I went down the Blue Ridge Parkway to pick up Alex in Harrisonburg. He wanted to come back to see his friend Colin, who is moving to Oregon, and to pick up his amp. I don’t mind driving down to get him. It is a pretty drive; we get good mileage on the hybrid and I can listen to NPR or my audio books. Gas is cheaper outside the Washington metro area. You get it for $2.39 a gallon in the Shenandoah Valley; the best you can do in Northern Virginia is $2.69.
Lots of the turnouts are under construction with signs that our stimulus dollars are a work. I saw lots of such signs, lots of barriers and lots of port-a-johns, but no workers. I suppose it put people to work setting up the signs and port-a-johns, but we might have hoped for a little more actual construction.
The Blue Ridge is very pretty. You can see why they were called blue ridge. It is almost all secondary growth. They cut most of the trees off during the 19th Century Some was done for agriculture, but a lot of the wood was used to make charcoal for small steel and lime production. There are still lots of place names in the hills with forge or furnace in their titles. Farming was not very profitable with the thin and soon eroded mountain soils and most of the farmsteads were abandoned. The hillsides reverted to the thick oak-maple & tulip poplar forests you see in the pictures. Actually, at the time they were oak and chestnut forests, but the chestnuts were wiped out by a blight that came in 1904. I am hoping GMOs can bring them back.
It was a little hazy when I took the pictures yesterday. They would have been better today, since the wind left over from Hurricane Earl cleared the air. Today is beautiful weather. We are getting into the nice fall weather, IMO, the best time for Virginia weather. October is usually the best month.
I am at FSI for the PAO course that I never took. I figure that there are basic things that I just didn’t know and I hope to learn about them.
At FSI, I was greeted with an “improvement” around the bike racks. Look at the picture. I bet these things cost the government a lot, because we never get anything cheap. What good are they? They won’t protect the bikes from the rain. The probably actually make it hotter around the bikes, since they face into the south and into the sun. Worst of all, they eliminate at least two bike parking spots (on each end) and make it a lot harder to get at the bikes in the middle.
This is the kind of thing that someone who doesn’t ride a bike much thinks is “bike friendly.”
I figure that somebody will get an award for putting those things up. They will look better on somebody’s personal report than they do in real life. Maybe that same person will earn another award when they take them down, create more space and “save” the upkeep.
Class got out early enough for me to head down to Washington, go to Gold’s Gym and take the Metro home. It is easier for me to go down to Washington and take the Metro than to go up hill home, although both are about the same distance. Actually, it was a bit farther, since I went the long way through Shirlington and along the Potomac. They connected the bike trail all the way. Sweet. You used to have to get off the trail and cross the freeway on a footbridge.
Above and below are pictures of East Potomac Park. I have been stopping here at the end of the day to kind of settle back into that peaceful, easy feeling. It is another thing that is a little out of the way, but worth going. I went down there today for around a half hour, listened to my audio books and watched the water flow. It is a pleasant place to be. The breeze blows off the water in the late afternoon, keeping the mosquitoes confused.
I used my new GPS to find the goat farm of Jeff & Loretta Whetzel (more on that in the next post). I am a late adapter of the GPS for the car. I had one a long time ago that I used in my forestry, but it was not really good enough for precise measurement. This one (see above) is nice and was much cheaper. It tells you when to turn etc. I made it speak in Portuguese so that I can practice. Of course, vocabulary is limited. Also can play audio books.
Above you can see road work. We had to wait around fifteen minutes while the cleared out the rocks. They are widening the road. The rock is shale, which is common in the Eastern Mountains. It is very good for paving running trails as it breaks down into flattish chips and forms a springy surface.
Below is kudzu growing along US 211 (also called Lee Highway, BTW, a continuation of the Lee Highway that runs near my house) and doing the one thing it is good at – holding a steep bank. The government encouraged Kudzu planting in the U.S. because of its extreme ability to grow. That was not an entirely wise idea. What makes it a great cover for everything also makes it a troubling invasive, since what grows over rocky hillsides also grows over trees and other plants, choking them off.
