort over time as computers became smaller and lighter and faster.
My apprenticeship was at the breast of a monster that filled a room. It weighed tons, and was delivered in a semi truck by a crew of men who then took a week to install its special electrical connections, peripherals, air conditioning. When I wrote my first IBM assembler language program I had to wait two hours for my turn to submit my cards to the card reader, and then watch the huge consoles run the thirty lines of code in a millisecond. There was a presence and a gravitas to the ritual. Part of me resisted being taken in by it, and just wanted the results, which the generation of PCs waiting in the wings were quick to provide. But part of me responded to the priesthood, the steel and lightening of the oracle unleashed among mortals. That part got shoved into the bottom of a file drawer sometime in the mid eighties while practical matters pushed me along.
Yesterday that part of me got out and stretched, and looked at the spawn of the mother processors of my apprenticeship, and patted it on the head. The giant baby Blue looked like it was ready to play. The gods of ebcedic and hexadecimal looked down from a vanishing olympus and smiled at the folly. They understood. They had been there.
Yesterday I bought one for my basement.
It stands 61" high, and is 24" wide, and 3 feet deep. It runs on 240 volt current on a power buss that is two inches in diameter (that is the plug and power cord>) It probably weighs close to 900 lbs, considering it rack mounts two 9733 hard drives that weigh over 100 lbs apiece, in addition to about a dozen "feature cards" and a cpu cage the size of a toaster oven. I am guessing about 2000 watts minimum.
It isn't pretty to look at. Doesn't seem to have any design sense at all, in fact, in its plain vanilla box with no real blinking lights to speak of.
I hope it works. I am finding that I can download a terminal emulator for windows from SourceForge that will have me speaking to the monster in its own language fairly quickly. It just needs to work. If it lights up and the OS is still installed and boots, I might be talking to it in a week or so.
I do write data analysis programs for fun, and compose computer music. I have no idea at this time what I am going to do with the AS/400 if it works. It probably has two processors that are 32 bit CISC cpus running around 20 mhz, which means it was outpaced in sheer throughput by the first pentiums available in late 1996, if I remember correctly. I have a small, old, happy pentium 90 running windows 98 in the studio that I use strictly for midi utilities that talk to old synths from that era, and it might be more powerful than the AS/400.
If that is the case, why bother schlepping a half ton of high quality engineering and spending dozens of hours retrofitting an interface into an obsolete operating system in order to program in a clumsy, integer only environment with limited or non existant graphics output while paying the electric bill on a housefull of appliances for one big bland toy?
I guess you had to be there.
I guess you had to sit in night school for 13 months learning to write code for the IBM 360 mainframe on punch cards. I guess you had to learn RPG and Sperry Terminal language by filling in mimeographed grids and flow-chart templates in pizza joints at midnight in your thirties, when you had just gotten married and were seized with a vision of computer science that burned in your head like a halogen bulb. I guess you had to struggle for two decades to see the vision realized partially on a 20 pound box that contained more computing power than the entire united states armed forces had at its disposal in 1968, and had to lose the physical sense of that effort over time as computers became smaller and lighter and faster.
My apprenticeship was at the breast of a monster that filled a room. It weighed tons, and was delivered in a semi truck by a crew of men who then took a week to install its special electrical connections, peripherals, air conditioning. When I wrote my first IBM assembler language program I had to wait two hours for my turn to submit my cards to the card reader, and then watch the huge consoles run the thirty lines of code in a millisecond. There was a presence and a gravitas to the ritual. Part of me resisted being taken in by it, and just wanted the results, which the generation of PCs waiting in the wings were quick to provide. But part of me responded to the priesthood, the steel and lightening of the oracle unleashed among mortals. That part got shoved into the bottom of a file drawer sometime in the mid eighties while practical matters pushed me along.
Yesterday that part of me got out and stretched, and looked at the spawn of the mother processors of my apprenticeship, and patted it on the head. The giant baby Blue looked like it was ready to play. The gods of ebcedic and hexadecimal looked down from a vanishing olympus and smiled at the folly. They understood. They had been there.
4.8.04
My home computer is an IBM Mainframe
My love affair with technology dates back to at least when I was 4 years old. A neighbor who had been a radio man in WWII showed me how wrapping wire around a nail and attaching the ends of the wire to a battery made the nail a magnet. I went around the house trying the nail on everything. My mom put an end to my Royal Academy researches when she found me dangling her favorite silver-plated bracelet from the tip of an eight penny nail.
She didn't until that moment know that it was silver-plated, and not solid sterling. The lesson learned was: knowledge is a double edged sword; it can cut away ignorance, but there is always an emotional price to pay.
Today I am acutely conscious of both my love of technology and the weird byways it can lead me down...often at the expense of some female in my vicinity. In today's case, it would be Sara who has to anticipate the arrival of my newest Technical Foible with far less excitement than I. And my newest technical foible wouldn't inspire many people to anything than fear for their backs if they had to move it and a sense of loss of storage space where ever it might end up.
I am thinking of calling my new personal Mainframe IBM computer "Blitz." It has the connotation of speed, as in "blitzen" the Reindeer and "blitzkrieg" the lightening war. Blitz sounds a bit like bits, too...another computer resonance.
They say it won't fit in the van. I sort of bought it thinking I could get it home in the van at least, even if I couldn't personally lift the 5 foot high rack myself. They think it needs a flatbed or pickup as a conveyence.
You'd think that someone who just bought a mainframe wouldn't quibble about paying a few more bucks for a two man moving crew and a truck, right?
Not if he just bought the mainframe on eBay for $6.50.
Well, there will be more to tell of this story. In the meantime, I have to go get the bumper sticker made that says "My home computer is an IBM Mainframe."
The funny thing is, I am not sure if I would even like someone impressed by that fact.
She didn't until that moment know that it was silver-plated, and not solid sterling. The lesson learned was: knowledge is a double edged sword; it can cut away ignorance, but there is always an emotional price to pay.
Today I am acutely conscious of both my love of technology and the weird byways it can lead me down...often at the expense of some female in my vicinity. In today's case, it would be Sara who has to anticipate the arrival of my newest Technical Foible with far less excitement than I. And my newest technical foible wouldn't inspire many people to anything than fear for their backs if they had to move it and a sense of loss of storage space where ever it might end up.
I am thinking of calling my new personal Mainframe IBM computer "Blitz." It has the connotation of speed, as in "blitzen" the Reindeer and "blitzkrieg" the lightening war. Blitz sounds a bit like bits, too...another computer resonance.
They say it won't fit in the van. I sort of bought it thinking I could get it home in the van at least, even if I couldn't personally lift the 5 foot high rack myself. They think it needs a flatbed or pickup as a conveyence.
