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Yeah, it's a week without an entry. I've returned from some great Human Patterns training (psychometric testing) and I'm off to LA for a wedding. Ah, the stressful life that is our existence.
Not only do we get hit with low temperatures (we had several days that did not get about 5ºF [-15ºC]) and with Chicago's snowstorm tonight, but on Saturday we will probably get hit with more lake-effect snow. Last Sunday, my friends from Demotte — about 20 miles sout — said that they didn't hit anything until they got to Hebron (about 15 miles south), and then when they got closer to Valpo, it was pitch white. As it were.
We get hit by snowstorms out here, these blasted lake-effect snows, that don't ever touch Chicago. We'll have 10" (25.5cm) and Chicago will get a dusting. Of course, I knew that I was moving to northwestern Indiana when I bought the house. This season is the first one that's really snowy, though. We've had a few snows in the past three years, and the occassional dump but it never stayed. We even got 18" (46cm) before New Years, but it melted before we made it back.
And to think that just a week ago it went from a high of 60ºF (15ºC) to 5ºF (-15ºC) in about 36 hours. The metric numbers are more fun, with the bookending and all. It dropped even further during the week. Of course, I could live in Montana where temperature gradients have been known of 50ºF in 20 minutes, when the cold air finally pushes over the mountains.
Still, I'd like to have a respite from the percipitation. The old guys at the barber shop by the courthouse said that this winter would be cold and wet, and indeed we have seen more than usual cold and snow.
From the NWS:
TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 10 INCHES ARE EXPECTED BEFORE THE SNOW ENDS SATURDAY EVENING. THERE WILL BE ADDITIONAL LAKE EFFECT SNOW OVER PORTIONS OF EXTREME NORTHEAST ILLINOIS AND NORTHWEST INDIANA MAY PRODUCE LOCALLY HEAVIER AMOUNTS.
Yeah, we're supposed to have no less than 8 and probably 14-20" by Saturday evening. I don't care where you're from: 20" of snow is a royal pain in the patootie. That's half a meter! Of course, it could be worse. When she took the Fellowship here, L had been looking at a job at Hope College, in Western Michigan.
Lots of shovelling. Should have bought that snow blower from Al before he moved to Florida...
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." — Matthew 5:3 (NIV)
The Beatitudes still haunt my mind. This phrase has been coming to me lately, unbidden. "Oh, how lucky are the spiritually bankrupt!" one friend said it should really go, if you kept the spirit of the greek. Spiritual bankruptcy, as J pointed out awhile back, involves humbling yourself before God. But what does that mean?
For us, bankruptcy is something that you declare to recover from your creditors. We have a way out for those who have overextended themselves. In the times of Jesus, there wasn't a social safety net. If you were bankrupt, you had nothing. Bereft, without hope. No food. Perhaps even your life may be forfeit, or the lives of your wife and children, to be sold as slaves in payment. You haven't just spent all you have: you have spent more than all you have.
"Oh, how lucky are the spiritually bereft, because they get the kingdom of heaven!"
Not the way that we would run heaven, I reckon.
[ Continue reading "Spiritual Bankruptcy" ]Brian Mahan (2002), Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition
L thought highly enough of this book that I've been reading it. I'm not sure that the other Lilly Fellows enjoyed it as much as she did: they didn't like it's non-linear argument. Mahan prefers a more medieval argument style, circling and circling ever closer.
He writes that we believe, falsely, that somehow "ambition" is a goal in and of itself:
But this is nonsense. It is closer to the truth to say that we are what our ambitions make of us. There is no such thing as ambition in general. Desire in its raw specificity is always for this or that. It is only later that we abstract from these particulars and speak in tame generalities. The raw imaginal and emotionally charged particulars of what we evasively call wealth or power or love or compassion are what beckon us, thrill us, deceive us. Ambition in general is a nullity; ambition in its specificity may come to define our lives. [pp. 90, his emphasis]
Like many things that confuse us, ambition requires an object. Like love, it cannot exist as an abstraction. You don't "love"; you love this child, this man laying hurt on the side of the road. You don't have ambition but ambition for something. It is not desire but the desire for something. The desires of our heart are not abstract but real.
Can I love you if I do not know you? Can I have ambition for something I do not know; can I want what I cannot imagine?
Is this not our problem?
