A different lens

As I wrote recently, I find that some reading and exposure to math and math-related concepts gives a different view of the world.  The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell said that it must have been millenia before humans realized a connection between 2 birds and 2 days.  Philosophy and history are often thought to be fundamental in understanding the world but too often mathematics is overlooked. 

Mathematics is often thought to be cold and unfriendly but lots of history, philosophy and logic which can clarify the world and make life far more understandable are not so warm and cuddly, either.  There are other joys and pleasures in life besides friendship and smiles.

Most people I know had a math curriculum of arithmetic in elementary school, algebra in middle school and geometry and maybe calculus in high school.  Traditionally, calculus was considered the top of the lower part of the curriculum.  Nowhere in the curriculum were math subjects that were invented and used after about 1850.  John G. Kemeny came to the US after getting his doctorate in Germany.  He led the creation of a basically simple book called Introduction to Finite Mathematics, the first book to point intelligent, non-math majors to the many branches of math and associated logic that were pertinent to their studies.  The book is now available free on online at Dartmouth, the college were Kemeny taught.  I love that book.  I had plenty of questions answered by it.

I was part-way through college when it became clear that I had to have a minor.  My major was elementary education, which some experts think is a waste of time and certainly not a subject to study.  I agreed to that major when I found it involved more choice in what to study than the alternative possibilities available at that school: a combo English-history or math-science.  I guessed that math for a minor would give me the least homework and leave me the most freedom to date, read on my own, wrestle, and generally have fun. The best math course I had in college was math of finance, how interest is calculated and mortgage pay-off schedules are created.

Toward the end of college, I read "Men of Mathematics" by Eric Temple Bell.  Really opened my eyes to the humans behind the creation of Western math even though the actual history of our Hindu-Arabic counting system and other important insights and ideas from non-Western countries was not touched on.  The crucially important invention and understanding of zero (if it means nothing, why have it at all?) and related subjects of negative numbers, irrational numbers and complex numbers are discussed in the very readable "Zero" by Charles Seife.

A look at mathematics from the view of its history makes things much clearer and less mysterious.  Often, math is associated with the idea of difficulty but part of that comes from the usual way of deciding if some math is understood.  The most common way of doing that is to give someone a problem which can be solved using the mathematics in question.  Very often, in other subjects, one is asked to explain a concept in one's own words, not solve a problem.  It is true that if something can be applied in the sense of a method or procedure, a knowledgeable student should be able to make that application.  But it is also true that having a firm grasp of a concept can be very satisfying and provide the basis for further curiosity and learning.

Another branch of mathematics is entering its heyday now: statistics and data analysis.  Prof. Hans Rosling of the Swedish Karolinska Institute is delivering wonderful, clear and succinct talks on TED talks and YouTube.  He specializes in revealing statistical information that explains some aspect of the world that you might not have currently up-to-dates views on.

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

Improving one's educational background

Say, a mature person, we'll say, someone of high intelligence and drive, knows English well and has just retired.  This person grew up in a place without schools.  He knows how to read and knows the ways of the world but would really like to get a background in what might be called the classics.  By the way, the movie "The First Grader" is a story quite like this situation.

It is fairly easy to ignore the fact, at least for some people, that a hunger for more knowledge and background, is a hunger in somebody, some particular person.  What appeals to that person matters.  No matter what, a project of reading and familiarization will be different for different explorers and result in different choices during the project and different sorts of changes.  So, all along the way, it is important for our explorer to stay in touch with himself, his reactions to a book, his connections made between that book, others and his life. For most people, the best results will be attained by meeting stories, experiences and information that surprises and adds to the person's views.  That isn't to say that there won't also be challenges and shocks, maybe disbelief followed by gradual and even reluctant broadening of the mind.  Some of the shocks may come from how clearly you find you do not wish to continue on in a given famous or respected book.

For people like me, generally impatient to get started on something that seems fun, it is best to start right in.  Pick a book.  Not so easy, you say?  Well, there are dozens of sources of suggestions. I put "important books" into Google and it immediately suggested the phrase "important books to read".  Click here to see the results of that search. (I embedded the link, which is about a paragraph long.)  I often recommend in thinking about one's desires and wishes, that one simply ask one's self for the answer.  So, what is a book that has often seemed classy to you, one that you have heard of but never actually looked at?