You'd think that someone who just bought a mainframe wouldn't quibble about paying a few more bucks for a two man moving crew and a truck, right?
Not if he just bought the mainframe on eBay for $6.50.
Well, there will be more to tell of this story. In the meantime, I have to go get the bumper sticker made that says "My home computer is an IBM Mainframe."
The funny thing is, I am not sure if I would even like someone impressed by that fact.
28.7.04
beyond left and right: resilience
In the 1920s the spectre of millions of deaths loomed behind them and the shadow of fascist and communist totalitarianism darkened the European's horizon. In the midst of this oppressive onslaught against the human spirit, one thinker looked westward for hope.
The British philosopher Herbert Read said that the strength of Americans lay in our unwillingness to become polarized into two warring factions, left and right. At that time he felt that the practicality, humor and good will of Americans prevented them succumbing to the mortal pettiness and rancor of the Europeans, with whom he included the Russians under Stalin. Read despaired of the one dimensional political hatred that was taking over all classes of global society, and he looked to the U.S. to provide a clear headed leadership grounded in humane values and practical intelligence.
This was remarkable for many reasons. Read was not a champion of the common man. He was a connoisseur of the arts, a philosopher, and a member of the elite of his nation and generation. So he wasn't just expressing the stereotyped support of a liberal or progressive intellectual mired in the crumbling aristocratic traditions of Europe.
He had what you might call a technical insight into the systemic problem which was driving Europe toward the devastation of World War II. He knew that simple two valued conflict between "left" and "right" drove both parties to extreme positions which were ultimately inhuman: totalitarian, whether fascist or communist. The circle was closed at the point of unsupportable violence against citizens within the nation's boundaries as well as mechanized warfare on an insane scale mounted against the "enemy." America represented at least three values in any conflict: the liberal, the conservative, and the skeptical. And in any given mileu the skeptic armed with humor was more likely to win an audience if not a constituency. For every Father Coughlin spewing simple minded hatred into the airwaves, there was the counter force of Will Rogers "calling it as he saw it", putting the pretentious in their place and elevating the common sensical and clearly observed to head of the table.
When Bush attacked Iraq, and a millenial chill settled into the bones of arguement in this country, I thought that the last vestige of Read's hope for the U.S. had been done in. Everywhere I looked and listened, the polarization proceeded at light speed. No one could present a balanced appraisal of anything important. There was the Patriot position and there was the Terrorist position, and every utterance in public was a litmus test of where the speaker stood between these two monoliths.
It was as though the national media had become a Boa Constrictor of the intellect, and each time the body politic exhaled, the censorius grip of intolerant polarization tightened, until there was little breath of wisdom or skepticism left.
But there is something in the gut of the average American, no matter how long they have been here, that has to say "wait a minute" when things get out of hand. It is at work at every lunch counter and office break room, every bar and family gathering in this country. It is laced with humor, braced with just enough logic, and motivated by a hugely uncontainable sentiment that believes, first and last, in the human spirit. And that humor, logic, and spirit will not be crushed by group think at the media level or immature jingoism at the level of national governance.
A nation that looks its leaders in the eye periodically and challenges the bill when it comes due is going to be resiliant. It will take in damaging blows to its self confidence and stagger for a while, but it will come back and speak up and look askance, and laugh. What should other nation's trust and honor in the spectacle presented by America at the present time? We are skeptical of our own excesses, not impressed easily by our own extremes, quick to laugh at our own foibles even as we persist in them.
There is hope for us yet. And in that hope for us, there is a certain untameable, unsuppressable hope for the spirit of every man and woman in the world.
The British philosopher Herbert Read said that the strength of Americans lay in our unwillingness to become polarized into two warring factions, left and right. At that time he felt that the practicality, humor and good will of Americans prevented them succumbing to the mortal pettiness and rancor of the Europeans, with whom he included the Russians under Stalin. Read despaired of the one dimensional political hatred that was taking over all classes of global society, and he looked to the U.S. to provide a clear headed leadership grounded in humane values and practical intelligence.
This was remarkable for many reasons. Read was not a champion of the common man. He was a connoisseur of the arts, a philosopher, and a member of the elite of his nation and generation. So he wasn't just expressing the stereotyped support of a liberal or progressive intellectual mired in the crumbling aristocratic traditions of Europe.
He had what you might call a technical insight into the systemic problem which was driving Europe toward the devastation of World War II. He knew that simple two valued conflict between "left" and "right" drove both parties to extreme positions which were ultimately inhuman: totalitarian, whether fascist or communist. The circle was closed at the point of unsupportable violence against citizens within the nation's boundaries as well as mechanized warfare on an insane scale mounted against the "enemy." America represented at least three values in any conflict: the liberal, the conservative, and the skeptical. And in any given mileu the skeptic armed with humor was more likely to win an audience if not a constituency. For every Father Coughlin spewing simple minded hatred into the airwaves, there was the counter force of Will Rogers "calling it as he saw it", putting the pretentious in their place and elevating the common sensical and clearly observed to head of the table.
When Bush attacked Iraq, and a millenial chill settled into the bones of arguement in this country, I thought that the last vestige of Read's hope for the U.S. had been done in. Everywhere I looked and listened, the polarization proceeded at light speed. No one could present a balanced appraisal of anything important. There was the Patriot position and there was the Terrorist position, and every utterance in public was a litmus test of where the speaker stood between these two monoliths.
It was as though the national media had become a Boa Constrictor of the intellect, and each time the body politic exhaled, the censorius grip of intolerant polarization tightened, until there was little breath of wisdom or skepticism left.
But there is something in the gut of the average American, no matter how long they have been here, that has to say "wait a minute" when things get out of hand. It is at work at every lunch counter and office break room, every bar and family gathering in this country. It is laced with humor, braced with just enough logic, and motivated by a hugely uncontainable sentiment that believes, first and last, in the human spirit. And that humor, logic, and spirit will not be crushed by group think at the media level or immature jingoism at the level of national governance.
A nation that looks its leaders in the eye periodically and challenges the bill when it comes due is going to be resiliant. It will take in damaging blows to its self confidence and stagger for a while, but it will come back and speak up and look askance, and laugh. What should other nation's trust and honor in the spectacle presented by America at the present time? We are skeptical of our own excesses, not impressed easily by our own extremes, quick to laugh at our own foibles even as we persist in them.
There is hope for us yet. And in that hope for us, there is a certain untameable, unsuppressable hope for the spirit of every man and woman in the world.
20.7.04
The therapy of the macrocosm.
The first step in personal therapy is to get the voices of your mother and father out of your head.
You didn't know it was that simple, did you?
