Schooling younger salespeople

I am amazed sometimes at the approach people take when they want to offer me a deal.  They think I'm really stupid,  I had one such conversation last night.  A publisher called and wanted to market my books for me.  The sales person launched into a line of questioning about my book to "hook" me into talking with her.  She asked me questions like how I had come up with the idea and how long it took to write.  As if she was interested.  Somebody who's really been around the block doesn't fall for those tricks, but she was young and wanted to treat me like I was 20 and dumb.

When she told me of all her marketing strategies, she wanted me to jump at the chance to join with her company, no questions asked, and marvel at the prowess of the her company which would put all other companies to shame.  When I balked, I could tell she had been given a plan B for people like me who balk.

She reloaded and reiterated all the marketing tools available to her company and began casting dispersions on the publishing company I was using.  Finally she got around to mentioning the price of all the marvels of her company's marketing ability.  I, of course, thought the price was much too high.  What I told her, though, was that I wanted a different deal than her company's standard package.  I wanted equal participation.  I had already done my work.  They needed to show me theirs, then we would profit together.

She couldn't deal with this off-the-track counter-move to her offer.  So, she reiterated all the marvels of her company, then offered the same deal she had originally offered.  I said no, and then reiterated my counter-offer.  She had to get her supervisor.  He was older and understood exactly what I was doing, so he promptly got off the phone in a less than gracious fashion.

They weren't exactly scammers.  They were selling for a legitimate company.  But, it's amazing that people think they can gain a profit by cold-calling complete strangers and getting them to fork over several thousand dollars.  Who really does that?!  Young people have to learn that hard lesson I guess.

About slaves and breaking chains

I had a recent discussion with a young adult from Russia about the idea of grading in education these days.  She described her experience in Russia.  Then we compared to the system used in the United States.  It was the same in both countries.  Then we talked about what we thought the results of such a system have yielded.  She had studied psychology and is currently taking courses for her masters degree in psychology, so she understood well the ramifications of giving everyone an "average" of all the grades they make.  She agreed it has led to mediocrity.

So we talked of various other methods for grading and tried to predict the ramifications for them as well.  One of the more interesting methods was taking the grades a person made and plotting them on a chart of standard deviations.  The first grade over the first standard deviation or the highest grade before the first deviation would be the grade the student should receive.  This in turn would teach the lesson of incentive and trying to do well for yourself.  That translates to the idea used by business in giving people bonuses and promotions based on merit.  This also eliminates the idea that if one can do well, then it is recognized rather than pulled down by the law of averages.

We spoke of conditioning.  Those who knew about receiving the highest grade if it appeared over the first standard deviation or right below it, would probably try harder to make sure that the deviated grade would  be higher than the time before. Of course, there would be those that never completely understood how the standard deviation works, so they would plug along without realizing the pull that low grades have on a complete distribution of grades.

At that point the discussion moved to Jean Piaget and the idea that people go through cognitive stages.  It seems that some people make the middle adolescent concrete stage a stopping point instead of a way station along the developmental journey.  Those people understand the idea of money buying goods and services and make decisions to stay right at that level.  Others understand delayed gratification and are willing to put off goals and achievements until they have put themselves in a better position to live a long, productive life, the abstract and advertent stages of life.

We mused about what might cause one to stop at a concrete stage and what might drive one to continue through to the later stages.  We ventured into the territory of making a correlation between a grading system that produced an "average" and a system that rewarded more determination and understanding.

We went on to another topic soon after that.  But, I have reflected on that conversation since then.  What if the "average" method of grading really did have a strong an effect on people as we ventured that day?  What if people are so conditioned to mediocrity that the law of percentages of any other psychological damaging cycle applied here?  You know, like the percentage of children whose parents go to prison also go to prison.  Or the percentage of alcoholic children who also become alcoholics?  Chains are hard to break.

I certainly lean that way.  The grading chain would be hard to break.  I can see its enslaving effects. And, it would take as much an effort for people to free themselves from it as from any other strong, suffocating, conditioned influence they had experienced.  How freeing would it be to offer a better way to the generation coming up.  We should do that ASAP!

Release

I read a short story over the last two days about buried memories (Beyond What Words Can Capture).  The longer I live, of course, statistically the more memories there are that get buried.  The story was about memories that get buried because they were so painful, and the point of the story was to talk about them so that katharsis would take place.

