Month: January 2011

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New Classics

Who would have thought it? A new edition of Polybius in Loeb Classics. The first edition came out in 1922.  According to the preface of the new edition, the translator, a WR Paton, died in 1921 before really finishing the work, but the editors figured it was good enough, so they went to print. It was good enough until 1964, when the editors decided to contract another guy to polish it up. Unfortunately, work did not proceed really quickly.  In the 1970s the demand for classics was not what it used to be and the project was put on hold. For reasons not explained, in 1993, the fortunes of Loeb improved and work resumed. It was finished in 2009, so now we have the pleasure of a revised edition of Polybius.

Loeb Classics feature the classical language original, in the case Greek, on the left page with the English translation on the other page. That matters not so much to me anymore. I cannot read any of the Greek.  I bought the book more for nostalgia than for actual reading. Polybius was the first Greek author that I studied in depth, when I had the seminar in Polybius at the University of Wisconsin.  

I couldn’t afford my own copy (Loeb Classics were expensive) so I used the library, where it was on permanent reserve at the Greek & Latin reading room. Yes, we had such a place. It was down in the basement at Memorial Library. You would never go down there or find the place by accident. There was the musty smell of old paper. I remember there was a giant Greek-English dictionary on a pedestal table in the middle of the room. We always called it a lexicon instead of dictionary. I am not sure if there is a difference. I spent many hours down there, I was often there alone and the place was quiet. Quiet as a tomb seemed to fit. The wall of the nearby bathroom had erudite graffiti.

A couple years ago I tried to go down there again to see if the Greek & Latin reading room was still there, but they wouldn’t let me in. The guard – yes they had a guard – told me that outsiders couldn’t just go into the library, since I had no current connection to the university. Evidently weirdos were hanging around and I couldn’t convince them that the desire to see the Greek & Roman reading room wasn’t something that a weirdo would do. I understand the need for security, but I liked the idea that libraries could be open.

Polybius was a good author for a not-so-talented classics scholar. His Greek is relatively easy to read, since he wrote in simple declarative sentences. Reading Polybius was a kind of a double payoff. He wrote in Greek but he wrote about the rise of Rome. As I said, I won’t be reading the Greek at all, nor do I intend to read even too much of the English.  Buying the book fulfills and old desire.

I read the introduction and the Polybius’ own comments on the importance of history. It reminded me of the old days (both my own and the much older ones Polybius wrote about.)  He says “…the surest and indeed the only method of learning how to bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune is the recall the calamities of others.”  It sounds a little like a schadenfreude advice, but I think that is an artifact of the phrasing and maybe the translation.   Maybe a better paraphrase could be “when we look back at the experience of other times and places, our problems don’t seem so tough.”

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Ice Storms & Walking

I have not written much, since my language training is absorbing much of my intellectual energy and making my life predictable. All I do is walk from the Metro to FSI.  We had a little variety with an ice storm a couple days ago. It made walking harder, but produced a few good pictures.

It takes around 25 minutes to walk from the Metro to FSI, door to door. The walk there and back every day, plus other places I have to do give me time to listen to my I-pod and I have some good audio books, so it is not all Portuguese language. I am just finishing “the Pity of War” by Niall Ferguson about World War I.  My next one is “the Atlantic” by Simon Winchester. He is a great writer and I look forward to this new book. But language does occupy most of my thinking.

I think I am reaching a plateau. I understand most of what I hear and read, but i still make silly mistakes when I speak. It gets harder to make progress as you make progress. It is the old story of the more you know, the greater your recognition of the big area you don’t know. The best I heard it described was that it was like a light bulb. The more powerful bulb creates more light, but also touches a bigger perimeter of darkness. I don’t know what else to do, literally. I am doing all the things I think I should and acting on faith now that it will work. Of course, I will come up against the limits of my abilities. It is unpleasant to think that there are limits, but there are limits. I just hope mine is fairly high in this case.

There is so much language to learn and then so much to learn about Brazil. I can only really scratch the surface.  I go back and forth from the appreciating the exhilaration of the challenge  and talking joy in the new understanding to feeling crushed by the weight of what I can never do.  At this time in the training, the doubt predominates. I have been here before, so, fortunately, I know how it will work. This time it is better than during similar periods in other training, actually. I don’t have any real worries about not passing the tests in good form. I recall when I was half way through Polish training I really wondered if I had somehow damaged by brain, since I didn’t feel I was learning enough.  It was the cold winter of doubt. That passed; his will too.

