Below is the tree version of the sword of Damocles. I suppose it will fall in the first strong wind and it is not over a walking trail, so it probably is not a real danger to anybody. Natural places need not be made antiseptically safe.
Below shows why forests in foggy places are different than those w/o so much fog. The tree leaves sort of comb out the moisture and it drops to the ground, as you can see in the picture with the water under the silver maple in Warinmont Park.
Below is the fog bank hanging out over Lake Michigan on the other side of the Milwaukee breakwater. I thought it looked like a distant mountain that could move.
Below are lichens on a white birch tree. This is a European white birch planted by the park authorities, not the native paper birch. Of course, neither is native to Milwaukee, but the paper birch range is much closer.
Below are gargoyles on my old Bay View HS. The building was constructed around 1920. I heard it was designed to look like a castle in Germany, but I don’t know for sure. My mother went to Bay View and it used to have strong local support and traditions. This was mostly lost in the 1980s, when the city did busing to achieve integration. The goal was good, but the method was bad. IMO, it was an experiment that failed. It didn’t quicken integration; it cost a lot of money; it delivered kids more tired to school; it contributed to the ruin of a once decent school system and it wrecked the idea of neighborhood schools. A quarter of a century later, we have nothing good to show for the suffering.
I used to go in the door below the gargoyles at Bay View. From that spot, my home, grade school and junior HS were all within a ten minute walk. It was a better time to be a student in Milwaukee than it is today. We didn’t need to be bussed. We didn’t spend a lot of time commuting. We got some exercise and we got to know the neighbors. It was something that should not have been thrown away.
The Milwaukee Art Museum building is itself a work of art, perched on a wonderful location up against Lake Michigan. Chrissy & I saw it shrouded in the lake mists. I am sure that the designers anticipated such meteorological events as part of the presentation.
How much does art belong to the artist? This is a difficult question. IMO, we revere artists too much. Artists express themselves through their art. But it only becomes meaningful when interpreted by other people. I don’t really think very much of individual expression. Art is a social activity. Below is a good example. It is the infinity room. The artist evidently thought it represented outer space. Do you think it does? And I think that Chrissy standing there greatly improves the artist’s vision. It is a human showing wonder at the otherwise soul-less light show. So the art was not complete until we stepped into it. And it will not be complete until others do too.
I wrote a couple of posts on this general subject here & here and won’t repeat it here. I guess the general idea is that art is like a general idea. You put it out there and other people add to it, change it and maybe perfect it. Below is the infinity room again with my feet improving the art.
I think it was a good thing when artists had patron who could help call the shots. A lot of great art resulted from the tensions between the creator and his patron. When artists are left to their own, they too often drift into a kind of self-indulgence. Art usually improves when it ages because it gets modified or reinterpreted. Most art is incomplete when the artist gets done with his part. Below is a “sunburst” sculpture. It is made our of girders. It is interesting, but the city paid too much for it, since any competent steelworkers could make the same thing. In fact, when the city bought the thing, I recall that some old guy on the South Side made his own smaller version out of scrap steel. Some art is like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”.
We have had several deadly tornadoes recently, so the short memory set is talking again about killer weather. The fact is that weather related deaths have been dropping for a generation. But it is like other news of improvements, such as the drop in crime, drop in traffic fatalities or the drop in cancer deaths . It goes unnoticed and reports of the facts are greeted with disbelief or even hostility. For the 30-year span of 1980-2009, the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes was 194—fully one-third fewer deaths each year than during the 1940-1979 periods, as outlined in this article. This is even more remarkable, since the American population in 2009 is more than double what is was in 1940, so your individual chances of dying in a weather related event is even lower. The weather has not become more benign since 1940. The weather is … the weather. It varies a lot. It gets very cold sometimes and hot other times. Sometimes it rains a lot; other times it rains hardly at all. The difference is human adaption. We are better at predicting weather and better at saving lives. People are adaptive.
My posting is based on an article by Professor Donald Boudreaux of George Mason University. He believes that the number of weather related deaths will continue to decline and has offered to bet $10,000. the dooms sayers always underestimate is human ability to adapt and triumph. They see what is today and cannot conceive of anything that doesn’t follow in direct projection. They assume that in the face of a rising tide, human beings will sit like King Canute instead of moving.
