kerr's folly

This is one of those blogs that I intended to type two years ago and started to put together around that time but I never really figured out how I wanted to structure it, so it collected dust for a while. I have got several like that from around the same year. That is beside the point right now, though.

Back when I started typing this I had just learned of a concept called "Kerr's Folly" in school, which describes an issue that has always intrigued me. Steven Kerr, who was or is a professor of management at the University of Michigan, wrote a relatively famous piece in 1995 entitled "On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B." The title sums up the concept nicely. All too often societies, businesses, individuals, and other entities believe expect a certain type of behavior but reward a contradictory behavior. As an example, we expect politicians to be representative of the common constituency, but we accept a system that requires someone be either independently wealthy or willing to accept contributions from whomever will give them in order to be elected. So, we are hoping for a representative who understands and responds to the issues of the common folk, but we reward millionaires and sellouts.

The concept was originally written for business and it is very applicable there. Investors demand long-term growth and stability but judge companies on quarterly results without regard to statistical variation. Management expects teamwork but rewards and punishes based on comparative individual accomplishment. Projects are expected to be completed with high level of quality but rewards are based on meeting time and cost goals.

I see the same sorts of things in life outside of business as well. People who feel mistreated lash out, thus guaranteeing that they will continue to be mistreated (or will start to be mistreated if they misunderstood their treatment before). People who desire friendships and deeper relationships become clingy, which encourages others to avoid them rather than befriend them. People expect their kids to have certain standards and viewpoints but they model opposing standards through their personal behavior and are inconsistent in enforcing the standards they preach.

I have always tried to pay attention as to whether I an providing incentives for people to do the opposite of what I want them to do. I don't know that anyone can be objective enough all of the time to really know what behavior he or she is encouraging, though. Do you pay attention to the behavior that you are encouraging in others to behave in your life as well? Do you have a reason not to?

holiday busyness

I am well-documented in expressing my distaste for all of the responsibilities that come with the holidays. It is supposed to be a joyous time of year, but you have to jump through fifteen different hoops just to have done things right for the holidays. Christmas cards, decorations, gifts are all stresses more than they are things to bring families closer together or emphasize the importance of Christ, which are what the focus of holiday time should be anyway.

I remember really looking forward to Christmas as a kid, but the reasoning for that was pretty sound. It was one of my best opportunities to get toys and games, I got time off school, and I usually got the opportunity to play with cousins. I had no real responsibilities with the holiday, so the adults got to deal with all of the stress.

I have a theory that twenty percent of those who celebrate Christmas are holding the other eighty percent hostage. I think that twenty percent of people are so into the holidays that they are the ones listening to carols all year and putting up huge Christmas displays in their yards the day after Thanksgiving. They are the ones who put hours into creating their Christmas cards and send them to everyone they ever met. They are also the ones who figured out the popular gifts for the year in August and had them purchased before the rush (probably not as relevant this year, but you get the picture). I think that this twenty percent of people for whom this is a hobby rather than a responsibility sets the bar for the other eighty percent of the population.

To the eighty percent of the Christmas-celebrating population I say, "Enough!" Rather than describing people who would prefer to spend time home with their families watching TV or playing games than in a chaotic mall or holed up in the back room writing Christmas cards as apathetic Scrooges, we should aspire to be more like them. Of course, I say that as an apathetic Scrooge.

prayer

I have never felt like I was any good at prayer. At different times it has felt like one of the three following things.

1. Patronizing, because God already knows He is great and knows that I know.
2. Selfish, because I seem to go to Him most frequently for less than altruistic purposes.
3. Boring, because what do you say to the One who knows everything?
   

Something about a lot of prayer and the emphases I have seen on prayer has always felt a little off, and it typically was related to one of the three impressions above. Since I know that prayer is important, possibly the most important element of a Christian's life, I have never felt too comfortable going in a path that might lead me to take some weird anti-prayer stance. In retrospect, I do not think that has ever really been a danger, though.

I have long felt that the key to understanding prayer is in Matthew 6:5-15, copied below from the NIV. I have also long felt that the emphasis that I have often seen placed on prayer in church environments has conflicted with what I read in this passage. Until recently, though, I had not taken the time to parse this and give it proper thought.

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. "This, then, is how you should pray:" 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.' For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins."