There are so many more language learning resources today. Internet brings us all the sounds and sights of Brazil in real time. But the more you have … it is that old light bulb thing again.

The top two pictures show the ice we had a couple days ago. The bottom picture is a crane. There is lots of construction.  The crane is braced, which makes it look like it is flying.  

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Mud Slides & Popular Politics

It takes a brave man – and one with a secure job – to tell the truth in the face of great “natural” tragedy.  I saw that today on “Bom Dia Brasil”, where commentator Alexandre Garcia talked about the recent mudslides in Brazil that killed hundreds of people and left many thousands homeless.

The cause is easy to identify. People build dense settlements on steep hillsides, destroying trees and natural cover. This results not only in their own houses being destroyed by mudslides, but also can affect those down the hill who didn’t do anything wrong.

Garcia points out that Brazilian politicians love to make rules, but are less enthusiastic about enforcing them.  (This is not limited to Brazil, BTW. We have mudslides in our country true for some of the same reasons.) It is already illegal to build houses on most of the affected hillsides. But the poor, and sometimes the not-so-poor, invade the green zones and nobody has the political will, or maybe the actual force, needed to stop them. Local politicians, and sometimes even those at the Federal level, play the victim card and pander to voters. It seems unjust to not allow the poor people to have a place to live. There is also little support to solve the problem among the more established parts of the population, who are happy to have the poor living somewhere else.

And each time the predictable “natural” disaster happens, everybody can show solidarity and stick together to overcome the trouble.  Politicians can take credit for “solving” problems everybody should have avoided. Garcia says that the Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio Cabral, knows what everybody knows:  populism helped kill people. (Sérgio Cabral sabe o que todos sabemos:o populismo ajudou a matar.) But what can you do about it?In the mountains of the Serra Gaucha in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, there are very nice towns such as Gramado & Canela. They are built in the mountains and are surrounded by steep slopes. But they rarely experience these sorts of problems because the slopes are covered with trees and vegetation that protect the soils.  As Garcia pointed out, this is also part of Brazil. Above is based on what Garcia said. Don’t blame him for the rest, which is my extrapolation.

Finding space for people to live in growing cities is always a challenge, but you have to recognize real options and constraints.  It doesn’t matter if the people and the politicians want to build houses on steep hillsides.  They cannot do it and expect not to suffer dire & deadly consequences.  

In other words, expanding in steep and unstable places is not an option and cannot be made an option by anything government can do.  Some places need to be protected, not to achieve some abstract aesthetic perfection, but because the immutable laws of physics and ecology forbid some kinds of development. It will rain. Mud will slide. If your house is in a place where the dirt moves, you will slide with it. If you remove the vegetation, even more mud will slide and destroy houses and vegetation that would not otherwise be affected. In other words, if you build houses on an unstable slope, you are responsible for significant property damage and maybe for murder.

The government’s role here is more difficult. It has to go against the manifest “will of the people” and constantly suffer criticism. Those enforcing the rules will be characterized as heartless, mean and cruel. Inevitably, a few people will occupy part of the preserved area.  How hard will it be to evict these people, who seem to have no other option?  How much can “a few” little people hurt the big hill? And how can it be fair not to allow more if you allow some?  You see the problem.

Preserving land in steep places is a never-ending challenge and not always as simple as just leaving things alone (although that can be far from simple, as I mentioned above). I read about the forests and meadows in Switzerland.  That very pretty and effective environment has been carefully managed by the human inhabitants for centuries and many lessons were learned. Sometimes they cut too many trees, but sometimes they didn’t cut enough.  In 1876 they made a law to prevent deforestation. Today forest may be becoming too thick. A dynamic balance is what we need. I wrote a little about the dilemma at this link.

An ecosystem is a living thing in the state of constant change. What works today might not work tomorrow w/o modification. The Swiss established forests on slopes where nature would not have put them, since frequent avalanches knocked them down. Once established, however, the trees helped prevent further avalanches and became mostly self-sustaining. I say mostly, because there is sometimes a disturbance that kills the trees locally. If they were not quickly reestablished and a meadow formed on the steep slope, snow would slide quickly down that area, destroying forests below, expanding the treeless area until you had again the unfavorable “natural” conditions.

The Swiss learned how to manage their mountains through centuries of hard experience and no doubt sometimes paid terrible prices for their education. The people in Gramado have evidently also come to equilibrium with their mountains. Gramado looks a lot like Switzerland, since its Italian and German immigrants brought their building styles. Maybe they also brought some of their forest management skills.  

