Category: My life

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Telling the truth

You can truthfully recall events that never happened and it is easy to honesty forget ones that did. Memory is never perfect. Scientist who study these things explain why. Our memories are not like recording devices and memories are not stored like a picture on a computer hard drive. Rather, remembering is like making a new drawing each time. Memories are recreated each time we try to recall something. That means that our memories of one instance are mingled with those of other events that happened before or after. Subsequent event can, and often do, alter memories of things before.

I have been thinking about this since 1990. I don’t rely on memory for this information; I wrote it down. At that time, I was reading about decision making and found a section that addressed how relying on memory contributes to bad decisions. The authors suggested an exercise, which I have followed, on-and-off, for more than 25 years. I recommend it as a way of improving decision making and life in general. Write down your predictions for some significant event. I am not talking about big political or economic ones, but ones in your own life. Sometime after the event, write down what you think you predicted. Then examine your original prediction. You will almost always find that your recollection of your prediction was wrong in many details and that it is wrong systematically in the direction of making it more in line with what really happened. We edit our memories to make ourselves seem smarter, or at least more prescient. Are we telling the truth? No, we are not. Are we lying. Well, we are also not lying.

In my case I am morally certain that I cannot call it a lie. I am writing only to myself and I know that I am trying to tell the truth. Since I rarely share this information with anybody else, there is no benefit to shading the truth.

What I have learned is that I am incapable of telling the full truth when I rely only on my memory. And my memory, at least my ability to memorize, is better than average. Besides a few outliers who perform at carnival freak shows or are otherwise freakishly strange, nobody can tell the full truth from memory alone. BTW – most of the people who can recall events with machine-like accuracy are idiot-savants, who can do little else in life and are more to be pitied than emulated.

I am not making the case here that we should be untruthful, nor that we should tolerate liars. On the contrary, I try very hard to be honest in everything I do and say. But I recognize that I fall short and when I do it is not always, in fact it rarely results from moral failing or nefarious intent. There are limits beyond which humans cannot go and that does not mean we are all equally bad.

Michael Phelps won 23 Olympic gold medals. It is safe to say that he is a faster swimmer than anybody reading this. Yet there are swimming events where most of us would have a chance to do as well as he can, maybe better. If the test was just to float in the water, most of us could do as well as Phelps and if the test was to swim from California to Hawaii none of us could make it, so we also would do as well as Michael Phelps.

Tests that are so easy that everybody succeeds or so hard that everybody fails are meaningless standards. Yet it is tempting to apply both to bring down the more accomplished.

We are doing exactly that in our age of fact checks and ubiquitous recording. As often happens, the ostensible quest for the perfect is making it impossible to be good and demands for truthfulness beyond human capacity is creating a more dishonest society in the practical sense. All of us pool floaters can self-righteously say that we are as good as Michael Phelps, since all of us can float and can demonstrate with scientific certainty that he would fail to swim from California to Hawaii. Don’t believe me? Let’s have a trial and test him.

A good society is good enough and it is better than a perfect society. An honest person tries to live life according to truthful principles, but never succeeds perfectly. We should lighten up on this, lest we empower the liars and the cheats to argue that they are as good as everybody else.

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Everglades

Alligators used to be so rare that they were put on the endangered species. Today they are so common as pigeons, common enough to be a nuisance. We visited Everglades and Big Cypress. One stop featured a 15 mile loop you could ride on rented bikes. We did. We hoped to see maybe one alligators. There were dozens. The rangers said that they were not dangerous as long as you didn’t get too close. The ones we saw barely moved, but Chrissy did get a good action picture of one that you can see in the first photo.

The bikes were not very good. They had only one very low gear. I felt like one of those clowns on a little bike. The distance that I easily cover in less than an hour on my own bike took two hours on the little ones.

The second last photo shows the Everglades from an observation tower. It is an interesting ecology, very flat and wet most of the year but with a dry season. During the dry season, it often burns. We saw smoke from a fire (last photo) but all I know about the fire is contained in the photo.

