The End of a Matter

A verse in the Bible declares that the end of a matter is more beautiful than its beginning.  For quite a while, I have known that my project of blogging would conclude after six months rather than the initial goal of a year.  The six months are now complete from April 15, 2010, to October 15, 2010—but my regular readers will know that I have cheated a little, especially recently, to artificially reset the posting dates of a few entries.  My decision is based on a need to re-channel my energy toward more pressing concerns—most obviously, to becoming healthier and to continue steady work on my book manuscript.  The demands of work also press insistently, so much so that finding the 20 minutes daily that this blog requires is sometimes pretty hard.  But blogging has been a lot of fun.  Not only that, I have been able through Century Hypothesis to clarify some of my own shortcut beliefs and practices that help me from day to day.  I hope these have been entertaining to readers, mostly family, though I am quite certain that I did not gain 100% agreement.  I'm much more confident of 100% love and, I hope, respect—which is what I really want.  So, what is the title Century Hypothesis about?  It's a point of view about human potential, about what you and I can accomplish.  We too often wrongly assume that a high level of achievement, goodness, or character requires an investment of time and effort that's beyond us.  But the number 100, such a round and beautiful number, is within reach.  A modest and conceivable number of 100 tries can take us quite far.  This is post 184 of Century Hypothesis, for example—substantial but not heroic.  To invest 100 times in anything is not asking too much.  The path from try #1 to #100 is long but achievable.  As of this final post, I still hold the Century Hypothesis as tenable: that a century (100) of tries is within every person's grasp, and that the hindsight view can be breathtaking.

Ice Maker

In 1978, the year we got married, some high-end refrigerators were equipped with automatic ice makers, but we didn't have one.  For the first 32 years of marriage we had to fill plastic trays, stack them in the freezer, and flex the ice out whenever we wanted an extra cold drink.  Those ice trays deteriorated over the years, though, which had consequences.  When you filled the trays, the water leaked through the cracks in the plastic ridges separating the cube wells.  That was okay when you filled the trays but it left a drip trail when you carried the trays back to the freezer.  All this means that today was a game changer.  We moved our old refrigerator out to the garage and replaced it with a stainless-steel Kitchenaid we bought from a neighbor.  The appliance guys hooked it up to the water spigot on the wall behind.  Just a few minutes later we heard a strange new sound sequence—grinding followed by a mini-crash of ice.  Now is that cool or what?

Emotional Thermodynamics

With cars, energy flow is a pretty simple matter.  Generally, the more you drive the car the more energy it consumes.  This basic model is complicated a little by hybrid vehicles.  With a hybrid's capacity for charging a large storage battery, a car can actually have more stored energy after it descends a hill.  Still, the basic model holds: when you drive a car it usually consumes more and more energy.  Humans are different, especially when you consider emotional energy.  On personality factors, people differ on whether they are introverts or extraverts.  Extraverts prefer being around people and find the presence of others to be energizing.  Energy flow works oppositely for introverts: Being around other people may provide pleasure but it involves a net energy loss.  Of course, the specific people whose company we keep influence the direction of energy flow—some drain energy away, so much so that several hours can deplete reserves and set us up for a nice long nap.  Other people are restorative; their company yields a net energy gain; we feel stronger and healthier as a consequence of time together.  Not just people, but also activities and places can pull energy away or add it back.  I doubt that physicists will ever try to construct a theory of emotional dynamics; no doubt it's the job of psychologists anyway.  But even without a general theory of emotional energy, it's probably a good idea to try to understand our own personal laws of thermodynamics.

