Several miscellaneous bits

history of BIA - I had never paid much attention to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs until our recent trip through Pueblo and Navaho lands.  On the tour, we heard about a freeze on construction and construction repair that lasted for 30 or more years, which resulted in people living in buildings without roofs and even in cardboard boxes for that long a time.  Looking at some sources for this note, I find that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has administered Federal-Indian affairs since 1824 was started by a single man, not a law.  From what I have heard, it does not have a good record of wise dealing with the more than 500 separate native tribes and groups.

Sound effects - I am interested in ways to make sounds for the sound track of audio and visual work.  I saw a video once where the sound of men punching each other in a fight was actually produced by punching a defrosted turkey body.  I once was given a set of items used for sounds, including rubber half-spheres to be clomped against my chest to simulate the sound of horses galloping.

 

Information diet, distractions and a satisfying balance of concentration and exploration - I thought this sounded like a good book but after reading the reviews more carefully, I decided not to get it at this time.  Two ideas that I have picked up are that news close to a source might be better and the internet makes it easier for people to choose sources that confirm their present opinions instead of providing information.

sneezing, coughing lessons some people need - I was walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon on a paved sidewalk.  It was a sunny day and people streamed along in both directions.  I heard English, Spanish, German and something that might have been Russian.  Tourists from all over.  Suddenly, a woman screamed.  Everybody around froze.  Then, she did it again and everyone realized it was her way of sneezing.  I am advocating instructors and several different types of physicians and scientists offer sneezing lessons to everyone found by the NSA or anyone listening to have a natural sneeze that is too alarming to others.

 

Grandma drove right over roundabout, knew way - Around our way, roundabouts are being installed.  Supposedly, they are better than stop signs or traffic lights.  They are not popular or even understood by everyone.  We heard of an elderly woman who didn't get the concept, knew where she wanted to go and simply drove across the middle of the whole thing.  Be on guard!

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Five

I think that every number has its own personality.  Maybe not a very strong one but at least a little bit of one.  What focused my attention on 5 is the idea of the Five Whys.  I first learned about them in a book by Peter Stenge on systems analysis, an underappreciated subject in my opinion.  I'm a system, so is my neighborhood, so is a flock of geese or a site of mold on bread.  Sometimes, helpful things are noticed about any collection of interrelated parts.

The five whys is much like the little child's practice of repeatedly asking "Why?"  As part of studying a system, especially in trying to get to the root of a problem, one asks "why is this problem occurring?" and asks why about the answer and so on, for a total of 5 times.  It can throw surprising light on one's knowledge and understanding of something.

Of course, 5 is the number of fingers we have which leads to 10 for both hands and is probably why our usual numbering system is based on 10 even though we use a binary system based on 2 much of the time, in our computers and electronics, and one based on 16 in them, too.

Since five is a smallish number in the scope of things, it doesn't have lots of power and grandeur like a million or a trillion.  It can still be surprising as an exponent, though.  2 to the 5th power = 32.  So, if you halve something and halve the parts and do that for a total of 5 cuts, you reduce the original to pieces that are one 32nd of the originals.

 

Similarly, while 5 is not large enough for a very good sample for most purposes, having taken 5 separate samples of something can be enough to get a good idea of a result.

Finally, I have always been interested in repeated trys at something.  Trying to do something with a low chance of success is hard, since we fail many times and that is discouraging.  Sure, with better training and good analysis of the problem, we may increase the probability of success but even if we can't, even if the same small probability continues to hold, repeated tries may lead to success.

In the table below, the probability of success, p, is in the first column and the column for 1 or more successes gives the chance of having at least one success in 5 separate tries.  To the right, is a more complete listing for 5 separate tries, using only the chance of success of 1 in ten.

p	q	all fail	1+ success		tries	P(fail)	P(some success)
0.1	0.9	0.59049	0.41		1	0.9	0.1
0.2	0.8	0.32768	0.67		2	0.81	0.19
0.3	0.7	0.16807	0.83		3	0.729	0.271
0.4	0.6	0.07776	0.92		4	0.6561	0.3439
0.5	0.5	0.03125	0.97		5	0.59049	0.40951
0.6	0.4	0.01024	0.99
0.7	0.3	0.00243	nearly 1.00
0.8	0.2	0.00032	nearly 1.00
0.9	0.1	0.00001	nearly 1.00

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Names and naming and search

William the Conqueror was William the Bastard (illegitimate and unacknowledged son) until his forces won the battle of Hastings and he became king of England.  As a result, "William" became a popular name to give a male child. An English professor once told me that at one time 75% of the males in most English villages were named "William".  So my name is not especially unusual but I have never been very fond of it.  Sounds too fancy to me but "Bill" is ok.

