Yep, next year for me

I have seen the present and the future this Christmas.  My daughter who lives with me works a schedule that is almost parallel with retail stores.  So, she would have had a really tough time shopping in my world.  But not in her world!

Packages have been delivered almost daily for the last 3 weeks.  She has shopped totally online.  She has bought all manner of items online from beds to dolls.  This is my kind of shopping.  She bought an Amazon membership last spring and so all her shipping is free.  Good move.

I can see this being more than a trend. Especially when Amazon starts using their drone fleet.  Yeah, a drone right to your front door with your package.  It's definitely a picture of what is to come.  I shopped only at stores this year - but next year... you betcha. All online.  Every bit of it.

The world changes

Click here.

A video of four sisters who posed for a picture every year for forty years.  There are lessons for us all as we view the four decade transformation.

Nobody really needs proof that the world changes.  Our bodies are living proof.  From the time we are born until the time we die.  One change leads to another which leads to another... ad infinitum.

Such pictures are good to have because we all make footprints in the sand.  We get to remember afresh the times in our lives.  I'm thankful for mine.  They have put me where I am today,  It's a pretty good place to be, all changes considering.

Terrain of memories

I don't really have many memories of growing up.  I can remember what all but one of the houses looked like  Five out of six isn't bad.  I remember snow fights outdoors and some ice skating ventures on rivers, lakes, and skating rinks.  I remember what all of my schools looked like.  I can recall the names, but not the faces of my four girlfriends before high school.  I can call to mind spending the night with a my best friend from elementary school.  Beyond that, the first twelve years of my life must have gone smoothly enough for me not to have bothered
with memories.


From 12 on, memories abound both good and bad.  I remember the good, the bad, the zany, the miserable, the lonely, the ecstatic, the mundane, the angry, and the ugly.  It have a mixed bag of memories, a potpourri of sounds, sights, smells, and feelings.  I guess everyone has to own his/her own past.  Denial of what happened never changes what happened.  But, the opposite is also true. One embraces his/her past to enjoy the moments that have built the present moment.


As I look back, the terrain looks like a mountain range snapshot.  The peaks and valleys are there.  The rolling hills with meadows, the rock cliffs and flat buttes, the dry lake beds, the snow-capped tops, and the pine-covered slopes.  But the peaks always stand out the most, as with any view of a mountain range.  Some are jagged, other smooth.  They stand out against the sky.  They represent the zeniths of life.  I have memorized all their shapes.  The one in the foreground is the one I love the most... I wanted to build a cabin there, still would... It's so beautiful... majestic... enchanting!

The meaning of night

It's late.  Tomorrow is a really busy day as the last two days have been.  Busier than normal for sure.  The lights around the house are off.  Everything is quiet, inside and outside.  The night has taken over.

But I like it.  It's my best thinking time.  It's my best memory time.  People go to bed and leave you alone to think things through, to revitalize and evaluate.  Thoughts of great moments flow uninhibited to your mind's eye and bring smiles.

Viva la noche!  The best time of a 24-hour period.  Visuals abound.

The grandest spin

Sometimes history glosses what actually happened.  People ignore the facts or align them favorably toward someone who was not well liked by most of the people.  How does that happen?

I'm talking about Abraham Lincoln.  Most people would put him in the top three American presidents that they like - Washington, Kennedy, and Lincoln.  The order of these three vary considerably, but consistently, these three presidents are named most often as their top three picks.

That's astounding to me, knowing what happened with Lincoln.  When he was president, he wasn't America's darling.  It's a miracle he was president at all.  In 1860 there were four candidates for the top job.  Each had to tell how they would handle the issue of slavery.  One said each new state that came into the union should decide.  People didn't like that because it had the potential to upset the balance of power in Congress.  Imagine that - people worrying about the  balance of power in Congress!  One said that states should enter the union on an every other state basis as a slave or free state.  One said people shouldn't care because the ways of life in both north and south were good for each other, both were good for the economy.  