What is the source of the deepest disconnect between individuals and their immediate environment? I propose this construct, this trope.
The debilitating influence of parental echoes are greatest when the individual is in a situation where the nostrums and precepts of their parents are not only useless, but dangerous or overtly destructive. Consider someone raised in a parochial society that feared and reviled their neighbors. Now imagine that person is forced to move across the border and live among those feared and reviled. Obviously in order to find any peace, they would have to extirpate the bias they had been raised with. Something similar to this conflict scenario tends to be behind the pain many troubled people feel. The receipes of their youth do not match the dietary requirements of their adulthood, but until they can "get the voices of their mother and father out of their head" they cannot find peace. What a painful, but simple, dilemma.
This dilemma has been known for at least a thousand years among certain groups of people. In the 11th century, the Sufis created havens for troubled individuals who could be taken away from their immediate families and allowed to rest and clear their thinking. Jesus said you have to turn away from your parents to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he didn't mean following Charles Manson or other cult leaders as parental substitutes. He meant you literally have to evolve past the lessons that your parents inculcated with their stories and admonishment. Of course, people in trouble often revert to the atavistic comfort of parental messages. People who are deeply frightened or very angry are rarely in a position to use that emotional energy to make a forward leap of understanding or personal integration. On the other hand, Gurdjieff teaches that times of emotional turmoil are good for bootstrapping yourself to a more integrated psychological level.
The challenge for therapists is to extricate a person from the family of voices in their head until they can hear their own voice calmly and clearly again, and simplify the decision process to where it resembles sensible and safe behavior again.
There is a cost to meddling with the voices in people's heads. Any psychiatric social worker, bar bouncer, help-line volunteer, AA sponsor or school guidance counselor can tell you bluntly how difficult it is to deal with someone who is not following conscious urges and persists in the unconstructive behaviors. Change is possible, but there is always a cost. Sometimes the cost is simply the extremes of a personality. Sometimes it is a life. Sometimes it is just a protracted period of discomfort that can result in a new level of awareness. These things are too complicated to predict for any given individual, but the patterns are persistant across numbers of people. If you practice the professions named above you know what I am talking about. If you have a seriously troubled family member you know what I am talking about.
I use "voices in their head" advisedly, as I am aware that often these dynamics occur without conscious auditory phenomena, and are only experienced as deeply felt emotional urges that override reason. But in the spirit of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I will refer to the phenomena as "voices in their heads."
(Jaynes supposes that until a few thousand years ago the voices in one's head were in fact due to a disconnect between left and right brain functions, and experienced as voices of gods. When he wrote his admittedly controversial book, "consciousness" was presumed to be unitary, exhaustive and sufficient. That means that each normal person was deemed to have one consciousness, which covered all their needs for thinking and awareness. Research since the 70's has followed many different routes, not least of which propose that there are different kinds of consciousness, or that different kinds of awareness and understanding do not always reach conscious levels before they are employed, or even that there is more than one legitimate consciousness in a healthy mind. I am not promoting Jaynes whole theory.)
But back to the voices. The first and most persistant voices are the parents, most often the mother. Now, I am not elaborating a technical construct here; only offering a kind of rule of thumb to those who might be interested in the idea.
Let's say, for the moment, that I am right.
As cultural and economic stress intensifies, people revert to the most primary level of guidance, and for most people that is their father/mother voices in their heads. When does this become a problem? When the reality of the current situation is in conflict with the values of the father/ mother voices. As cultural conflict and economic stress increase throughout society, we spend more of our conscious energy trying to figure out what we believe and whom we trust, and we spend more of our unconscious energy struggling with the gods of our ancestors who are blind to the present but very alive to the deep emotional truths of our existence.
Someone like Bush benefits superficially from our atavistic turmoil. He is accepted uncritically by a group of people who want someone who looks and acts like they could be the source of the voices in their heads.
It isn't working of course. We need the therapy of order, therapy of the social macrocosm. We need to get the voices of our parents out of our heads, while keeping their memories and love well established in our hearts. Bush can't help with that. I don't know if any politician can.
The first step in therapy is getting your parent's voices out of your head. The last step is letting them back in, without losing your own ever again.
If you have found your voice, use it.
If you have lost your voice, find it.
You didn't know it was that simple, did you?
What is the source of the deepest disconnect between individuals and their immediate environment? I propose this construct, this trope.
The debilitating influence of parental echoes are greatest when the individual is in a situation where the nostrums and precepts of their parents are not only useless, but dangerous or overtly destructive. Consider someone raised in a parochial society that feared and reviled their neighbors. Now imagine that person is forced to move across the border and live among those feared and reviled. Obviously in order to find any peace, they would have to extirpate the bias they had been raised with. Something similar to this conflict scenario tends to be behind the pain many troubled people feel. The receipes of their youth do not match the dietary requirements of their adulthood, but until they can "get the voices of their mother and father out of their head" they cannot find peace. What a painful, but simple, dilemma.
This dilemma has been known for at least a thousand years among certain groups of people. In the 11th century, the Sufis created havens for troubled individuals who could be taken away from their immediate families and allowed to rest and clear their thinking. Jesus said you have to turn away from your parents to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he didn't mean following Charles Manson or other cult leaders as parental substitutes. He meant you literally have to evolve past the lessons that your parents inculcated with their stories and admonishment. Of course, people in trouble often revert to the atavistic comfort of parental messages. People who are deeply frightened or very angry are rarely in a position to use that emotional energy to make a forward leap of understanding or personal integration. On the other hand, Gurdjieff teaches that times of emotional turmoil are good for bootstrapping yourself to a more integrated psychological level.
The challenge for therapists is to extricate a person from the family of voices in their head until they can hear their own voice calmly and clearly again, and simplify the decision process to where it resembles sensible and safe behavior again.
There is a cost to meddling with the voices in people's heads. Any psychiatric social worker, bar bouncer, help-line volunteer, AA sponsor or school guidance counselor can tell you bluntly how difficult it is to deal with someone who is not following conscious urges and persists in the unconstructive behaviors. Change is possible, but there is always a cost. Sometimes the cost is simply the extremes of a personality. Sometimes it is a life. Sometimes it is just a protracted period of discomfort that can result in a new level of awareness. These things are too complicated to predict for any given individual, but the patterns are persistant across numbers of people. If you practice the professions named above you know what I am talking about. If you have a seriously troubled family member you know what I am talking about.
I use "voices in their head" advisedly, as I am aware that often these dynamics occur without conscious auditory phenomena, and are only experienced as deeply felt emotional urges that override reason. But in the spirit of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I will refer to the phenomena as "voices in their heads."