Somebody has probably done sociological studies and surveys to see how people feel about their names.  Imaginative and active people who don't like their names can often find a way to modify or replace their name with one they like better.  Sometimes, the new name is quite different from any name they have been given or inherited.  I admire the writings of P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced "wood house" according the biography by Robert McCrum).  I learned that his nickname among friends was "Plum", quite different from "Pelham Grenville."

The subject of naming came up for me because of that 87 year old gymnast.  She is amazing and we were watching her on a computer on Father's Day.  The music playing was familiar but it was a day later that my musical granddaughter remembered the name of the piece.  It is Brahms op. 39, no. 15.  Now with the name, today's world enables us to find it, to buy it, to install it on an iPod.  The name allows us to find people who can play it, buy the sheet music and look for similar pieces.  

There are one or more apps for some smart devices that can listen to music and identify it, I am told.  I don't have a need to do that very often but I am intrigued.  Music, voices, paintings, sculptures and other art is difficult to search but programmers, thinkers, inventors and marketers are working on finding ways to do so. Google's internet browser, Chrome, can take in sound but I don't know if it can identify music.  I am pretty sure that Google's image search can accept image input and search.  

In today's searchable world, having a name like "Periwinkle Gillicuddy" is an advantage if you want to be found.  Having a name like John Nelson can be good if you don't want to be found since there may be a hopelessly large number of "Googlegangers" with that name, too.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Impending disaster!

Chicken Little was a bit mixed up. I heard he went about shouting,"The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!" In the very good kids' series, "Peep and the Wide World", the little Peep gets hit in the head by a falling acorn and concludes that a geological/atmospheric disaster is upon him and his friends.  I imagine running about screaming will elicit a feeling of alarm in those around us more or less without it mattering what the text is.  Sometime, I may try acting alarm and trying to spread fear by shouting in some foreign language or using nonsense syllables.  I suspect that voice tone and body language would be sufficient.

Since we can't get into the future, it is a fine place for storing fears.  People can get all hung up on the notion of an impending disaster.  The book "When Prophecy Fails" (1956) tells what may be the best-known story of a predicted disaster that didn't happen but the link leads to a paper listing quite a few.  A course on the Bible and its influence told of an earlier time, 1833, when William Miller calculated or intuited or somehow realized that the big one, the "end of the world", was almost upon him.  He let his followers know and I guess they prepared in their way.  Many of them gave away their farms and properties, knowing they would not need them after the Second Coming, which Miller figured was due in 1843.  The year came and went but no one was whisked away or arose from the grave.  Reportedly, some of the group wanted their farms back.

"Apocalypsist" is a term used by some scholars to mean a person like Chicken Little or William Miller who is convinced of some very big event that is drawing near.  Very often the event is some sort of judgment day where we will all be called upon to pay for our misdeeds.  Sometimes, some of us are to be whisked away to a heavenly place.  The novel "The Leftovers" by Tom Perrotta tells about peoples' lives and feelings after many simultaneous disappearances worldwide.  Some of those left behind are puzzled and unhappy..  If the disappearances were indeed the Rapture, why were some known sinners disappeared and genuinely good persons like themselves left behind?

Many practitioners of Zen and the writer Eckhart Tolle agree with Matthew 6:34 "Take therefore no thought for the morrow."  Of course, that is not always best but then what is?  I can see I am going to want some milk in the morning so planning ahead for my groceries trip in an hour makes sense.  But of those things I cannot know, or have insufficient evidence for, I might as well not think.  I am especially wary of "big disasters", such as the end of the "world".  'World' is an odd word.  Bill's world includes no shepherds but yours might.  The world can mean my usual surrounds and contacts and it can mean the universe.  I did some of my professional work on "the future" and I noticed many predictions do not have a date.  So, I can't tell if they were wrong or not.  I like to spend most of my time in the NOW.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Aging: the cost of living

Logicians, thinkers and psychologists often warn about overly simplified thinking.  They tell us to beware of "black and white thinking" but in some cases, it may be a good idea, helpful, even.  Think about life: you either got it or you don't.  Yeah, yeah, I know, that when I am dying, I will pass through stages of loss of consciousness and all that, but in everyday practical terms, I am alive or am dead.  