The bottom line is that my life is significantly better than my father’s. My sons and daughter will live better than I do. When I was 18 I didn’t believe this. We were told that the American dream was over and that we would face bleak futures. I think they tell us that every year, but people seem to forget the earlier predictions. It is like that clown that predicted the rapture … and then it didn’t happen. We have secular versions of that too. It seems we all like to think our times are uniquely difficult. It provides an excuse for our personal failures.
Progress will end. Everything ends, but probably not today, not tomorrow and not soon. The new hi-tech, such as biotech and nanotech, will revolutionize the way we live, creating greater wealth and engendering new anxiety among the weak minded and the credulous. Twenty years from today, people will look back on our times and claim that our challenges were nothing compared to theirs, just as we do with earlier times. They too will be wrong.
Nobody likes to do everything or is equally competent in all areas. I understand that and I am reminded again now that I am working in the press office. I needed a place to stay from now until I go to Brazil and they needed someone to fill in, so that is what I am doing. It is the kind of exciting job that they might make into a TV show. We have urgent challenges, big personalities and short deadlines. Yesterday, for example, we worked on the press surrounding the extradition of a Mexican drug lord, statements from high level meetings and various other hot items. It is a truly essential job but I don’t like it.
Some of my colleagues love it and I can understand why. I get to be close to important people and events and, in time, I could probably convince myself that I am an important person too. But it is a “machine bureaucracy” where you are most successful to the extent that you can maintain the integrity of the hierarchy and the procedures.
We often speak of bureaucracies in pejorative terms, but the reason all literate human societies have developed bureaucracies is that they work wonderfully within their areas of expertise. If you need to control events there is nothing better, providing that conditions are reasonably predictable within the accountability of the bureaucracy and you have the resources to make it work. I can affirm that we have a great bureaucracy. Nothing gets lost. Information passes efficiently through the system; decisions are made and promulgated. The machine works. The question really is not whether or not a bureaucracy works; it does. It is rather where and when the bureaucracy is the appropriate tool for the task.*
I am able to do the work and I am willing to do it because it needs to be done. I got all that language training that I loved, so it is fair to do some of the more bureaucratic tasks. As I said, some people love that sort of work and many think I am crazy for loving the language training. I suppose people should do the things that they do well. I will be glad when I can get back to doing the things I am better at doing, the things I like to do. It won’t be long.
* Give a man a hammer and every problem starts looking like a nail. That phrase comes from Abraham Maslow and a lot of my understanding of bureaucracy comes from Henry Mintzberg. I don’t pretend to be a scholar on this, so this is my extrapolation from their ideas. One problem for bureaucracy is that it grows and applies rules to inappropriate situations. But the bigger problem is that most humans don’t adapt well to highly-rule based system. It is essentially not a human system. If you want to see an ideal bureaucratic system, look at a computer program. A computer automates many of the machine bureaucratic functions, which is good, since it frees people for the tasks that they are better at doing.
The ancient Greeks & Romans were fairly unanimous in understanding that body health & mental health were inseparable. The idea slipped during the middle ages, when some believed in the “mortification of the flesh.” Our ideas in modern America are mixed. Popular culture features the fictional conflicts between nerds/geeks and jocks. According to the formula, the geeks are uncoordinated and physically weak, but hard working and smart. The jocks are the opposite. Like lots of high school concepts, this one is based on a simplified version of brains v brawn and narrow definitions of health and intelligence. The Greeks were right. Healthy bodies and healthy minds go together, at least in a statistical sense, i.e. in general but not always. I know that somebody will throw up the example of Stephen Hawkins, but he is an exception in almost every way. The brain is part of the body. When the body functions poorly, the brain is affected. You just cannot think as clearly if your body is giving you trouble. Think about the last time you had a bad toothache. Did you think about lots of other things when it was acting up?
It is hard to determine the causality in mind-body health. Healthy people can devote more energy to keeping their mind alert and intelligent people understand better the need and methods for staying healthy. We find a correlation between health and success, with obesity and poor health more common among the poor. It some ways it violates our sense of fairness. We like to think there is some kind of compensation, so the guy with the weak body gets the compensation of being smarter. It just doesn’t seem to work like that.
I go to Gold’s Gym three times a week and I am under no illusions that all those guys built like gorillas are rocket scientists. On the other hand, the people who work out during their lunch hours, before or after work seem a cut above the ones who don’t.