In any case, the sooner others can learn the better. Many disasters can be avoided. Then maybe we won’t need the heroism we saw in the wake of the recent tragedies.

PS – I have some experience in mud sliding on a smaller scale. I have seen that the ground is always moving near my creeks. It doesn’t hurt anything and it is interesting to watch the changing conditions. It doesn’t hurt because it is just moving dirt from one natural place to another. During a big rain last year, it looks like the water rose at least five feet above the usual water surface and deposited mud many meters away from the creek. The water soaked in and the mud deposits will help fertilize the woods. If you had houses there, however, they would have been severely damaged. Even worse, they would have prevented the natural process.  There are some places that are not suitable for some uses.

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Useful Comparisons

I like to look at maps, but maps can be deceptive. They might lead us to believe that countries that cover a big area are more important. You can also be deceived by prominence in the news. An interactive map from the Economist puts in some perspective. Giant Russia has a GDP the size of Texas and oil rich Saudi Arabia is no richer than Massachusetts.

Your perspective changes when you look at the map that compares population. Saudi Arabia has a Texas sized population, even if it doesn’t manage Texas style prosperity. Cameroon has a population as big as New York’s. New York’s GDP partner is Australia.

Countries like Sweden and Finland would fit in well as states in both terms of population and GDP. Sweden has a GDP about the size of North Carolina with a similar sized population. Finland has a GDP about the size of Wisconsin’s and a population like Minnesota. Finland, Wisconsin & Minnesota all feature clean cities, cold weather, northern forests & lots of lakes, so maybe that is appropriate.

International comparisons are always rough and the United States is especially problematic because of its unusual size, population, prosperity & diversity. The only “country” that really can be compared to the U.S. on all counts is the EU. We are often fond of the cherry picking comparisons that seem to prove a point. In fact, as we can see from the map, that the unit of comparison might often be more at the state level. I remember an interesting comparison. The GDP per capita in Germany is about the same as in Arkansas.

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The Doctor Lied-Kids Died

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.

The problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time. Remember when Merrill Streep, in one of her best passionate acting voices, testified before Congress about Alar? Celebries look so good and seem so earnest that you might almost think they knew what they were talking about. Many people laid off their healthy apples for weeks or months. By the time the truth comes out, or by the time it is actually proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even crooked lawyers cannot spin, the damage is done. It is especially fun for them to go after big firms, something like what is going on with Toyota, BTW, right now.

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.

References are here & here and especially here.

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The Light Bulb Goes Off

The great Ronald Reagan said that you could accomplish almost anything as long as you don’t care who gets credit. Of course Reagan was not the first person to say that. It is almost impossible to trace an idea to its “source” because there really is no one source. Ideas don’t pass unchanged through the people who hold them and none of us ever has a truly original thought, which is why we might not fight so hard to take or give credit. 

 I proudly proclaim that I have never in my life had a truly original thought. I am well educated. The chief benefit of education is that you tap into the accumulated wisdom of other people, places and other generations. I spend a lot of time reading with the specific goal of appropriating the ideas of others. I cannot keep them straight. I often cannot remember where I picked them up and I mix them together in ways that complicate provenance. It doesn’t bother me, although I suppose that some people of deceive themselves about their own originality might be upset that I “stole” their ideas. Footnotes have always been a challenge for me. 

The image of the lone genius coming up with a great breakthrough was always mostly mythical. Innovative ideas are created when they bounce off and recombine with each other. (Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist characterizes it as ideas having sex and producing synergistic offspring. His book, BTW, is among those I have assimilated in the Borg-like fashion I mentioned above.) They do not do well when they are contained in a single mind, the more people involved in an idea, the better.

I have little patience with the careful parsing of credit. That is a reason I had to flee academia, where the first ¾ of any research consists of summarizing and discussing the lineage of all the ideas you will be considering in the second-last paragraph of your thesis. It is just an awful long run for a very short slide and beyond that it does not reflect how people think or ideas are born outside the ivory tower.

Let me break my credit rule again by referring to another book I recently read called Where Good Ideas Come From. If you follow the link, you will find a good illustrated summary of the main ideas of the book, which saves me the need to write it all down here. The summary does not include, however, the point that in an academic sense I would give him credit for. That is that many people have similar ideas when faced with similar challenges and similar opportunities. Of course, this is not a new idea. I wrote a post with some of the same thoughts before I read the book and I think before the book was published. It kind of proves the point about ideas flowing around.