I know about painful memories.  I have more than a few.  They come from every area of life - education, religion, parenting, death, companionship, family, and human relations in general.  These are not mere disappointments, they caused great disruption and emotional upheaval.  If I think of them all at one time, I feel like a complete failure.

Fortunately, the events took place over a number of years, in different decades of my life.  I am not here to say that these events were handled properly or even that my reactions were noble.  I am only here to say that I acknowledge that great pain happens in life, and in order to go on, burying all or portions of a memory of an event helps in allowing good to replace the great failures.

One of the themes of the story was to show that finding a friend to help in bringing meaning to unfortunate events is so necessary in moving forward.  I look back at my intense traumas and see that that was true for me.  Without friends in just the right places at just the right moments, the outcome and direction of my life could have been different.

We all need nudges to move on.  We all need to enjoy our lives.  In one way of looking at life, we all need to bury portions of our difficult and intense disturbances.  Then we can release a modified version of ourselves to enjoy new life, that is, life from the point of recovery of such an event.  These days, that's what I am all about.  Life changes from drudgery to enjoyment when I practice that principle.

Working on it

Perhaps I don't understand human dynamics as I should.  I have to deal with young adults all the time - you know, the group called the Millennials.  I hear all the time that they feel like they are an entitled group.  I guess I don't understand that word well enough because I don't really see the characteristic, as I understand it, applying to the group as a whole.  I have read the occasional article about this group, so I have seen some of their expectations and likes and dislikes that writers think they have.  What I see and what I read sometimes match, but mostly not.

Their is one characteristic that seems to apply to more than 50% of the ones I know, though.  Many of the ones in this group resist wanting to become adults in the area of responsibility and fallout from irresponsibility.  I call it the Peter Pan effect.  They want to live, it seems, in Never Never Land where every episode of life ends nicely and has tidy effects regardless of how bad the behavior is in the episode.

Eventually, they learn there is no Tinkerbell, no Peter Pan, no Captain Hook, and no pixie dust.  But is seems that the passage from age 18 to around 32 is a hard knocks university for them.  They have to learn that the raw, overly used expletives in their speech have ramifications.  People don't accept what they say as having moral value or social value.  Their use of many expletives marks their generation's speech, but it doesn't leave people feeling good after they have finished speaking.  

They have to learn that virtual friends are mostly friends that have images, but no real substance to their character.  The images are all about the "selfie" taken for a profile picture, not about learning from each other how to live together.  So they live separately behind good profiles that don't match the real person behind the profile.  Encounters with the real people behind the profile leave them feeling very dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

They also have to learn that people who make plans but don't keep them create the domino effect, a new concept to them apparently.  Not keeping appointments as they have said they would really does alienate acquaintances and friends.  The have to learn that appreciation of friendship is a designation to be earned, not assigned to them automatically.

Somewhere around age 32, it seems that some type of awareness finally creeps in that the world really does have episodes that don't end nicely and tidily and that bad behavior really does have a negative cumulative effect on their surroundings.  As to why it takes about a decade and a half for them to gain that awareness is the particular human dynamic I don't understand.  But, I'm working on that.

It really has happened already

I saw a Facebook picture of a long-standing colleague of mine in a bookstore.  The picture was an ad for Half-Price Books.  I thought it was really unusual for this friend to be in such an ad.  She and I were going to co-write a book at one time back in the year 2000 about the coming decade's effect on reading and writing.  We both thought that all the new technology would have a ravaging effect on reading and writing.  Unfortunately, her life led her in a different direction from our task in writing that book.  But, she has since received her doctorate in education and is currently a principal in a high school in the North Texas area.  Conversations with her between the year 2000 and now have shown me that she hasn't changed her mind from the days when we were mapping out chapters to write of the coming demise of reading and writing.

So, I thought it strange to be perusing through my Facebook images and see my friend's picture advertising a book store.  I just wrote one word in my comment on her picture.  Books? 

Her answer confirmed what we all know to be true 17 years past that millennial year of planning.  Really, Barnes and Noble developed the Kindle just to stay in the game.  But they, like all the others, know what the end game is for reading.  If you walk into a modern Barnes and Noble, you will see the number of aisles dedicated to books have dwindled.  So, that is why my friend's response to my comment was something that made me reply with You know I'm going to have to write a blog about this. LOL. 