And then there was Lincoln.  From the beginning, he said that the stance of the northern non-slave states were right.  No human being should be a slave.  If elected, he would move to abolish such a depraved institution as slavery.  That stance, of course, divided the nation in half.  As a result, 10 southern states refused to put Lincoln on the ballot for the 1860 election.  How did Lincoln still win the presidency?  

He took a divisive position before the election, and he became the most divisive president to that point in American history.  Southern legislatures vowed that if Lincoln won, they would secede from the union.  He was elected and a month later southern legislatures were true to their word.  Out of all the options available to a president, Lincoln chose war as his prime option to force the southern states to recognize the error of their ways, pitting family members against each other in the border states. Even among northern states, people and federal legislators didn't support the war option.

Tell me again why Lincoln is one of the most loved presidents in American history?  I tire of hearing disgruntled people today whining about current events of the current administration.  It's all happened before.  And I can't imagine that anyone short of a king would be more divisive than the one of the top three most beloved presidents in U.S. history.  Lincoln even has status enough to be depicted on currency we use everyday.  How did that happen?  It's called spin.

Good will to all

Let's see.  250 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

Even if the chances of life were 10 billion to 1, there would still be 25 planets like Earth.  And where are they in their development?  Will our 15 minutes of fame exist in the same 15 minutes as theirs? Or are they like Mars.  We missed their window by about a billion years.  They had water and life, but their atmosphere burned away and all their water evaporated.  Too bad.  It would have been a nice dance to have two planets so close exchanging ideas and DNA, I'm sure.

I would really like to meet E.T. one day.  The chances are good.  The Milky Way is not the only Galaxy, and the chances are really better than 10 billion to 1.  It could happen.  We'll probably meet them on another planet as we continue to explore.  It will be a neutral meeting place.

It'll probably happen after I am long gone, but that doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for seeing how they would communicate with us.  Possibilities are numerous - with math, with the universal shapes of space, with colors, with a certain spectrum like x-ray or gamma ray, maybe even with a language of some sort.  The symbol of M or W, with rounded peaks, and O, with or without other symbols inside the O, will definitely be one of their main symbols.  They are their chosen symbols of communication.  How ironic it would be (given the "peace, goodwill to men" heard so much at this time of year) if the symbols mean "peace" and "good will."

At the speed of light

Here it is.  Virtual Telemedicine.

All I have to say is that the virtual application of any field is going to be continuous and ongoing. Those who train children to contribute to society should take notice.  Applications of technology like this will continue to make the news.  The virtual will aid, supplant, and grow in every field.  It is efficient economically, physically, and temporally.

I truly hope the ones wanting to follow the old paths will not persist in their pursuit of training children using old world means to achieve new world ends.  It won't work, will end in unproductive denizens, and will cripple the abilities of those on whom it is imposed.

It's twilight for a day that is about to dawn in splendorous glory for those who can work at the speed of light, at the speed of visual cues and stimulus, not at the speed of black symbols on white pages that takes hours to read and mull and respond.

Waking in a different world

I hear jets a lot at my house.  I hear them at midnight, at midmorning, during the early afternoon.  I hear them a lot.  They run military maneuvers from a nearby noncommercial airport.  Twice now I have seen them practicing their hovering techniques.  Right.  Helicopters hover, jets fly at supersonic speed.  Nope, not these.

When I was growing up, I lived near a naval air base, and the experimental jets there ran maneuvers over our house.  One day I saw a propeller plane adjust the position of its rotors in midair and practice hovering.  They have come a long way over the last few centuries.

It's only when people can think creatively that machines can do the seemingly impossible.  Hovering jets - whoever would have thought of such a thing?  But when I looked about a month ago and saw it hovering over a neighborhood next to mine, there was no mistaking that it was a jet not a helicopter.

Society is probably not ready for such things as non-car transportation, but as surely as that jet hovered over my next door neighbors' houses, there will be such a thing.  When it happens, people will be waking in a different world.  That will be my granddaughter's world a half-century from now. She'll be ready along with most her age.  She represents the second generation after the birth of computers and digital storage and transmission.  They'll know all about creatively combining ideas.  Non-car transportation is only the beginning of what they will be able to do.