So, in this matter of aging, one either has the fortune to be alive or one doesn't.  That means pretty inescapably that as long as I manage to continue to live, I age.  Further, the effect is cumulative.  I haven't found a way to age through yesterday and not have the aging, wrinkling, slowing added to the previous aging and to today's.  As Danny DeVito says of his wealthy mother-in-law, I just keep getting older and older and older.

I do try to put the whole thing in perspective.  I saw those rocks on the trail at the Grand Canyon which have been dated to being 1.7 million years old.  I know that humans have been around for 4 or more million years, that the earth is about 4 billion years old and the universe about 13 billion.  But that information doesn't do much for my continuing confinement between aging and death.  

The best writing on aging I have met lately is Sister Joan Chittister's "The Gift of Years".  She writes:

The truth is that older people tend to come in two flavors-the sour ones and the serene ones. The sour ones are angry at the world for dismissing them from the rank and file of those who run it and control it and own it and are not old in it. They demand that the rest of the world seek them out, pity them, take their orders, stay captive to their scowls. The serene ones live with soft smiles on their aging faces, a welcome sign to the world of what it means to grow old gracefully. To have the grace of old age. They require us to go on growing more and more into ourselves as we age. It is of these that Meridel Le Sueur, who lived to be ninety-six, wrote, "I am luminous with age." Luminous. Not painted. Not masked. Luminous! They are the women and men who see with wider eyes, hear with tuned ears, speak with a more knowing tongue. These are people with soul.

The problem is that preparation for aging in our modern world seems to be concentrated almost entirely on buying antiwrinkle creams and joining a health club-when the truth is that what must be transformed now is not so much the way we look to other people, as it is the way we look at life. Age is the moment we come to terms with ourselves. We begin to look inside ourselves. We begin to find more strength in the spirit than in the flesh.

Joan Chittister. The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully (pp. 39- 41). Kindle Edition.

I have tried "sour" and "serene" both and I find I prefer serene.  It is worth striving for and working at.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Lies, deception and intention

My friends and I are still reading "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" by Sissela Bok.  We haven't gotten very far, partly because some of the copies have been slow to arrive.  But no matter what we find, we are probably still going to feel that it is ok, even more than ok, to lie when a Nazi officer asks "Where is Anne Frank?".

So far, I don't feel that I spend much time wrestling with the subject of lying.  I have watched several episodes of "Lie to Me", based on the work of Paul Ekman, a scientist who showed that, world-wide, many facial expressions are used just the same way.  In Borneo and Boston, surprise, disgust, confusion and other emotions tend to be expressed with the same facial expressions.  "Lie to Me" is fiction and depicts a small company of experts who get hired by police and espionage groups to try to detect who is lying.  Ekman has stated that the show depicts greater certainty about what this or that face means than he feels.  It is not that clear or that definite and easy.

The show makes much use of video tapes of a person speaking or listening and the equipment can freeze the exact expression or micro-expression that crossed the subject's face when a particular remark was uttered or heard.  I have also been listening to the audiobook "What Every BODY Is Saying" by Joe Navarro.  This Cuban-American came to the US as a child and had good reasons while learning English to pay close attention to what he calls "tells", signs from any part of the body that may help in evaluating what someone is saying or feeling. Navarro has worked for the FBI and the intelligence community and teaches classes in reading body language.

Sissela Bok defines a lie as a statement made with the intention of deceiving someone else.  I am confident that criminals make many statements to victims, other criminals and the police and law enforcement authorities with the intention of deceiving.  But when I ask myself how much of the time I tell the truth, I am in doubt about the answer.  I tell my wife, my grand children and a friend that I love them.  I am pretty sure that I don't love them all equally or all in the same way but I use the same word with them all.  Am I trying to deceive?  No, I am not.  I don't feel capable of knowing the exact degree of affection I feel.  I imagine that if I did know and tried to express the different degrees, I would be insufferably long-winded.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Hypnotized by signals

News by definition is what is new, not what is older.  Leon Lewis inserted the item "L. Lewis spent the month of Feb. reading in the library."  It is a report of what he did, a journaling, but not likely to spread around the world by means of Facebook and Twitter.

You can see the progression: we start a village newspaper to inform everyone about the dire financial straits of our church.  Then, we use it to let everyone know that Sally had a baby boy and both are in good health.  Both warnings (taxes about to come due, town reservoir is getting low, a scam has been noted in the area) and happy things (kids graduated, new doctor in town) are put in the paper.  Paper itself is expensive and writing the content and printing and distributing takes time, talent, and money.  We wouldn't use our paper to explain all the items that are continuing on as they were. We try to use the paper to announce changes, not continuations.