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Memories of my father and the Civilian Conservation Corps

My father’s CCC records came in the mail today. I didn’t learn too much but what I learned was interesting and it was interesting to see a facsimile of the originals that he held and signed.

He was seventeen years old when he went far away from home. He was 6′ tall and weighed only 145 lbs. The report says that he had dark brown hair and green eyes. There was a place for “nationality” and they did not mean citizenship. My grandparents were listed as Polish. Grandpa had a sixth grade education. Grandma was a scholar who had graduated the eight grade.
Young John Matel dropped out of HS in the tenth grade. CCC provided education to its young charges. I was surprised to find on my father’s report that he was not interested in education. Later in life he respected education and wanted it for us. I also learned that my father attended vocational school, studied shoe-making. I don’t recall him ever mentioning that. He didn’t keep up with it.

Like the other common laborers, my father received $30 a month, of which he had to, by regulation, send $22 back to his family. The CCC helped the young men by giving them work and discipline and helped the families back home with supplemental income that they earned. And the CCC boys did valuable conservation work, some of which we can still see in our parks. It was the most popular of the New Deal programs for a good reason.
The CCC was probably the best thing that happened to my father in his young life. I have the impression that joined the CCC semi-voluntarily after some undisclosed trouble with the law. As a city kid, this was my father’s first sustained contact with nature. He worked in Pattison State Park near Superior, Wisconsin.

He did only one stint with CCC, starting and ending as a common laborer, from January 14, 1939 until June 30, 1939, which means that in that part of Wisconsin he worked only during the winter. His record indicates that he has scarlet fever when he was 13 years old and a tonsillectomy in 1929, but was otherwise healthy. In service, he missed five days of work because of the flu and was AWOL for two days. What he did during that time was not specified and there was no follow up. When he mustered out, he owed the USG $1.50 for “clothes and equipment” but otherwise had not debts or demerits.

After the CCC, John got a job with Medusa Cement, where he stayed for the rest of his working life except during his service with the Army Air Corps from 1942-5.
I was surprised when I found that the old man served only six months in the CCC. It seems to have loomed bigger in his life than that short time would imply. He talked about it frequently and with some fondness. It changed his life and so made mine possible. Thanks CCC.


Other references –
http://johnmatel.com/2011/05/16/civilian-conservation-corps/
http://johnmatel.com/2010/09/23/dirt-is-the-basis-of-civilization/
http://johnmatel.com/2007/12/06/great-glorious-and-grandiose-aspirations/
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October forest visit 2

A few more forest visit photos. My longleaf is first. Next is my now customary photo from exit 104. Last is the pump. I have become a little obsessive about filling up. I have to get to a significant historical date. This one is the Glorious Revolution that overthrew King James II.
 
 
 

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Civil service

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/05/washingtons-governing-elite-actually-think-americans-are-morons/?hpid=hp_local-news_wonkblog-1145am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

As a career FSO, I became “elite” when I passed the test. I came from a working-class background, but my career choice made me different. There is no way around this. In order to do my job well, I had to be different from most Americans. Different, not better.
I was acutely aware of this and addressed it. Like many of my colleagues, I spent lots of time traveling in the U.S., talking to people. I drove across the U.S. a total of five times, and that does not count the many smaller visits. I also own rural land and keep touch with my neighbors. They know things I want to know and I learn a lot from them.

Am I an average American? No. I am MORE connected with America than the average American. As a result of my effort, I have been around more of America than most people. I have great respect for my fellow citizens. I recall talking to ranchers in Texas who explained foreign trade to me much better than I could explain to them. (State Department send me there to explain. I was explained) I studied it; they lived it. I learned from truck drivers about our transport system and spoke with foresters fighting invasive species, a downside of globalization. This aspect rarely comes up in discussions of trade.
I love America. That is why I joined the Foreign Service. I wanted to help tell America’s story and be part of it. And I know that Americans are great from experience. Some government workers think others are morons. Most of us know better.
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Poles & siege of Vienna

Vatican museum features a large painting by Jan Matejko, whose work I got to know well during my time in Krakow. Jan Matejko lived in the 19th Century in Krakow. His specialty was massive works depicting great moments in Polish history. Painting in Vatican shows Jan III Sobieski, one of the greatest Polish kings and his victory over the Turks at Vienna.
It was September 1683. The Turks had pushed to the gates of Vienna and were successfully laying siege. The triumph of the jihad seemed assured with the Turks continuing their 300 year conquest of eastern and central Europe. But then the Polish army crossed the Danube under King Jan Sobieski. Soon the Turkish army was fleeing back toward Constantinople. Its expansion finished, a true turning point in history. Never again would Europe face this kind of existential threat.