While perusing glorious Half Bakery today during lunch, I came upon an interesting comment about security lighting that said that security lighting actually increases vandalism. A little Dogpiling found some more information.
Conventional wisdom suggests that light reduces crime. That's why outdoor lights are often called "security lights". School districts across the U.S. are turning conventional wisdom on its head by turning off lights on school grounds.
The results have been impressive. Annual energy savings can add up to hundreds of dollars per school. Significant decreases in vandalism have been documented since the "Dark Campus" policies have gone into effect. Here are three examples. [from "Dark Campus Programs Reduce Vandalism and Save Money" by the dark sky people]
Of course, the reason that this works is that no one is there. The main problem is vandalism. As Sam Wolf, director of security for the San Antonio ISD said in the article, "I remember as a kid, we never hung around in the dark. We hung around a street light. We wanted to see who was with us."
Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns · Buildings · Construction (1977) talks about the issue of light pools and how attracted we are to it.
As I've been reading coaching sites, the following has been attributed variously to Nelson Mandela's 1994 and 1997 inauguration and a speech in Pretoria.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Great. Except that Nelson Mandella never spoke these words. And when you spend a moment thinking about what they really say, there no way that you can imagine him doing so.
They're actually from A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles by < A HREF=http://marianne.com/">Marianne Williamson, a new-age guru whose website is Marianne.com (really). The A Course In Miracles that she refers to in the title is probably unknown to you unless you are into the new age scene. I'd never heard of it, but I've left most of my new age friends behind in Chicago. For a general overview, see the Skeptic's Dictionary entry on A Course In Miracles.
So get it right! Attribute appropriately! For goodness sakes, this took ten minutes of web searching and reading to track down!
Think about it: Nelson Mandela is not going to say "We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?" He spent his life suffering, which we can all argue made him great but it certainly didn't lead to him being gorgeous or fabulous. It broke him down a bit, and he lost years of his life, including time with family. Nelson Mandela saying "you're fabulous!"?
I went back and updated some online information. I realized that I've got a very stable work history for someone who's done so much freelance as I have: my normal gig lasts 2 years or more. That's pretty stable in IT. When I worked at "Large Swiss Investment Bank", I had more seniority than most of the employees I worked with. After that I worked with BIG through INFOSEC for over two years, and before it I worked with Computer Sciences Corporation on two accounts for almost three. For a guy who supposedly hops around a lot, that's pretty stable. Most consultants I know would envy such stability. Too bad I never figured out a way to turn it into a stable position.
And that's not a bad client list:
I suppose I should have a Psychology category, too, if I keep reading this stuff. Although officially, this book is by a psychiatrist and not a psychologist: he had to get a MD.
In How Do We Know Who We Are?: The Biography of the Self, Arnold Ludwig discusses how the various psychotherapeutic approaches have about the same efficacy. He explains that therapies work because they help you "restor narrative flow" to your lifestory. The post-moderns among us will appreciate that.
Explanatory systems or personal stories acquire narrative turth in several ways. The very process of putting confusing and ambiguous feelings into words gives the formulation a reality. Even in the absence of confirmatory memories, this formulation still offers a reason why certain events have happened. No matter how improbable the explanation, it tends to be treated as true if it provides missing links to account for otherwise complex and disjointed events. Pattern and coherence gives the account credibility in its own right....Even when the reconstruction of the past is entirely imaginary, it acquires the mantle of truth if it lets patients find coherence and meaning in the personal stories and makes sense out of their chaotic experienes....
In a sense, the taks of psychotherapy is to offer you a more satisfactory life story or get you to move on in the one you already have. Mostly, you enter therapy when you're stuck in a certain chapter of your life and don't know what you want to do next or don't like what you see ahead for yourself. What a successful therapeutic experience does is to reestablish the narrative flow, reawaken a sense of meaning in your life, restore personal control, and realign you with the prevalent cultural myth. The very process of recounting a drama, in which you are the protagonist, to someone in a helping, parental role, such as a therapist, obliges you to push your personal narrative ahead. [pp.157]
The New York Times has an interesting overview of the current fiscal state of the US Social Security system. I personally have mixed feelings about the system (it costs me a lot of money and I think that baby boomers will make out like bandits at my expense) but still enjoyed the series.