She really had not changed her stance on reading and writing.  Half-Price Books needed all the advertising help they could get, even having a good doctor of education pose beside its name in exchange for a discount on a couple of old LPs she was purchasing - music, not even books.  I'm still laughing.

Let's celebrate - no, not really

Well, well, well.  The result that everyone wanted has been 100 years in the making, but it is finally coming to fruition.

High School Seniors make A's

This year celebrates the centennial for the compulsory education laws in the United States.  Mississippi in 1917 was the last state to pass such a law for its students.  The idea, of course, was that the U.S. would be better off with an educated work force with a by-product of everyone being able to perpetuate the idea of democracy because they would be an enlightened public.

Well, congratulations to the U.S. for seeing that everyone not only gets an education, but an excellaent one at that, because now half of graduating seniors make As as they pass into society as adults.

I am sure you can hear me laughing hysterically at this point.  Seriously!  And I'm also sure you have tried to like carry on like a conversation with like one of the like seniors who has like graduated like from a 2017 class.  It's quite disturbing.

This class of seniors graduated with a 24 point drop in the average SAT score from last year's average, which had also dropped from the previous year.  Every year states publish articles in their newspapers railing against how poorly students have performed on their states' tests.  Students from this class never had a 100 point grading system in their entire school career.  The lowest grade any student could make was 50.  So their A is from a 50 point playing field rather than a 100 point field.  Statistics from this class, if disaggregated into ethnic groups, have a at least two subgroups that have one of the lowest graduating rates in 40 years.

But... okay, let's celebrate those As and ignore the crumbling system that produced them.

A formal goodbye

At this point, the die has been cast.  Over the last ten years the world has changed from print-intensive to digital-file-intensive.  If I "write a note" to someone, it is by text or email - a digital file. In two more years, texting will be only for those who learned how to text and capped their knowledge of how to use technology at that point. Most new cars being sold today can change text to voice if you receive a text while driving or change your own voice to text to send to someone.  But, the next step is already on the rise.  A lot of people even now use video messages, such as Glide, Tango, Skype, Hangouts, ooVoo, Peer, and iVideo, to send short messages.  Even if you don't want to send messages, people like to have fun by sharing their experiences.  SnapChat knows this and sells glasses that record 10 seconds of video of whatever you are looking at, stores it in the cloud, and sends it to anyone by voice command.

Probably not in the public schools because they lag from 5-10 years behind, but everywhere else - students in schools, universities, corporate training sessions, professional and continuing education development for medicine, law, engineering, technology, and sciences - printed materials are not being used.  People are imparting information through video means, objects from 3D printers, 3D simulations, and holographic presentations.

It's really too late in the game now to stop reading and writing from carrying the load of sharing information any longer.  The two are being relegated more and more to minor chores.  This blog itself will change when 2017 changes to 2018 into a video blog.  It's hypocritical at the very least to continue in written form.  But what better way to illustrate the change from the written word to the visual world than to celebrate the end of the ten-year war that has outlined and tracked the demise of reading and writing by dropping the written version of this blog in favor of a video version.

To the dinosaurs among us, the meteorite has hit the Earth, exploded, and created the catastrophic forces of water deluge, mach 1 sound waves, and burning rain of rock and Earth from the force of the strike that will completely eliminate the species.  Death is imminent.  There will not be a funeral.  People will move on, not using print, but the devices they carry (for now), to present, transmit, receive, and enjoy the world around them and preserve any knowledge they want to perpetuate.

Modern sham

Education in the modern world is really a sham compared to what it should be.

What?  Why would you say that?

Well, have you ever gone through a drive-thru of a fast food restaurant.  Who hasn't!  The experience is the same all across the country.  You drive to the order menu, order whatever, receive at the pick-up window, and drive away.  When you look in the sack at least two blocks and two traffic lights away, you realize you ordered a chicken sandwich and you got a hamburger.  Or you cut the onions and your hamburger is loaded with them.  Or you said, "No cheese please," and they put two slices on the sandwich.  Or you got someone else's order.  Or you ordered and paid for two sandwiches, french fries, and a drink.  When you opened the sack - right, now fries.  Since these orders were put together by teenagers, usually, you have to think These are  supposed to be students of a world class educational system.  We're in trouble if they represent the whole. Oh, no, they do.  Because you have the same experience no matter what the brand name of the drive-thru, no matter which city, no matter which cuisine, no matter what state.

