The vultures are circling our species.

I just finished reading this article about BPA in our diet, and found myself wondering if we have more dangerous predators today than we did as hunter-gatherers: as a wanderer, there were a variety of animals that would have gladly eaten us for dinner, but they would only take one or two at a time, so being a part of a larger group really added a level of safety, just from the mathematical standpoint. Now, being a part of a large group really just makes us a bigger, more attractive target to the corporate interests that want to farm our consumerism while steadily feeding us chemicals that probably kill us a little each day, but certainly help their profitability.

Do you hear it?

That, Mister Anderson, is the sound of inevitability.

The Yummy Chewy Center

This is a thought about the purpose of learning high-school physics, and an attempt to answer the question of "why do i need to learn this crap?"

Many elements of the physics curriculum can seem to be pointless, knowledge for its own sake, which is a terrible argument for high school students, or probably most people (when it's in a field that they *haven't* identified as their life's work). My feeling is that physics (and possibly some other disciplines) is like a tootsie roll pop. There a lot of vaguely interesting elements to be learned, and you keep going since you're already in it, and then all of a sudden you get to the yummy chewy center, and you remember that this was the reason you took the wrapper off the sucker in the first place.

In physics, the chewy center is the feeling of being a bad-ass. You look out upon the world and everything you can see is something you understand the dynamics of, how it moves, why it moves.

Lots of people can do this though, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that even though you may only have figured the height of that tree to the nearest 10 feet, you did it with nothing in your hands but air. You could tell someone roughly how much that bus weighs, and how many SUV's it would obliterate if it fails to brake properly.

Lots of people can do this, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that if you chose to pick up a calculator and a pencil, you change from a reasonably smart, observant person into a magician, who can look at the shadow of a tree at noon on a summer day and tell someone what their longitude and latitude is. You could be the person that tells the bus driver exactly how much space they need to leave in order to avoid obliterating those SUVs.

Nobody can do this, without learning the concepts we teach in physics.

So if you want to have a choice someday, whether to push that magician button or not, then strap on that pointy hat and grab your tootsie roll pop.

Adult vs. Child

I think one of the huge differences between a child and an adult is that a child does not automatically accept that even with good intentions, one can be repaid with pain and misunderstanding. Adults have learned this lesson, and don't charge into a situation with their good intentions pinned to their shiny shields.

Chinese Water Torture

I just had an interesting and vigorous discussion in my Intro to Education class about unintentional discrimination. It started out as a commentary on those seemingly harmless (to me) comments that teachers make that get their students fired up with a little 'girls versus boys' competitiveness, e.g. when a boy does something good, saying "ooh girls, don't let em get away with that!", and vice versa when a girl does something good, with special care taken to make sure that the comments are balanced within the context of a single class. That's a pretty vague description, but the point is that the instructor was making an effort to intentionally foster competition between the boys & girls of the class without endorsing either side.

My reaction was that there's nothing wrong with these types of comments as long as you keep a bead on whether it's bothering any of the students, and stop if you see some evidence of that. The girls in my class saw it differently - they felt that they'd prefer not to be placed in that kind of competitive situation, and that it felt like discrimination. The guys in the class and the girls in the class (it was a small class) lined up perfectly along those lines - guys felt that it was no big deal (but were willing to stop), girls felt that it was out of line.

I started out feeling fairly confident of my position, but as the discussion moved on, I was reminded more and more of some of my extremely rare experiences with racial discrimination, specifically the unintentional ones at the hands of my friends.


Some quick history on myself: I grew up in a rural upstate NY town, lived in the hills well outside that town, on a farm, in a relatively poor family. My parents were relatively poor, but this was somewhat by design for them as they struggled to embrace a self-subsistent lifestyle. My school was mid-sized for the area - about 100 students per grade, and I was one of maybe six black kids in the entire school district throughout my years there. I don't think I ever saw much real discrimination there, partly because I'm a fairly low-profile person, partly because the school was populated with really decent people, and partly because my parents taught me to let it slide off my back, so it basically went in one ear and out the other. There were situations that pinched me a little, though, and the stuff that I remember the most clearly through the years are the situations where it was my friends that were making me feel uncomfortable.

It was always clear to me that it wasn't intentional, but there it was, and the discomfort was worse for the fact that I knew I could never say anything to them about it, because they would either feel terrible, or they would conclude that I was hypersensitive and draw away from me slightly; neither of these options seemed like a win to me. One instance in particular was related to the one black girl that joined my grade briefly in high school. I never really became good friends with her, and my perception is that we both deliberately maintained a neutral attitude towards each other, to avoid the assumption that we were going to stick together just because we had the same skin tone. We had friends in common though, and I found that after a number of months I began hearing from a few of my friends, "You should go out with her!"

Up to that point, none of my friends had made any recommendations at all of that sort to me - I was (and still am) a relatively shy person when it comes to women, and I think some of the kids translated this into a suspicion that I was gay. But once they decided to break the ice, of course, my internal reaction was pretty negative - "What, you think the two black kids outta get together, eh?", "If she's so great, why don't you ask her out?!", and "There are plenty of hot girls in this school, why exactly are you only recommending this one to me??"