My friend had the intuition that "Walden or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau (1854) would be a good starter. I applaud the idea. I happen to have a special relation to that book, which I met in a junior high Scholastic book club sale and read as a college freshman.  It pays to follow an intuition.  It also pays to be alert for your reaction to that or any other book.  It also pays to withhold the decision to keep reading for at least 50 or so pages.  Some of the best experiences come days after a whole book has been read and digested.

If you recall a high school or other reading assignment that haunted you for its difficulty or lack of appeal, you might try giving the book another chance.  I have often had students who revisited books read much earlier and were surprised by the excellence they found this time through or even amazed that something that had seemed so revealing or moving now seemed so tame. An older explorer is not the same as a youngster, something some parts of the world's educational system have still to adjust to.

I have actually read few of the books usually recommended.  I have a preference for more popular science and mathematics that is typical of the average list of recommendations. Three that are on some lists that I did enjoy are Silas Marner, The Scarlet Letter, and Main Street.  All three are part of the 43,246 books available in many ebook formats, including Kindle, at the Gutenberg Project.  They are also available in most libraries.

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

two messages

I have already gotten two important messages today.

The first said something like "Hey!  I depend on a post from your blog to get my morning bounce.  Please get your act together and get something to me each day.  I need it."  This message reminded me of my relative's question about regular, dependable daily delivery: "Why do you think we pay you the big bucks?"

As is usually the case, I have energy and interest and opportunity today.  I know it is good for me to use a keyboard and I like and admire my friend so here I am.

The second message said something like:"You have read the classics.  I haven't but I am getting a little hunger for them, I think.  Where should I begin? What do you think of my giving Walden by Henry David Thoreau a try?"

I really haven't read the classics.  In fact, I can cite good evidence that there is wide disagreement on which works are in the classics and which are not.  Sometimes, the word refers to people, conditions and writings from the ancient Greeks and Romans.  More often today, it means "the really great writings, the ones that have counted the most". Naturally, once one asks "counts with whom?" and "counts for what purpose?", the matter of what counts gets even more difficult.

To be even more difficult, as people have traveled and communicated with others, what passed for the classics in the colleges and universities of America have come into criticism for being too narrow and restricted.  Until recently, few women writers and thinkers were included, especially if you look outside the area of fiction and poetry.  It is not just a matter of fairness and balance.  Women naturally have a different view and experience of life.  Further, in any sort of puzzle or mystery such as encountered in all of science, women often have very good insights.  Just the other day, Google Doodle celebrated the work of Rosalind Franklin, the British scientist whose insights into the structure of DNA led to the current understanding of the double helix but who got elbowed out of the credits.

Similar criticism and recognition of blinders apply to the range of geography and ethnicities.  China has excellent credentials as the highest and most advanced civilization over the longest period of any country or culture.  Works of influence in India, Japan, Korea, and all of the countries in southeast Asia have been unknown or slighted in most Western schools, libraries and reading lists, although work is proceeding to make some changes so we are not so ignorant.  You can see why the book by David Weinberger "Too Big to Know" can be a help.

The attempts by the University of Chicago and its Mortimer J. Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Clifton Fadiman and others to lay out the important works for an educated college graduate to read were brave and notable.  The set of 60 volumes called "The Great Books of the Western World" can be purchased.  I admire the effort and feel the pain of trying to decide what to include and can imagine the scorn of others who could not believe X had not been and Y was.  Personally, the only thing I read was the introductory volume called The Great Conversation, which can be downloaded for free as a PDF here.

I will write a little more about where to start and how to proceed in my next post.  Meanwhile, Walden and the Apology of Socrates by Plato (both available for free or very low cost) would be good.  Just about any library would have copies for borrowing.

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

I'm intrigued but skeptical

500 to 1000 kinds of bugs live in our mouths and most of them seem to be ok or even beneficial but we don't know them all or their interrelations.  David Gallo says that scientists have explored about 3% of the area and depths of the oceans.  At depths that were long thought to be impossible for anything to live, they have found more life than found in the Amazon rain forest, thought to be the life-richest place. David Cannadine and other historians and researchers are showing good and convincing evidence that many of the pictures I learned in school of what went on during the years between humans started wandering over the planet and my birth were quite limited.  Not always wrong but limited.