Columbus Day

Even a quick scan of Wikipedia shows that Columbus Day is widely controversial.  It's been renamed "Indigenous People's Day" in some parts of South America, for example.  The status of Columbus Day is a little ambiguous as a national holiday in the U.S., and it's not even recognized in every state.  The reasons are pretty clear: An honest appraisal of the acts of Columbus and other European explorers that were presented as heroic in my school history books are wrong or at least seriously incomplete.  Columbus, Cortez, and others were exploiters who often acted with reckless cruelty to an extent that seems hard to imagine.  A second reason is that the character of Columbus himself seems to be anything but heroic—he must have been brave and visionary, but was apparently an unrestrained and egotistical self-promoter.  I admit that historical revisionism makes me dizzy.  Part of the reason for the vertigo is that when the old propaganda is replaced by a new version of the truth, there is an obvious basis for questioning the new view.  Is what's new really true, or is it likewise tainted with subjectivity that serves the agenda of a replacement ideology?  When the ideological winds shift, aren't we tempted to entertain radical relativism—that it's all a matter of interpretation?  Such a leap must be incorrect, but the flow of ideas seems to sweep us toward such conclusions.  Finding a solid basis for interpreting history takes hard work.  Giving up on myths and accepting new views hedged by uncertainty is unsettling, but it's all in the service of critical thinking, of growing up, and of becoming more honestly educated.

Magnificent Monocots

When I took botany at UC Davis I learned the difference between monocots and dicots.  Now it's been some time, but what I remember is that dicots have two "seed leaves" when they sprout.  More significant, dicots develop the capacity for secondary growth, which allows for the widening of tree trunks.  Monocots, such as grasses, have a single seed leaf when they sprout and don't have the capacity for secondary growth.  This means that they can grow taller but not wider; all their growth is at the end.  Monocots and dicots therefore look different.  What's funny, though, is that monocots can grow really big in one well-known instance, palm trees.  When you look at the profile of a palm tree, it usually has a distinctive grasslike quality with a long and slender trunk.  Palm trees normally don't grow wide—well, some do, actually, which means that the defining quality of "no secondary growth" isn't strictly true.  (Here, I'm trying to fake that I'm a botanist.)  Anyway, palm trees are botanically special because phylogenetically they are pretty different from most other trees.  They're special aesthetically, too.  Their long thin trunks and spray of top fronds are emblematic of a tropical paradise.  In their many varieties, palm trees grace Fiji and Southern California, though not so much our old Bay Area stomping grounds.  That's okay, the Bay Area has its own lovely flora.  But I'm glad that so many specimens of those fancy monocots line the boulevards of the Southland.

Oil Painting

How can a rectangle with two "legs" signify oil painting?  It can.  We capped off a nice weekend with Bob and Kiely by playing Pictionary.  I drew for Stephanie, my teammate, and on the basis of the most rudimentary sketch she was able to get oil painting immediately.  That such great accuracy of communication can come from such inadequate clues makes me think that something else is going on—that maybe our brains are synchronized by electromagnetic waves or other signals not yet discovered by science.  We did pretty well with other sketches, too: blob, train track, and forty winks.  Kiely wasn't surprised at our good Pictionary performance this evening; to her it seemed natural that 30 plus years of marriage should pay off in this way.  I'm sure we gain skill in reading each other.  Sometimes I worry that I wear my thoughts and feelings on my sleeve while at work, but feedback tells me that this is not the case most of the time.  People tune in who know us well.  For me, that's unquestionably my wife and daughters who can read me with scary accuracy.  Can't I keep a secret?  Sometimes I think that they know what I'm thinking before I do.  Amy and Hilly, especially, think that's pretty funny.  It is funny, I admit, but it worries me, too.

The LJC Seminar

Last Thursday, my friend Sam Wineburg was recognized as the new Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford.  Sam and I discussed his speech prior to the event and yesterday sent me a copy.  In the speech he recalls the key events of his graduate experience at Stanford—or rather the key professors who transformed (and my) thinking.  One experience involved the recruitment of a retired and renowned professor of educational psychology, Lee J. Cronbach, to meet with six of us Ph.D. students weekly to discuss works of Dewey, Montessouri, Froebel, and Rousseau.  Sam's point is that the Cronbach seminar, though not part of our formal program of study, was incredibly formative.  I don't think we really knew it at the time.  In fact, the larger significance of the Cronbach seminar is that as we move through life we may have only a dim sense of the people and events that will ultimately form our biographical milestones.  The classic example is misjudging the events in our child's life, seeing their importance only in retrospect.  I believe and hope that most of us have wised up to the fleeting nature of life, and to the danger of treating daily things as mundane throwaways.  Wisdom must mean, in part, the ability to see the significance of people and events in the moment so that we can be alert and participate fully.