I was driving home the other day, listening to a discussion about the economic stimulus on a popular talk show. The caller was irate about the trillion dollars being thrown at banks and insurance companies. His solution? Take the trillion dollars and give a million to every person in the country.
Huh? I make that out to be more like a little over 3 grand. Who knew? The host of the show never skipped a beat. He smelled a rat but was unsure of himself and just mumbled something about the concept being a good idea but it didn’t feel quite right.
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We’re not wired very well for remembering facts, at least not individual ones. We’re wired for pattern recognition. Here’s a test for my hypothesis. Have you ever been in a busy restaurant, gazed around the room, and suddenly locked eyes with someone? For just an instant you knew beyond a doubt that a person was looking directly into your eyes, and you into theirs. I call this the ‘eye lock’. It’s a remarkable feat if you think about it. There’s nothing that’s particularly identifiable in an eye, just a shiny colored globe, especially from a distance, yet when it’s locked on to you, there’s no mistaking it.
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One of my daughters used to ask why we never say last morning or yesterday night. Good questions! How come there’s no downside up or outside in either? Clearly, these are puzzling questions for a math teacher and I’ll not attempt to answer them, but they do make me think about looking at the conventional with a skeptic’s eye. My guess is that upside down stands alone, without its symmetrical twin, by habit more than any grand design.
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My wife has recently taken an interest in genealogy. She’s traced parts of our family back as far 100 A.D. She’s done it all on the internet. I’m always astounded at how much information is out there for the taking today. Anyway, with my sister’s help we got our hands on a bunch of old family documents. Among them was an old newspaper from Barton Vermont (my mother’s childhood home). I’m not into the genealogy thing but I love old newspapers.
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I used to own an old wooden sailboat. It had a very deep substantial keel and was moored in a river mouth, comingled with hundreds of modern plastic ones with, not so deep, insubstantial, fins. The river, which was very fast running, would, at times, get a deep counterflow when the incoming tide was just right. My boat would happily obey the whims of the countercurrent and the plastic ones would stay aligned with the outgoing river current. It produced this odd looking situation where my anchor rode (with a bit of slack) appeared to be pushing my boat up the river backwards.
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I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor. According to this principle, it’s useful when trying to explain a phenomenon, to make as few assumptions as possible. The idea is to ruthlessly eliminate the assumptions that make no difference to a prediction. For me, I take this to mean peeling back the onion to its simplest, most base, components to glean some understanding on how all the pieces of a thing fit together. Hang in there with me as I use the good friar’s principle to unravel our educational, political, and societal woes in a grand unified theory of the collapse of western civilization.
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When I was a kid, much of my time was spent playing with rulers, compasses, protractors, and the mystical French curve. My grandfather was an old school cabinet maker. He was a major challenge to his clients, often changing their commissions on his fancy because he ’saw’ something in the wood. I can remember many pieces of beautiful furniture wasting in his barn, decommissioned as it were, by customers who weren’t enamored with what he saw in their wood. Read more
About a year ago, I got my hands on a 1958 elementary (1-6) arithmetic curriculum for my city. This was; before the era of state standards, before much of the current consensus born of 50 years of education research, and before our city had ‘failing’ schools. When I read it, I found it to be amazingly simple. It comprises just 8 pages. Our current standards, from my state’s D.O.E., are to be found in a 137 page tome, about half of which is dedicated to the same elementary years. Funny how centralizing ‘clarifies’ a thing, eh? Read more
My favorite artist is Enya. Her lyrics connect to me like no other and her delivery has a haunting quality that always seems to compliment and develop the emotion of the piece. She records in layers (dozens) and it gives her work the ethereal quality of a perfectly synchronized choir. My favorite lyric, from her album A Day Without Rain, is Pilgrim. Every time I listen to it I think of my kids. They’re like pilgrims, beginning a journey they don’t know they’re on.
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Sometimes events converge in a way that make you go hmmmmm. Seemingly unrelated things show up unexpectedly beside each other and each throws a light on the others, uncovering connections you never suspected. Read more