So the Polish King Jan III Sobieski helped save Europe from conquest by the armies of Islam and Pope John Paul II (Jan Pavel) helps save Europe from Soviet communism. Is there something about the name John or being Polish?

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Around Washington

Well, I did not go to Liberia & Sierra Leone. Bureaucratic problem with my status. I will probably have a chance to go elsewhere soon. I got all my shots and visas for place I may never go, but it was interesting getting the visas.

I had to go myself to the Embassies, since it was a rush job. I rode my bike and got to see parts of Washington I had not seen for a long time. BTW, it is almost all up hill to the Liberian Embassy.

My first photo is Rock Creek. I rode the trails through Rock Creek back from the Liberian Embassy. I used to travel this route every day when I studied Polish. We lived near Silver Spring, MD and I would ride to FSI in Roslyn. Nice ride going down, not so much going up.

Second photo is the bike lane up 15th Street. It is a fairly pleasant ride. I like it that the cars can park at the far side of the bike trail. We get a wall of parked cars to protect us from the moving ones. But it is generally up hill to the Liberian Embassy and it is pretty steep past Meridian Park, see third photo.


Liberian Embassy is in photo #4. The flag looks a lot like ours.
Photos # 5&6 are Meridian Park. #6 shows a statue of Dante.

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Big trees in Williamsburg

There are lots of big trees in Williamsburg, more than you would probably find in a similar area of a natural forest. People protect these trees. In my first picture, you can see the cable of a lightning rod that protects the large sycamore from lighting. My shadow in included to show reference.

There are also lots of very large catalpa trees around town. Catalpa is widely planted around the U.S. but is not native to Virginia, so strictly speaking this is not an authentic Williamsburg tree. But it grows very well. My other pictures show a live oak and some sycamores.

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Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg gives an idea of life in Virginia a few centuries ago. It is a pleasant place with lots of period buildings and big trees. But it is more pleasant in our modern contemplation than it was to live in those times.

The English were not prepared for Virginia. It was deadly to many of them and you can understand why. We live in a tamed Virginia today. Back in those days, there were all sorts of dangers ranging from unusual diseases, to very hot and humid weather to hostile natives. We do not really live in nature as they had to do.

They built as they did in England. You can see examples in the photos. These houses are adapted England’s generally cool wet climate. In pre-airconditioned Virginia, these neat, buttoned-up houses must have been stifling. Of course, people spent a lot of time outside.

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Busch Gardens

Went to Busch Garden with the whole family and rode of the various roller coasters. The new one – Tempesto – is fun, but Apollo’s Chariot remains my favorite. It was a very hot, but fun day.

The best thing about Busch Gardens is not the rides, but the grounds. It is a pretty place, very well-planned. It is a good place to test out and see urban planning and crowd management.

The park is 383 acres, with villages themed to England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland and Ireland. 383 acres is not that big and the villages are very close to each other. But they do a good job of making them seem separated and distinct. They are separated by bridges or arches, which create transitions. It would be good if we deployed these techniques more often in our non-theme part communities.

There is a good classic on this subject called “A Pattern Language.” (https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Build…/…/ref=sr_1_1…) The authors studied patterns of landscape and architecture and discovered ones that people of a variety of cultures find pleasing. People tend to like things like winding paths. transition zones and clusters. This makes intuitive sense and the patterns tend to be present in our most beloved places, usually the ones that grew organically over generations. We can use these patterns in our plans and subdivisions.
Theme parks are good places to test some of these ideas.