Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've never heard the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith, but somehow (I've forgotten whom to credit) came upon this transcript of Quarks and Creation, an interview with the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne.  If you can ignore the annoyances of a word-for-word transcript of an audio program, it's a fascinating interview.  (For those who prefer an audio format, that's also available.)  Polkinghorne touches on subjects as diverse as beauty, truth, quantum physics, prayer, free will, and the dangerous brilliance of creating a world that creates itself.

In 1997, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, though, as tradition dictates, Polkinghorne does not take the honorific title "Sir" because, as an ordained minister, he would not be expected to wield a sword.

And we're expecting Sir Elton John to use a sword?   Hmmm.

[B]eauty is a very interesting thing, and a form of beauty that is important to me is mathematical beauty. That's a rather austere form of aesthetic pleasure, but those of us who work in that area and speak that language can recognize it and agree about it. And we've found in theoretical physics that the fundamental laws of nature are always mathematically beautiful. In fact, if you've got some ugly equations, almost certainly you haven't got it right and you should think again. So beauty is the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical world.

[I]t's very hard, of course, to describe any form of beauty....In some sense you have to perceive it. And it's more difficult with mathematics because you have to be able to speak the language. It's a bit like saying, "This is a wonderful Icelandic poem," but if I don't understand Icelandic, I won't get the gist of it. So mathematical beauty is connected, first of all, with things being elegant and economic. You don't write a great sprawling equation that takes half a page to write down. It's very concise, just perhaps a line with only a few symbols in it. But it turns out that it's also very deep, so that when you explore its consequences, you find this very simple-looking thing. It implies this, it implies that, all sorts of surprising and unexpected things. And if it's a successful part of mathematical physics, of course, it will imply all sorts of phenomena happening in the world. And that's what we mean by mathematical beauty.

Equality means everyone gets to run the race. It does not mean everyone comes in first.

John C. Wright and I may not agree on Prince Caspian, but we saw the same message in The Incredibles: the loss of excellence, enthusiasm, and initiative that results when we foolishly favor equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

The inspiration for Wright's post was a soccer trophy won by his five-year-old son.  Well, "won" is stretching quite a bit, and that's Wright's point.  Everyone on the team received the same trophy, just for showing up.  Or even not showing up; the coach also wanted to give a trophy to Wright's other son, who had quit the team mid-season!

One can argue that five-year-olds should not be competing for trophies.  One can even argue, à la Alfie Kohn, that getting trophies will actually decrease the children's enjoyment of the game.  But if you're going to have a competition, make it a contest, not a sham.  Don't give out hunks of plastic or cheap metal that waste resources, take up space, gather dust, and have no correlation whatsoever with accomplishment.  I like to think that the child who has done well does not need an award to tell him so, and the child who has done poorly will not be fooled by the award into thinking he has done well; unfortunately, my college professor friends won't let me keep that illusion, since they've had plenty of experience with students who have been given (not earned) A's all through high school and nearly break down when they discover they're not the academic whizzes they thought they were.  If their parents, teachers, and coaches had not, in effect, lied to them for years, they might have learned to buckle down and work and actually become highly capable students.

Wright found the problem on the soccer field; I've seen it time and time again in the educational system, from the principal who out-and-out told me that the purpose of kindergarten was to get everyone on the same level, to the elementary school "contests" that were rigged so that every student won at least once, to similarly-rigged "Teacher of the Year" awards, to the school board that took a monetary award away from the school that earned it and gave it to a poorly-achieving school.  No matter what a school district may say in principle, "making everyone great" means holding down those who are capable of exceling more often than it means raising those who are struggling.

None, least of all the winners, likes a situation in which the same few people win all the awards again and again.  Dash would soon lose interest in racing, and possibly in running itself, if he blew away the competition every single time.  But a coach or a teacher, for example, who wants to reward every student can, with a little creativity, devise competitions where the outcome is by no means certain, and yet in which the winner knows he has truly earned his victory.  (John Holt did this with some of his classes, but I've forgotten in which of his books he discusses it.)

Muscles, be they physical, mental, or spiritual, grow with use, and atrophy if left unchallenged.  Wright is right to be worried about his sons.  Fortunately, awareness of the problem is half the solution.

For two quite different yet effective views of the consequences of "anti-elitist" policies, see Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron and C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Proposes a Toast.

So. Studies have shown that length of life can be extended by eating a very low calorie diet, twenty to thirty percent less than a "standard diet." Whatever the standard diet is, you can bet it's significantly less than the average American diet, so we're talking severe calorie reduction here.

Thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (my nephew's current college of choice), the National Institutes of Health, and DSM Nutritional Products of [ahem] Basel, Switzerland, there is a better way. Drinking red wine apparently has similar effects and works by nearly the same mechanism. (If you're ambitious you can read the full report.)

Let's see. To drink, or not to eat...is that a question? I don't care much for wine and even then I prefer whites to reds, but I could manage this.

The article doesn't say what happens when you combine the starvation diet with drinking red wine, though the picture it evokes in my mind is not exactly one of robust health....

The spectre of mercury poisoning from dental fillings has made the leap from alternative medicine/tabloid fodder to official health concern, as the FDA now acknowledges the possible danger to children, unborn babies, and other sensitive populations.  I doubt it's worth having fillings replaced (which I'm guessing could release more mercury than leaving them alone), but certainly a good idea to check with your dentist.

I'd much rather get my mercury from eating tuna and swordfish. 

The comic strip Baby Blues, like Dilbert, often frustrates me because of its negative views.  Its depiction of family life does not usually reflect my experiences, and the recognition of one's own situation is a key ingredient in good humor. But whenever I begin to decide it's not worth reading, Baby Blues (again like Dilbert) comes up with a priceless strip.  Today's says so much on several levels that futher commentary would be foolish.

We've lived in Florida more than 20 years and haven't yet mastered the art of gardening in this climate.  After a year or two of being defeated by nematodes, giant grasshoppers, and the need for daily attention, we pretty much gave up, until inspired to try again by Heather and Jon, who managed to get a few good things to grow even at their zero-yard city apartment.

Our biggest (and nearly only) success from last year was a hot pepper plant.  As I wrote last year, it had been labeled as a sweet green pepper but was clearly not.  The first couple of peppers were quite mild, with just a little bite, but I think they were just testing the waters—subsequent fruits have been the fabulous "don't touch your eyes after chopping them up even if you've washed your hands three times" variety.  This is the only plant to have survived from last year, and it has been blooming and bearing continuously.  Here it is with its new companions, sweet basil (left) and Thai basil (right).  Thai basil is that wonderful anise-like herb served with Vietnamese pho, and often in summer rolls.

The radishes, lettuces, and carrots were just starting eight days ago; now they're filling the pot and ready for some thinning.  On the right is our parsley and stevia, along with a left-over Christmas poinsettia and some aloe and coleus plants.

Last year's tomatoes never did very well; these heirloom plants look much more promising.

With all due respect for everyone's personal choices, and with free acknowledgement that in our diversity of educational options lies our strength, here's an excerpt from today's Frazz for a moment of homeschooling joy:

I did place an order on Amazon.com this morning...but somehow I doubt that's what brought down the system.  Whatever; it has been unavailable for a few hours now:  "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."  Just another reminder that we are too dependent on infrastructure over which we have little or no control: water, sanitary services, electrical power, grocery deliveries, police protection, mail, phone, and Internet services.  Our ancestors had plenty of worries that we don't, but they dug their own wells, buried their own sewage, grew and/or hunted their own food, and protected their families with their own weapons, and lived among neighbors who could help out when needed.

Communities still share what they can during times of trouble, but for the most part, if we lose one or more of the basic services, so do our neighbors.

Thanks to John C. Wright for bringing to my attention Story Time by Andrew Klavan, in City Journal.

Read it. It may frustrate you, it may make you despair, it may inspire you; it will certainly break your heart.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)

Let me write a nation's songs, and I care not who writes its laws. (various attributions)

As I said before, I'm not always curmudgeonly.  Here, for your morning's delight, is an inspiring story from the blog, "Et tu?"  What happens when an introverted mother of three children under four, whose only much-needed time for solitude comes when all three kids are napping simultaneously, finds this time interrupted again and again by neighborhood pranksters who repeatedly ring her doorbell and run?  No, this is not a sordid tale of mass murder; I said it was a happy story.

Read the What first, then the How (with further details).

The curmudgeonly protective part of my nature wants to warn her to keep her eyes open, and let the girls help around the house but never leave them alone with her children; I've heard too many horror stories of irreparable damage done to innocent children by street-wise kids from troubled homes.  With that caveat, it's a wonderful story, and a glimpse of what neighborhoods used to be like, back in the day when "that house" was "those houses."

Though it's hardly the main point of the story, I love this paragraph:

A while back I took a Birkman test, a personality inventory renowned for its accuracy, and on a scale of 1 - 100 with 100 being most extroverted, I was a 1. One. Uno. It doesn't mean that I don't like people, but that being around others is exhausting for me. As the test administrator put it, "You need introvert time where you don't have to be 'on' like normal people need air."