Yeah, these are the students that are making 70% or higher on tests, homework, projects, and final grades.  And talk to a university professor to see if gets any better.  Talk to human resource interviewers to see if their entry level applicants are any better.  Talk to the government agents who are trying to collect on student loans.  Talk to the voters who convinced Bernie Sanders to allow free college tuition for all students who want to attend college.  Talk to the parents, and there are many, many, who have 30-year-old children living in their homes.

The only thing modern education seems to be producing is a group of people whose 70% knowledge of a general curriculum tells them that what they have learned is nothing or next to nothing.  In 10 more years when society's adult population will be paying the piper for these educated people's lack of knowledge about general matters, a huge portion of adults are going to find it hard to exist above the subsistence level.  Lots of them.  Lots and lots of them.  If there is a time coming when the Haves will take the opportunity to take from the Have Nots, this will be the time.  I'll probably witness it.  By then, I hope to have my spot in the top 5% of the nation consolidated.  But for many... I already feel for them.

What people give up

I sit on Easy Street if I think about it.  I really don't have to leave my house except for work and exer.cise.  It's a self-contained bubble.  I eat there, watch t.v. there, sleep there, compute there, and enjoy year-round 74 degree temperature there.  Sometimes I drive to the store, but I don't have to.  I can order nearly all food to my front door.  I can order anything online, really, so that I never have to go to a store.  I can receive clothing, shoes, computers, furniture, dessert, vitamins, prescriptions,just whatever.  It's really a great day and age to live in.

But then, occasionally, I get to see something else that still exists in the world.  I had an occasion to visit with some young people who were in the U.S. from other countries.  They were all here on student visas because they wanted the education that America offers.  Those with an American education, they said, catapult themselves far ahead of the crowd when they return.  One young lady told me she comes every single day of the week without fail to her classes.  She gets to the school after riding the light rail 2 hours in the mornings.  Every afternoon is the same trip - two hours to her house to study.  But she will return to Vietnam as a pharmacist and be able to have the highest quality of life there. 

Another young man's story made me really grateful that I really don't have to lift a finger anymore, but reminded me of some of the days gone by.  Originally he rode the light rail to school, but then he moved so that he could be closer to the school.  He still walked to and from, and everywhere else he wanted to go.  Finally, he was able to buy a bicycle.  Now, it takes him only 30 minutes to ride to and from.  When he returns with his MBA to Nigeria, he will outstrip any of his home-grown colleagues with opportunities for business and a luxurious life because he will be paid handsomely.  

Even students from China, the second leading economy in the world, come to the U.S. for the same reason.  One young woman wanted very much to get a graduate degree in international business because even though she was at the head of her classes in China, she knew that her income would be limited.  She wanted a degree that would allow her to be in her homeland as a business woman, but to have the added dimension of great respect from the business community because they valued international experience over the intelligent people who never left the country.  She worked diligently to learn English fluently so that she would have no disadvantage in the graduate school competing against native English-speaking Americans for the best grades.  She gave up her upper adolescent years to strive for her goals.  She has to live with people she doesn't know and has to make friends in different states as she pursues her education.

After these visits, I returned to my house, to my life of irrealis compared to the students I visited with.  I have had to do some hard things in life.  I haven't always been able to receive life sustenance at my doorstep.  But I am in awe of people who give away so much of their lives, much more than what I had to endure, to achieve a quality of life mainly from living in the best economy in the world and taking advantage of some of its perks.  I find my self grateful, and I admire those who live as I do, but who gave up friends, family, language, culture, and familiarity to accomplish a dream for a high quality of life.

Next phase please

One of the most amazing advances is the ability to stream a television subscription to any device.  I think it's amazing because of what it will pave the way for.  All communication is meant to be streamed.  The television companies have dominated the streaming business for 70 years.  But their shelf life is at an end.  Now people can choose when, where, and what they want to stream.  All that is needed  is an internet Reaconnection.