My public reaction was just to drop the issue without taking any action on it. In retrospect, I have mixed regrets about handling it that way - from what I heard, she was actually an extremely vibrant personality, kind of an edgy tomboy, probably exactly the kind of person I would have wanted to be close to. I also believe now that there are a variety of plausible non-racially related reasons why they may have brought her up to me, one of the simplest among them being that she may have asked them to [note: if you were there, you may recognize this as wishful thinking on my part]. I'll never know for sure.


So, after bringing these experiences back to mind, I thought about the similarities between the two events, i.e. the two distinct interpretations they each elicited from the majority participants versus the minority participants. Namely, the majority participants (the guys, and my friends) had pure intentions, and the negative interpretation of their actions wasn't even on their radar as an element of the situation. The minority participants (the girls, and myself) could acknowledge the possibility of pure intentions, but still couldn't put aside the negative feeling caused by the form of the comment.

How is someone supposed to sort out the correct way of behaving? Both views of the same event are absolutely valid, given the information that each party has at their disposal. People in these situations don't typically engage in a philosophical debate with themselves before they react, so there's little hope that they're going to think hard about the opposing viewpoint and moderate their reaction. It has to be an a priori understanding, something that pre-educates everyone about how to navigate this type of misunderstanding.


The glorious punchline: I'm not sure how to solve this problem. But I did think of analogy that feels very accurate, and may shed light on how to be sensitive to the stress of being in the minority. Picture a victim of Chinese Water Torture. Supposedly the art of driving a person insane, by randomly dripping water on the exact same spot of their strapped-down head. I've heard that, along with the intense psychological stress it creates, there is also a significant amount of real pain. So then imagine this victim escapes from their torturers, only to find themselves caught in someone's sprinkler system. Some of the drops will hit the tender spot on their head, and it will cause far more psychological and physical pain than a drop of water really should, but whether or not it makes sense to the innocent sprinkler, the pain is real.

Similarly, a person in an oppressed minority of one sort or another is randomly, but steadily poked in the exact same place over and over again (whether they shrug it off or not). After a while, it really becomes difficult to decipher the intentions of the one poking that spot. After a longer while, it becomes difficult to care what their intentions are. It's just irritating.

On the other hand, I'm a staunch believer of the idea that intentions must be taken into account, always. There are so many little feuds in the world that are constantly created out of thin air, simply because of a mistake or a misunderstanding, that honorable positive intentions have to be respected where they're seen, or they'll be stamped out through negative reinforcement. From this perspective, I've felt that it was my responsibility to look for reasons not to be offended, and to grow thick skin. I think it's possible to be supportive of the overall fight to end discrimination without finding each instance and taking it to court.

So homeowners, turn off your sprinklers when you see someone hurting in its shower. Tortured masses, recognize the scars that your victimization left you with, and plan ahead. Carry an umbrella.

Michael Kintner: Microsoft Word 2007 won't close correctly

Michael Kintner: Microsoft Word 2007 won't close correctly

I love elegant solutions to obscure problems. My wife's copy of Office 2007 suddenly started failing to open documents when clicked on, and hanging up on close - going into this loop of freezing, "finding a solution", and restarting itself. I had also seen this behavior with one of my clients, but hadn't run across this solution. Many man-hours down the drain on this one, but Michael's post is the cherry at the end of the tunnel, er, the light at the bottom of the bowl, er, yeah. Rock on with your bad self, Michael, and many thanks!!

Thoughts on healthcare

I'm currently being bombarded by pleas for grassroots participation in events whose goal is to cut through the misinformation cloud that's being perpetuated by those that wish to derail or at least entangle the health care reform effort. When is the health care reform legislation agenda going to stop shifting around, so I can contribute informed and specific support instead of blind support for this nebulous notion of "the system need reform, but on Tuesday it's going to have a public option, on Wednesday it's going to be a coop-based system, etc"? I strongly support a government-run single-payer system with regulated costs. I also support a branch of the health care system that is exempt from that regulation but is also not covered by the public insurance, to allow a space for continued innovation and profit. I envision something like this:

Company X develops a new technique for robotic surgery. The new machines that are the result of that research are manufactured and sold into the hospitals that chose not to opt into the public health system's patient pool. The procedures that use these machines are performed at those hospitals (at prices comparable to today's insanity) until they've developed a usage history and a few years of profit-taking. Then those machines are sold into the public health system hospitals at a fixed (regulated) profit margin with respect to the actual manufacturing costs. Rinse, repeat.

I would gladly pay increased tax dollars to make this happen.

I'm not against the concept of people with $$ being able to spend it on getting the best cutting-edge health care available. I am against a system where that's the only option; i.e. people without $$ are unable to get access to base-level health care and technology that's been around for years without being completely leveled financially.

Net Neutering Reality