I've quoted many times the statement that both extroverts and introverts like people and enjoy their company, but for the latter, interacting with a crowd (even a small one) is usually a net loss of energy, while for the former it is generally a net gain.  We introverts like being with people, but it drains us, and we need time alone to recover.  When challenged on a source for that idea, I couldn't come up with a source, but here's evidence that it wasn't just my own invention.

Here's a scary article for you:  Emily Gould's Exposed, from the May 25, 2008 New York Times Magazine.  Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) would definitely appreciate this story of one woman's venture into a world of publishing unfettered by editorial oversight and subsequent free-fall into the Dark Side of Blogging.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

Another sad story about a naïve teenaged girl molested by someone she met on MySpace? Not at all. Just an imprudent adult woman seduced by the delights of seeing her thoughts in print.  Scary.

In a previous post, which was primarily about something else so I won't link to it here, I said:

Having experienced the higher-level coinage of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and the European Union, I wish the United States had the sense to supplant (not just supplement) the dollar bill with dollar coins.  (And maybe the $2 and $5 bills while we're at it.)  But the mountain of paper used to print dollar bills comes from Massachusetts, where the Crane Paper Company has a stranglehold monopoly on the business.  The $1 bill has a lifespan of under two years and represents about 45% of the U. S. currency production, so it's no surprise that Massachusetts politicians don't like dollar coins.

I've mentioned the idea of getting rid of the lower-denomination bills in favor of coins, and while women generally don't seem to mind, I am likely to get a negative reaction from men.  I think this is because women's wallets almost always have a place for change, but men's wallets rarely do.  Porter carries his change in a small coin purse (something like this) which keeps the coins handy and protects his pocket.  But most men I've talked with tend to keep their change loose in their pockets and then dump them in a jar or on a dresser at the end of the day.  This system works because our coins are worth so little.

(Back when I was little and our coins were worth a lot more, this system was a boon to children, who would comb couches and chairs for change that had fallen out of men's pockets.)

Needless to say, these men are less than happy with the thought of heavy coins jangling in their pockets instead of light, thin bills in their wallets.  I can see their point.  However, I know that Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders (and no doubt people from other countries) manage quite well with higher denomination coinage instead of bills.  So my question is, What's your secret?  How do you handle change?

(I'll admit I only know of one European male who regularly reads this blog and can be counted on to be generous enough to comment, but there are others who occasionally stop by, and I figure the women probably know something about it, too.)

Then again, eveyone else seems to have been able to adjust to the metric system and we still haven't managed that, so maybe I shouldn't hold out too much hope.... 

My feminism tends to be of the on-again-off-again sort.  As a child—thanks to parents who encouraged me—I never considered any good character trait, activity, or occupation to be off limits because of my sex.  I didn't think much about feminism back then; I just acted, becoming the first girl to break the sex barrier in my high school's stage band, and the only or one of just a few girls in some of my science classes.  This sounds tame and silly from a 21st century perspective, but it was a big deal back then.

When Feminism became a movement, however, I soon had to distance myself from it, largely because it distanced itself from me.  I was (and am) all for equality of opportunity—as much as is physically possible; I don't ever want to see men getting pregnant—but when Feminism veered into being anti-man and pro-abortion, when it denigrated the role of homemaker and made the two-income family first common and then in some cases necessary, and when it invoked "political correctness" over the very words we speak and even started calling God "Our Mother," that's when I turned away.  Not from my beliefs, which hadn't changed, but from the movement and the label.  Women were now included, and succeeding, in nearly every possible opportunity; it was time, I believed, to give feminism a rest.

Until I found myself for a few years in the company of some people (mostly men) whose view of women was more oppressive than anything I'd known growing up nearly half a century earlier.  Then I realized that even a necessary correction to the movement's faults and excesses (great though they were and are) could send us back too far.  I actually worry less about those men now than I do about the Princess infatuation that little girls are embracing as they did Barbie dolls.  (And still do? I've been out of the scene for a while.)  We're still encouraging our boys to be smart and strong and our girls to be...pretty.

How does one raise boys to be men and girls to be women and all to be intelligent, strong, and competent people?  The impetus for this post was an article I read yesterday in a church bulletin insert, which included this paragraph.

A godly father has a profoundly positive influence on the life of his son or daughter.  He teaches his son the importance of self-control, respect for women, the value of work, and healthy risk taking.  He affirms his daughter's femininity by expressing his appreciation for her as a woman.  Dads, keep these thoughts in mind as you nurture healthy gender identity in your children.