It follows that if I can receive video transmission of any kind on any device, that sooner or later, devices will begin to send and receive video transmissions much like we receive email and text at the moment.  It will just be video instead.  The capability already exists, it's just not packaged in consumable form at the moment.  However, when it becomes readily available, then no longer will people be willing to stop and text or stop antype an email.  They will simply press "record," then "send."  The video will play the message on the other end.

That will in turn put pressure on the industry that publishes books or any other type of printed material for both entertainment and education, even including the little short messages found in Twitter and Instant Messaging.

In case one wonders about the wisdom of leaving behind print, one has only to look at what happened with the fax machine.  The fax was useful for about a 15 year period, some of those years after .pdf files were available.  But, very soon after Adobe made available transmissible documents through digital files, electronic signatures were made into law.  A few years thereafter, real estate documents, legal documents, and other important filings. began to be used, and a person's real signature was no longer required.  PINs and digital IDs are a whole lot more valuable these days than signatures.  No one needed the fax machine any longer.  They're museum pieces now,

The world has changed.  Those who can't stream a live video on Facebook, who can't snapchat an experience, or who don't have a smart t.v. with streaming programs of what they want to watch will not do well in the phase that's coming.  The coming phase will be feature the populace wearing Fitbit-like bracelets for small amounts of information (not necessarily health related) and screens that transmit light beams for 3D viewing.  Clarenden Schools will fare well.  Businesses always adapt.  The legal world will not be far behind other businesses.  The medical profession will absolutely expand and become infinitely better at diagnosing and treating diseases.  The public will adapt (some of them kicking and screaming).  But the next 50 years will be a pole away from the last 50 years.  Imagine routine trips to Mars and doctors diagnoses sent to you without doctors' visits.  Imagine self-driven cars and electro-magnetic trains everywhere between cities.  Imagine wireless electricity and living in a home with mostly holographic furniture rather than real furniture.  Imagine never talking with someone if they only voice call.   They either show their faces or you will not accept their calls.

Ah-h-h the possiblities!!!  I think I'll do some meditating now by streaming I💗Radio from the t.v... kicking back to enjoy the next phase!

A new face

I found myself on a university campus today.  International students were learning English.  They had plans of continuing their educations at American universities, but had begun their educations by bringing their language skills up to near-native fluency levels before trying to listen to professors teach them their career knowledge.

The lesson started with a short speaking exercise in which each student answered a question from the professor.  At the first grammatical mistake made, the student had to stop speaking.  There was nothing from a book.  They listened to a song so they could learn vocabulary, cultural implications of phrases, idioms, and native pronunciation.  A speaking exercise occurred where students sat across from each other in rows.  They were given a topic and 3 minutes to discuss it.  When the 3 minutes were up, one side of the row moved one chair to their left so students could have new speaking partners.  Other activities came and went since this was a three-hour class.  One was a reading activity, but there were no books.  An internet website was used for the activity.  And one activity involved writing but there was no pen or paper.  Students were writing in an online journal, not with the end result as an essay but as a check for specific grammar evidence.  Writing was to support their speech.  They practiced listening by watching a psychologist speak on YouTube about how the brain remembers.  Comprehension check of this was done by oral rather than written questioning.

Amazing. A whole three-hour block of time with no books, no labs, very little reading and writing except to enhance their speaking abilities.  Now that's a good environment for learning a language.  And when the students came to class they had either a phone or a computer.  They sat at tables.  Each table had a plug built into it for their devices to charge.  The lesson included use of a USA Today app so that students could choose two pictures to complete an exercise where they came to a podium to speak about the pictures.  When it came time to type into their journals about a third of the students use their thumbs and fingers to type on their phones.  The others logged into their journal by computers and typed away. 

In just a few short years, this classroom experience, which has already been transformed from the laborious days of books, writing, and labs, into even a better environment because it will have a seamless environment between the real and virtual worlds and include even less writing and more interaction as a way of learning.  I cannot wait for the next five years to complete the evolution from a learning culture heavily invested in books, classroom, reading, writing, and desks in rows to a world of three dimensional learning, sometimes virtual bringing anything you want to study, no matter how remote, and sometimes real, interacting with physical object and people around you.

Yes, there was a ten-year war from 2007 to 2017.  Technology and visual presentation have annihilated education as it happened in 2007 and before.  The dinosaurs who wanted the status quo before all the changes have begun to die.  Now there is nothing holding the next phase of virtual and real integration from happening.  Alex Kipman in the video below will preview what is already being done and which will be done on a more widespread basis in the short term ahead. 