There's a lot of interesting numbers. Of course, the Times has generally supported the system of the last 70 years for a variety of reasons. I wonder how many of us remember that FDR created social programs in order to "save capitalism". Large corporations also back it, along with other federal business laws, in order to make the various States more or less equivalent. Back before computers, having 50 different pension requirements made for a lot of extra work. And potential liability.
The upshot of the main article is that the various actuaries feel pretty secure about Social Security: although any projection is inherently faulty (we project out from the past; no one saw the computer in 1920), the Social Security actuaries have been relatively accurate recently. It seems like the only reason to do too much to SS has to do with personal beliefs about the morality of taxation and not with the solvency of the system.
I'd be interested in seeing what the researchers come up with. There's a wide variance on Social Security's solvency, but it seems like the actuaries strongly tip towards its security.
Because of the recent upswing in personal attacks, I am formalising the current norms for behaviour on manasclerk's The Power Struggle.
General Reminders:
Specific regulations for everyone who doesn't understand "keep it civil":
You don't have be nice but you do have to be civil.
Some of y'all are bombastic and while I don't like it, I don't go out of my way to get you to adhere to my way of discussing. Sometimes a more aggressive or combative style can be healthy to the dialogue. But when it degrades into namecalling, I draw the line. And I've noticed that we're all prone to that, not just the more abrasive of us.
As a publisher and creator, I reserve the right to discontinue or to refuse to publish any material I deem inappropriate. I also have a variety of communities that use this site, from professionals in the RO discussions to friends in Personal, and I'm very protective of them.
This has not been that big of an issue thus far, but I have noticed a marked increase in personal attacks recently. I don't want them, so I'm not going to have them.
manasclerk's The Power Struggle continues to have a bad time of it. I've salvaged some of the lost pages (I think), including the most popular page I've ever written, but they're still not in the system. I'll have to see if I have time to do it.
Sad, really. All for want of a nail and all that.
Just to show that every workplace is ripe for the picking when it comes to RO consulting, allow me to present to you three different comments from a recent issue of — all things — Comic Book Artist. I'll go through the quotes and then comment.
From "Darwyn Cooke New Fronteir: From Batman Beyond to Catwoman to New Frontier, the brilliant 'newcomer' gives us a comprehensive look at his life", Comic Book Artist Vol 2, #3 (March 2004), pp. 98:
One thing I can't seem to communicate very clearly — or nobody seems to really want to accept this as a fact — is that the company I work for is not really relevant to me. It's the editor. It's the person. I follow people; I don't follow companies. Each company has characters that are interesting enough to do something with, so it comes down to people. If Axel [Alonso of Marvel Comics] went to Dark Horse tomorrow, you'd probably see me working for Dark Horse. If Mark [Chiarello of DC Comics] was to go to Marvel tomorrow, you'll probably see me doing more work for Marvel, because the relationship is important to me.
Mark Chiarello, same issue, on legendary comics editor and writer, Archie Goodwin:
[Archie Goodwin] was the weirdest mixture of a super-intelligent guy who was a complete nerd, who also happened to have this great sense of humor, was one of the great writers — one of the top three — in comics history. Archie was also the best editor ever in comics, bar none. The underlying thing was, he loved comics.The man really, really loved comic books....
Everything I know about editing came directly from Archie. I saw the way he treated freelancers and, more importantly, for someone like me who just wants to be liked, I saw how much his freelancers loved him. I saw his relationship with Al Williamson, Walt Simonson, and all these guys, andthe advice Archie gave me was, "Editing's easy. Hire the best people you can possibly get and just let them do what they do." Don't tell Mike Kaluta how to draw a hand, don't tell Wally Wood how to spot blacks, because you're just getting in their way. Let them do what they do best. — [pp. , emphasis in original]
Returning to Darwyn Cooke, he also talked about what a good editor needs to be able to do [pp.96]:
I no longer understand where the emphasis is on the editor's role. For example, if you're pencilling a mainstream monthly title, depending on the editor, you can only get him on the phone once a month. I'm trying to figure out what it is they do. There must be a lot of stuff they do, but I don't understand it. If you can't get the guy on the phone, how can creative concerns be addressed? A lot of people are like this. I don't even know what the criteria are for being an editor, because a lot of them come through from the company's political system. You can't even talk about story structure. The writer sends you the script. You phone the eidot and go, "Look, there's a major plot hole here on page 12, it's foreshadowing this event, but it contradicts what we did in the issue last month." But the editor doesn't know what the [expletive deleted] you're talking about, you know? So you get into a pissing match with the writer, because the editor doesn't have a clue.