What follows is how I break down and interpret this passage. The first few points have to do with the act of praying more than what is actually said.

"...when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father..."

Don't make a show of it. This seems elementary, but when you think of a good prayer do you think of one that is a good speech or one that is humbly directed to the Father? I think that the emphasis on turning prayers into speeches has done more to discourage everyday people from praying than anything else because those oratory prayers make us think on some level that the quality of delivery is what matters.

"...do not keep on babbling like pagans..."

Length for length's sake is pointless. A genuine three-minute prayer is better than a fifteen minute prayer with no real communication with God. Prayers cannot and should not ever be judged purely on length.

"Do not be like [the pagans], for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."

To an extent this addresses my second and third annoyances from the beginning of this post. I can take my needs and wants to God and He will address those things that are really needs, so selfishness is not necessarily rewarded. Furthermore, God does not want me blathering on into boredom in an attempt to be heard. I can beseech God as long as I need to, but there is no obligation to pray into the point of boredom.

At this point Jesus gives an example prayer, opening it with the command, "This, then, is how you should pray." So, the Lord's Prayer which follows is an example of how I should pray. I think it is also important to note that since this prayer is meant as an example of an alternative to babbling like the pagans we should be careful not to just mindlessly rattle off the prayer without really meaning the words. Otherwise, we are babbling like the pagans and violating the very spirit of this passage.

"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name..."

I am praying to and should acknowledge God. He is great and holy. To address my earlier concern in point one that God already knows that He is great and holy so why bother saying it, I think much of the value is in my understanding it through my saying it. Do I think about how great God is and what that means enough? Do I think about how holy God is and what that means enough? I should stop and consider this every time I speak to God.

"...your kingdom come..."

I should pray for God to do the work that He said He would do. Jesus spoke at great length about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom represents the true Church, so I would interpret this as a prayer for that true Church to remain strong and to grow. Since the teaching in the Gospels about the "Kingdom" is relatively complicated, this is something that could be investigated further.

"...your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

I believe this is an indication that we should not be praying for what we want to happen, but for whatever God's will is to happen. Jesus provided the perfect illustration for this in Gethsemane: "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." I think there are some people who, if they were in Gethsemane with Jesus that night, would have chided Jesus for a lack of faith in not believing that the cup would pass.

"Give us today our daily bread."

I should request daily provision. Few things scare me more than this because comfort and luxury are not implied in any shape or form in this request.

"Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."

I should request forgiveness for my shortcomings. Importantly, I must also not be harboring unforgiveness when I pray this prayer. I actually read this more as a focus on us forgiving others than a focus on God forgiving us.

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."

I should pray that God guides me throughout each day and throughout my life. I should also pray that, in that guidance, I am steered clear of evil. If I had to choose, I would say that this is the most important part of the prayer.

"...if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins."

It is part of the same passage and it bears repeating. The prayer itself is a meaningless charade if the person performing the prayer harbors unforgiveness. Your standing with God is a charade if you harbor unforgiveness.

only in america

One list that I have come across several times in my time online is a series of things that could happen, "Only in America." A typical representation of the list is here, and common observations are that pizza can get to your house faster than an ambulance and that there are handicap spaces in front of skating rinks. The observation that has always stuck with me is the following, though.

"Only in America... do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet Coke."

It sounds good at first, and the reason it initially stuck out to me was that I thought it was more insightful than the other observations in the list the first time I read it. Upon further introspection, and the fact that I have started drinking diet cola with more frequency, I now believe that this observation not very insightful at all.

The implications with the observation is two-fold. First, someone who orders double cheeseburgers and large fries truly has little self-control. Second, diet Coke is a lazy and ineffective means of offsetting the calories consumed in the burger and fries. I believe that both of these assumptions is false, so I would like to address them.

Double cheeseburger and fries
Is this really that much food? On a calorie for calorie basis I know that a burger and fries tends to be more expensive than most other equivalent entree options, but this does not mean that ordering the food equals a lack of self-control. Everyone splurges on some things, which can be healthy when it is controlled, so splurging on the double cheeseburger (rather than the triple cheeseburger) does not seem like such a big deal. It is a big deal if someone with a sedentary lifestyle orders the burger and fries every single day, but that scenario is not implied in the joke.