A thousand expletives for people like that

It's true - the saying - that a person's judgment is only as good as his/her information.

I was talking to a woman who had come for help with a life-long struggle she had had.  She had spent 39 years trying to overcome the problem that she felt had shut her out of the world.  Along the way, she had gone to schools, both public and private, to receive help.  They referred her to different places and people, had given her various remedial help, and had filled her with information that she believed to be true about herself.

The people that tried to help her were either uninformed or arrogant beyond belief since the information they gave her was way off the beaten path from reality and the best science.  But, she believed them.  It was information that she considered to be better than her own information and was given to her by sources she trusted.

After dealing with the misinformation, the woman was able to do some things for the first time that she had longed to do her entire adulthood.  It's a work of beauty to see people free themselves from misery after enduring it for so long, and it is a work of discipline to provide information that others lack.  And, it's a work of disgust to observe what others have placed on someone because of ignorance and laziness.  Total disgust.  Needless,  And a thousand more expletives for people like that.

I am so glad to see this woman blossom, restore her happiness, and renew her dreams as she accomplishes the steps to normalcy.

For  this woman I have nothing but admiration for her determination.  For the many who failed her I have nothing but a wish that their own Dark Ages approach to problems closes in around them.

Full control

"Keep this between you and I," I heard one woman tell another.

"I want this for you and I," one sister told another.

"That made Elyssa and I mad," my daughter said describing an action taken by a cousin.

The above three examples don't use the grammar of textbooks, for sure.  I've seen a couple of my Facebook friends also complaining about the grammar of the mistake made above.  And, I'll never forget sitting in a teacher conference area listening to a bunch of English teachers talking and one in particular was railing against students who made the mistake above when talking to each other. Within 20 minutes, the same teacher made the exact same mistake.  Laughable, really.

Every English teacher worth her/his salt knows that me is the right choice, not I.  If a sentence requires the objective case of a pronoun like all three sentences above, then me is the correct choice. I is the subjective pronoun and never doubles in the objective position.

But what English teachers don't seem to recognize is that they don't control what people say.  So what is the pattern the people have chosen?  When using a compound object, if the first person pronoun is used, it appears second and is found in the subjective case.  The generation of Americans under 40 are pretty clear about their preference.  It doesn't match the grammar taught in schools, but that generation regularly follows their own rule unapologetically.

What happens when the people speak so clearly?  The same thing that happened when the people pronounced blood as blo-duh and spelled it blode.  Another generation came along, pronounced the word blo-o-ohd and spelled it blood.  Another generation came along and pronounced the word bluhd but declined to change the spelling.  Speakers of a language have full control over their language.  They can change it at will whenever, however they want.

The purpose of language is to communicate ideas.  People want, like, and need things, so they create a system to express those ideas.  If people understand each other, that is what matters.  Period. Without variance.  Rules change; they don't last.  If that wasn't true, all of us would still understand the English of 1380: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, and the droghte of march hath perced to the roote.  Those who stand in the way of the change get aggravated like my good Facebook friends and like the teacher in the conference room.  But language is bigger by far than the people who teach its use and/or try to control its patterns.

Long live the will of the people - the real controllers and keepers of their language.

People love their pictures

Here's just one more fact in an overall trend, an irreversible trend at this point.  Officially, today Instagram passed Twitter for the overall number of accounts.  Of course, nobody can touch Facebook, but Twitter was reporting 284 million users while Instagram surpassed 300 million today.  In just the last 9 months, 100 million Instagram accounts were established. Mark Zuckerberg's bet paid off for him.  He bought Instagram for 1 billion dollars not too long ago.  He knew people loved their pictures.

The commentator who was giving the information went on to say that she had to admit that she uses Instagram and likes it the best of all social media because she likes pictures.  Another announcer chided her kiddingly by saying, "So, you don't read books I take it."  The announcer said she does read books, but only those that have a lot of pictures.