(Jaynes supposes that until a few thousand years ago the voices in one's head were in fact due to a disconnect between left and right brain functions, and experienced as voices of gods. When he wrote his admittedly controversial book, "consciousness" was presumed to be unitary, exhaustive and sufficient. That means that each normal person was deemed to have one consciousness, which covered all their needs for thinking and awareness. Research since the 70's has followed many different routes, not least of which propose that there are different kinds of consciousness, or that different kinds of awareness and understanding do not always reach conscious levels before they are employed, or even that there is more than one legitimate consciousness in a healthy mind. I am not promoting Jaynes whole theory.)
But back to the voices. The first and most persistant voices are the parents, most often the mother. Now, I am not elaborating a technical construct here; only offering a kind of rule of thumb to those who might be interested in the idea.
Let's say, for the moment, that I am right.
As cultural and economic stress intensifies, people revert to the most primary level of guidance, and for most people that is their father/mother voices in their heads. When does this become a problem? When the reality of the current situation is in conflict with the values of the father/ mother voices. As cultural conflict and economic stress increase throughout society, we spend more of our conscious energy trying to figure out what we believe and whom we trust, and we spend more of our unconscious energy struggling with the gods of our ancestors who are blind to the present but very alive to the deep emotional truths of our existence.
Someone like Bush benefits superficially from our atavistic turmoil. He is accepted uncritically by a group of people who want someone who looks and acts like they could be the source of the voices in their heads.
It isn't working of course. We need the therapy of order, therapy of the social macrocosm. We need to get the voices of our parents out of our heads, while keeping their memories and love well established in our hearts. Bush can't help with that. I don't know if any politician can.
The first step in therapy is getting your parent's voices out of your head. The last step is letting them back in, without losing your own ever again.
If you have found your voice, use it.
If you have lost your voice, find it.
16.7.04
Relationships and fear: two modern ideas whose time is past
We are not on this Earth to have "relationships" with people. We are here to love and fight others. The simplicity of this has been shattered by the subtle elevation of fear to the status of final arbiter of all public good. These two dissimulations: relationships as a goal and fear as a justification, need to be examined carefully in order to understand the damage they do to the trusting mind.
If someone says "I need a relationship" you know they are an idiot. They might be nice or dangerous, but they are an idiot. You have a relationship with everything and everyone. You don't know it until it becomes conscious, but the word "relationship" or "relation" simply means that two things exert some kind of mutual influence on each other. To say you need a relationship, or are in a relationship, or have a good or bad relationship with another person, begs the question of whether you love them or want to fight them or both.
Learn to discriminate the quality of affection and respect you have for others. Learn to develop your skills so you may act spontaneously and well in all settings. Then the "relationship" will take care of itself.
Now, if someone says "We did this because we were afraid of blah blah blah" you know they are an idiot. No one acts because of fear. They act out of desire. The term "fight or flight" became popular in the last century in the campaign to dehumanize choice and reduce us all to absurd bundles of reflexes. It implies that we follow, and don't lead, our impulses.
If you want to understand your behavior, figure out what it is that you desire. Admit what you want. Then you will understand why you do what you do. If you think about fear, it is like trying to figure out what the darkness looks like. We have elevated an absence to a place of pride in our cultural life, with the worship of ideas like terror and evil. The "scare" tactics of free-lance political guerillas are actually designed to outrage people and reveal the weakness of politicians. Fear is not really the issue, and its extreme form of "terror" simply becomes the trademark used to brand a whole industry of selfish behavior ranging from rudeness and lying to theft and murder. The average person is outraged by theft and murder and wants to stand up to the perpetrators. You don't want to cower behind some uniformed figure who takes your son out to be killed in battle while handing you a picture of a flag.
Try taking my stuff. Try hurting me or my family and I will show you what I mean.
In the meantime, figure out what you really want. And admit it to yourself.
If someone says "I need a relationship" you know they are an idiot. They might be nice or dangerous, but they are an idiot. You have a relationship with everything and everyone. You don't know it until it becomes conscious, but the word "relationship" or "relation" simply means that two things exert some kind of mutual influence on each other. To say you need a relationship, or are in a relationship, or have a good or bad relationship with another person, begs the question of whether you love them or want to fight them or both.
Learn to discriminate the quality of affection and respect you have for others. Learn to develop your skills so you may act spontaneously and well in all settings. Then the "relationship" will take care of itself.
Now, if someone says "We did this because we were afraid of blah blah blah" you know they are an idiot. No one acts because of fear. They act out of desire. The term "fight or flight" became popular in the last century in the campaign to dehumanize choice and reduce us all to absurd bundles of reflexes. It implies that we follow, and don't lead, our impulses.
If you want to understand your behavior, figure out what it is that you desire. Admit what you want. Then you will understand why you do what you do. If you think about fear, it is like trying to figure out what the darkness looks like. We have elevated an absence to a place of pride in our cultural life, with the worship of ideas like terror and evil. The "scare" tactics of free-lance political guerillas are actually designed to outrage people and reveal the weakness of politicians. Fear is not really the issue, and its extreme form of "terror" simply becomes the trademark used to brand a whole industry of selfish behavior ranging from rudeness and lying to theft and murder. The average person is outraged by theft and murder and wants to stand up to the perpetrators. You don't want to cower behind some uniformed figure who takes your son out to be killed in battle while handing you a picture of a flag.
Try taking my stuff. Try hurting me or my family and I will show you what I mean.
In the meantime, figure out what you really want. And admit it to yourself.
15.7.04
The soul and the spirit of a human being
The spirit flies free, and takes many shapes easily, but its destiny is to find a home. The soul is rooted deep into the earth, but it must travel and undergo change in order to become what it is. These two dynamics weave around each other and create the shape, color and music of a life.
The spirit does not take much notice of pain. The soul finds pain to be a directional beacon, a guide. The spirit must learn the nature of pain, and must learn to relieve the pain of others in order to find its own true limits. The soul must learn to forgo pain, to find its way without seeking pain as a proof of its existence.
The spirit wants to play with the angels and it must learn to serve the prisoners of the earth. The soul listens in the darkness and must learn to sing in the light.
No one can kill their spirit or ignore their own soul. Great discontent, great longing and tragic grief rip a person from their moment, but cannot tear them from the warp and weft of destiny: soul and spirit.
It doesn't help to know this. It does help to know you are not alone in your journey, and you will not be alone when you find your home.
The spirit does not take much notice of pain. The soul finds pain to be a directional beacon, a guide. The spirit must learn the nature of pain, and must learn to relieve the pain of others in order to find its own true limits. The soul must learn to forgo pain, to find its way without seeking pain as a proof of its existence.