“Talk of the Nation – Science Friday” reported studies that show that moderate exercise, like walking 40 minutes three times a week actually increase the size of your brain. They also discussed “brain exercises” like doing crossword puzzles. These things make you better at crossword puzzles, but don’t do much in general. Physical exercise, on the other hand, improves the raw material of brain health and so provides across the board benefits.
I know this is not the same thing, but I find that I think more clearly when I am walking. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it is just better to be in motion. I can think about things when I am walking. I suppose if I was just to sit still and try the same thing my mind would wander or I might just fall asleep.
Another thing the ancient Greeks used to say was “nothing too much” or “everything in moderation.” You don’t have to be a triathlete to have a healthy mind and body, but it would be a good idea to be able to walk around the block w/o your body complaining. It helps keep the mind clear.
The picture up top shows the dumbing down of our society. How dumb do you have to be to require a warning on your computer keyboard? IMO, one of the big challenges to our society is that we allow fewer and fewer responsible decisions.
Kids used to die from diseases that are now preventable. Many of these diseases, such as measles & whopping cough were almost eradicated until a dishonest doctor published an article in the once reputable medical journal “The Lancet” blaming vaccines for autism. Crooked lawyers and opportunistic politicians jumped on the bandwagon. Measles is now endemic in England. California recently suffered a whooping cough outbreak that made 7,800 people sick & killed 10 babies.
This is a story with real heroes and villains. The obvious villain is “doctor” Andrew Wakefield and other researchers who used bogus data to reach dubious conclusions. Also villains are lawyers who quickly sued firms. Useful idiots are the parents who wanted to blame someone and maybe profit from their children’s suffering. I am not sure where all the celebrities and politicians belong. They may not actually be villains, but they are worse than useful idiots.
And one of the biggest threats to human health and safety is the ignorant attacks on the sciences of biotechnology and nanotechnology, but those are all subjects for other posts.
I had all my kids vaccinated against everything they might get. I made sure they got their meningitis shots before going away to school. I get my flu shot every year. I grew up just after polio was conquered. I remember people not much older than I was telling about the horrors. I got my immunization to chicken pox, measles and the mumps the old fashioned way, by getting the disease. I survived, but it is not a harmless thing.
You have to be pretty dumb to avoid vaccinations unless you have a specific medical reason – a real one, not one you got from the Internet. But those who avoid vaccinations are worse just dummies. They harm others. Not everybody can get vaccinated. People with compromised immune systems cannot, for example, but they are extremely susceptible to sickness. The chicken pox that just bothers you and me might kill them. They depend on all of us to NOT to be the carriers of the germs. If you bring measles or mumps etc among them, you might be killing some of these people.
Just be smart and take the jab. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for others. And if you won’t do it for others, go live someplace by yourself. You may both avoid the contagious diseases and avoid passing them to others.
The Danes are the happiest people in the world. The U.S. is up near Denmark, while poor little Togo is both the unhappiest place on earth and the among the poorest, if you believe measurements of those things. China & India fall in the lower middle of both. They have some growing to do before they reach that land of sweet contentment where hardships don’t prevail.
I am happy until I ask why. Then I am just perplexed. Maybe that is because identifying the components of happiness is hard and they are often ethereal. When we look at them closely, they may disappear or seem insignificant. What made me really happy on Saturday, for example, was sitting in front of a south facing wall, after my run, soaking up the warm sun on a cool day. What goes into that, however, is having energy and time to run and to doze in the sun after. It is also the earned freedom to rest after even a small accomplishment. It would not be the same if I just went out and sat in the sun.
Enough money is clearly a component in happiness, since it gives you options and helps avoid hardships. I recall the old hippie saying, “Life is a shit sandwich; the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.”
Some people are naturally happier than others. But almost everybody can be made less happy by circumstances, some of which can be avoided by having money. Nevertheless, it remains a sort of statistical process. A rich person has better odds, but a poor person may come out better off with better luck and wise people may be able to maintain their equanimity despite the vicissitudes of capricious fortune. We all die pretty soon no matter what, which evens out all the material possessions, so it is probably not a great idea to get too wound up in the acquisition of stuff – or the lack thereof – anyway. Sic transit gloria mundi.