Of course, why wouldn't they be?  They themselves were limited, just like me. I am designed a lot like a chimp or a bonobo.  I like a good meal and I am built to find one or somebody who can make one. I am impressed by and interested in the opposite sex.  I have a big brain that likes stimulation and interesting objects and thoughts, up to a point.  I like a good nap and a nice walk.  I like a good stretch and talking with friends.  I like clever talk and good stories.

 

How would I know about speaking a foreign tongue, or playing cat gut stretched over thin wood?  How could I ever learn about mouth bugs or ocean life or past eras?  My knowledge of everything is limited and a good chunk of it is irrelevant.  I know the name of the street my grandparents lived on when I was a kid but haven't used that knowledge in years.  Some of what I know is no longer correct but I don't know which part, even though I have my wife handy to correct me as often as she can manage.  Every day, I get still another reminder that I don't know that much and that neither do most of us.

Home again

Yes, I was in the hospital from Tues. morning until mid-day today.  I pruned a lilac bush on Sat. and right after, I started feeling poorly.  I didn't feel good all day Sunday or Monday but Tuesday morning I was in pain with each breath. 

So, not sure that anyone could do anything preventive, I went to Urgent Care.  They saw an old guy complaining of chest pains and focused on being sure I wasn't having a heart attack.  I wasn't but they wanted a night in the hospital for observational purposes.  When I got to my room, the hospitalist said they wanted two nights.

They diagnosed pneumonia and a low-salt condition.  But the low-salt business is not mentioned in the writings I was given when discharged.  The most shocking thing I found when I got home was that I was about 10 lbs. heavier than I thought.  The last time I weighed myself on a good scale, I weighed 156.  At the hospital, they told me that my bed weighed me and that it said I weighed 166.  I laughed and dismissed the idea as a false reading from this expensive and sensitive bed.  I am not laughing now. We have since remembered things that seem related to my complaints during the week previous to working on lilacs.

I am to see my regular doctor next week to consider what to do next.  I've never had pneumonia before and I am taking antibiotics to fight the condition and a pro-biotic to try to lessen gut-bug damage from the antibiotics.  I am confident that I have some water retention going on but I know very little about the condition, causes or steps to try to fix it. I think that it can be serious but I have only heard much about it in relation to pregnancy.  We will all be surprised if I am pregnant.

I am in the beginning of "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson.  If you are interested in American public life, the quality of American civilization, in understanding some forces operating in our country to contribute and amplify the sense of us (the good ones) against them (the bad ones), I highly recommend the book.  As I have mentioned, Johnson has a weight problem but he is smart and able to learn and remember.  As he explains the forces in publicly-traded companies and the way that good intentions all around can and do change the nature of what the public learns and what it doesn't.  My reading in mental biases matches his analysis quite well.  Johnson sees close and useful parallels between American (and world?) obesity and media approaches that constitute an unhealthy American information diet.  The book was very much in my mind as I was processed and interviewed by medical and health services people.

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

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

Confirmation instead of information

I admire Dr. Atul Gawande.  So, when I read a Tweet by him that a book he was reading was gripping but giving him nightmares, I looked the book up and downloaded it. It is "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" by George Packer.  I only read about 5% of the book and then stopped.  I was not impressed.  It tries to show the poor state our country is in.  Personally, if you want to do that, I recommend you use lots of good evidence and facts and figures.  I realize the county is more than 313 million people so I don't doubt that using vignettes and colorful language, a picture of a great many people can be constructed with some truth in it. I thought it ironic that the book includes this quote:

And he saw that the voters no longer felt much connection to the local parties or national institutions. They got their politics on TV, and they were not persuaded by policy descriptions or rational arguments. They responded to symbols and emotions. They were growing more partisan, too, living in districts that were increasingly Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative. Donors were more likely to send money if they could be frightened or angered, if the issues were framed as simple choices between good and evil— which was easy for a man whose America stood forever at a historic crossroads, its civilization in perpetual peril.