Can you imagine how much easier space exploration and colonization will be when students began learning with what happens on this stage?  (Most pertinent to the answer to this question is the 4 minutes between time slot 10:00 and 14:00 in the video.)

Leave it!!!

The ancient Greeks used a phrase, "This one having said, he said," is a literal translation of the Greek words.  In English, of course, such a word-for-word translation would be ludicrous to make.  English speakers don't speak this way.  If someone said something once, then says the same thing again, a translator surely would render the words said again, repeated, or reiterated.  He reiterated would be a sound translation of the Greek phrase because that is something English speakers would actually say or write.

How education is accomplished in this country troubles me a lot.  It seems to me that education of this country's children is a little like translating a Greek phrase word for word instead of trying to render a Greek phrase into a usable equivalent in English.  Yes, education has been around for a really, really long time in the world.  But, Plato and Edward DeVere/Shakespeare received really different types of education.  That's because they were educated about 2000 years apart.  One would hope the two were educated differently since they lived in vastly different time periods.

If I think back to the times of education around 1950-1975, I think of an education without computers, without cell phones, without Skype, without internet in a car that students drove to school.  I think of a time when students were expected to get jobs after school or do homework until supper time or later.  I think of a time when music came from AM radio and juke boxes.  In order to communicate to an outside source from one's own car, a person had to have a CB radio.  That's right.  The world was vastly different.

And yet, the schools today still educate as if they were in the same world.  When was the last time you saw a student using Skype to speak with someone else in another city or country for an assignment - right, you haven't.  When was the last time you saw a student use graphic information when telling a teacher how to solve a math problem - right, you haven't.  When was the last time a student was able to use a 3D printer to copy something for a project to work on - right, you haven't.  When was the last time you saw someone using his or her cell phone to make a YouTube presentation for the homework assigned - right, you haven't.  When was the last time you saw a classroom in which students used software from which to learn or compute from - right, you haven't.  When was the last time you saw video blog responses as a means of learning from others - right you haven't.  And when was the last time you saw someone experimenting with the next form of learning in today's classroom, the holographic platform - right, you haven't.

Plato is dead; DeVere is dead.  They left their marks to be sure, but the world has traveled 500 more times around the sun since DeVere.  And, it has traveled 50 more times around since last century's heydays of education.  Education today should not be just a little different.  It should be a quantum leap different from anything from the last half of the 1900s.  Methods should be a far cry different for sure!  Reporting and measuring those methods should reflect the complete difference from anything the late 1900s used as well.  Anything less than a complete departure from days gone by frauds students and families and keeps them from living a fruitful, qualitative life.

Let's leave the word-for-word translation business of education from the last century.  Let's translate education into the usable world of the present, something a quantum leap different from what has been!!!

Having an understanding

When people pronounce words, they are pretty unaware of the sounds they are producing.  I walked into a class not long ago where the students had just learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  In the IPA, each sound has a separate symbol, so it is much easier to isolate sounds than using the English alphabet which duplicates sounds for letters.  They were practicing words like pen and pin, then and than, where the spelling is different, having fun discovering how they really pronounced the words.  People think they are pronouncing the words differently when in reality, their dialects produce them in exactly the same way, sounding the same.  In speech usage, context determines which word is meant, not pronunciation, since they are pronounced the same.  Din and den is another pair among the many that could be cited here.

It's not true just in English either.  I have heard many a Spanish speaking person say Spanish pronunciation is easier than English pronunciation because each vowel only has one sound.  Of course, that is not true, just a perception or a learned precept.  Para, for example, has only one sound in some dialects, but has two in much of the regional Spanish in Texas.  The second a has a schwa sound rather than the mid-vowel pronunciation of the first vowel.  The word jabon, too, contains a dialect variant for the first sound of the word.  Some speakers pronounce it like an h in English while others pronounce like the Greek letter chi, the overly aspirated, non-plosive guttural consonant akin to k in English.