Diet Coke and calories
While I am sure that a diet Coke contains many things that are not good for the body, a twelve-ounce diet Coke contains just under 200 calories less than a regular Coke of the same size. The average adult would have to walk almost two miles to burn that many calories. Doesn't it make sense that the person who should order the diet Coke to trim those 200 calories should be the one who is splurging on the double cheeseburger rather than the person ordering a salad?

I like to think of this in budgeting terms. Let's say that I have budgeted to spend 800 calories this meal. If my double cheeseburger and fries gets me to 790 calories, I would have to drink the diet drink or a water to stay under budget. This is the same concept that if I have $800 to do repair work around the house, once I hit my budgetary limit and spend my $800 I have to only repair the things that can be repaired for free. It is not absurd to cut back in spending on one part of a renovation project to offset splurging in another part.

Why do I care? Because only in America... are the burgers so good.

smokin'

Gallup released some data last week stating what is probably obvious, that smokers as a whole have a statistically lower quality of life than non-smokers by several different measures. While one could argue that low quality of life causes cigarette smoking, I would have to say it works the other way too. This does not surprise me and it should not surprise many other people, but what perplexes me is what the appeal of cigarettes are.

As I understand it, most people who smoke as adults started as teens, possibly under peer pressure, then stick with the habit because it is hard to break later. What I do not understand is how this specific vice has caught on. I assume that most people who are smokers and started since our culture has been inundated with information about how unhealthy smoking is are more short-term thinkers who do not picture themselves at age fifty with emphysema or lung cancer.

When I was in high school I worked as a cashier and a bagger at a grocery store. Probably the majority of the observations I have made about cigarettes and smokers came out of the experience of that job. Since I was frequently the person who had to retrieve customer's cigarettes from the locked display case, I got a good sense of who was buying cigarettes. Granted, no one was quite young enough to be in my age group because I was under eighteen, but my observation of the general cigarette purchaser demographic did not make me think that I would be more cool if I smoked. I am sure that I was heavily influenced by a strong correlation that I saw between people who used food stamps and people who bought a multiple cartons of cigarettes. I am not saying anything about those who have to turn to food stamps. I just did not want to emulate the lives of those people in that situation.

That grocery store had a small break room where most employees spent their breaks and where it was not yet illegal to smoke, though it probably would be illegal today with the lack of proper ventilation and all. If there was any question about the impact that cigarette smoke can have on lungs a person would only need to look at the walls of that room. The originally white walls had been turned what I assume was a brownish yellow. They were repainted while I was there and very quickly started to look dingy again. Of course, this illustrated what everyone in this country knows, that cigarette smoke will damage whatever it comes in contact with over extended periods of time.

One of the managers at the store once was illustrating how old he was using the price of cigarettes as an example. He noted that he had given up on cigarettes in his younger days because the habit was too expensive at fifteen cents a pack. At the time a typical pack of brand name cigarettes cost about two dollars. I do not know what a pack of cigarettes costs today, but I do know that in Pennsylvania where I had that grocery job that the taxes on a pack of cigarettes is now more than two dollars, which would imply a price approaching four dollars a pack. At more than $1400 a year, who has the kind of money to be able to afford a pack-a-day habit? I certainly do not.

A final thing I noticed when I worked at the grocery store was that, whether I was judging them fairly or not, the middle-aged to older people who bought cigarettes nearly always looked noticeably worse for the wear than those who did not. A few had severe creases around their lips where they had pursed them to hold their tobacco container of choice. A handful had obviously damaged their voice boxes in some way. Who wants to start a habit that almost guarantees they will appear an aged fifty or sixty years old rather than an attractive fifty or sixty?

Of all of the vices there are, smoking is one of the ones that I just do not understand. There are many addictions I that I understand how someone could get sucked into them because they offer a fleeting but significant endorphin rush. I guess that smoking must too, but as someone who has never smoked I just don't see it.

I have heard some people claim that smoking is a sin, but I do not think that is necessarily the case. It is an addiction, and those are the sorts of things that have to be dealt with as we prioritize Christ. It is not necessarily any more sinful than other addictions that people see as benign, though, such as to a specific food or television show.

