I spent a whole post describing how I am not creative, and now Gwen demands that I be "Kreativ". Either she is an author/librarian with poor reading comprehension skills, or mutilating the spelling of a word drastically changes its meaning. Either way:

"List 7 things that you love, and then pass the award on to 7 bloggers that you love! Be sure to tag them and let them know that they have won. You can copy the picture of the award and paste it on your sideboard letting the whole world know...you are Kreativ."

Apparently I have won! I once won the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes, but the bank wouldn't cash the check. I'll resist making this a paean to my wife in an effort to be something homophonically similar to Kreativ.

1. Cheese
2. Cheese Figuring out a puzzle... crosswords, math problems, how to do strikethrough text in HTML... you name it.
3. Cheese The instant after the ball is clutched in my hands in soccer. It is the only five seconds in the game where nothing can go wrong.
4. Cheese Locating Polaris. Life is better when you know which way is north.
5. Cheese Sitting and reading a book for hours on end... particularly if it is such a good book that when I am forced to put it down I still can't stop thinking about it.
6. Cheese Being tall. Being the tallest person in the room is extra nice.
7. Cheese Sitting on my front porch, especially during a thunderstorm.

I won't play chain-letter mayhem... especially since I don't know enough bloggers to whom to pass it on. "Hah, blogworld, you didn't win! In your face!"

Quantity has a quality all its own

I just got back from my first real trip to Dayton since moving a year ago. (A whirlwind Memorial Day last year doesn't count as it was dominated by a low-ball offer on our house.) For any readers who I didn't connect with, I will try to catch you next time.

I had a lot of thoughts run through my head over the weekend, and I will try to distill them here.

The most important thought is that there is no substitute for quantity time. I love the way my family can sit around the living room and let conversation swing from trivial to deep to silent. The silence is one of the most important parts. One part of the conversation might run its course, and there is no pressure to say something and keep it going. One person will do a crossword puzzle, another read a book and one get a cup of tea. Some time later, the conversation will open up again and wander wither it will.

It is so hard to capture that kind of feeling in a phone call or even a video chat. The comfort of silence is part of that. Even with the ease of technological connections, I still feel constrained by the device and pressured to not let the conversation dwindle. The "I call you when I want to talk, though you might be in the middle of something else" dynamic of a phone call is also a hindrance; with the time difference making that far more likely.

I feel so sad when I think that a comforting and stimulating experience was once so common and will now be so rare.


In many other ways, Dayton felt like a distant strange place. It didn't help that the weather was custom made for film noir. It was so obvious the economic and social pounding the city has taken over the last few decades. The starkest aspect was the number of empty and dilapidated buildings that have been husks for decades and will be for decades to come. As a patriotic Dayton resident, those fixtures blended into the background and I focused on the changes that happened little by little. As a visitor, though, the sheer mass of industrial, commercial and residential detritus are overwhelming.

One of the things that the high cost of housing in California provides is the benefit of high density living. (An economist will say that high density leads to high cost, but stick with me here.) In Ohio, if someone has an urge to build housing or a mall, the easiest thing to do is go pave over a farm. This leads to a Sherman's March of suburbia out from the city center trailing a path of plundered property. The city is a victim of the quantity of land available.

Here in Silicon Valley they paved paradise in favor of a parking lot a long time ago. Supposedly, this is the best ground in the world for growing citrus but the last commercial orchards stand like the 101st Airborne in Bastogne. The lack of elbow room and scarce greenery can get to me sometimes, but the trip back to Ohio made me appreciate that it is full. There are occasional office suites or store fronts that are empty, but they have the look of recent recusals. If they stay empty too long, someone with an idea will knock it down and build something else, because all the suburbs have smashed into each other and there is no place left to go.

I am not saying that full is better. It is just a dynamic that was really noticeable. There are plenty of eyesores here, from strip malls to dodgy neighborhoods. And the high housing costs have real consequences on the lives of people, particularly ones who don't work at nice high tech jobs. (My brain is petering out here. I will elaborate on this more later.)

Crabby Birthday to Me!

"Thirty Seven?!?!"

As seems to be the usual way, my birthday morphed into a week long celebration. The distance from family and the vagaries of Amazon's shipping speeds meant that the gifts trickled in all week. Kelly had a final on Monday, so we just went out for Thai food (TRADITION!).

Saturday was the best though. Outro Michael (shown above) and his girlfriend, Candice, served an outstanding crab feast... replete with crab bisque, corn fritters, home-made sauces and half of a dungeness crab. We followed that up with a fantabulous Guinness cake baked by my wife. From there we went and saw Paula Poundstone perform her standup act.

It was fascinating to watch the live crab be dropped into the boiling water. On one hand, I felt a twinge of remorse. I think that feeling is a bizarre byproduct of our urbanized and gentrified lifestyles. Food is not something grown, raised or caught. It is something that magically appears in shrink-wrapped packaging on our shelves next to the Soylent Green. Heck, Kelly and I were amazed last year at watching eggplants grow. I figure, if I can't handle the reality of the process, I shouldn't be eating the food. And on the other hand, it was really freaking tasty.

I had a really hard time with my last California birthday (#29), and I was worried that this one would be similar. Thanks to some real support from my wife and friends (and the help of an income higher than a grad student), it was a very special and energizing experience. I miss all of you who are far away, but you will just have to work your way out here soon.

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?