I drove the country way home from Harrisonburg, through Luray and over the mountains. I enjoy driving that more than the freeway. It is a bit shorter in miles, but takes about the same time since you have more curves and have to drive slower. It is not a good idea to drive through the mountains during the winter or at night, but it is nice on a nice day like today.
Most of the way after the mountains is the way home from Old Rag Mountain, so I have been driving this way for twenty-five years. The area up to Warrenton is very built up, and much of US 29 has become a big strip mall. This includes areas near the Manassas Battlefield. It kind of takes away from the historical feel. But after Warrenton, it has not changed that much. It is still very rural, green and pleasant. Fauquier and Rappahannock Counties are among the nicest in Virginia. It is a great pleasure to pass through them.
I took Alex back up to school at James Madison. He is in a new dorm right in the center of the campus. I think he will be better. He can more easily walk to the places he needs to go and will have more contact with other students. The room is smaller than the one he had before & has no air conditioning. This will be okay most of the school year, but it still can get hot in September. His room is part of a suite with six guys, who share a kind of living space in the middle. Above is his building and below is his room as it looked when he moved in. The tree is a river birch, the southern cousin in the birch family. In Wisconsin we can grow the paper birch or the white birch. They are pretties than this kind of brownish one, but you have to adapt to local conditions. I wanted to get a picture of Alex too, but he refused and kept on moving in and out of the shot.
The campus was full of new freshmen, you can see the gaggle of them below. They are much better groomed than back in the 1970s when I started, but otherwise look similar. Speaking of gaggles, the geese just stroll across the road and most cars stop. I didn’t. I went slow enough that they could move out of the way, but I am not going to yield to geese. They squawked a little but they cleared a path. Up at the farm, a turkey stood in front of my car and stared at me. I actually had to get out and shoo it away. Turkeys are dumb enough to be run over by a car going 3MPH; geese are not.
It was cool and overcast for my morning bike ride, but an easy trip because of the west wind. I am glad that I don’t have to drive. Below you can see the cars backed up on Memorial Bridge.
Above is the stop light to cross near the Lincoln Memorial. You have to push the button to get the walk light, at least you HAD to. Somebody glued button down so that it just goes through the cycle continuously. I think that is good. I hate that idea that you have to push the button and always wait. Of course, sometimes you can just nip through between the traffic.
Above & below are elm trees looking not good on Independence Avenue. I have noticed that many of the elms around town are not looking good. Some elm trees are resistant to Dutch elm disease, but none are completely immune. I worry that something is going on with the trees. It would be a shame if these big trees died. I have been watching the media for reports re the elms. So far I have found nothing. I hope that my fears are unfounded. It was a hot year. Maybe they are just stressed.
Chrissy and I went to visit Mariza in Baltimore. It really is a nice city, at least the parts we visit. Espen and I once turned into a less nice area. It looked like the set for a cop drama; lots of people just hanging around, but these places are being renewed and redeveloped pretty well.
The pictures are from Fells Point, where we went to eat at a place called Kali’s Corner, a seafood restaurant. They had a special menu for restaurant week. I had sea bass; Chrissy got skate, evidently a sting ray & Mariza got the salmon. The Atmosphere was very good; food was okay.
Mariza is doing fine. Business is picking up a little at Travelers. Evidently they are at least hiring some new people this year. Above & below are pictures from the windows of Mariza’s new apartment.
There is talk about building a drain again in back of the houses. This drain would cost around $8000 and would not solve any problems. I am probably the only one who will actually stand out in the rain and watch the drainage and soak away characteristics and I see how it really works.
The problem is that the decks, board fences, houses and vegetation creates shade, enough shade that grass won’t grow. In a heavy rain the water running off the rooftops can cause erosion. The culprit is the lack of vegetation, not the water.
Although grass won’t grow, lots of other things will. A couple years ago I planted some lily turf. It cost me nothing, since I took the shoots from the front of the house. The only improvement that I had to make was to put in some timbers to stop the water in the short term. I also knocked down the board fence at the end of our house, letting in more light.
Look at the pictures. I took them from my deck today after a few hours of rain. Notice how the mud starts exactly where the planting stops. If the problem was water or sunlight, it would not be like that. My plantation not only greened up my space; it also slows erosion up and downstream by slowing or stopping the water flow. Things will grow back there, just not grass.