The spirit wants to play with the angels and it must learn to serve the prisoners of the earth. The soul listens in the darkness and must learn to sing in the light.
No one can kill their spirit or ignore their own soul. Great discontent, great longing and tragic grief rip a person from their moment, but cannot tear them from the warp and weft of destiny: soul and spirit.
It doesn't help to know this. It does help to know you are not alone in your journey, and you will not be alone when you find your home.
14.7.04
The age of knowledge
Prior to the twentieth century, a majority of christian europeans assumed the bible to be literal in its setting forth the age of creation, which certain clerics calculated to be about 6000 years. They believed a lot of other odd things, too. By the 1970's Marschak, an anthropologist, threw established notions of prehistory all cock-a-hoop with the disclosure that orderly markings on an antler found near a paleolithic fire pit in Czechoslovakia were in fact lunar phase diagrams. And they were dated to 25,000 bc.
How old is knowledge? We still can't agree.
Lately I have come across two widely separated books with a common theme...the "hidden" science of the Rgveda. The Rgveda is the Indian scripture with a wealth of mysterious intellectual structures scattered about, a kind of reader's Stonehenge and Baalbeck rolled into a lengthy series of poems and stories. One book purports to establish a common hidden ancestry for all cultural musical norms, and another purports to discover hidden astronomical knowledge of an extremely high order hidden in the numerical structure of the poems stanzas.
Someday before I die I hope to read both books, and feel quite brainy as I do. In the meantime, I wonder if we are not in fact living at the end of the age of Knowledge, however long it has taken to get to this point. With men like President Bush governing the amassed destructive resources of our civilization based on feelings that originate from a point no higher than his belly button, I would guess that questions of the age of knowledge will become academic, even as the academies close and fall to ruin.
How old is knowledge? We still can't agree.
Lately I have come across two widely separated books with a common theme...the "hidden" science of the Rgveda. The Rgveda is the Indian scripture with a wealth of mysterious intellectual structures scattered about, a kind of reader's Stonehenge and Baalbeck rolled into a lengthy series of poems and stories. One book purports to establish a common hidden ancestry for all cultural musical norms, and another purports to discover hidden astronomical knowledge of an extremely high order hidden in the numerical structure of the poems stanzas.
Someday before I die I hope to read both books, and feel quite brainy as I do. In the meantime, I wonder if we are not in fact living at the end of the age of Knowledge, however long it has taken to get to this point. With men like President Bush governing the amassed destructive resources of our civilization based on feelings that originate from a point no higher than his belly button, I would guess that questions of the age of knowledge will become academic, even as the academies close and fall to ruin.
13.7.04
the universe
The universe exists to give all creatures exactly what they want when they want it. The problem arises when creatures don't know that they want exactly what they have, when they have it. Animals seem to obey this law better than humans. They sit with what they have until they want something else, then they go for that.
This flies in the face of therapeutic "wisdom" that makes fun of addicts, who "want what they want when they want it". But therapeutic wisdom ignores the fact that addicts don't want to get high, they just want to be in the presence of their lover. The problem with addiction begins when a child goes to a parent to simply be in the presence of their lover, and the parent gives them food, a toy, or some other distraction in order to avoid paying attention to the child. The child then is trained to go to the distraction on the way to love, and that becomes a way of life.
That doesn't make the problem of addiction easy to solve for anyone except the addict. When the addict wakes up and realizes whom they love, all they have to do is go to the presence of their lover, and they will find release from the cycle of distraction. Of course, for many people, the cycle of distraction is immensely attractive, because it is a kind of foreplay that enhances the anticipation of going to the presence of their lover.
The universe, with its mandatory aspects of space and time, provides a lover for every lover, and a direction towards that lover. The necessity of crossing space and taking time to get to your lover creates the multiplicity of life's sensations and experiences.
We are all going to be in the presence of our lover sooner or later. Maybe you were in the presence of your lover already today. What a great thing! What a beautiful thing to return to!
This flies in the face of therapeutic "wisdom" that makes fun of addicts, who "want what they want when they want it". But therapeutic wisdom ignores the fact that addicts don't want to get high, they just want to be in the presence of their lover. The problem with addiction begins when a child goes to a parent to simply be in the presence of their lover, and the parent gives them food, a toy, or some other distraction in order to avoid paying attention to the child. The child then is trained to go to the distraction on the way to love, and that becomes a way of life.
That doesn't make the problem of addiction easy to solve for anyone except the addict. When the addict wakes up and realizes whom they love, all they have to do is go to the presence of their lover, and they will find release from the cycle of distraction. Of course, for many people, the cycle of distraction is immensely attractive, because it is a kind of foreplay that enhances the anticipation of going to the presence of their lover.
The universe, with its mandatory aspects of space and time, provides a lover for every lover, and a direction towards that lover. The necessity of crossing space and taking time to get to your lover creates the multiplicity of life's sensations and experiences.
We are all going to be in the presence of our lover sooner or later. Maybe you were in the presence of your lover already today. What a great thing! What a beautiful thing to return to!
8.7.04
The Next Big Thing and me (and you, maybe)
My experience in Visualization of Management and Research Data
Jeff Beddow
Minneapolis. June, 2004
1970-71 As research Assistant to Dr. John Modell at the University of Minnesota, I worked to extract interesting patterns out of 1880-1890 U.S. Census data from Rhode Island. I imagined a computer program that would make literal visual patterns out of the tens of thousands of numbers, to aid interpretation.
1978-80 I experimented with variations on quilt patterns as a visual design exercise, and thought that the visual syntax and grammar of textile patterns might support the visualization of complex data.
1980-81 Took courses in computer science and programming to acquire necessary skills to create the program which would implement the idea of visualizing complex data sets through visual patterns.
1982-1984 Developed and published a graphics program with special pattern manipulation features, contacted ARPA and other potential sponsors for a visualization program.
1984-1987 Interviewed business owners, executives and managers in a broad range of fields including manufacturing, car rental, data-base management, retail store management, government economic forecasting, etc. to refine specifications of a program. I also intensified my research into the physiology of perception, the psychology of learning and interpreting visual information, and other fields relating to this project.
As a matter of interest, this was a time in the field of perceptual physiology, cognitive science, and the psychology of learning when the emphasis was splitting dramatically from conscious, purposeful thinking skills to machine learning on the one hand and pre-attentive cognition on the other. Triesman's and Livingston’s research represents leading work in the latter field.