You can also look at the TED Lecture. If you are unfamiliar with TED lectures, you might want to take a look; they are usually interesting. On an unrelated note, one of my favorites was on the intelligence of crows.

Johnson gives some good examples. The most famous is probably Darwin and Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution completely independently about the same time. The idea was gestating around in general at the time. Thinking up the theory was made possible by scientific advances that made analysis of species possible, by floods of communications that spread that knowledge and, not inconsequentially, by the society that had developed in the West that would not stone or burn anybody who published such ideas as infidels or heretics. In short, a person living in the 15th Century anywhere in the world or even living in the 19th Century anyplace else probably could not have thought of the details of the theory of evolution at all or, if he had managed the thought, would have died in a nasty way shortly after revealing it to anybody else.

When I studied anthropology and ancient history, we used to refer to diffusion. This was the concept that ideas and technologies were created in some place, in ancient history usually the Mesopotamia or Anatolia, and then they were carried – diffused – to other parts of the world. This led to a linear type of history, where your attention is first drawn to Sumer in southern Mesopotamia and then you move the “center” of civilization to northern Mesopotamia, expand it to include the Eastern Mediterranean, then to Greece, then Rome. After that you move to the Empire of the Franks, then to England and finally you end up in America.

Of course, I am conflating diffusion with an ethnocentric historical perspective, but diffusion is essentially an ethnocentric historical perspective and it is based on that bogus concept that ideas are invented and then spread, rather than the more correct one that ideas spread and then they are invented. (This diffusion thing gets even worse, BTW. Some people believe that space aliens came around and “seeded” ideas)

It is not exclusive. It is likely that people in different places, faced with similar challenges and opportunities came up with similar adaptations. It is also likely that when they came in contact with other ideas the mixed, matched and innovated. So did the use of particular tools, pottery or agricultural techniques spread through diffusion from originating centers or did they develop in many places at once? The answer is yes.

So the academic exercise of trying to find the “origins” can be fun, but it is isn’t much use.

Next year we will essentially outlaw the traditional incandescent light bulb, and with it the long-time symbol of innovation and new ideas. We all learned that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but there are always wise guys who point out that he didn’t. They are right. The Greeks invented light bulbs almost 3000 years ago. The problem is that they didn’t work. Who had the basic idea first doesn’t really count for much. It matters who can make it work and make it useful. The greatest innovators are not those who have the best new ideas, but rather those who can figure out how to make ideas work for themselves and others and those who can reformulate ideas into new mixes.

All ideas are old in their basic form. I am convinced that the Greeks, Chinese or Native Americans (if you want to be PC) pretty much thought of everything on a basic level. If you want to say that the concept of a chariot of the gods is essentially the same as the space shuttle, you are being silly and impractical but you have a nerdly rhetorical point. Just don’t take that kind of thing to seriously and don’t get annoyed when you don’t get credit for having useful ideas.

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Cooper’s Hawk

I think this is a Cooper’s hawk, also called a chicken hawk. Hawks are more and more common and I even see eagles sometimes near the Potomac, but I never get pictures because they are on the fly. This one was chasing something by flying and then running on the ground, so I got the picture. Whatever it was after got away. The photo is not perfectly focused because I still had to shoot fast and the light was not great.

According to what I read, these birds eat other birds. I have noticed there are a lot fewer pigeons and I think the resurgent hawk population is one of the reasons. That alone would make the hawks a good thing in my book. A pigeon must be an easy meal for a hawk. This one was right next to Glebe Road just a little north of Henderson, in a fairly built up area. I read that hawks have adapted well to cities. Some of types actually prefer urban living because there are lots of slow witted pigeons and fat squirrels and tall buildings provide many of the attributes of cliffs.

I saw a really majestic bird up close a few months ago on Independence Ave. It swooped right past me, actually frightening a woman on sidewalk in front of me. It was a kind of white color. I think it was an osprey. It was bigger and more impressive than the one above, but it was long gone before I could even get my camera out.

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Boldy Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

A green field investment is when you build a plant where none have been before. The term “green field” is exactly descriptive of the actual geography and contrasts with the “brown field” which is when you rebuilt or build on an old industrial site.   Which is better depends on what you plan to do. Existing buildings and infrastructure can be worth a lot, but they can also be worth nothing and sometimes they even have negative value because existing structures must be demolished and the new owners have to take responsibility for perhaps years of pollution to ground water, soil etc. This can be a major liability and is a big reason why it is so hard to redevelop old industrial areas. Nobody wants to take on the liability. The green field has none of the baggage, but of course you have to build all the necessary infrastructure to support the investment. Circumstances dictate whether or not this is an advantage.