Even if I did not have all of these reasons not to smoke, I would probably still have to pass on it. I already have a dependence to a chemical substance that stains my teeth, ruins my breath, impacts my mood, and is associated with relaxation. I drink my share of coffee every day and that is good enough for me.

nazis

Not long ago I watched a silent movie from 1927 called Metropolis. It was supposed to be a science fiction move set in 2026, but it was more of a political story about the plight of the lowly worker than it was science fiction. Since I believed it had been made in the United States as I was viewing it I was a bit amazed because the slant did not match my understanding of the political environment in the U.S. in the 1920s. When I investigated after watching the movie, though, I found that the movie was made in Germany. This gave the flick a bit of extra historical value because it presented a view into the general mindset in Germany during the time between the two world wars.

My perception of this film aligns with my interpretation of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will that the real appeal of the Nazi party was that it was a workers party. The German super man that Hitler pushed was presented as the typical German worker who was superior to the typical workers of other nationalities. Rather than saying, "Germans are superior to other races so let's systematically eliminate non-Aryans," Hilter emphasized the strength of the German workforce.

The reason I care to post about Hitler is that there are few lazier or more insulting tactics than comparing an opponent to the Nazis or to Hitler, but they are made with amazing frequency. It bothers me that people take the tactic of pinning Nazism to opponents rather than genuinely searching for the real reasons that the Nazi party was able to take hold and learning from them. Sometimes valid comparisons between the Nazi party and some situation in modern times but we cannot learn from those because all of the erroneous comparisons have dulled the effect of a good comparison. It also bothers me that people minimize the evil perpetuated by others from the past century such as Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein in focusing so much effort on Hitler, but that is a discussion for another day.

I believe that the warning that Hitler and most other bloodthirsty dictators offers is more simple than people realize. When the masses follow their wallets in bringing a leader to power, and they nearly always do, this is when a nation is most at risk of accepting things from their leadership that they might not otherwise on moral grounds. I do not believe that, had they known of the atrocities committed against the Jews and other "lesser" groups, most Germans would have supported the regime. That said, since the Nazis offered the best economic hope to most Germans, a critical mass of Germans believed what they needed to about what was going on so that they could continue to enjoy relative economic strength.

My real point in this is not to take an anti-labor position. To compare organized labor to the Nazis would be to go to the extreme that I am lamenting. My real point is that the most sure way to allow a Hitler into power is to care solely about our what our leaders are doing for us financially than whether they are leading society down a proper course. Since I personally believe that most members of society do not spend enough effort understanding the economics of different policy positions this may seem odd, but I do believe that our social principles should trump our economic positions when there is conflict. History and general observation tell me that most people rationalize their social principles based on what will economically benefit them rather than the other way around.

As a final point, it is possible that someone could read this post as some sort of indictment of the current or the previous White House. This is not my intent, though. I am just saying that the warning that Hitler provides is simply that we should be wary of the political revolutions we support because just because what we have at any given point may be bad that does not mean it cannot get worse. Sometimes it is better if the bad leadership isn't booted.

tech insecurity

I think that in economic times like the current time people tend to appreciate that they have jobs more. I don't know if this has a general impact on whether they like their jobs, but it certainly has an impact on how people value them. For my part, I definitely appreciate that I have a job, but I probably appreciated it about the same before the unemployment rate doubled.

I have been thinking about this because I think I assume something that most people do not assume. I figure that it is inevitable that I will be laid off at some point in the future. It could be tomorrow and it could be thirty years from now. It could be from my current employer or some other employer far in the future. Given the nature of modern job markets and the way I see various industries trending I do not see how I can avoid it indefinitely.

Most of the people who read this have been laid off or fired at least once. I am certainly among that number. The last place where I was laid off was especially tough because I lost a bit of trust in the experience. Against my better judgment I had been convinced by senior management that the consulting firm that I worked for would maintain enough work to employ me at least for a few years. Within a few months of that I was informed that my contract would be terminated four months later. I was one of the lucky ones who could not be immediately replaced at the customer site.

In technical fields I think it is just assumed that specific jobs will not be there forever. Certainly the required skill sets change enough that the nature of jobs today are not the same as the jobs a few years down the road. There is not as much call for a mainframe administrator or COBOL developer as there once was. Straightforward technical jobs also have a tendency to migrate offshore. Since I chose to pursue working in a technical field I should accept that this comes with the territory. It can still be a bit scary, though, because layoffs typically happen at times when few other companies are hiring. Also my skill set is broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep. This is good in my current position but it is the opposite of the ideal in a job search for anything other than an entry-level job.