As it pertains to values and notions, I find that many people are unaware of their world view in comparison to those around them.  Perception and masks (like regional dialects) exist in various areas of life, affecting our world views, and people are blind to them.  One of the real trademarks of an education is being able to see something through more than one filter or mask.  That helps in establishing views and values that allow for more than one perception.  It prevents being notional about matters.  It allows for tolerance among friends and acquaintances.  It also helps us to choose sounder ideas about our own views from the different views that exist.  Understanding is a good medicine for many situations.  Awareness of why differences exist is the interim step to having an understanding.

At the end of twists and turns

Some people have made comments about the recent show Arrival.  In particular, I remember the comments they made about the language aspect portrayed in the movie.  The movie was very short on particulars, but it must have been enough to gain the respect of the public.

As I look at the first contact idea of sharing a language with another human species, I don't really have a cohesive theory about it.  However, I have given some thought about it since I heard a documentary about a man who claims to have heard an alien language and duplicated it for the television show.  It was a series of clicks, spaced like Morse Code dots and dashes.

In Arrival the language was communicated in written form, circles to be exact.  The circles have flame-like portions placed in different positions around the circle, and the flame-like designations seemed to be logographic or hieroglyphic in nature.  Of course, it was an invented language, but a cleverly conceived one.  The linguist in the movie, played by Amy Adams, was able to retrieve whole ideas from her "translations" of a number of different occurrences of the circles.

I am really thinking that any first contact we might have will exhibit the advancement of communication since an intelligence that could find us on Earth could dispense with something primitive like writing.  Even in our own culture, writing is taking a greatly diminished role from what it has been in the past.  So telepathy will probably occur because telepathy deals with thought patterns, and an advanced intelligence could communicate with the same thought patterns, especially if their culture had gone through similar phases of communication like Earth humans have passed through.

It's an intriguing study.  I would love to be on the communication team that has first contact with another intelligent species.  It would be challenging in many ways and pioneering to say the least, not knowing what to expect next.  At the moment I am pleased to just figure out how life is going to treat me next.  It is so filled with twists, turns and curves of all kinds that it poses challenges enough for me to figure out.  If trying to figure out the various relationships that occur is anything like figuring out another species' way of communicating, then I will happen on its many facets and be dismayed, fascinated, and elated, all in turn.

That's why it is called a journey.

Arrival as predicted... It's 2017

This is the year - 2017!  The end of the 10-year war for dominance of technology.

In the year 2000, a colleague of mine and I began planning a book to write on the loss of reading and writing over the first quarter century of the second millennium.  As we progressed, we realized that it could even happen before 2025.  Unfortunately, my colleague moved away and we abandoned our project.  However, I decided to continue in one form or another working on the idea.

At first, I outlined chapters for a book.  I found I didn't really have time for such a venture, so I put it aside for a while.  Also, life took some sharp turns in my life as well which included the death of my son after a prolonged bout with cancer.  Other almost equally severe events happened, but in the year 2007, I was able to focus again on the issue of reading and writing disappearing.  After spending time in a more than a few conversations, it became apparent that two camps existed, those who believed as I did, and those who believed I was a lunatic for even thinking that writing or reading was on its way out.  Even most of those who agreed that it would disappear thought I was a bit too quick on the draw with my date of 2025.

Out of these conversations, I wanted to chart, and thereby "prove," unscientifically, that the end was imminent and would arrive quicker than people thought.  I decided to take to the blog as my format for charting this evolution.

I want to refer to my first blog on the subject dated 2/10/08 and entitled Year 2 - and you probably missed year 1.  The blog sets out the thesis and says that a 10-year war from 2007-2017 has started for the dominance of how everything will be communicated after that point.  

For a second look at that blog, click on the year 2008 on the right margin opposite this blog and scroll to the blog for February 10th. (Entries are in reverse chronological order).

Holographic design and transmission was predicted as the catalyst and replacement for reading and writing.  In the year 2017, that prediction is fully on target and will prove to be the leading discovery to wean society from its dependence on the written word.  

Pure Genius is merely the beginning of all that will become available by the year 2025.  This year the first blog of each month, the charting will begin for the demise of the written word and the leap into the next phase of communication and the different areas that will be affected most by this evolution.

To continue the dinosaur analogy that I have followed all through the years with this blog, the asteroid has hit the Earth.  The dinosaurs closest to the blast have already died.  Shockwaves and subsequent incendiary flying debris are about to take the second round of victims.  It's time to get on board with the quantum leap that will begin in earnest by 2025.