Packer, George (2013-05-21). The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (p. 23). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

It seemed to me that the selected quote applies very much to the book itself.  I am not against emotion and colorful language but it seems to be a Chicken Little situation for an author to simply start sketching dramatic scenes.

I do agree that I frequently see both words and images that are clearly meant to elicit feelings rather than reveal important truths.  I am actually a bit sympathetic to efforts to persuade or to simply be memorable using colorful and gripping ideas, contrasts, facts and pictures.  I am confident that getting a point across requires memorable examples.  But I realize that basic points need to rest on strong foundations of evidence, facts and statistics.  When I watch the news, which I rarely do, I see that most media organizations aim to stir feelings, especially along lines their audiences have come to expect.

Recently, I also started reading "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson.  It seems a much more valuable book, to me. Johnson is a technologist and a strong advocate of what is often called open source government and transparency in government.  He explains that he is technically overweight and he isn't happy with that.  He realizes that over the past century, agriculture, food processing and food marketing have worked rigorously to find out what foods people will eat and eat and eat.  He compares the current situation with the national media to that of empty calories, salt, fat and sugar that lure people to eat.  He and a few others sense that "people prefer to have their ideas confirmed to being given news". So, the same strategy that gets people to eat lots of munchies gives the media outlets lots of audience members.

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

Divesting for the future

I have been using Gmail for about 8 years.  Google allows current saved emails and archived messages up to 15 gigabytes.  The other day, I noticed that what I had been saving amounted to 7% of that space.  I am conscious of opening ads or relatively trivial messages and then letting them sit in the Inbox.  That 7% was 1 gigabyte but I knew most if not all of what was sitting in my email was not important.

So, yesterday, I deleted a great amount of what I had saved.  I have a friend who makes it a principle to allow no more than 100 emails in the Inbox.  I imagine there are books and experts who can tell me the optimal number.  I think that one month's saved messages might be about right but I have no solid evidence that a month is right.

More than 20 years ago, I accidentally blanked many lessons I had created.  I had been saving them with the idea that I would have them handy and not need to create so many.  When I realized the mistake I made, I was very excited and annoyed. But then, I got to thinking that I am the sort of person who often doesn't follow a lesson plan I have right in front of me.  Most of the lessons, writings, and messages I write today will not apply unchanged in another week, much less longer periods.

I hadn't realized that Google counts the archived messages as part of the allowed 15 gigs.  There is no quick way that I know, to get back into the archives and delete all or most of it.  But, with a little searching, I did find a way so I had the pleasure of deleting 8600 messages at once.  Yes, it is a little bit of a gamble to delete so much at once but my experience is that I won't use it or look at it.  

Lynn is way better at logical and systematic deleting, and tossing out, all sorts of things than I am.  Having a future that has been pared down in the matter of old clothes, old furniture sitting in the basement, is refreshing and rejuvenating.  I realize that the earth is finite and that there really is no "away" as in "thrown away".  One of the satisfying things about electronic records is that they can be thrown away about as well as anything can be. Just as I am trying to divest myself of unwanted body fat, things will go more smoothly in the future if I keep my amount of saved possessions pared down.

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

Odd men

We have been enjoying the British tv series "Doc Martin.  It is clever and well-written but sometimes disconcerting or even painful to watch. Martin Ellingham, MD, was a first-class surgeon and was generally recognized as outstanding, one of the very best.  Then, one day, he had a severely upsetting reaction to a patient's blood while conducting surgery.  Sometimes, it was so bad that he would vomit.  It was clear that the condition would end his ability to be a surgeon.  He left London for a small British town that had just lost its long-time general practitioner.

Dr. Ellingham is an excellent diagnostician and in a way, many of the townspeople realize they are lucky to have him.  However, he is afflicted with what may be a form of Asperger's syndrome, which is to say that his interpersonal skills are terrible. He developed a relation with a local woman teacher.  He likes her very much and she him.  However, they can move from enjoying each other's presence to have a sharp argument in a flash.  You could say that the more tender the moment, the higher the chance that they will fall into anger and accusations.  Louisa is not especially self-revealing and Martin has only about a 10th of her ability to see what people are feeling emotionally and being able to comfort them.