Excuse me? The best a father can do for his daughter is to appreciate her as a woman?  I thank God my father did a lot more for me than that!  Self-control, respect, the value of work, and healthy risk taking are things we all need to learn—not just half of us.

I do believe boys need to be taught how to be good men, and girls to be good women, and that these roles are not identical.   But could we please find a way to make boys into men without putting down girls?  It must be possible to nurture in boys fatherly and protective characteristics without appealing to pride, which generates worse problems.

Any ideas?

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

It's past time to get this book back to the library; I actually finished it quite a while ago, but have been putting of this post because I haven't known quite what to say.  It's a complex book, probably an important one, but it covers so much territory I'll never do it justice.  The book is far more than a diatribe against amateurism, but I will skip over the sections on Internet gambling, Internet pornography, privacy concerns, and the demise of an iconic record store.  Except for Tower Records—it's hard to mourn the disappearance of something you never knew existed—I'm aware of the other issues and tend to agree that they are, indeed, serious problems.  Whether or not the proliferation of amateur voices is boon or bane is a bit more complex.

Now that I've finished reading the book, I still stand by what I've already said (here, and here), and will add that Keen is right to fear that truth, accuracy, responsibility, and excellence are in danger of being lost in our society, but wrong in laying the blame solely or even primarily on the Internet.

It's true that many people are no longer giving professionals the unquestioned respect, trust, and even obedience they once did. But it is not so much because the Internet lets amateurs speak as because the professionals have proven themselves untrustworthy.

When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighted by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy.  Take those filters away, and we, the general public, are faced with the impossible task of sifting through and evaluating an endless sea of the muddled musings of amateurs. 

Most of us assume that the information we take in can be trusted.  But when the information is created by amateurs, it rarely can be.  And the irony in all this is that democratized media wil eventually force all of us to become amateur critics and editiors ourselves. With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye.  The free information really isn't free; we all end up paying for it one way or another with the most valuable resource of all—our time.

Anyone who has ever been part of a story reported in a "respected newspaper," magazine, or television news story probably laughed at that first paragraph.  I don't believe any of the many stories I've known first hand has been reported completely accurately, and often the errors are significant.  The need to read everything with a skeptical eye predates the Internet.

It doesn't take much research into factory farming, modern American childbirth practices, the pharmaceutical industry, the politics of university research, the news media, the educational system, and even the music world to realize that professionals are not necessarily good and wise, and often disastrously wrong.  [Keen does not deal with most of these areas directly, but what he says about the amateur vs. the professional applies equally well.]

[E]very free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper.  Every visit to Wikipedia's free information means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica.  Every free music or video upload is one less sale of a CD or DVD, meaning one less royalty for the artist who created it.

I'm not at all sure this is true.  I suspect many things are listed on Craigslist that would never make it into a newspaper's classified section, not just because people sell some really weird things on Craigslist but because I think it, like eBay, inspires people to sell things who otherwise wouldn't have bothered.  I'm certain that if online references such as Wikipedia were not available, it would not drive many people to purchase an encyclopedia; their question would simply go unanswered.  Knowing next to nothing about online music an videos I can't say much about the last thesis, but I do know that the availability of free music samples has helped inform my CD-buying decisions, and that I've bought more CDs than I otherwise would have due to being able to have that data.

I do appreciate the availability of Google News, and free online versions of many newspapers, including our Orlando Sentinel.  But that was not what drove us to cancel our subscription of nearly 20 years.  Rather, it was because the Sentinel itself had become unreliable, with more and more opinion being inserted into the news stories instead of confined to the editorial pages, and with factual, informative articles being cut in favor of insubstantial fluff and large pictures.

Becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a journalist, or an engineer requires a significant investment of one's life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying exams, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours....Can the cult of the noble amateur really expect to bypass all this and do a better job?

There's the rub.  Because Keen is right here:  we need the professionals, the ones who will invest their lives and resources in becoming experts in specialized fields, and if the proliferation of amateur works makes it no longer possible for them to earn a reasonable return on their investment, we may very well lose the infrastructure that makes the expertise possible. 