And CBA's Jon B. Cooke (no relation) started this off with his comments about the real goal of the CBA magazine [pp. 96]:
I often say that it's an open secret that Comic Book Artist isn't about artists at all; it's really about editors. It's about what makes a good editor and what makes a bad editor. It's about the virture of facilitating artists and writers, bringing them together, making an environment to make them feel safe, protecting them from interference, and the result just might be exceptional work done quite often to please the editor. But if the priority is not the work, but the product, well, you can take the Mort Weisinger approach and scare the [expletive deleted] out of people and make them not produce their best work but work that comes in on deadline.
Some thoughts:
We're having some server issues. Well, actually, it's a piece of software that I have installed. Please don't be troubled if things go awry.
From JMMJ's review elsewhere on this blog host:
I finished listening to Dan Brown's prequel to The DaVinci Code several days ago. Several folks had mentioned that this was the better book, so I gave it a shot. This is the sort of book that I was lamenting to my wife when she said I should stop reading crap.
If only the New Yorker still did reviews like this.
Trey and I spent yesterday evening trying to hook up the Atari CX 2600 (and CX 2600A: I've got both) that I picked up in my folks' garage to my 1993 JVC television. After much consternation, I Googled the problem and we left for Radio Shack to get part #278-255. We got there just as they were locking up. I noticed that they were glad that we knew our part number. I've discovered with this new, trendier location here in Valpo that the staff is less electronics geeky. I can't even get good solutions to my RCA Lyra power problem.
An aside: the Atari 2600 was a cartridge-based video game system that hooked into your television. It became the world's mot popular game system; and as far as I know still is. It had a 128-byte RAM with a 1.12 MHz GPU. Wow. The cartridge contents and makeup could make a big difference, as was true throughout the cartridge systems, including NES. Sears & Roebuck had their own version of the 2600 and since my family didn't buy one, my memories of the Atari come from waiting for my parents shopping at Sears and playing their demo models. As kids still do at Target.
We did get the connector and played 2600 games until late. The Activision games are the best. I'll have to say that the best thing about the Atari titles is the is the instructions booklets, which I also found.
There was also an Atari 400 computer (with tape drive and I could have sworn a monitor, although the Atari 400 page says that they only hooked up to TVs. Maybe it's a later generation monitor lying next the Atari. There was also an old TI-99 home computer (16k anyone?) that competed with the Tandy TRS-80.
None of these were things we had as kids. I have no idea what they are doing in the garage, except that my folks do buy lots to get one thing in them.
Ah, the heady days of 1980 and playing with the Atari 2600!
Updating the reading list because I never get around to changing the template:
Next up: more fantasy novels.
I have given up, for the time being, Cryptonomicon, Linked, Six Degrees and A Solitary Winter: Expanded Edition.
Dave has an inordinately funny piece on defending oneself against the horrors and seductions of intellectual masturbation for Christian young men. Maybe you have to have grown up a fundamentalist to find this funny, though. I can't imagine my mainstream Christian friends making heads or tails of it. They had a very different experience: "Next week, the youth group will be discussing contraception in the library."
I remember first hearing that phrase in college and it had nothing to do with church-people or disparaging someone else. Witt used it to describe a paper he had just written. I always took it to mean that you were massaging your mind without the benefit of true dialog. Talking to hear yourself think.
Anyway, I think I threw up laughing.
Once again, James Fallows has another article in The Atlantic this month.
Where does he find the time to investigate and write so broadly? Man, I admire his writing style, too. Clear, erudite but not pushy. Fabulous.
Even fair and balanced. Which means that people of all stripes write in to say how much they hated his articles.
The editors of Science report on an interesting study on Crohn's Disease, a very difficult to treat problem of the digestive system that can be, in it's worst instances, deadly. The treatment involves something fairly interesting:
IMMUNOLOGY: Treating Disease with Worms
Crohn's disease is a debilitating inflammatory condition of the intestine. Although the etiology is unclear, the disease is thought to result from inappropriate activation of the immune system against the bacterial flora of the gut. In developing countries, where infection with parasitic intestinal helminths is widespread, Crohn's disease is rare, leading to the notion that the allergic-like state generated by parasitic worms counteracts proinflammatory influences.