This interdependence of wisdom, wealth and luck is more or less what Solon explained to Croesus. Read the story at this link. (BTW – the Greeks thought of almost everything we care about in philosophy. This shows us that our problems are nothing new and ensures that you can always quote one of them if you want to be erudite.) A quick summary is that Solon was known as a wise man. He was asked to make reforms in Athens, which was going through challenges a lot worse than we are facing in America today. They had their own sort of globalization (or at least Mediterraneanization) going on and when you said you were a debt slave back then it was literally true. Solon did his duty and after he was done he wisely got out of town before the glow of the people’s gratitude and enthusiasm wore off. During his travels, he met Croesus, the King of Lydia & the richest man in the world. Croesus asked Solon who was the happiest man in the world, expecting that Solon would pick him. (The ancient Greeks rarely made a strong distinction between happy and rich, often using the same word for each w/o distinction.) To his surprise, Solon named others. Croesus thought Solon was nuts, but in the end it turned out Solon was right.
Read the link above if you want the rest of the story and if you are apt to complain about not being happy, cut it out. If you cannot actually be happy, pretend to be happy. Acting happy is sometimes enough to actually make you happy. But even if that doesn’t work, at least you won’t be bothering other people.
You don’t think of yourself getting older. But you do. At the cafeteria today, an acquaintance was talking to the checkout woman about coffee. He told her that he could remember when coffee was a quarter. Then he looked up, noticed me and said, “And that guy can remember when it was a nickel.” Actually, I can’t, although maybe it is just because I didn’t drink coffee. But the young checkout clerk seemed to accept it w/o serious doubt. She looked at me and asked, “Really, you used to be able to buy coffee for a nickel?” I suppose it is better to be talked about than not talked about. I just mumbled “yep” and let it go at that. This is my last day here, so I don’t need to maintain my credibility.
I am done and the day is not even over yet. I turned in my Blackberry, did the final checkouts, said my last goodbyes and reduced the size of my email box (according to IT, the most important thing). Nothing remains but to slip out the side door. Transferring within the Washington Metro area is not very hard. I look forward to the adventure of language at FSI and then to Brazil, but it is always sad to leave.
Of course, I will miss the big things like the people I work with and the job. But I am past that now. Now I am thinking about some small, prosaic things that have contributed to quality of life. For example, the shower/locker room downstairs is what really made bike communing possible. It was very refreshing after a hot ride. It also made lunchtime running a realistic option. It is really important to integrate exercise into the day, because you will usually be too tired, busy or have some other excuse for avoiding workouts in the evenings and weekends. A valid excuse is weather and darkness. In the winter you can run during the middle of the day, when it is often sunny and reasonably warm even many days in January. By evening it is dark and cold.
Another pragmatic benefit was Gold’s Gym, although when we moved to our new building that became less useful. But when we were in our old building, Gold’s Gym sat between my office and the Metro. There was never any excuse not to work out. In fact, I felt compelled to go in, even if I was “tired from a long day.” I have been lifting weights fairly regularly since I was fifteen, which is now forty years, but over the past six years (except for my Iraq time) I lifted MORE regularly because it was just more convenient. FSI has a gym, although I haven’t looked closely at it. It probably will not be as good. Gold’s Gym doesn’t have the really fancy equipment, but it is a place more attractive to people who really want to work out, as opposed to the dilettantes who just want to be seen looking good.
Well, one door closes and another opens. I am sure I will find plenty to like in my new incarnation. I am eager to get to the kinds of work I do well and the intellectual challenge of the language and area studies is attractive.
Time passes slowly but before you notice it has lurched forward and the future has become the past. The many days of doing routine things and seeing the same places seem to merge.
It is funny how things end. That is why it is more important to have goals re what the type of person you aspire to become, rather than attaining particular jobs or positions. The day after you leave your job, no matter how exalted, is the day you are a former-whatever it was you were. You cannot take the nice office with you and the fancy title is meaningless once it is done. But you always take yourself along wherever you go, so it is a good idea to get to like what you are and to work not so much to win respect as to be worthy of your own respect and that of others, not matter what position you currently hold, or not Sic transit gloria mundi.
The pictures show the Lincoln Memorial at dusk. Next is the Capitol with the preparations for the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert show. Last is the Commerce Department from the Mall.
I am always limping around in October. It is prime time for running injuries, which I feel especially acutely as I see the enchanting but ephemeral season pass by. They are mutually reinforcing. I want to run because of the beautiful weather, so I run more. Eventually, I run too much and pull something and then I cannot run. I understand the problem, but I cannot seem to address it. Even after many years of lessons, hope triumphs over experience.