New transportation patterns, markets and changing technologies can make old locations obsolete and create opportunities for new ones. The raw geographical distance doesn’t matter. What matters is the practical distance, which depends on the quality of infrastructure and technologies of transport. A few dozen miles away on an unreliable dirt road can be farther away – practically – than a few thousand miles by sea transport.   A load of wood sitting at the Brazilian port of Santos might well be closer in the practical sense to a construction site in New York than the same wood stacked in a hollow in the hills of West Virginia. Geographical distance doesn’t change, but practical distance changes all the time, creating and destroying business opportunities.

Fortunes are made when somebody recognizes a new practical distance. For example, I have been reading about the Maggi brothers, growers of soy in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. It is worth pointing out that soy production in Mato Grosso became possible only within the last decades because of advances in agricultural techniques and plant science. They could not have done what they did fifty years ago. Nobody could, since the technologies were unavailable. But their business was almost killed by logistics. The Maggi family came from Southeastern Brazil and everybody continues to look in that direction to sell their products internationally through the Ports of Santos and Paranaguá. But the overland transport was too expensive. So they looked in the other direction and moved their product north west to the river port of Porto Vehlo in the state of Rondônia, where the products are put in barges, a very inexpensive way to transport bulky commodities, and shipped down the Madeira River, which eventually flows into the Amazon from which the products can be put onto ocean transport. Most of the soy ends up in China, a market that was unavailable twenty five years ago.  So what we have here is a product that had not yet been developed twenty-five years ago, grown in a place that would not have supported it, sent over a transportation system that didn’t exist or was “undiscovered” and finally sold to a market that only recently came into existence. And you wonder why the world is a surprising place. 

Markets and productive capacity are created by human ingenuity. They are not “out there” waiting. 

What got me thinking about green fields was another story about Brazil; this time about a little city called Tres Lagoas, in Mato Grosso do Sul, the state next to Mato Grosso. I was surprised to learn today that Tres Lagoas is the world’s biggest producer of cellulous.  Who knew? I didn’t believe it, so I researched it and sure enough it is true. It only happened within the last couple of years because of a partnership between a big Brazilian firm called Fibria and International Paper. The reason they chose Tres Lagoas is because it was the classic greenfield investment, with a great capacity in the neighboring area to grow eucalyptus trees. Paper/pulp/fiber mills have trouble if the forests that supply the fiber are more than 60-80 miles away. This is not a problem in Tres Lagoas.   

Look at the slide show of the fiber plant at this link. 

Of course, once you get the wood to the mill, you still have to move the product to markets.  No problem again. Tres Lagoas is located in a region that is flat as a board. It presents no building challenges.  But the infrastructure is already there. The city sits astride rail, highway and canal infrastructure and is even on the right of way of a pipeline that brings Bolivian natural gas to Brazil. This has attracted other industries.   Petrobras is locating there to build a fertilizer operation. Natural gas is a feedstock and the growing areas (remember the Maggi brothers et al) are nearby. There are also steel mills expanding, among other things.

So how about that? People not very old can remember when there was nothing much in these places. Who knows how many other places in the world are languishing, waiting for a change in technology of a paved road. It is amazing how fast wealth can be created and how the practical landscape can change in years or months. Sometimes all it takes is a paved road and some imagination and vision. We sometimes think the heroic age of innovation is over. We are wrong … again. As long as there are humans, they will create opportunities and – to steal the phrase – boldly go where no man has gone before.  

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More Thoughts on Telework

I used to manage a professional staff of around forty-five, most of whom telecommuted twice a week. Telecommuting is not appropriate for all jobs, but in the jobs where it is possible workers can be more productive away from the office. We have to get used to it, anyway, since President Obama signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act.

I wrote a lot about this on other occasions, in response to an an NPR story on Results Only Work Environments and when we was all kept at home by snow storms.

The bottom line for me is that telecommuting is a good thing that can improve morale and productivity. Take a look at the linked article and the links in it for the pluses But there are caveats & I believe that my experience managing telecommuting as well as telecommuting myself, sometimes between continents, give me some insights, which I can share.