The very first really tender kiss resulted in his asking her on the spot if she had a program of regular dental care.  An odd question to be asked in such a moment but the doc followed up with a description of the unpleasant  taste and aroma from her mouth.  He really is concerned with her well-being but he manages to hurt her, put her down, and infuriate her at times when they seem to be drawing close.

It is not just his favorite woman.  He manages to insult, contradict, frighten all who come in contact with him, all the while being totally mystified as to people's reactions.

This upsetting, insensitive and psychologically clumsy man is only one of several heroes of tv shows with this sort of handicap.  The hero of the show "Perception" is similarly afflicted but not to the same degree.  Likewise the Sherlock character in both the American series called "Elementary" and the British series "Sherlock".  The British professor of psychology, Simon Baron-Cohen and others have done research that leads them to theorize that some kinds of autism and Asperger's syndrome result from the bio-chemical forces making fetus brains male overdoing their job.  He thinks that most women are more emphatic than men and that most men direct their attention to understand systems, be it an automobile or a financial market.  However, an afflicted brain can result in the person treating others very impersonally.

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

Asking "What are you reading now?"

Many K-12 teachers in the US are required to take additional college credits to stay licensed.  The nature of the credits varies.  Sometimes, their school systems require the credits to be in the area the teacher teaches.  A French teacher might be required to take additional credits in French language, literature, culture or history.  That rule works pretty well much of the time but for a mature teacher, it may be much more refreshing to take credits in something new.

I had the idea that teachers had been reading various subjects since early childhood and it might be worthwhile to pause in further reading and take a look back at what had been read. The result was a course that was fun for me to teach as we reviewed personal reading from The Poky Little Puppy and The Little Engine that Could right up to the latest James Patterson novel.  From doing that several times, I got into the habit of asking those who had taken the course what they were reading when I met them somewhere afterwards.

I have found that asking the question "What are you reading?" can feel like a criticism or an attack.  I may have been reading old love letters and reflecting on them but I am not going to mention that, of course.  Might be better to say I have been brushing up on differential calculus.  On the other hand, that might mark me as a likely fibber or too much of a nerd to be tolerated.  The question asked of the right person at the right time can lead to wonderful new ideas, worlds, opinions and jokes.  So, I don't like to give up on asking it.  It has paid off.  A member of the audience at a recent presentation on good books advised me to try Stuart Kaminsky.  I have now read two of his Inspector Rostnikov novels, one aloud to Lynn.

But the question seems to be a culture-test or a test of my good taste.  Am I reading trash?  Am I reading low quality garbage?  Falsehood?  Cheap literature?  I am interested in people's reaction to the question but I don't want to be offensive.  I am inclined to browse book titles in many sources and places and giving what seems interesting a try.  I am willing to check out a little kid's book, or a book that has been banned, or a best-seller of 10,20 or 30 years ago. So, I might get interested in something on beekeeping, or bookkeeping or ballet or ballistics.  "Getting interested" doesn't necessarily mean I will get deeply immersed in a subject.  If I look over several titles on beekeeping, titles that seem summative, outlines, the basics are what tend to attract me.

Back in the B.K. era (before Kindles), I spent plenty of time in local libraries.  I found that the one that loaned books for only two weeks served me better than the one that offered longer borrowing periods.  The shorter loan required me to take a look at the books and get into them with more concentration that allowing them to sit on a shelf, awaiting some attention.  Being in a library is conducive to nosing around, maybe getting into a subject or a type of book that I don't usually look at.  So, if you ask me what I am reading, I will just hit a couple of the highlights and not list every book I have lugged home or downloaded.

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

Who made me as I am?

I like think I am a self-made man.  Since I think fairly highly of myself, having made me like I am would be an accomplishment of which to be proud.  But the truth is I didn't make me.  Sure, I have done a little of the shaping and pruning but there have been lots of other influences and hands in the making.  

Clearly, my parents and their ancestors got things started.  My sister, a steady influence for rationality and good companionship, had a hand in.  I have had many inspiring teachers, most of whom I cannot remember clearly.  A few who were extra-strict and another small set on whom I had a crush or who seemed like they would be good friends stick out in my memory.  

