Thin air and leaving trails

I love mountain trails.  I could actually live in the mountains with no regrets.  The air is thin, granted. But that forces me to be in better physical condition than I otherwise would be.  The people are just as thin (in population), but that forces me to choose the thinking habits in my own mind better.  I can see all around me from the mountain peaks, even the shorter peaks.  Getting there requires going through some thickly forested areas, but the view from the top is stunning and clear.  I can see the whole picture.  In the forests it seems like there are some patterns, but they break off - the trail bends behind the trees - and the patterns have to be guessed at.

Beyond this, there is not a road for the masses of cars to come to the peaks.  Just little trails.  There aren't that many that want to breathe thin air, and be guessing in the forests up to the peak.  Usually, the trail is wider at the foot of the mountain and narrows the closer to the peak it gets. 

I wish I could talk to educators who deal with the masses, who make plans for the masses, who teach ideas that could define people, but that are handled in such uniform ways as to dilute the information for the youth they care so much for.  Could we teach some basics that allow the ability to walk and then turn people loose on the trails they seek?  People like to find trails that lead to peaks.  It's just that many peaks exist, and some like to travel to far peaks, others to closer peaks, still others who hang around the closest peaks.

Teachers don't have the knowledge of all the trails to all the peaks, but they do have the knowledge of the survival skills, the fundamentals, needed.  However, these skills are not learned passively but actively.  Youth need to be given information, yes, but more importantly, they need practice at gathering actual wood and starting actual fires.  They should hunt actual animals, snakes, fish, and pick berries to put in their actual stomachs so they will know what the trails are like that lead to the peaks around them.  They have to sit around fires and sleep under the actual stars at night.  They have to get used to actual distances in order to build stamina on the trails that lead to thin air at the peaks.

I love mountain trails.  And while all of the above is true, there is one kind of mountain peak that requires people to find their own ways to get to the top.  The best, but the most difficult trails of all are the ones that people leave behind them, the ones they forge.  I'm thinking that there might be a few more people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, and Elon Musk if the practice for survival skills were more in abundance.  It would be easier to follow small trails that disappear, and so leave the opportunity to leave one behind, if the survival skill to follow trails were taught before people left for going on their journeys.

I look forward to the day when Muriel Strode's statement is commonplace:

 Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. 

(from her poem, "Wind-wafted Wild Flowers," 1903)

Lacking the last word

I can describe the setting - I was there - didn't want to be there, but there nonetheless.  As it turned out, I was actually thankful I was there
.

It was a normal day.  I had gone to school and come to work for the evening.  My first job that evening at the little mom and pop grocery store was to stack the 1 lb. blocks of butter in the corner of the freezer.  The freezer wasn't that big, probably 20 feet by 15 feet.  Sides of beef hung from the meat hooks that lined the length of it.  At the time four or five sides were hanging on the 8 hooks available.  Sundry other items were in the freezer also like frozen dinners and ice cream.

So, I was stacking...  Unexpectedly, the freezer door opened.  I heard someone say something outside the door.  Then, I saw the cashier from the front of the store being pushed into the freezer.  Also at her back was the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.  As soon as the door shut, she put her forefinger to her lips to tell me not to make any noise.  The door opened again, then the butcher was shoved inside.  I knew there was one more person in the store, the head cashier.

About a minute later, he came stumbling in because they pushed him very hard with the barrel of the gun after pistol-whipping him.  We all heard something like an ice pick being put through the handle of the door so that we couldn't open it from the inside.  The cashier told us all that we were supposed to wait 10 minutes before trying to get out.  I guess, the thieves didn't trust us since they secured the door from the outside.

That was the second time I had feared for my life.  I don't think the thieves knew I was there since I had been working in the freezer, but I really thought that after they had pushed the head cashier into the vault, they would step in and mow us all down.  I experienced mortal fear at that moment.

A few times in my life I have been minding my own business, doing what I was supposed to be doing.  All of a sudden, I didn't want to be there, but I was nonetheless.  For the times that I now know what the ending of the situation was, I can say, as it has turned out, that I am glad I was there.

But, there are those times... the ones where I don't have the last word of how things will turn out... that make me uneasy...  I fear the outcome will not be what I want it to be...