Pre-attentive visual processing
Pre-attentive cognition is the processing of visual information such as color, contrast, shape, etc in order to navigate, avoid danger, recognize friends, and perform other complex perceptual/judgment skills without involving fully conscious mechanisms. It occurs almost instantaneously, without comparison, recollection, or decoding of encoded value schemes. It is known to occur at a much higher speed than linear thinking and analysis, since it involves the parallel processing of thousands of bits of visual information in coherent spatial patterns. Pre-attentive processing supports human judgment in all natural environments, but it has been forced out of most modern decision contexts. The careful application of the principles of pre-attentive design will simplify the task of extracting meaningful information from a mass of data in any circumstance.
I was swimming against the current of interest in artificial intelligence which dominated many fields of computer research at the time. I was committed to the idea of not only keeping the human “in the loop” as it was described, but maximizing the essential human aspects of judgment that I felt were never going to be replaced by machines.
Developments in pre-attentive processing were important to me because they supported my intuition that labeling and organizing information according to conscious categories had to be subordinated to perceptual figure-ground relationships between operationally relevant data and the data set in general. I decided at this time that I would not try to gradually evolve conventions of data pictorialism, i.e. pie charts and bar charts. Instead I decided to go directly to the strength of computers and the human visual cortex by displaying large amounts of data carefully organized to depict decision-critical aspects of these sets without summary methods. It would require thorough understanding of how figure ground visual relations should be mapped from decision making criteria.
Based on the results of this research and work, I designed a prototype visualization system on a microcomputer. It presented hundreds of data points in highly designed arrays that allowed a non-specialist the ability to easily separate the foreground data points from the background of the entire data set while keeping everything in view, and hence in perspective. The Vice President of Operations of Valspar paint company grasped the idea in its entirety the first time he saw the demonstration. He said that one of the hardest aspects of his job was having to sign off on exception reports every day, (hundreds of gallons of paint ruined for one reason or another) and that with a complete perspective on the whole operation those exceptions would not weigh so heavily on him.
The foreground data points were defined by the context of the decision to be made. They could be extreme points, average points, incidence of change, or change in certain directions. By moving the cursor over the display, the operator could read specific label information, and by clicking down, contextual information such as statistics relating to the item in question, or the entire data set, could be obtained easily.
As I refined this prototype, I worked with real businesses and researchers to use their data in the context of their management or research interests. The University Center for Urban Research, several start up technology companies, Valspar Paint Corporation and National Rental Car were some of the groups that I worked with in this pursuit.
1987-88 I worked with the Minnesota State Department of Economic Development’s small business unit to develop a business plan and make contacts among potential partners in developing this system. I approached the director of Information Technology at the regional government that employed me full time, but he felt that the approach of visual pattern emphasis would be confusing to the managers at the county who were more linear and verbal in their approach to decision making. Through the State office I was introduced to the President of McGraw Hill, Inc. He saw my demonstration and flew me out to McGraw Hill corporate headquarters in New York to make a presentation to the Executive Board of the corporation. They gave unanimous consent to start a pilot project with one of the divisions of McGraw Hill. I was teamed up with the product development group at California Testing Bureau, which provided tests and test score services to half of the 16,000 school districts in the United States. After initial meetings and review, I was given the challenge of developing visualization products for four very difficult areas selected by the scientists and marketing people. This included ways to present student achievement against probable performance estimates, and presenting individual student's performance on standard tests against their class and their class against the school district performance. I returned a few months later and demonstrated the solution to these problems to the team’s satisfaction. We could not agree to terms for further pursuit of the development at that time, but Gordon Wainwright, the Director of new product development, encouraged me with the assertion that I was only 10 years ahead of my time. I also demonstrated the approach to Carl Adams, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the U. He characterized my methods as “...being to bar charts and pie charts what the integrated circuit was to the vacuum tube.”
I contacted NASA’s Godard Space Science Data center as a result of a Wall Street Journal article I had read, and met Dr. Lloyd Treinish, the director. He was heavily involved in visualization methods, and as a result of our conversations he invited me to participate in NASA and the National Science Foundation’s first Scientific Visualization conference. It was held at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, in 1988. I attended this conference as an observer, but was invited to chair a workshop on multidimensional, multivariate data visualization methods at the ensuing conference to be held at Stanford University in 1990. In the course of developing the workshop, I contacted researchers and developers in major universities and corporate research centers around the world.
1990 In February of 1990 I chaired the Multidimensional/Multivariate Data Visualization workshop at the second NASA/NSF Scientific Visualization conference at Stanford University. We met over the course of three days, and had presentations from Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute, Columbia University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California at Davis, IBM, and several other groups at the lead edge of visualization of complex data. One of the attendees was the head of the Information Science department of the Naval Research Laboratory. He invited me to submit a paper on my work to a conference he was chairing for the IEEE in June, in San Francisco. He also invited me to propose a workshop at the conference that would follow on the Stanford work.
In June I attended and presented at the first annual IEEE Visualization conference in San Francisco, and my primary publication on this work was included in the proceedings of that conference. I was invited to join the steering committee of the conference and plan the following year’s conference, and to have another workshop in multivariate data visualization.
The data I used for my paper consisted of a merged data set drawing upon sensors in orbit around the earth, on the ground, and in solar orbit. It depicted 13 parameters of the earth’s magnetic field and solar activity for 20 days on an hourly basis in one screen.
1991-1992 I developed and chaired workshops and a tutorial on Multi Dimensional Visualization for the IEEE conferences, and worked for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory part time to develop visualizations of engineering design alternatives for the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor - a consortium project involving Japanese, Soviet, European and American science institutions trying to develop a workable hot fusion reactor. My work with Livermore resulted in several joint authorships of progress papers presented to sessions of scientists on the ITER project, and ultimately inclusion in a book on advanced visualization methods. I was invited to join the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell to help develop a visualization center in the Computer Science department, but my lack of academic credentials prevented any development in that area.
2003 The market was ready for what I had done finally. I purchased a Pentium IV computer and a copy of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET development system and wrote the basic routines of a third major revision of the program. The current version supports the browsing and manipulation of 120,000 data points simultaneously on one high resolution screen, and has a refined set of essential features derived from the various generations of the program. The program is designed to be both an exploration and presentation tool for executive decision makers, managers, and operations supervisors who need to examine performance and resource use over a large organization. It can be used for research in any field that needs to establish the status of events or operational entities against the context of expectations, known performance parameters, or internal categories derived from arbitrary boundary and set inclusion definitions.
I have done the research and development completely independently on this program, in my spare time, on my own equipment and software. In 1988 a principal analyst in the Operations and Planning Department of Hennepin County saw the prototype and tried to create an accommodation for me at work, but the resulting contract was not acceptable. The Information Technology department passed on the project in 1988. In 2003 I again sought out managers in IT who might be interested in visualization, and they referred me to data warehousing and data mining groups who were not apparently active at the moment.