My expectation causes me to approach things a little different than many other people. As an example, a coworker was talking to me about how a specific new vehicle would only cost a certain amount of money a month with a good-sized down payment and I noted that I was not comfortable having another monthly financial obligation. "Oh yeah," he replied, "You think you're going to be fired." I explained that this was not true, because I do not think that I am going to be let go in the near future. Since I figure it will happen some day, though, why get buried in even just a little debt?

While I think job insecurity is inevitable going forward, I do not think it should have to be. I think that most layoffs can be traced back to one of two things. The first is poor forecasting. During good times some companies probably grow a little too irrationally fast. The second is the myopic view on Wall Street that ignores that statistical variance for revenues and profits is unavoidable. Eventually, even the best companies are going to have bad quarters. It's only the Enrons and the Madoffs that don't. The street should not expect layoffs any time a company misses on earnings. Unless the market as a whole addresses two issues most industries will continue to be insecure places to maintain a career. I hope they get to work on that soon.

formality

Today was the first day that our church went back to one service from the previous setup of two services. There are good and bad things about it. On the good side, it puts less of a strain on church workers and it encourages people who would otherwise be going to different services to get to know each other. On the bad side, it strains the church's facilities and forces me to get out of bed on Sunday morning earlier than I have been. There is one other thing that I mark as a negative even though it probably is not a big deal. I have really enjoyed the casual nature of the service that I was attending, and I feel a little awkward now that I am ushering in something less formal than a three-piece suit.

I have made no bones about the fact that I like a casual environment more than a formal environment, but since I know a lot of people who disagree with this I have invested some thought and observation into this. I believe that most people are either in the category of those who get serious pleasure out of being in a formal setting (or having letters after their name, or something like that) or they are in the category where they are seriously uncomfortable in that sort of setting (or with listing PhD after their name). I could be wrong, but I think the group of people who are indifferent about this are in the minority.

In my analysis (well, that is what I am calling it) I am excluding the people who just like to wear nice clothes every once in a while to be seen in what they are wearing. For example, girls who look forward to wearing a new dress to the prom are probably less interested in formality than they are in people noticing them. My main focus is on comparing those who see real value in formality to those who see formality as a waste of time or worse. Since my main clashes with those with whom I have disagreed were generally that of receiving a bit of judgment for a lack of respect, I responded by also being judgmental for a while. I used to believe that those who like formality desire it for its ability to act as a tool to discriminate against less civilized inferiors. While there is no doubt that formality has been used in this manner (a lot), it was certainly an improper judgment for me to make because it probably does not describe most people drawn to the formal. As a bit of a confession, I still struggle against this line of judgment.

I now think that there is something different in foundations of the mind between those who strongly favor formality and those who disdain it. I am sure that environment plays a role, but I think the urge is more basic. My best guess at this point is that someone is more likely to appreciate formality if he or she more comfortable with cultural norms that have an appearance of being arbitrary, regardless as to whether they are. For example, to accept that a tie should be worn with a suit without much explanation because it does look better in the ensemble appears to require an acceptance of a social norm. Someone who does not accept the norm will appeal to how arbitrary that article of clothing seems because its only apparent purpose is to limit blood flow to the head. As another example, my experience is that people who believe that formality is important will often point to the importance of respect or dignity or something else like that while people who do not believe that formality is important will respond with the question of whether formality truly adds respect or dignity or whatever. Since it the subject matter is subjective, no headway will have been made in that debate.

The only way I can really get a feel for what makes someone like or dislike formality is to ask. How do you feel about formality? Are there specific reasons that you like or dislike it? Do you believe my line of reasoning is flawed?

live wires

When NJ was a baby Golden and I both noticed that he was significantly less interested in being held quietly than other babies. We didn't understand how other parents could keep their young children in the main church service without the kids making a scene every week. I chalked it up to NJ being a boy who needed to move around and told Golden that when we had a girl things would be different.