It's a visual world and getting to be more so.  Social media has gone from the world of bulletin boards in the 1990s to MySpace to Blogs, both written and video, to Facebook, to Instagram.  It certainly makes you wonder what is next.  That's not really much of a question though.  3D and holographics are on the horizon.

I embrace this world we're entering wholeheartedly.  It will be a faster, richer, more emotional world. It's time.

Hiding in the open

People rely on implicatures all the time to communicate their ideas.  An implicature happens when someone says something that is obvious or that seems odd for someone to say aloud rather than merely thinking it or that seems astray from the topic at hand.  When that happens, the meaning of the utterance is implied, and many times it is sarcastic or denigrating in some way.

An example of an implicature is something like the following.  Two people are talking.  A third person walks in.  The person talking says to the third person, "Please give us a moment."  The third person knows that it is implied that he should leave the two people he tried to join alone to finish their conversation.  Another example is when you are talking to a friend who knows you, and you say, "I'm going to visit my mother this weekend, but I'm going to leave on Saturday night."  Your friend replies, "Yeah, I don't blame you."  The answer seems like a non sequitur. Why is leaving Saturday a good idea?  The friend knows that the mother goes to church every Sunday, the daughter doesn't go, and the whole issue is uncomfortable because the mother is so judgmental of her daughter's absence from church on Sunday.  By not being with the mother on Sunday, the issue doesn't arise.  But, all of that information is implied between friends who know each other.

Sometimes implicatures are called inside jokes or friendly banters.  Innuendo is another popular word for implicature.  Whatever it's called, it's part of the communication system we have developed, and we all use it pretty well.  Mostly implicatures are hurtful to someone in some way or another.  Comedians use it for laughter, but still the implied information is hurtful.  It's just that it is better to laugh so you don't cry when it comes to some things.

It's hard to say

It's hard to say which influences are the greatest in our lives.  Influences sometimes build on each other.  So, the second influence couldn't happen unless and until the first influence is felt.  Sometimes influences establish stability in our lives, and at other times the influences seem to take us to a new level.  However, it is the stability that was important before we were prepared to pass to a new level.

Sometimes influences compete with each other.  While one influence may eventually subdue or  displace the other, the influence that  wins becomes clearer and more entrenched in our behavior.  And while the one that loses is replaced, it had to be considered in the first place, so it affected our behavior in part during its consideration period.

A man born in England in 1942 is a good example.  He was born into a family in which the mother and father were both supremely educated.  Thus, they put an emphasis on education.  But, the young man didn't do well in school, later commenting that he nearly didn't learn how to read.  The family moved, so fortunately, the young man learned to read at a different school.  His father was an eccentric, medical researcher and traveled often to Africa, so he shared some characteristics with the fabled "absentee father."  One biographer says that at the dinner table (especially when the father was at home) each person at the table had a book to read, making the meals a really quiet time of day.

Backgrounds make us what we are, right?  Well... when the young man went to college he was a social misfit, but soon learned how to correct that.  And, for many, at this point in life there is that magical moment that supersedes any shape background has given us.  It is that meeting with the one who tickles our senses and wins our heart.  The young man listened to his sister and met the one who would "give him a reason to live" (his own words).

Debilitating illness can be a major influence for sure and set aside any influence that has affected our lives to that point.  Such was the case for our young man.  Debilitation can end an academic career, end a marriage, and end any immediate family connections. It is hard to overcome and is all-pervasive.  Initially, all three possibilities seemed to have its way with this man, but other influences helped him overcome what usually happens.

Because the young man grew up to have so much notoriety, one naturally who the greatest influence in this man's life was?  His father, who provided stability even though he was absent?  His mother, who had studied politics, economics, and philosophy?  His sister who earned enough respect from him that he listened to her when she recommended a woman he might like?  His wife, who stuck by him even after he developed a crippling medical condition.  His parents as a team, who provided a better than average base for him to grow up in?  His teachers at all the levels of his education, who recognized that this quirky, aggravating young man actually had much to offer.  A committee of professors who denied him the track to Cambridge that sprung his career because he failed an exit test.  He had to convince them in a subsequent oral exam that he was worthy of being in an honors program before he was allowed to continue.