The teachers were supplied by the taxpayers as were the school buildings, the streets I used to get to them.  Larger but quieter than the taxpayers themselves were the cultural forces that said there ought to be schools, and order, and respect and diligence in learning and sports.  The culture used the ability to read in many ways and expected me to acquire that ability.  The culture provided public libraries and the opportunity for my mother to haul me into one as soon as I could write my name legibly, the basic requirement for getting a library card and borrowing books. Her culture encouraged her to get her kids familiar with libraries and books.  I got my card at the age of 5, about 68 years ago, and there has been no time from then to now, that I haven't had a book or two from the library.

I am confident there were innumerable forces and experiences besides schooling and books that influenced me but not are quite as continuous and salient as my schooling, my full-time job during that time.  One of the more unusual influences were Russian scientists, employees I imagine of the Soviet army or related security forces, the people who worked out the math, physics, and engineering that put the first human-made satellite circling the earth.  When Americans learned about the achievement, they were surprised, intrigued and challenged.  The governor of Arkansas was offended when he was told that the satellite circled above his state's space and threatened to shoot Sputnik down.  The Russians were probably not worried since they felt their creation was out of the range of the governor's shotgun, flying 300 miles and much more from the earth.

The American people and their government were not about to be kept in second place and vastly increased their efforts and funding to duplicate and surpass the Russian achievement.  One of ingredients was in the effort was the National Defense Education Act, federal legislation that provided funding for some of my undergraduate and most of my graduate education.

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

Intelligence: artificial and natural

As I have written before, there are something on the order of 100 million blogs on the internet.  So, naturally, neither you nor I are going to read even 1% of them.  Way before you got very far in the project, your common sense and your perception of the world and your needs and interests would kick in and you would go do something else.

Google Reader was something of a hub into which I could put subscriptions ("feeds") when I came across a blog that seemed promising. For some reason, Google decided to discontinue that project.  They gave us plenty of warning. I looked up alternatives and quickly settled on Feedly, which seems definitely better than Reader was.  It says I am subscribed to 102 blogs, all free, of course.

I still continue the practice of having snippets of some of the blogs I follow appear beside my own blog posts on my blog web page.  I have not evaluated all my subscriptions lately to see if there are some I should remove from the web page of the blog and some I should add.

Today, I looked at Eric Barker's "Barking Up the Wrong Tree", a blog that often has good excerpts from insightful psychology books.  When I look at something in Feedly, I often click to go the web site for the whole article.  Once there, the links and ads may distract me or enhance my search and I get off into something else.  Somewhere, today, I came across a link to this PBS video on artificial intelligence, a subject that any researcher and any educator might find of interest.  One reason to pay attention to the subject is that work in it often highlights what seems to be an ordinary human ability that the scientists and engineers simply can't figure a way to duplicate.  Following a moving object with your eyes and understanding the sentence "To is not the same as too" may seem ordinary but they are complex and high-level.

Barker mentioned the book "Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined" by Scott Barry Kaufman.  The book has high ratings and Amazon says it is by a present day psychologist who was labeled in school at one time as needing special education. In the PBS video, scientists familiar with the work on simulating and attempting to equal or surpass human intelligence with machines admitted that much remains to be done.  They cite our vision, our use of natural language, our ability to manipulate objects and our common sense as especially difficult areas for artificial intelligence.  The video says that during the first few decades of attempts to build smart machines the general strategy was to create rules that the smart machines would follow.  Over time, it became clear that humans do so many things and change their approaches to problems and goals so often and so cleverly that unwieldy sets of rules would be needed.  Today, the work is proceeding more along the lines of trying to build machines that can learn the way we all did and do.

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

The mindsphere

We have the atmosphere, the globe of our air, and the blogosphere, the globe of blogs around the planet.  The "biosphere" refers to our globe of life, plant and animal.  But humans like me spend much of their time thinking and communicating with other thinkers.  Through the medium of print and electronics, we deal in written and spoken expressions.

Human minds are wonderful.  They can posit themselves into the past at any depth and can transport themselves into a projection of the future.  Since we use our minds so much, it can be helpful to practice noticing when our thinking involves stones, food, moving around on the planet and other aspects of the physical world.  Often, our observed reality involves only ideas: likes and dislikes, desired goals and feared possible events, peoples' feelings and opinions.  