Matter of orientation

The young man took my tickets to see the movie and said, "Thank you.  Theater 2 is on the right."  I migrated to the snack counter, ordered popcorn and a drink, then turned to my right.  Theaters 9-14 were on the right.

Didn't he just say the theater was on the right? I thought to myself.

Then I realized that we were facing each other as I handed him the tickets.  The young man's right was my left.  Yes, indeed, the theater was on his right, my left.

Perspective is one of those very important realizations in living.  Orientation is probably a synonym to perspective, though not always.  In this case, it is.  I forget sometimes that I am not the only one on this Earth.  Some people are facing a different and, sometimes, opposite direction.  Talking to my sister the other day, I told her that some political view we were discussing was a view of rabid Tea Party members.  She replied, "Don't be too harsh.  I am one of those Tea Party people."

I can't help but trace my actions as I look at my personal history.  Yes, I have changed my orientation almost completely from the one I had when I graduated college.  Life's experiences were in front of me then.  Now they're not.  The theater room used to be on my right.  Now, after treading through life, the theater room is on my left.  I'm not disoriented.  I reversed my orientation. 

At the theater, I ended up in the right theater when I changed my original orientation from when I faced the ticket taker.  I think the outcome will be the same when I finally make my way to life's destination.

A crystal ball view

I would love to gaze into a crystal ball and catch a glimpse of my life 10 years from now.  I hope I would see a great quality of life - traveling to various regions of the U.S., enjoying my progeny, engaging in meaningful and productive projects.  I hope I wouldn't see a pain-wracked body - stuck at home, unable to visit the homes of children and grandchildren, aloof from the society surrounding me.

In ten years, technology will be farther down the road.  Communication should be one of the easiest endeavors on the Earth.  Videos will dominate the type of communication being sent.  Television will be much more interactive than it is now and will only be watched through apps that stream the programming one wants to see.  Transportation for personal needs will be almost fully electric.  Smart houses will represent about 40-50% of the housing market.

Ten years will bring great innovations in medicine as well.  Genetic manipulation will begin creeping into treatments for diseases that originate from gene order.  Diseases that are generated by cellular proliferation will be controlled.  Diabetes and heart disease will begin to disappear because nutrition and complications from lack of nutrition will have an almost 0 balance, meaning that diet and habitual unhealthy intake will offset each other.

And yes, dreams once held will have been realized.  That will be worth experiencing on the way through the ten-year period.  I should be one happy man a decade from now.

Work away

I whipped around the corner from the main street of the housing addition onto my own street.  It was clear of cars on the curb.  Every car was in its driveway.  The air carried no noise from any of the yards facing the street and no sight of human movement from the lawns, in front or back of the houses.  Late Sunday afternoons don't represent a great hub of activity in the neighborhood.

I was glad, though, for all of the inaction.  I needed to relax after a full day's work.  At least it was a good tired, relief after successful effort.  Good food and favorite drink topped off the beginning to an evening that rejuvenated depleted energy.

I won't say that these days are ones of stepping in high cotton, but but are days of momentary relaxation, pockets of rejuvenation.  I'll take them.

Charting life

Establishing a baseline is a necessity in charting progress.  Baselines help in  finding averages, deviations, anomalies, and outliers.  All four of these yield useful information.

As I evaluate my life, I find all four of these in the decades I have lived.  I find behavior that is average.  That helps people know how I will act in given situations.  Deviations, anomalies, and outliers are also present.  Usually, I see them as I enter a new phase in my life.  They are outlying points at first, but then those points become the new normal.

But there is one example of a deviation (at about the 4th standard deviation level) that is my one wish in life since it appeared.  I have highlighted it because the time represents such life-filled vitality and enjoyment, watching it, hoping it will slide down the deviation scale into the field of normal.  I have faith!

All I can say

This is about what you would expect from the academic establishment.

In July, Anne Mangen of Stravanger University in Norway published, along with her research team, a study of people reading a fictional story from a paperback book and from a kindle.  Her results were that the group using paperback books remembered less about sequence of plot than the people using Kindles.  She performed a similar experiment last year with 10th graders who read from an iPad and from a .pdf document.  The .pdf readers scored higher on a test.

Manger was at least a true scholar in offering conclusions by saying the studies "suggest" that paper or the imitation of paper, in the study using .pdf documents, help people perform better on tests and provide a better mental framework for remembering sequence in particular.