Ok, that might have been the situation in 1810 or 1910, but after radio and the development of the media for entertainment, after the mammoth growth of multiple channels and sources and connections, we are now in the midst of competing groups, all of whom want to be the FIRST to tell us that Indonesia was hit by an earthquake or a gunman shot 3 people in California.  No, wait!  A different gunman shot even more people in Nevada!  No, more importantly, a fire is raging out of control.  Oh, yeah, a building collapsed and many people were hurt or killed.  

The competition and the natural desire to know what is going on around us, extended to across the surface of our planet, creates storylines that are outstanding in their novelty and in the terror they inspire.  You think that is bad, frightening, ominous?  Just listen to this!

So, somebody notices this slant toward the negative and tries to balance all this drear and alarm with smiles.  Out comes a paper with pictures of very lovely flowers, beautiful mountain meadows and adorable children playing with adorable puppies.  Smiles on every page!  

Again with the competition and the technical advances.  Our pictures have more detail!  No, OUR pictures are in HD!  No, our paper comes out on the iPad and the iPhone and the computers.  We have videos!  See the actual children moving and tumbling!

All this is quite different from the weekly village paper that had a few announcements.  Too much time spent absorbing the competing streams gives us a very distorted picture that we come to believe in.  Maybe I'll check with Google News every other day and just look out my window on the alternate days.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

I think I can, I think I can, I really do

Ignorance is not usually bliss, at least in my life, but it can be an aid of some power.  I read that I might sleep better if I covered up my clock so I can't easily take a peek and bemoan how many minutes I have lain awake.  

Sister Joan Chittister quotes James Thurber:

"I am sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics," James Thurber remarked. "But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight. That's the trouble with us: We number everything."

Joan Chittister. The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully (p. 21). Kindle Edition.

The other day, I wrote about defending numbers and overly disliking or disdaining them.  But they can capture us.  A team from a small high school may know that they are about to play a team from a much bigger school.  Approaching the playing field thinking how many more students in the other school can despirit the players.

Thurber is right.  Numbers are usually arbitrary.  We had a reason for making a year = 365 ¼ days but we could indeed use a different measure.  When I wake up in the middle of the night, I have to stop and ask myself how I feel, how long it actually feels that I have slept.  If I forget my age, I could stop and ask myself if I feel like a senior citizen.  When we use the Fahrenheit temperature scale, we can be tricked by the number into thinking that 80° is twice as hot as 40° when it is only 8% warmer.  We were tricked by the numbers without realizing that the actual situation of no heat is much colder than either of those temperatures.  40 F is actually 277.6 on the Kelvin or absolute scale.  80 is actually 299.8.  You can see that 277 is actually rather close to 299.

Of course we can misjudge.  We might boast of being young and spry when we aren't.  We might "feel" that our bank account is full when it really isn't.  Still, psychologists, coaches, teachers, and physicians are quite aware that attitude, feelings and suppositions matter very much.  By reading, hypnosis, sermons, pep talks or other inspirations, we can sometimes heal from serious threats, defeat enemies more numerous than we are or otherwise surprise the odds makers.  Deepak Chopra tells of a real incident of miners trapped in a collapse.  They had little air and might not have been rescued in time.  One man had a watch and as an aid, he called out the hours as they passed but called only one hour for every two that passed.  The others survived but he did not. 

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Who is studying my behavior?

I know many of my friends are on Facebook but I am not.  Maybe I should get on it again.  My wife says she has not been bothered by requests to use her contacts as targets for invitations.  I don't like getting junk email from people and I don't want to be responsible for any being sent, if I can help it.  I know the situation is complicated. 

Just yesterday, I saw a comment in The Onion, the satirical newspaper that was started in Madison, WI.  The headline said a man was outraged that somebody like the National Security Agency or the CIA was collecting data on him and not just commercial interests.  I used to set my browser so that cookies were accepted but deleted when I closed it.  Lately, I have been accepting a few more of the little bits of code that were invented to allow me to get into and out of sites faster and with less signing in but have developed into a big commercial deal.  Companies like to track what they can of what I buy and what sites I visit, hoping to improve the rate at which I accept offers to buy this or that.

I know for a fact that I have bought books that Amazon suggested to me.  I have no good idea of how often that has happened but I definitely benefit from Amazon's suggestions.  I saw on tv where stat analysis (this is supposed to be the emerging age of 'big data') had found an odd combination of sales occurring together, something like people who bought book X and this sort of shoes tended to also buy a certain candy.  So, human operators on phones were instructed to inquire when taking orders for those books and shoes to ask whether that candy would be of interest.  Often, they got a surprised response of "Why, yes, I would like some of that candy."