If I am feeling out-of-date, it is likely that my negative feeling does not actually involve my chronological age but more my current slate of friendships and social events. If I think I have been quite clever or very diligent, I am mostly dealing with concepts and labels, not "things" in the actual world.  Sure, we can start getting more particular and remind ourselves that we all only know rocks and trees through our senses in further workings of our minds, but in a practical sense, there is a daily, fundamental difference between my actual face and my opinion of my looks.

Our mental worlds are so large and full that we can be shocked when we see their limits.  The Zen teacher, Charlotte Joko Beck, points out the shocking news that "New Jersey" doesn't exist.  Her news applies to your city, state and nation, too.  She was flying in a plane and she looked carefully for some indication that she had left a neighboring state and moved above New Jersey but there is no indication at all.  She had to conclude that New Jersey is a concept but not something in the world.  To use their concept of New Jersey, humans have many tools, agreements and measurements which can answer questions such as "Am I in New Jersey?"  The state has its own government and flag and state police, all of are used in a way that supports the use of the concept.

But I can imagine someone living near the border of New Jersey deciding that they were tired of the place and bored with it while actually being in Delaware without realizing they had inadvertently crossed the border.  The Wikipedia states that Native Americans lived in the area of New Jersey for 2800 years, many of which were years in which those poor Natives had no idea that they were New Jersey residents or pre-residents.

It can be quite refreshing to quiet myself for a few minutes, just looking and sensing but avoiding the mindsphere as much as possible.  One of the most common complaints of those who try to meditate is that they can't quiet their minds.  That will be true of all of us with minds, since minds are constructed to think, recall, inquire, etc.  But focusing your eyes on a single spot and concentrating on your breath for a few minutes can assist you in travels into the mindsphere and out of it.  If you try but find that you have wandered into the mindsphere without realizing it, just quietly return to focusing on your breath.

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

It may not be that simple

[Yesterday's post was created when I was feeling overstuffed with ideas, pleas, plans, needs and other concepts.  I was planning to use a blank rectangle but some mishandling of the software gave me a look at an "open-ended" rectangle, which suited my mood and maybe expressed in a (confusing?) way my aim to simply be still, observant, open and absorbing.]

Today, I am onto David Cannadine's "Our Undivided Past".  I have listened to about 12% of it.  He is a professional historian and has tried to collect evidence that

• class,

• race,

• religion,

• sex,

• nationality, and

• civilization

have never been as sharp and powerful at dividing people into opposing groups as many writers have claimed.  He provides documentation on Muslims and Christians helping over more than one thousand years.

He has focused on oppositional binaries, A and ~A, Us and Them.  Whenever I hear of binary oppositions, I think of some lines I read in "Jitterbug Perfume", by that clever nut of a writer, Tom Robbins.  His binary distinction is unusual:

"There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong."

If a person is aware of statistics and nature, it is possible to see nearly any binary distinction as a bit arbitrary. There are almost always cases that don't fit into one or the other.  Stat students sometimes have a little difficulty thinking in binary terms about a continuous variable.  It is usually possible to divide a population into those over 6 feet high and those who are not.  But the famous "real world" is tricky and doesn't use binary, trinary, or other classes neatly. There are undoubtedly living people who were over six feet tall but now are no longer.  There are people who are not six feet tall now but will grow to be. Nature and time are tricky and difficult to pin down.

We normally think of sex and being alive as two very clear-cut variables.  You are a male or a female.  You are alive or you are not.  But on the other hand, we know there are cases of sexually ambiguous people who may be somewhere between or in both groups.  We know that as we magnify the matter, it can be difficult to decide whether a person has reached the state of death or not.  And, of course, we know how much debate and energy goes into considering the question of when a new human is actually alive and when that state has not yet been reached.

I know it is hard to go through life doubting every damned thing and it is hard to be a committed believer or accepter of a story or idea or notion.  Personally, I try to strike a balance between acceptance and skepticism. I don't think it is necessary to go as far as some logic from India that says, not as the West has, that any meaningful statement is either true or not true, but asserts that a statement could be

• True

• Not true

• Both true and not true

• Neither true nor not true.

However, when using a binary variable or distinction, the wise person takes the two classes with a grain of salt.

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