I am exploring the feasibility of patenting aspects of the process. It has gained recognition in small but prestigious circles both as a pioneering effort and a signature method of approaching the problem of seeing both the forest and the trees, as it were, in complex system operations and management.
Purpose of the program (“DataProspect”)
The purpose of the program is to help make operational decisions about large, complex systems, or to find relations of interest in complex data sets. The method used is to objectify the operational components or research objects and paint these objects in a meaningful color and shape on the screen, where they can be browsed and interrogated by the operator.
The definitive method involves normalizing the display of the operations as an array of objects, and allowing the operator to use sliders to assign the most visible colors and shapes to the most critical components. This can be done before loading the display through a table of critical thresholds, or it can be adjusted on the fly, just as a lens can be focused during use.
The lens is a good metaphor for the program. It looks at the entire system, but brings the critical components into the foreground and into clear focus.
The program is different from other visualization methods in its ability to keep the critical features within a complex data set in a simple foreground/background relation to all the data, without simplifying to the point of misrepresentation, or requiring an inordinate amount of specialization from the operator.
System issues
The current version is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology, which lends itself well to integration with enterprise databases (SQL), office automation standards such as Excel and Access, and Internet Information Server services. It could easily be written in Java2 to reside in a Linux, Unix, Windows, or OSX environment through browser technology.
The core technology is a mapping, manipulation, and interrogation technology that can reside on top of conventional or customized data management technologies.
State of the Current Development phase
Currently the program can access, manipulate and interrogate 45 variables on 3000+ cases on a single 1600 x 1200 pixel display. The demo data is census data from each of the United States counties. Once the data is in and parsed, system response on a Pentium IV 2.4 ghz machine is virtually instantaneous…that is, there is so little lag that it doesn’t interfere with the operator’s concentration.
While the primary technology is resolved (defined as subject to patent), there are some enhancements that need finishing. The strength of the program is that it has one conduit to existing enterprise technology: it only needs to be fed an accurate table through any channel, and it does not rely on any proprietary or brand of enterprise support for its function. If it is to be integrated into a browser delivery, this would change.
Specifically, a proof of concept for any given enterprise could be arranged within a short time, ranging from a few days to a few weeks depending upon the number of defining displays that needed to be construed and the state of existing data.
The system parses and organizes itself according to the dimensions and size of the data it is given, and then presents the results in a consistent and intuitive manner. This means that the tool can be managed by one person in an enterprise, and will scale up to any level.
Make an offer.
Contact me at Jeff@zeitguide.org if you are able and willing to lift this promising preliminary work to the level of supporting results and a full time staff.
Jeff Beddow
Minneapolis. June, 2004
1970-71 As research Assistant to Dr. John Modell at the University of Minnesota, I worked to extract interesting patterns out of 1880-1890 U.S. Census data from Rhode Island. I imagined a computer program that would make literal visual patterns out of the tens of thousands of numbers, to aid interpretation.
1978-80 I experimented with variations on quilt patterns as a visual design exercise, and thought that the visual syntax and grammar of textile patterns might support the visualization of complex data.
1980-81 Took courses in computer science and programming to acquire necessary skills to create the program which would implement the idea of visualizing complex data sets through visual patterns.
1982-1984 Developed and published a graphics program with special pattern manipulation features, contacted ARPA and other potential sponsors for a visualization program.
1984-1987 Interviewed business owners, executives and managers in a broad range of fields including manufacturing, car rental, data-base management, retail store management, government economic forecasting, etc. to refine specifications of a program. I also intensified my research into the physiology of perception, the psychology of learning and interpreting visual information, and other fields relating to this project.
As a matter of interest, this was a time in the field of perceptual physiology, cognitive science, and the psychology of learning when the emphasis was splitting dramatically from conscious, purposeful thinking skills to machine learning on the one hand and pre-attentive cognition on the other. Triesman's and Livingston’s research represents leading work in the latter field.
Pre-attentive visual processing
Pre-attentive cognition is the processing of visual information such as color, contrast, shape, etc in order to navigate, avoid danger, recognize friends, and perform other complex perceptual/judgment skills without involving fully conscious mechanisms. It occurs almost instantaneously, without comparison, recollection, or decoding of encoded value schemes. It is known to occur at a much higher speed than linear thinking and analysis, since it involves the parallel processing of thousands of bits of visual information in coherent spatial patterns. Pre-attentive processing supports human judgment in all natural environments, but it has been forced out of most modern decision contexts. The careful application of the principles of pre-attentive design will simplify the task of extracting meaningful information from a mass of data in any circumstance.
I was swimming against the current of interest in artificial intelligence which dominated many fields of computer research at the time. I was committed to the idea of not only keeping the human “in the loop” as it was described, but maximizing the essential human aspects of judgment that I felt were never going to be replaced by machines.
Developments in pre-attentive processing were important to me because they supported my intuition that labeling and organizing information according to conscious categories had to be subordinated to perceptual figure-ground relationships between operationally relevant data and the data set in general. I decided at this time that I would not try to gradually evolve conventions of data pictorialism, i.e. pie charts and bar charts. Instead I decided to go directly to the strength of computers and the human visual cortex by displaying large amounts of data carefully organized to depict decision-critical aspects of these sets without summary methods. It would require thorough understanding of how figure ground visual relations should be mapped from decision making criteria.
Based on the results of this research and work, I designed a prototype visualization system on a microcomputer. It presented hundreds of data points in highly designed arrays that allowed a non-specialist the ability to easily separate the foreground data points from the background of the entire data set while keeping everything in view, and hence in perspective. The Vice President of Operations of Valspar paint company grasped the idea in its entirety the first time he saw the demonstration. He said that one of the hardest aspects of his job was having to sign off on exception reports every day, (hundreds of gallons of paint ruined for one reason or another) and that with a complete perspective on the whole operation those exceptions would not weigh so heavily on him.
The foreground data points were defined by the context of the decision to be made. They could be extreme points, average points, incidence of change, or change in certain directions. By moving the cursor over the display, the operator could read specific label information, and by clicking down, contextual information such as statistics relating to the item in question, or the entire data set, could be obtained easily.
As I refined this prototype, I worked with real businesses and researchers to use their data in the context of their management or research interests. The University Center for Urban Research, several start up technology companies, Valspar Paint Corporation and National Rental Car were some of the groups that I worked with in this pursuit.