The drains would not work because they address the wrong problem. Beyond that, it would make everything worse by quickening runoff. It is exactly what we don’t want to do to our local streams and Chesapeake Bay. So we would be spending $8000 to help break down stream beds downstream and ultimately dump more silt and pollution into Chesapeake Bay.
I am afraid such backward activities are common when we make collective decisions.
I have more formal education than I can practically use and that is the way I wanted it. I just liked to study when I was in college and for my leisure today I do things very much like studying. I read books and write essays (now known as blog posts). But I think you don’t understand real education until you understand that all of life is – or should be – about learning.
I took the formal “book learning” education route; others chose different ways. Sometimes we make too much of a distinction. Learning, whether it comes from books, experience or anything else, has to be integrated into a person’s life and outlook. Some people despise “useless” education. Others boldly assert that no education is useless. I think both miss the point. Education of any kind is useful if it changes how you look at and/or do things, if it spawns new ideas or skills or if it just makes you think. This definition would seem to include almost everything, but it doesn’t. There is useless education, although it has more to do with the recipient than the subject. Some people just don’t pay attention or don’t integrate what they learned into their behaviors or thoughts. They don’t turn information into knowledge. These are the kinds of people who memorize lots of things, but cannot recognize them when they are a little changed or in different contexts. Unfortunately, these are often the people who call for more “education” and are most interested in official credentials. These are the guys that try to trump you by quoting experts or citing their own expertise. I recall discussing economics with a guy who didn’t like my opinion. He said something like, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that I wrote my PhD dissertation on this subject?” I just said no. I should have elaborated, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that you went through all that trouble and learned so little?”
I have to admit that I take some refuge in my own formal education credentials. I can be a lot more of a smart-ass because I have some of the smart papers. Lately I have been in closer contact with practical people who know things I want to learn about buying land, developing property, building roads and sustainable forestry/agriculture. These guys know all sorts of detailed things, like the quality of dirt or the type of rocks you need to use to shore up a bank. Lots of these things seem really easy until you have to make the decision yourself. As with anything else, some people are better at what they do than others. I was thinking about the type of education you might need and how you could figure it out. There are some places where my education has a very direct connection. For example, figuring out how much I can pay for things and still make profits and payments is something I did indeed learn in finance class, although I have to admit that I really didn’t understand it until I bought my first house. Let me jump back to my other life for a minute.
I have been sitting on promotion panels and trying to judge which of my esteemed colleagues should move to the next level. Many of us get formal training at the upper-middle or lower senior level. I valued that training, but I wanted to see what they did with it two or three years later. I wanted to know if it took root and grew or if it was just a pleasant sojourn in academia. I found some of each. Some people were clearly changed and improved by their educations, i.e. they learned something. Among others you just couldn’t tell. Everybody had earned the same credentials, but it was different. So I guess I am advocating a kind of “Gold’s Gym standard.” I go to Gold’s Gym three times a week. I do an intense workout that takes me less than 15 minutes and then I am out. People make fun of me for that. I get a variation of “Leaving so soon?” with monotonous regularity. Most people spend more time than I do and many spend a lot more time, but time in doesn’t matter. It is like the credentials. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can pick up the weights. The answer to the question, “Can you bench press 250 lbs?” is not, “Well, I come here every day and workout really hard for at least an hour.” All that matters is yes or no, probably followed by an actual demonstration if you answered in the affirmative. Educational achievement is harder to measure, but the same type of standard should apply.
College is not the only place you get educated. Increasingly, there are other options. Many firms have their own training programs, which are often more up-to-date and almost always more specific than the program at the local college. Community colleges are increasingly important because of their low-cost, almost universal access and flexibility. Of course, online options are exploding. Aristotle thought that the best education was just to live in a good city. I think if he were alive today, he might call it lifetime learning and advocate a learning culture. Learning, like art, truth and beauty, is ubiquitous. We just need to be aware and constantly searching. And our needs are protean. (Me use hard words from education). I never thought that variations in rocks and dirt would absorb so much of my intellectual energy.