This is an attempt to try to reverse what is happening in reality.  Manger acknowledges that other studies show a tremendous decline in the number of people reading books.  She is trying to stem the tide of this trend.

It's not going to happen!

Here's reality.  The new world requires interactivity.  Reality is not answering questions on a test.  It's interacting with your environment as you learn.  Disney learned this several years ago.  They launched ABCmouse.com and have young children ages 2-5 learning on an iPad all kinds of things because they interact with the tablet.  Learning is not compartmentalized, i.e. read something first, then write answers over what is read.  Children in STEM schools know this too.  Project based learning allows the brain to more lastingly learn (to form synapses along dendrites for long term organization and storage, to use technical jargon) even if the amount of time to "learn" or register understanding takes longer.  Learning is integrated into projects and interactive with the environment.

A study like Menger's also ignores what has recently occurred and what is about to occur.  The Apple watch is just the beginning of something huge.  Icons and apps on your wrist to give you real time interaction in a format handier than your cell phone, quicker than your cell phone, and with improved Siri speaking your results to you will make both books and Kindles archaic almost immediately.  The next wave of technology using 3D holographic information delivery will seal the coffins for paperbacks and Kindles alike.  After that comes artificial intelligence.  At that time, nothing resembling paperbacks will be the way to learn information or enjoy a story.

I knew the academic world would have a contingency of die-hards wanting to stem the tide to a world that is a quantum leap from the world they lived in most of their lives.




All I can say is, "Prepare your coffins."

The gift of expression

The experiment went like this.

You will have someone to teach who doesn't know your language.  Your job is to teach him your language, 1 on 1.  You will be with this person one time a week for five weeks for two hour sessions. Make a prediction of how much English this person will know.

OK.  I will be able to talk to the person in much the same way as I would talk to a child who has had one year of formal schooling.  (S)he should be able to take directions, find his or her way around the environment, and tell someone else what is happening to him or her. 

Really? 10 hours and the langauge capability of a 2nd grader?  People say you are amibitious or arrogant to think you could give a person the same skill in communication as someone who has been raised with a language for 7 years.

We'll see.  How can anyone give the gift of language to someone so easily?  Of course, it's really not so easy.  The ability to give language quickly would have been years and years in the making.

OK.  T-10 sessions and counting.  Time's a wasting.

Flip off that switch

There I was, sitting on a 20-year-old couch.  All the lights in the house were turned off.  They were only turned on after the sun had completely set, then turned off around 10:00 PM so that the other person could get 8 hours of sleep.  The air conditioner was set on 82 so that it wouldn’t turn on unless it was needed.  82 degrees was the point where it was needed.   A ceiling fan overhead spun with a clicking noise.  The only phone in use in the house was a land line.  Portable phones like the ones popular in the 1980s were placed at 3 locations in the house.

A TV was in the room, but turned on only for an hour in the morning to catch the news for the day.  For the rest of the day until evening, the TV was set on a symphonic music station.  In the evening we watched the news again and 2 hours worth of Waltons reruns on the Hallmark station.  Occasionally the channel was turned to the Inspire channel for a movie.  Together we watched one of those on Labor Day.  The story happened immediately following World War II where the storyline traced a woman who had to find her fiancé because of amnesia.  The love story was in black and white.

 There was enough conversation to make the day pass without feeling lonesome, but there were many pockets of silence also.   Computer use to accomplish work, banking, or any other online function was out of the question since no internet existed in the house or anywhere nearby.  My cell phone, luckily, did bring me the internet, but typing and banking took twice as long because of the tiny screen.

Everything in the setting was a result of a rigid belief in extreme frugality and extreme adherence to routine and religious piety.  No television programs could be watched that had the remotest possibility of “cursing” being used in it.  Only 3 channels were watched as a result of that belief.  Outside, the weather was bright, sunny, and 95 degrees.  Inside, only light filtering through window blinds lighted the areas of the living room.   Lights in the kitchen were permitted during cooking times, but not before or after.  Bathroom lights shone only while the room was in use.  The same was true for bedrooms. If I left a light on behind me as I left a hallway or room, I was reminded within two steps of leaving the area that I needed to turn back to flip off the switch.