To test this, Summers et al. fed Crohn's patients eggs of the common pig helminth Trichuris suis, which can colonize the human intestine for short periods without pathology. A marked improvement was seen in most of the patients, and these clinical results are paralleled by the observations of Elliott et al., who found that giving the helminth Heligmosomoides polygyrus to mice that were afflicted with a Crohn's-like condition reversed inflammation. In protected animals, there was a redress of the imbalance toward proinflammatory cytokines, and these early results suggest that unconventional therapy of this type might be effective in treating a range of chronic inflammatory diseases that extend beyond the gut. -- SJSGut 54, 87 (2005); Eur. J. Immunol. 34, 2690 (2004).
Yes, that's right: treating it with a pig's worm. I've been watching Star Trek: Enterprise and enjoying the good Doctor's use of various critters for treatments. Just came to mind reading about this.
After years of disuse, medicine returns to using leeches.
From Mintzberg's Power In and Around Organizations, page xvii:
In our society, power in and around organizations is a kind of tragicomedy; we would like to laugh, and sometimes do, but there is also much to cry about.
One of the pioneers and inventors of the modern graphic storytelling medium of comics died after heart problems.
Will Eisner was one of the greats of what he called "Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative" and "Sequential Art". The creator of the newspaper "comic book", The Spirit, Eisner also created maintenance and instructional comics for the US Army during his enlistment during the war, something that lasted until the 1970s through his studios continued work with the government. You haven't lived until you've read one of Eisner's tales of how to clean a carburetor.
Eisner continued to develop the medium through a series of theoretical theses, most notably 1985's Comics & Sequential Art. It's hard to overestimate the importance of that book to the industry: it gave comics credibility and an academic language for design, plus providing descriptions of some of the techniques most successful artists used unconsciously.
His work also continued to be vibrant and worth reading. He moved into personl storytelling in recent years through his several graphic novels. 1991's To the Heart of the Storm fictionally retold his youth as a Jew in New York during the 1930s, with Hitler rising and Communism spreading. He continued with further explorations of Judaism, which have come under some fire. L even taught from some in her classes on narrative art in medieval Europe, including Day In Vietnam and Contract With God.
When he died, he was working on yet another graphic novel.
He was one of the last great comic book storytellers from comics' "golden age" (roughly from the appearance of DC's Superman to the Wertham investigations in Congress). Others survive, but they entered comics as teenagers and tended to do their best work later.
Eisner stands with Kirby as one of the genuinely important creators in the comics field. But Eisner was smarter and didn't work for The Man.
From the Chicago Tribune: "Will Eisner, Famed Comic Book Innovator"
I am sitting here at night, thinking about the Beatitudes, Jesus' bizarre set of sayings.
"Oh how lucky are the ones who mourn because they get to be comforted!"
Oh, how lucky!
They're troubling me right now. A friend told me last week that his wife has decided to divorce him. She says she doesn't love him, that she never loved him. He's so fortunate?
Our dear young friend, Courtney, who likes to sit with L and me in church, all of age nine and the smartest person I've ever met, including me — she's going back to the Children's Hospital for more tests because the doctors fear its cancer. She bleeds and she hurts and they don't know what could be wrong. She's so fortunate? And Jesus wants to tell her parents, "Oh, you're so blessed!"
My wife's aunt loses her mother, L's grandmother, the woman she has cared for and who has dominated her life for three years of steadily declining mental abilities. The years of caretaking destroyed so many of her broader social contacts and now she loses her meaning. How is she supposed to be blessed in this?
Sometimes this Jesus I follow is a real bastard. I can't decide whether this is simply nuts or he's making a bigger point.
Is our little friend, Courtney, blessed because she has to suffer this pain? Are her parents blessed when they come in to see her lying on the floor, crying because her innards hurt so bad but not wanting to say anything?
What about the boy who has to sleep in a room that reeks of urine? Or Derek, alone in the world, bereft of friendship and honor? What about András's dad sufferring under the Romanian Communists for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
Oh, yeah: Feri Bácsi somehow considered it joy to be persecuted for the gospel.
An interesting article from McKinsey Quarterly that proves that no one has a clue about how to manage any longer:
New from The McKinsey Quarterly:
Strategy
"Balancing short- and long-term performance"
The benefits are many for corporations that can walk this tightrope.
(Premium Membership required)
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/links/15927