1987-88 I worked with the Minnesota State Department of Economic Development’s small business unit to develop a business plan and make contacts among potential partners in developing this system. I approached the director of Information Technology at the regional government that employed me full time, but he felt that the approach of visual pattern emphasis would be confusing to the managers at the county who were more linear and verbal in their approach to decision making. Through the State office I was introduced to the President of McGraw Hill, Inc. He saw my demonstration and flew me out to McGraw Hill corporate headquarters in New York to make a presentation to the Executive Board of the corporation. They gave unanimous consent to start a pilot project with one of the divisions of McGraw Hill. I was teamed up with the product development group at California Testing Bureau, which provided tests and test score services to half of the 16,000 school districts in the United States. After initial meetings and review, I was given the challenge of developing visualization products for four very difficult areas selected by the scientists and marketing people. This included ways to present student achievement against probable performance estimates, and presenting individual student's performance on standard tests against their class and their class against the school district performance. I returned a few months later and demonstrated the solution to these problems to the team’s satisfaction. We could not agree to terms for further pursuit of the development at that time, but Gordon Wainwright, the Director of new product development, encouraged me with the assertion that I was only 10 years ahead of my time. I also demonstrated the approach to Carl Adams, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the U. He characterized my methods as “...being to bar charts and pie charts what the integrated circuit was to the vacuum tube.”
I contacted NASA’s Godard Space Science Data center as a result of a Wall Street Journal article I had read, and met Dr. Lloyd Treinish, the director. He was heavily involved in visualization methods, and as a result of our conversations he invited me to participate in NASA and the National Science Foundation’s first Scientific Visualization conference. It was held at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, in 1988. I attended this conference as an observer, but was invited to chair a workshop on multidimensional, multivariate data visualization methods at the ensuing conference to be held at Stanford University in 1990. In the course of developing the workshop, I contacted researchers and developers in major universities and corporate research centers around the world.
1990 In February of 1990 I chaired the Multidimensional/Multivariate Data Visualization workshop at the second NASA/NSF Scientific Visualization conference at Stanford University. We met over the course of three days, and had presentations from Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute, Columbia University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California at Davis, IBM, and several other groups at the lead edge of visualization of complex data. One of the attendees was the head of the Information Science department of the Naval Research Laboratory. He invited me to submit a paper on my work to a conference he was chairing for the IEEE in June, in San Francisco. He also invited me to propose a workshop at the conference that would follow on the Stanford work.
In June I attended and presented at the first annual IEEE Visualization conference in San Francisco, and my primary publication on this work was included in the proceedings of that conference. I was invited to join the steering committee of the conference and plan the following year’s conference, and to have another workshop in multivariate data visualization.
The data I used for my paper consisted of a merged data set drawing upon sensors in orbit around the earth, on the ground, and in solar orbit. It depicted 13 parameters of the earth’s magnetic field and solar activity for 20 days on an hourly basis in one screen.
1991-1992 I developed and chaired workshops and a tutorial on Multi Dimensional Visualization for the IEEE conferences, and worked for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory part time to develop visualizations of engineering design alternatives for the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor - a consortium project involving Japanese, Soviet, European and American science institutions trying to develop a workable hot fusion reactor. My work with Livermore resulted in several joint authorships of progress papers presented to sessions of scientists on the ITER project, and ultimately inclusion in a book on advanced visualization methods. I was invited to join the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell to help develop a visualization center in the Computer Science department, but my lack of academic credentials prevented any development in that area.
2003 The market was ready for what I had done finally. I purchased a Pentium IV computer and a copy of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET development system and wrote the basic routines of a third major revision of the program. The current version supports the browsing and manipulation of 120,000 data points simultaneously on one high resolution screen, and has a refined set of essential features derived from the various generations of the program. The program is designed to be both an exploration and presentation tool for executive decision makers, managers, and operations supervisors who need to examine performance and resource use over a large organization. It can be used for research in any field that needs to establish the status of events or operational entities against the context of expectations, known performance parameters, or internal categories derived from arbitrary boundary and set inclusion definitions.
I have done the research and development completely independently on this program, in my spare time, on my own equipment and software. In 1988 a principal analyst in the Operations and Planning Department of Hennepin County saw the prototype and tried to create an accommodation for me at work, but the resulting contract was not acceptable. The Information Technology department passed on the project in 1988. In 2003 I again sought out managers in IT who might be interested in visualization, and they referred me to data warehousing and data mining groups who were not apparently active at the moment.
I am exploring the feasibility of patenting aspects of the process. It has gained recognition in small but prestigious circles both as a pioneering effort and a signature method of approaching the problem of seeing both the forest and the trees, as it were, in complex system operations and management.
Purpose of the program (“DataProspect”)
The purpose of the program is to help make operational decisions about large, complex systems, or to find relations of interest in complex data sets. The method used is to objectify the operational components or research objects and paint these objects in a meaningful color and shape on the screen, where they can be browsed and interrogated by the operator.
The definitive method involves normalizing the display of the operations as an array of objects, and allowing the operator to use sliders to assign the most visible colors and shapes to the most critical components. This can be done before loading the display through a table of critical thresholds, or it can be adjusted on the fly, just as a lens can be focused during use.
The lens is a good metaphor for the program. It looks at the entire system, but brings the critical components into the foreground and into clear focus.
The program is different from other visualization methods in its ability to keep the critical features within a complex data set in a simple foreground/background relation to all the data, without simplifying to the point of misrepresentation, or requiring an inordinate amount of specialization from the operator.
System issues
The current version is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology, which lends itself well to integration with enterprise databases (SQL), office automation standards such as Excel and Access, and Internet Information Server services. It could easily be written in Java2 to reside in a Linux, Unix, Windows, or OSX environment through browser technology.
The core technology is a mapping, manipulation, and interrogation technology that can reside on top of conventional or customized data management technologies.
State of the Current Development phase
Currently the program can access, manipulate and interrogate 45 variables on 3000+ cases on a single 1600 x 1200 pixel display. The demo data is census data from each of the United States counties. Once the data is in and parsed, system response on a Pentium IV 2.4 ghz machine is virtually instantaneous…that is, there is so little lag that it doesn’t interfere with the operator’s concentration.
While the primary technology is resolved (defined as subject to patent), there are some enhancements that need finishing. The strength of the program is that it has one conduit to existing enterprise technology: it only needs to be fed an accurate table through any channel, and it does not rely on any proprietary or brand of enterprise support for its function. If it is to be integrated into a browser delivery, this would change.
Specifically, a proof of concept for any given enterprise could be arranged within a short time, ranging from a few days to a few weeks depending upon the number of defining displays that needed to be construed and the state of existing data.
The system parses and organizes itself according to the dimensions and size of the data it is given, and then presents the results in a consistent and intuitive manner. This means that the tool can be managed by one person in an enterprise, and will scale up to any level.
Make an offer.
Contact me at Jeff@zeitguide.org if you are able and willing to lift this promising preliminary work to the level of supporting results and a full time staff.
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