I apologize if this post has gone off in so many directions, but I think the idea of education is like that. We talk a lot about the need to educate our population. We say that education is the key to the future. This is true. But too often we are thinking narrowly of a specific place and time where education will be delivered by certified professionals who will hand out certificates when all the education is done. Maybe instead of education, we should think more about learning.* *How about a little display of etymological erudition, which is usually not of much value but fits here? Think about the words. Education is a Latin-based word. It means to bring out or lead out. The one being educated may be a little passive in this case. You can be educated by someone else. Learn is a Germanic based word. Its original meaning was to get knowledge. It requires that you take an active part. Learning is what you are supposed to do during your education. Some people do.
The reason I made the distinction between Latin and German was because of the nature of our wonderful English language. English is a Germanic language, but it is heavily Latinized, much of it through the use of Norman French (descended from Latin). After the Norman conquest, since the rich guys spoke French, the educated people read Latin and the poor guys spoke Anglo-Saxon (old-middle English), we tend to have a rich vocabulary of overlapping words; the Latin-French words tend to be classier than the Germanic-Saxon ones that mean almost the same things.
Most swear words are Germanic. In Latin-French based English, for example, people have intercourse in the bedroom and they defecate in the bathroom. The German-Saxon words for those things cannot be spoken on network television. But the twin words do not always mean exactly the same things. So it is with education and learning. My education taught me the things I just wrote, but I have learned that most people don’t know or care about them. That is another difference between learning and education.
We lived in the Oakwood Apartments across from Waterfront Mall when we lived in Washington in 1988 while studying Norwegian. It was a dump back then, the failed experiment in 1960s urban renewal. The Mall had few tenants, although I did appreciate the Blimpy and Roy Rogers. They went out of business a few years later until there was essentially nothing left but a CVS, Safeway & some used music stores. Perhaps most poignant was an escalator that went up to a non-existent second floor. They had great expectations at some time ago. But they plunked the place down in the middle of a crappy neighborhood that really couldn’t support a Mall. We were afraid to go there after dark and apparently so were most other unarmed customers not engaging in pursuits of questionable prudence or legality.
They tore it down a few years ago and started to build a new residential-commercial complex. Conditions have changed. There is now a metro-stop (Waterfront) and a more prosperous set of people has moved in around. It is the classic gentrification of anyplace within reasonable walking distance from a metro. You can see the new Safeway up top. Notice that the buildings are medium tall. It is illegal to build anything higher than the top of the Capitol. This keeps Washington’s skyline low.
They also have just about finished the Arena Stage that you see in the picture above. You can see pictures from a couple years ago, during construction here, here & here.
It has been really hot. The weatherman said that we have not had this kind of string of hot days since the 1930s. I remember that my father used to say, “It ain’t the heat; it’s the humidity.” He was right, but we have both. I still have been riding my bike to work and it has been about 80 degrees when I set off in the morning. I am soaking with sweat by the time I get to work and am more grateful than usual for the showers.
Yesterday I went to the Wilson Center to hear a talk on Brazilian biofuels. I will write notes later. I got to work and took my shower and then I decided to walk over to Wilson for the program that started at 9am. It is only around a 15 minute walk, but the humidity made it really uncomfortable. Well, the really hot weather is supposed to be over in a couple of days. Then it will be merely hot.
I got a little spoiled last year when it was cool (by Washington standards) most of the summer. I understand that this is an “El Nino” year, which means it is hotter than usual.
The funny thing is that it is an especially cold winter in South America. I have been watching Brazilian TV and they talk a lot about the “cold wave” hitting their country. Cold for them does not mean the same thing it does for us. When it gets down around freezing it is a very serious event. They just aren’t ready. There are reports of cattle just dropping dead from the cold in states like Mato Grosso do Sul and Parana. You can see it on TV. They evidently just drop down and are laying right where they stood in the fields. These are tropical breeds that just don’t make it through a cold (by Brazilian standards) night. They also tend not to have sheltering barns, since there is usually no need for them. Cattle raising is extensive instead of intensive and often what we would call “free range”. Brazil has a lot of pasture land. I read that each cow has an average of a whole hectare of land.
The pictures up top are from my morning ride through Arlington Cemetery yesterday and the day before. You can sort of see the humidity in the air.