The amateurs are, however, performing an important function.  In my own field of (amateur) genealogy, I subscribe to the Ancestry.com service.  Some people shun commercial sites and believe all information should be freely shared, but I am happy to pay for the work that their professionals have done to gather and make available a tremendous amount of genealogical data.  There is also a section of the site that has been created by amateurs:  a large database of people's own family trees.  This data is not subject to any editorial supervision, is rarely sourced, and is for the most part highly unreliable. I never cite it as a source in my own work, except in a few cases where I have contacted the author and have reason to trust his or her data.  I treat the personal family trees in a much different fashion from other Ancestry information, such as their images of census transcriptions, old newspapers, and books.  Nonetheless, the amateur data has proven many times to be extremely valuable, giving important clues and sometimes great breakthroughs.  Yes, I always need to verify the information, bur without the "collective wisdom" of all those amateurs my search would have been much harder, if not impossible.

I think Wikipedia, amateur news blogs, and the other non-professional works that Keen decries should be approached in much the same way.  Schools are right not to allow Wikipedia citations for research papers, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia isn't a great resource for getting started.  You'll never get a clear view of the news by reading only a right-wing blog, but it can be a useful balance to your local left-wing newspaper, and vice versa.

But he's right: we do need the experts, and we do need to recognize that some reports are more truthful than others, and some opinions more valuable.  What he doesn't say, but what I believe to be the most effective approach to a solution, is that we all need to be better educated, and better trained in logic and discernment.  Give a man a professional opinion and you'll feed his mind for a day; teach him to discern truth from error and you'll feed his mind for a lifetime.

I like academia. I love college campuses, chem labs, and the smell of libraries with old books. Places and institutions dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, to study, investigation, and discussion. In an odd way, I feel more at home on a college campus than in most places. They feel exciting, challenging, and yet as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. That my own college experience differed significantly from my theoretical ideal did not do much to diminish my belief that a college professor had a near-perfect job in a near-perfect setting.

Pausing to let my professor friends recover from their choking fits....

Thirty plus years away from the university experience—if you don't count paying tuition bills—along with a fair amount of reading, and discussions with friends who are college professors themselves, have revealed not only that an academic job is not the halcyon experience I had imagined, but that my view of academia as the ideal of intellectual inquiry is also seriously flawed. A recent article at Inside Higher Ed, entitled Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?, confirms both illusion-shattering discoveries. (Thanks to GroshLink for alerting me to this.)

The comments following the article are as revealing as the article itself, which notes that an academic career significantly reduces one's (statistical) chances of having children.

Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children.

I was pleased to note that the comments were for the most part several steps more civilized than the usual playground taunts I see in comments to online news articles. However, I also noted a disturbing tendency—which may in itself reveal something about academia's view of children. "I was 36 when I felt free to start procreating," "Not once in non-academic circles have I ever heard mothers referred to as 'breeders'—but I hear it from academics all the time," "fulfilling a biological function," "women have family caretaking pressures IN ADDITION TO reproduction," "the male/female binary couple"—perhaps the writers are merely being academic and precise, but terms like "procreating," "breeders," "biological function," "reproduction," and the redundant "binary couple" all sound cold in this context, and distant from the reality of children and families. When doctors talk about an unborn baby at a certain stage of development as a "fetus," they are being technically correct, but an abortion-rights advocate uses the same term to put distance between that being and the idea of a living, human child. I find it quite likely that the very language with which those in academia are speaking about having children would have a negative effect on their own childbearing decisions.

So too, would the attitude of the commenter who calls himself "ScienceProf."

Of course academia hinders parenthood — it’s hard to be a parent when you work 80-100 hours a week. The question, however, is not whether it hinders parenthood, but whether anything should be done about it.

My answer is a flat out No! We cannot and should not coddle to those who make the decision to have children. When a woman has a child it is her problem, and no one else’s. Why should her colleagues pay the cost of her decision with their time? Why should the department be dragged down by having a member is not producing research? Why should a university be expected lower its standards of excellence?

When I serve on a hiring committee or select graduate students to work in my lab, I don’t want any with children. I know that they will be unable to commit the 80-100 hour weeks that is the standard workload of my department. As a supervisor for tenure-track faculty and graduate students, I refuse to accept lesser productivity due to someone’s choice to have a child. Anyone who has a child must accept the responsibility for their actions.

For those who do choose to have children, it is wholly unfair to expect your colleagues and department to share the burden of your personal decision. Their child is their problem, not mine, nor the department’s.

Even with my less-idealized view of the academy, I trust that attitude is not widespread—though I fear it might be. If it is, the problem goes far beyond whether or not college professors must jeopardize their careers to have families. Such a system would require them to jeopardize their careers to have a life. Even the medical establishment is beginning to learn that one cannot require that kind of work load for any more than a short time period and expect decent, let alone creative, work.

I still love libraries, old books, research, and college campuses, and know that there are schools that come much closer to my ideal than most. I'd love to hear about them!