It is only possible to be tracked if I am connected to the internet but being connected is so valuable that even when some of the tracking and subsequent offers are bothersome, I usually prefer to be connected.  

I have read that a saying among programmers and inventors over the last 20 years has been "automate the tools, not the work".  I think that means that greater reports of acceptance and of pleasure have resulted from an automatic hammer than from having a robot that does all my nailing for me. I am confident that varying circumstances would make various possibilities attractive or not, depending on my purposes. Usually, I like to have options and control over them.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Don't worry - be Hopi

Motto on some t-shirts: Don't worry - be Hopi

On our recent trip to the Pueblo and Navaho lands, we learned that we could get t-shirts that said "Don't worry - Be Hopi".  Of course, that put me in mind of the song that made the rounds a few years back.  I heard it by Bobby McFerrin. Bobby McFerrin 's song, which evidently was Bob Marley's, too, is usually accompanied by happy-sounding whistling.

 

Since, if you are Hopi, you are Hopi all the time, I guess, I thought of the advice: don't worry.  My experience is such that telling or being told not to worry, by itself, is not a very effective way to stop worrying. I have read that it is just natural to want to be happy, preferably all the time.  Since happiness is more fun and more comfortable and satisfying than unhappiness, why not wish for it all the time?

One of the basic Buddhist principles is that life is full of suffering, which by definition is not happy.  The Buddha tries to make his case by pointing out that we flee or resist unpleasant things and find it distasteful when pleasant things cease.  So, both pleasant and unpleasant things can bring unhappiness.  What's a thinking, rational, wiley animal to do?  If we don't run from unhappiness, ignore it, sugarcoat it or dissociate from it (resolutely put our attention on lollipops or an image of blissing out), what can we do?

What is recommended is that we switch gears:

• accept unhappiness for what it actually is

• sit right with it, welcome it

• taste it bravely

It is rather like with dogs and lions: don't run!  You may even get to the point where you say,"Goody!  Some suffering!  Some unhappiness!  A chance to practice."  Often, disease, loss, some new burden on top of the other burdens we carry turns out not to be all that much bother.

 

Much of our pain and unhappiness comes for the standard mechanism our bodies use.  Generally, pain is a reminder: there is damage here!  There is a problem here!  Don't ignore this!  So, what we put out of our minds is designed to return.  I have sometimes found that with some pain, if I continuously concentrate right on the pain, giving it all of my attention, it stops.  Sure, with serious pain, it returns as soon as I try to do something else than concentrate on it but I can often stop it with attention.

If we can temper our fear and flee response, accepting our fear and unhappiness, we will increase our ability to enjoy more of life, more of our minutes and experiences.  Bravely face what is.  It might even turn out to be some sort of blessing or prize or treasure.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

45 years ago today

Today is the 45th anniversary of my beginning to teach at UWSP.  I visited the town and liked what I saw.  But I needed a summer teaching assignment to be able to finance a move to Wisconsin from the East Coast.  One of the things I reported to my wife was having seen a newspaper article on local crime.  One of the items mentioned was the theft of a fishing pole from a garage sometime over the preceding month.  At a time when some of the big cities in the country where having riots related to the war in Vietnam, such a level of crime seemed inviting for a young couple with two young children.

We found that our next-door neighbor had moved to town from a small local village and he expressed a little tension over being in a big town of 25,000.  That was a good lesson in relativity for us, since we were from cities of a million.  We were surprised by comments that so-and-so had lunched with the president recently until we learned that local language used the term for the local college president.

We knew that Wisconsin was much colder than Maryland.  We survived our first winter, which, all these years later, was indeed one the coldest and snowiest we have experienced here.  We didn't realize that the comparatively late spring would be the challenge for our spirits.  We were used to a pretty good burst of azaleas by April 1 and had no idea that we would regularly wait until June 1 or later for flowers, fully leaved-out trees and all the spring birds.

We were accustomed to 99% humidity and 90° heat at 9 AM in June.  We felt the local weather, both cold and warm, was more hospitable than what we left.  It is true that we have humid days sometimes and have even exceeded 100° once in a while.  But Texans have told us to stop whining and to have sympathy for parts of the country that have very warm days all the way through November. We have found that 3 or 4 inches of snow accompanied by expert and tireless snowplow operators and their equipment is much less of an obstacle than half an inch of slippery stuff.  When it is quite cold, say zero or below, the snow is not as much of a road lubricant and is more manageable.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety