Book Recommendation Time

I just finished reading "On Being Certain. Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not." by Robert Burton. Absolutely fascinating.

Why are so many people certain of things even when all the facts are contravening? Are they stupid or willfully ignorant? Why is one of those people occasionally staring back at me from the mirror?

The premise of the book is that logical reasoning and assessment of certainty take place in two separate parts of the brain. The "feeling of knowing" is more of a subconscious assessment than a deliberate weighing of facts and probabilities.

An example from the book. On the day after the Challenger explosion, a professor had freshman students write down what they thought and what they felt. Then when the students were seniors, he asked them to write down how they remembered feeling on the day after the Challenger explosion. In many cases, the two accounts were notably different. The interesting thing is that even when presented with their own recollections, many students disagreed that that was what they were feeling at the time. On student even says, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened."

The feeling of knowing can be present even without knowledge... "I know that guy's name, I just can't remember it right now." The feeling of knowing can be absent in the presence of knowledge... I know that I live 2500 miles away from my family but at some level it still doesn't seem real.

The author wanders around explaining how the brain works to produce this sensation and this part is a little tough to read... partly because he is telling me things that I "know" to be false. "My conscious thoughts are not some tip of the iceberg floating on vast body of shrouded cogitation hidden from view even to myself."

I plan on reading this book a second time to try and make some more sense of sections, but it has been very thought provoking. I also recommend Descarte's Error in this milieu, which I read many years ago.

Strange Days...

You know we are living in odd times when your financial planner says that your investments have returned -10% for the last calendar year and your response is "AWESOME!"

The definition of humanity...

The definition of humanity is doing the same thing again and again expecting different results.

With apologies to Albert Einstein, who claimed that the above is the definition of insanity, I think my definition is more appropriate. Who among us has not had our "Bart Simpson and the Cupcake Moment"... BZZZT-OW! BZZZT-OW!

For the non-Simpson fluent, Lisa has a science fair project "Is My Brother Smarter Than a Hamster?". She electrifies a hamster treat. After one shocking effort, the hamster gives up on the treat. Then she electrifies a cupcake. Bart repeatedly grabs it and is repeatedly shocked.

This may sound like a downer of a viewpoint from someone who is normally an optimist. I admit that I thought of it in a down moment, but it has stuck with me longer as something a bit more complex.

Tying in to my previous posts on the relationship of humans to animals, one big cognitive difference is the propensity for abstract thought. We have the ability to envision the world as it could be and then attempt to achieve it. This can be tragic in some cases, like the inveterate gambler who thinks that this time he really can beat the house. But it is inspirational in others, like the people championing environmental and sustainable practices. Despite years of setbacks, ridicule and frustration, they have charged those windmills over and over again. (Though, I suppose, in a literal sense, they have charged for windmills, not against them.)

Then, of course, sometimes it is mundane. I suspect each of us has many little things that we try to do, over and over, despite a lack of success. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I am not creative.

This is tough to accept, because I have a very good imagination. But creativity and imagination are separate entities. I spent many hours of my youth recreating the Star Wars universe in my head with myself in lead role, but the plot lines were always minor variations on cliched and simplistic stories. The ability to create something genuinely new, like my friends Stephen, Mary or Gwen, seems beyond me.

I think that is also why I struggled at the research aspects of being a professor. A significant part of the challenge is coming up with a problem that nobody has solved, that people want solved and that you can solve... and preferably one that people will pay you to do. I just couldn't invent a problem to solve. That is one way that my current job is a good fit. The goals are laid out clearly, and my challenge is building the bridge from here to there. Since I can imagine what the final goal looks like once someone has planted the seed, I am good at figuring out how to do it.

I have been reading the books about how J.R.R. Tolkien wrote "The Lord of the Rings". His son has painstakingly crawled through his father's old papers and the rough drafts to show the growth of my favorite tale with all the starts and stops. It was fascinating to see the process of true creativity unfold; what started as a simple sequel to The Hobbit pulls in the ideas and themes from his Silmarillion ideas and grows far beyond his anticipation. Aragorn starts out as hobbit called Trotter who wears wooden shoes and grows into Viggo Mortensen. In a way, I feel better knowing how laborious the process is... one burst of inspiration is followed by efforts in synchronizing time lines, calculating distances and honing the text.

And so, even though I know I won't write a novel, I know that I will keep trying to grow my creative side. BZZZT! OW! BZZZT! OW! But, hey, I'm only human.

Feliz Obama

The day that I have long dreamed of finally arrived, and I find myself woefully short of things to say. For years, I have awaited the time when my country would no longer violate the laws of morality, science, common sense or even the laws of the country itself in the wrongheaded pursuit of political expediency.

I felt so high when Obama defeated "Ready!, Fire!, Aim!" McCain. With a resounding voice the nation declared that they were ready for a President who could think in sophisticated terms and who expects us to do so as well. All Presidents promise the impossible. For the first time in my life, we elected a President who emphasized the hard work needed to create the impossible.

I believe there is a saying "When the time is right, the man comes forth". As much as our country would have been better off without Bush for the last four years, we were not ready to face the truths we needed to face. We seem to be there now, but I worry that the hole we have dug is too deep. Even if Obama is the chronologically and biologically miraculous offspring of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, which he often appears to be, the tasks seem so daunting.

How do you restore fiscal sanity when the economic wreck requires more spending?
How do you rescue a global climate that already seems past the tipping point?
How do you undo the damage done to our name and in our name in the world?

How long will the public support last? With the events of Tuesday and the acclaim, anything less than unparalleled excellence will be seen as a disappointment. But anything less than twice that level of excellence may not be enough.

I should be flying high as Obama has already made great decisions as President to reverse the previous path. Why do I still feel so scared?

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas...

Christmas in California is like reading a book that has been translated into a foreign language by a computer and then translated back. Many of the critical elements are still there, but a lot of the nuance is lost.

My internal clock stopped somewhere in mid-October. The weather here turned to "early Autumn" and lingered there. Christmas Eve felt more like a March afternoon than December. We try and convince ourselves that scraping frost off the car windshield counts as winter weather. It is a tough argument when it hasn't kept me from playing outdoor tennis every Saturday.

On the other hand, there are more houses with ostentatious Christmas displays out here than I saw in Ohio. On our morning walk, we pass multiple houses with animatronic, music-making blinking displays of ghastly tackiness. I should probably go take pictures and video to post here. Static pictures would not capture the full mind-bending incongruity of a traditional nativity scene being serenaded by an inflatable Santa-led jazz band.... or a two story house enshrouded by a galaxy of lights which blink in time (almost, kinda, sorta) to the blared Muzak carols.

I can't tell if such displays are a compensation for the lack of snow or simply reflects that it is easier to do external decorating in balmy conditions. We found ourselves listening to more Christmas music to try and make ourselves more in the holiday spirit... only to re-discover how awful a lot of it is, particularly one effort to sing about "Christmas in San Francisco" that rivals Vogon poetry in its auditory experience.

Kelly and I have been trying to import, re-mix and invent new traditions. We went and cut down a tree (as usual), though it was 67° and on the side of a mountain. There was no Irish Bread party, though bread was made and passed liberally around to broad acclaim. We haven't quite acquired enough extra-curricular friends to make a party not feel like a company event. We sat under the tree and exchanged presents, before making pancakes... followed later by a spectacular holiday feast that Kelly prepared.

I don't have much to add here. I know I have gone "dark" for a while and wanted to let all and sundry that I am alive and well. There are few deeper thoughts percolating in my brain, but work has kept them from steeping into a full post.

Update:
For your viewing pleasure, here is a picture of the Bethlehem Boogie group.


Once more with music

It's late September and I really should be back at school....

I don't really feel that way, but when you are married to Kelly it is not uncommon to find Rod Stewart lyrics running through one's head. In this year of milestones and changes, it occurred to me that this is the first autumn since 1974 when I haven't been in school.

I am still adjusting to this. I have set my internal clock to the academic calendar for so long that it is hard to think in terms of "fiscal quarters" instead of semesters... as if one was any less arbitrary than the other.

It is good to have stepped away from the classroom. I had reached a stagnation point in improving as a teacher. What I wanted to do was to help students learn to figure things out for themselves, to see connections and to grasp fundamental concepts in a way that they would retain and apply rather than forget. The challenge of a classroom is that every student responds differently to the same process. By the end, I was staring too much at the students who didn't respond well to my style and was becoming frustrated at my inability to adapt myself.

Now I am trying to learn as frantically as possible. It is interesting to assess how much of my formal knowledge I use. I would say that a majority of the time, I am trained monkey. Do this, push that button, write down the result, fill out this form, blah, blah, blah. A good fraction of the time I am utilizing only the basic concepts of my education, but combining those with problem solving skills and a willingness to dive in and learn the particulars of a given problem. Only a tiny percentage of the time do I feel like a specialized piece of information comes in handy, but when it does it can feel like the key in the lock that makes everything move.

Kelly is taking two online classes right now, and I am intrigued by the concept. I think there is a lot of potential in the format. The learning relies very heavily on her ability to read the material, process it and figure out how to apply it. It is very labor intensive, if a student wasn't as self-motivated as Kelly it would go very poorly. I think with some tweaking, it could be a very effective format. The challenge with the current online framework is that if a topic is confusing to the student, it can be a complete roadblock since the resources to get clarification are not as prevalent.

I learned an interesting thing about teaching while watching a Nature special on PBS. Apparently humans are the only ones of the great apes who teach. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are fully capable of learning by observation; but they don't actively work to instruct others. The show called it the "teaching triangle". If I point my finger at something, your eyes follow to the object. We create the triangle between the teacher, the pupil and the object. If a trainer with a gorilla points at an object, the gorilla stares at the finger of the trainer. (Commenter challenge: be the first to associate this fact with a scene from a movie. I am thinking of one in particular)

This has led to a summer of brushing up my biology. Despite having a fantastic biology teacher in high school (Hi, Mom!), my understanding of the boundary between evolutionary biology and anthropology feels weak. Perhaps the textbooks gloss over such things in a vain effort to not offend the nutjobs, or perhaps the knowledge is more recent than my biology class twenty years ago.

Given that chimpanzees share 99% of our DNA and are capable of learning, language, problem solving, play, cruelty, mathematics and personality, what does it mean to be human. What change was the crucial difference that led us down this path. After reading Jared Diamond's "Third Chimpanzee" and Richard Dawkins' "Selfish Gene", I keep coming back to the idea of teaching as the linchpin concept.

As Diamond points out, if an alien race arrived at the planet 100,000 years ago, humans would have been unremarkable and simply classified as a type of chimpanzee. He goes on to talk about some of the notable differences and similarities between ourselves and our primate cousins, but doesn't really speculate on what caused such notable shifts. Dawkins does a good job of explaining how a small genetic change can have large repercussions by reappropriating existing genes to new purposes.

It seems like the desire to teach is good candidate for the tipping point. Once humans began to teach our young rather than expect them to learn by imitation, evolutionary pressure in favor of richer language and cultural development grows. With language and culture come evolutionary pressures for extended childhood, menopause and the other human oddities.

I have no idea if I am even potentially close to correct, but it is fun to think about things outside of my usual subjects. Is it too late to go back for a PhD in anthro-evolution?

Worst. Shakespeare. Play. EVER.

I had always thought of this as "the ultimate date". Shakespeare, a picnic dinner, a bottle of wine, a beautiful view and an amazing woman with me. Perhaps it is best that it never came to fruition until I was with my wife. If my companion had been anyone lacking such a steadfast commitment, it might have been the "ultimate date" only in the sense of being "the last date".

The food was delicious, Kelly being a chef par excellence even under the challenges of the food having to survive travel in a cooler for 24 hours. The scenery was excellent. The wine was quite tasty. The woman by my side was amazing and beautiful.

The Shakespeare was awful.

When I had first heard of this many years ago, I imagined professional actors. When I saw the listing on the website, I still thought of semi-pro actors like the Dayton Theater Guild. When we arrived on the site, I was hoping for high school amateur. Even that was above the talent on exposition.

Twas a "Midsummer Night's Dream" turned into auditions for American Idol. Highly abridged by design... further abridged by missed lines. Moderately passable scenery of the mystical wood inhabited by less passable wooden acting.

The only point in its favor was that it was SO bad. Had it been slightly better, it would have been less enjoyable. It was like they expanded the subplot of the rough craftsmen of the town performing "Pyramus and Thisbe" into the whole play. Perhaps that was a mindblowing deliberate artistic recursive metaphor.... or perhaps it was just funny to watch a four year old faerie toddle across the stage wearing a winter coat.

Now the ultimate date will have to be redesigned. Any ideas from blogspace?