One non-obvious thing that is necessary for telecommuting is a degree of arbitrariness.Some people can handle telecommuting; others cannot. The manager of telecommuters has an additional responsibility to use judgment to make reasonable distinctions among employees. This is very difficult to do. You will often be accused of being arbitrary or unfair.

Those that abuse telecommuting usually can come up with good excuses for why they couldn’t complete their work on time. A good manager cannot let them get away with it. It is unfair to the good workers. What I have seen too often, unfortunately, is an abdication of responsibility in the name of “fairness”. Managers either ignore the transgressions or they punish the innocent and guilty alike with onerous rules and restrictions.

Managers also have to get used to looking for results instead of “face time”. Most managers claim they are interested in results, but they reward presence. Beyond that, although few will admit it, many managers like to have people around that they can boss. We also have to admit that a properly designed telecommuting program may mean that we need fewer middle managers. The organization afforded by technologies can to some extent replace the organization provided by middle management.

Still thinking of this from the manager’s point of view, we have to learn not to ask too much from our good teleworkers. Flexibility is one of the advantages to telecommuting, but some managers think that flexibility means stretching work hours to … forever.

I learned this myself by my own mistakes. I work odd hours and my work and my leisure overlap, i.e. I actually enjoy many of the parts of my work, so I do them in my free time too. I used to check my email when I woke up in the morning and before going to bed at night. When I saw something that needed to be done, I would often make my comments and send it off to whoever was going to have to handle it the next day. What I quickly learned is that my best colleagues also checked their work early and late. They also sometimes took my comments as commands to get the work done right away.

People follow the lead of the boss. The boss often enjoys his work and doesn’t mind – even likes – long hours. More importantly, the boss is in control. He/she doesn’t feel the same stress that the subordinate does. When I sent along a comment, all I meant was that it would be a good idea to work on this tomorrow morning, or maybe just think about. When my colleagues got my midnight message, they thought it was an urgent command. It is a smaller version of the Henry II “command” about Thomas a-Becket.

I finally had to make a rule that nobody was supposed to touch their office work between 8pm and 7am. I know that people looked at the work. I did. But I didn’t send or respond to any emails.

This brings me to my last caveat. Telecommuting is part of the whole technology-social media world. It brings with it the same danger of magnifying the trivial, flattening priorities and destroying the whole idea of actual deliberation. The instant nature of communications creates the illusion of knowledge. It is tempting to act before you have all the information you need for smart decisions. We are tempted to see trends where none exist.

We used to have a saying that you should “sleep on” any hard decision. This gives you time to put things in perspective and it remains a good idea in many cases, but it is much harder to do and much harder to separate the important from the merely urgent when you are awash with information.

Teleworking is more than just letting people work at home or cutting the commuting time. It is not just something that can be tacked onto a workweek, like pinning a tail on the donkey. It requires a system wide adjustment. Some people will thrive in a telework environment; others not so much. It is a bigger change than most people think and a bigger opportunity.

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The Worms Crawl In

This is something that just never occurred to me. 

I was watching a gardening show today about worms. Gardeners usually like worms. They help the soil remain fertile and aerated. That is what I always thought. But when I looked it up, I found out that worms are an invasive species. All those worms (night crawlers and the like) I remember as a kid were introduced from Europe.

Earthworms are destructive to forest soils, according to what I found at a University of Minnesota associated webpage.  Worms were wiped out by glaciers during the last ice age, which retreated only around 10,000 years ago. Without human help, worm populations move very slowly. Northern ecosystems developed in a worm-free environment. When worms arrive, they change the ecology. Evidently the worms eat the organic material too fast, taking away the layers of humus that all for the reproduction of forest floor plants and trees like sugar maples. Worms are small, but there can be lots of them and they don’t stop.

I never knew this or noticed it. The maple forests around Milwaukee already had earthworms, so I thought that was natural.  It still seems pretty strange to me that earthworms could be a threat. I suppose that when you are talking about long-established ecological relations, almost anything new that comes in can be disruptive.

BTW – honeybees are also not native to North America and neither are a lot of the flowers we see in fields, along with most farm animals and most crops we eat. Actually, I suppose that I am an invasive species, so I am not sure I buy into the native is better idea as a general construct. I will have to find out more about it.

The picture up top is one I took way back in September 2003 near the Milwaukee Airport, it shows the northern hardwood secondary growth forest.  We made a trip across the U.S. in 2003.  I kept up a webpage, it was the predecessor of my blog.  The link is here.