It is an almost perfect storm. October is the end of my bike season, so I am in good general condition. But I run less during the bike time, so specific running muscles, i.e. those that propel the legs differently running than riding a bike, are relatively weak even though it feels good until something gives. It would be better if I was in generally poorer condition. If all the muscles were similarly weak, the strong ones wouldn’t be pulling the weak ones out of joint. Add that to the beautiful weather and the sense of urgency that it will not last long and I find the combination almost irresistible.
I am fatalistic. I figure that this has been going on for more than twenty-five years. Even though I know it, it doesn’t seem to matter. I have to admit that I am probably unteachable. So I am limping around today as a result of yesterday’s mistakes. I will take today off, but I figure that come Friday, I will be limping around again from overdoing it on Thursday. It is a kind of compulsion. I reach equilibrium eventually.
Maybe November is actually the best running month.
Yesterday I watched an episode of “Law & Order –Criminal Intent” that featured a murderer obsessed with proving that people were not moral. He captured loving couples and forced them into situations where one killed the other to save his/her own life. Today I read about criticisms of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Evidently modern activists feel Atticus was not sufficiently outraged by the racism around him. As different as these seem to be, they are both based on pernicious and self-indulgent interpretation of human morality, an interpretation that is superficially perceptive and intelligent, but is in fact just sophomoric.
I understand that my own interpretation will sound shallow compared with the deep thinking that some of the chattering classes do about historical transgressions like racism or the Holocaust, but I think it has the advantage of being more useful. It has to do with capacities, and sometimes going beyond what we can expect of ourselves and other humans.
There are two types of judgments that are worthless: standards that are so high that nobody can pass and standards so low that everybody can. Both, unfortunately, are attractive because we can alternatively claim to have high standards or to be inclusive. I was on the swim team in HS, but I cannot swim as fast as Olympic champion Michael Phelps. But there are two sorts of swimming contests where I am his equal. If the test is simply the ability to swim 100 yards w/o any reference to the time involved in getting there, both of us can do it. If the test is to swim across Lake Michigan, neither of us can make it. It sounds silly when I put it in these terms, but that is what we constantly do in our moral judgments of others, especially when we are thinking historically.
If you prove that Michael Phelps cannot swim across Lake Michigan, have you proven that he is a poor swimmer? Of course not. What if you put a person into an impossible moral situation? You might conclude that this person is morally lacking, and you would be wrong. You might conclude that all humans were morally lacking and you would be right by the standard you set up, but it is a stupid standard. If nobody can succeed, the test is useless. Why do people insist on postulating such things? I think it is because it makes them feel better about their own personal moral shortcomings.
Just as a reasonable person – even a great swimmer – would avoid jumping off the car-ferry in the middle of Lake Michigan because he knows that he cannot swim forty miles to the other side, so a moral person avoids situations where he will be pushed beyond his breaking point. This is the moral thing to do. You need to anticipate challenges and take steps in advance to address them. In my experience, people who constantly get in trouble are not always worse at resisting temptation, but they are very clumsy about falling into situations where they cannot. Taken to a higher level, a good society is one that permits and facilitates moral choices. One of the biggest crimes committed in un-free societies is that they corrupt good people by making it very difficult for to make moral choices, or even recognize that there is a moral choice to be made. As they are threatened or enticed into poor moral choices, they slip farther down the slope.
I am not arguing for moral relativism when I say that we have to judge people’s choices in the context of their situations. There are standards we should uphold, but we have to recognize that when you are sitting in a comfortable chair in the safety of your home it is easier to postulate that you would make the right choice than if the Gestapo was asking you whether or not you saw someone hiding in a shed.
There is also the element of knowledge and experience. I know that I have become more interested in acting ethically as I have become older. I don’t think it is merely age. As I experienced more and learned more, my feeling of responsibility has grown. Some of us like to idealize children as innocents who instinctually know right from wrong. This is not true. It is just that we cut them a lot of slack and we don’t expect them to make the really hard choices. IMO, true ethics requires learning and introspection. In a similar vein, I am not a big believer in the noble savage ideal. I think Roseau was full of shit and besides his occasionally stirring phrases; he was harmful to the ethical development of humanity.