It could be none of the above.  It could have been a thought developed from seeing something happen or a book that he read to help him develop a radical theory.  It could have been the treatment of students at his high school or his first year at college.  Maybe it was the snub by the mentor that he had wanted to study under.  Maybe it was his doctor's attitude when the doctor told him that he would die in two years from the time of the diagnosis of his disease.

Who knows?!  But, Stephen Hawking had something to influence him, or many things, that would propel him to the forefront of the physics cosmos and make him the most imminent scientist in the modern world.  I'm glad for him and for us who live in the world of a better understanding because of him.

But, we nearly didn't have him.  He nearly couldn't read during his early school years.  He nearly didn't make it to Cambridge to follow his dreams with world renowned faculty.  He nearly gave up on his education after learning of his disease.  He nearly lost all hope before he submitted his dissertation finding a theory everything that exists... Nearly... but something influenced him... It's just hard to know what exactly... Maybe everything!

Life's snarls

I had a great visual reminder today of how life is sometimes.  I was driving to my destination that under normal circumstances would have taken 55 minutes to an hour to drive.  Given the time of day, it would probably take a little longer, maybe an hour and 15 minutes.  Well, that didn't account for lane closures.  Lane closures on two different freeways backed up traffic so badly that it affected the road I was on as well.  Add 30 more minutes to the schedule for stop and go traffic for about a 10 mile stretch.  It doubled the time of the normal drive.

And that's really how it happens, right?  You can't really tell when you're about to come up on a stretch that will slow you down - not just a little bit, but a whole lot.  It gets your attention,  It makes you a little angry.  It gives time to think about a lot of things, one of which is jumping off the freeway and taking an alternate route.  That nearly always costs me more time than the slow pace driving on the freeway.

When you make it out of the snarl, you sure feel like whooping and hollering.  Yes, that is the way life is.

It will be all right

I had a chance to talk to a 14 year-old Chinese youth.  He was very friendly and talked freely of his experiences in the U.S. and China.  He was under no illusion as to life in China having what most would consider "less freedom" than the United States.  He accepted the Chinese way of life, of course.  It was his frame of reference for living.  He had only been in the U.S. for four months, so his knowledge was limited of how things work politically here.  But, he did know how things worked socially for 9th graders in a rich, private school.

I was encouraged by what he spoke of - his dreams for his future, his immediate life, his family.  It's the same as what any ninth grader would speak of.  He didn't really have any axes to grind.  He wasn't bitter about being a fish out of water for a while in his life.  He seemed really comfortable in his own skin.  He was confident, content, determined, and affable.

I don't really want to live life over just to see if I would do anything different from the way it happened.  But, talks with young people, especially from other countries, allow me to imagine what the future will hold.  People are just people, so in some ways the future will be the same as the present.  But, it seems that there will be a more concerted effort for working hard to make life better.  These young people aren't satisfied with the imperfections they see around them.  They want something better.  They want a safe world, a good world (as opposed to an evil one).  They want to excel, they want to take the world farther.  They certainly have my vote.  I'll be gone when they are running things.  But, I sleep easier at night.  My children and their children are headed for a grand future.

Blue hair evening

I walked up to order my tacos from the waiting cashier.  It was not a chain restaurant but a place my daughter wanted me to visit with her.  My daughter turned to me and asked me if I wanted tacos. "They're bison tacos.  I'm getting two.  Do you want two?"

"Sure," I replied.

The cashier punched in the order.  She had long, blue hair.  Six rhinestone studs dotted the middle of her face - one on each nostril, one below each nostril, one above each corner of her mouth.  She was very competent, and we were finished ordering in no time.