One’s religious values were scrutinized in this place.  A couple of times I was chastised for some of my interpretations of the Bible.  Once I was told that I wasn’t following the example practiced by Christians in the Bible.  Another time I was questioned about whether or not I was reading the Bible.  I was probed to see if I still used the particular phrases of my childhood religious denomination.  I failed this test miserably because I refused to use them even though I knew what they are.

 

Yes, I had to check the date several times a day to make sure I had not become a time traveler and landed in the era of the austerity of the 1950s or 1960s.  No, it was 2014.  My only word for this experience is unbelievable.

I sat on that 20-year-old couch for a little over a week.  The shrouded, insular existence created by the other person was a result of nostalgia, mistrust of people and modern technology, selective memory of events from the good ol’ days, and a rabid belief in the divine inspiration and literal interpretation of the Bible.  Just unbelievable.  I will definitely buy a t-shirt that says I survived this environment. on the back I will have printed, " Unbelievable!!!"

It's the big one, y'all

Math and language, in the electric impulse stage in the brain, are driven by the same logic.  The evidence for this is from the way math and English behave.  However, most of the brain studies are trying to determine what people are thinking by identifying areas of the brain that contain electrical impulses when formulating thoughts of math or language.  That is helpful as a first foray into the study of the brain, but it tells nothing about what is being thought, what is similar in thought, or even what triggers a thought.

     

Gary Lynch’s work is a refreshing break from this direction of study because he has been trying to find out how thought is registered and remembered.  His work has been ongoing for the last 30 years and will serve as a first step in working with electric impulses.  Once we know how a thought is registered as a memory, the next step is to analyze the stages between stimulus and recall.  After that,the similarities of thought behavior can be observed.

Observations into what you ask? Into the pathways of operations of logic.  Finding what causes the various behaviors determining one’s thought.  Here’s an example of thought behavior.  The use of the adverb in English is mostly not a word order governed item.  The subject/verb/object order is definitely an ordered item for understanding the correct semantics.  The same logic applies in math.  Addition is not an ordered item but subtraction is; multiplication isn’t, but division is.  The same logic underlying the reason for not ordering the placement of adverbs and addends and ordering the operations of subject/verb/object and multiplication seem to hint at what the future of language holds.

                                       

In the big scheme of things, math is considered efficient, eloquent.  Language is considered imprecise, ambiguous.  (I know that some say that language is precise, but the fact that the words ambiguity, nebulous, and fuzzy can apply to an expression hint that language is otherwise.  Also the redundancies built into constructions such as subject/verb agreement and two aspects such as perfective and progressive conveying the same idea tell me that language is not precise).  When communication passes the threshold of 70% for being visual in nature, needing only words to identify a category type (like the names of buttons or names of an axis on a graph), then efficiency and eloquence will be heightened necessities.  The logic used for math is already the same as the one used for English, so logic will help in organizing language use to make it more precise, less ambiguous.

The catalyst for this change is imminent, within my lifetime.  I may be 80 when 3D, holographic, visual communication will be the rule rather than the exception as the principal way for communication, but at that point, the logic for math and language will be closer than they ever have been.  When it happens, I will celebrate that the slow, antiquated, inefficient, inadequate, and fuzzy nature of reading and writing has morphed into a smoother, more efficient, more precise method of expression.  Spoken language as well will tend to pare itself into a more efficient way of expression.  I suspect it will trend toward consolidation into one language, whichever one is deemed most efficient (fewest sounds, fewest redundancies, most component oriented, etc.)

.

The brain seeks the most efficient way to accomplish its tasks.  It will do the same with the two lines of logic – numbers and words.  I know regular people are ready for efficiency in language.  Business is also driven by efficiency, so I know they will be accepting.  Others, who are slower in accepting what is happening in the real world rather than an artificial world will have their boat swamped. 

I remember so well Mayor Nagan giving a press conference two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.  He told the people listening to the sound of his voice that New Orleans had always known that there might be a time when “the big one” would hit the city and cause a great catastrophe.  Then he added a comment about Katrina, “This is the big one.”  Many ignored his words, thinking he was overly dramatic, so they didn’t evacuate.  Many lives were lost as a result.

      

Those who are not realists about the disappearance of reading and writing, as we know its use, need to be given the same warning.  This is the big change that will transform the way business is conducted.  If you don’t evacuate, well, your future will be directly affected.