After the meal, we walked to a store called Hey Sugar.  Now that was a really different experience.  They had 20 different kinds of popcorn, from the regular, buttered popcorn to cashew caramel, cotton candy, and cilantra chile popcorn.  They had about the same number of odd combinations of flavors of jelly beans as well.  And the chocolate counter had some normal and abnormal combinations too.  I ended up buying some malt balls that were called bacon, toffee malt balls.  M-m-m-m, delicious.  I left after ordering (and drinking) a cafe latte milkshake.  Delicious too.

What a different kind of night, thanks to my daughter.  Looks and eats out on the fringe.  I like those kinds of evenings.  They help me know where the center of living is, but they also help me enjoy the edge even if I don't live on it.  Bison, blue hair, and bacon malt balls.  What a way to stretch my horizons!  I'm  better for having done it.

Life fluency

One helpful exercise on the journey to fluency in another language is to record one's own voice while reading aloud.  This exercise allows a person to pronounce words more crisply and to acquire the underlying tones or melody of the language.

Hearing one's own voice is quite the experience.  It doesn't sound quite like one would expect.  It makes one much more aware of the nuances that aren't the same as native speakers.  But it certainly helps in learning what adjustments to make.

The movies of our own lives so much like this tried and true language learning exercise.  When we get to see it, either from pictures, videos, or others' accounts of something that happened when we're spoken of as a third party, we notice things about ourselves that we wouldn't expect.  It allows us to make adjustments so that we can be more authentic to what we believe, what we want from life, or what we want to add to life.  I've come to fully respect these opportunities to make adjustments

After a number of adjustments have been made, this life becomes manageable, even fun, and we can live so much more in the moment.  To make the analogy complete, a person could say that we use moments for seeing ourselves as lessons in life fluency.

Fantastic imprint

Coca Cola put out a fantastic commercial this year.  It's easy to see what they wanted to do.  Coca Cola is recognized worldwide as represented by all the major languages of the world.  They wanted to show that diversity is important - Coke is not just one group's drink.  And the maker of Coca Cola wanted to be thought of as soothing, peaceful, and fun - in a word, beautiful.

I love commercials like this.  They're clear, insightful, upbeat, deliberate, and hopeful.  They make us feel good.

It is my hope that the footprint I leave in this world is the same as the imprint of this commercial.

Around the very next bend

Yep!!!

And this is only the first wave of something authentic using holographic technology.  It's not a prank.  It's a projection bracelet.  It's not a dream; it's a live project with donors who want to see its completion. You can find it at Cicret.com.

This device and few others will stake out a new territory.  What follows is the revolution that changes the definition of virtual from things that are simply data driven (as in 1s and 0s) to things that are visually driven.  The devices that follow the first wave will actually be three dimensional.  The difference between reality and virtualality will be seamless and nondistinctive.

The combination of the new Firestick from Amazon and the Cicret Bracelet will allow a whole different mode of operation for communicating, learning, planning, and defining sphere of influence and sphere of operation.  We're just on the cusp of something fantastic and a quantum leap from where we will find ouselves, but the prototype is underway.  I'm excited beyond belief!  I can connect dots from here.

Deep beauty

Depth only comes from two things: time and force.  This is very clearly seen in nature when a person looks at canyons, lakes, rivers, and oceans.  Over a long period of time, winds, waves, earthquakes, rains. and weight take their toll.  Rock gets carved out, eroded, moved, shaken, and pushed down.  That allows for water and related canyons to become deeper, to have more character.

Depth in people comes from the same two things: time and force.  This is very clearly seen as a person looks at people's losses, their misfortunes, their reversal of fortunes, their fortunes, their accomplishments, and the friends they keep.  Over long periods of time, people move, friends and family die, they work hard sometimes at two or more jobs, they play, they travel, they go to college, and they take a few chances now and then.  All of it together allows them to become deeper, to have character.

Depth happens, but not quickly.  Depth is forged.  It's a crucible.  But it makes us rich and beautiful beyond measure.