Fast forward two-and-a-half years and we have CD, who is a girl who is more of a live wire than NJ ever was. She has been in the sanctuary during service, but only when she could nap through it. When she was born the doctor and one of the nurses noted that they had never seen a baby wiggle so much in the process of being born. She is constantly into stuff and is now walking at eleven months (one month before NJ did). Anyone who knows Golden and me very well will not understand where our kids could have gotten these traits.

We are happy and frustrated at the same time that we have kids like this. First, it is probably a good thing for our kids to be explorers and have high metabolisms. They get into stuff because they are inquisitive and persistent, which are two very good traits. The bad thing is that neither Golden nor I have anywhere near either kid's level of energy and she is stuck at home all day just trying to keep up.

To those who have had multiple kids, how did you keep up? Were yours over the place? Did you have a general strategy? To those who haven't had more than one kid but plan on it some day, be prepared.

cancer awareness

October is breast cancer awareness month. Most people know this already and most people probably also know someone who has had breast cancer. I have at least one close relative who has battled through this form of cancer over the last few years, and had to endure multiple operations as a result. I think we can all agree that breast cancer is life-threatening, devastating to its victims, and absolutely a bad thing. What has bothered me a little in the past, though, is that many of the other cancers do not get the same level of attention and funding that breast cancer gets.

As an example, prostate cancer kills roughly 80% the number of people in the United States every year that breast cancer kills yet it does not receive anywhere near 80% the attention or funding for research that breast cancer receives (prostate cancer incidences, breast cancer incidences). Products all over the grocery store aren't sold in blue packages during prostate awareness month (September, by the way) with proceeds going to research prostate cancer. According to a New York Times article from last year regarding government funding for cancer research, prostate cancer is actually the most common of the cancers, but lung and breast cancers do account for more deaths. Funding is very skewed toward breast cancer when compared to other cancers by almost every measure, however.

A cynical part of me wants to believe that part of the reason that other cancers do not get the attention that breast cancer gets is that our society is obsessed with breasts. In reality, though, I think the modern focus on breasts more of an impact in how difficult the cancer is for the victim to deal with rather than on the attention that is given to it. It would be absurd to suggest that even a significant minority of people who participate in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, for example, do so because they care about one part of the human anatomy more than another. However, there are almost certainly people who participate because of fear or self-image issues a loved one had to deal with due to a mastectomy.

One reason that someone could probably give for all of the focus on breast cancer relative to the other cancers is that it is one type of cancer that can be caught and treated early. I believe that prostate cancer* is probably more important in this regard, though, because men are statistically much less likely to go to their doctors about medical problems they are having than women are. I also suspect that women are statistically much more likely to worry about getting cancer, so they are less likely to need to be made aware that they should be checking for abnormalities that could indicate cancer. If awareness is the goal, it would seem to me that an awareness campaign focused on getting men who weren't going to do so to have their prostates examined would be more effective than one to get women who weren't going to do so to check their breasts for abnormalities.

While I do not know this to be true, I suspect that the focus that breast cancer gets is because it is something unpredictable and scary that affects a large percentage of people's mothers and sisters. If my dad got cancer it would be a very big deal, but he would not talk to the rest of my family about it much simply because most men do not cope by talking things out. Whatever he goes through he does it in silence. By contrast, if my mom got cancer she would cope by talking about it, even though she is not normally much of a talker. I think the constant conversations within families impacted by breast cancer motivates people to take steps to do something about such a devastating disease. Families of men with prostate cancer probably do not talk about it as much, and so they are probably motivated to become active in finding a cure for or raising awareness about this form of cancer. I suspect that this accounts for much of the attention and research funding disparity between the cancers.

In the end I am not trying to say that giving attention to breast cancer and encouraging people to take steps to catch early is a bad thing. I just believe that we should be careful not to focus only on the one type of cancer and neglect awareness and research efforts for the others.

* Update (10/21/2009): I found out this past week that the official guidelines on at least one of the prostate cancer tests recommend not getting the test because the level of cancer found is rarely significant, and the treatments are often worse than the cure. This kind of damages part of my argument, so I felt obliged to add a note about it.

education

The value of education and the means of improving it has been on my mind quite a bit recently. The two biggest reasons are that NJ is approaching the age where we have to start planning for pre-school and kindergarten and the other is that I have been getting a bit jaded about higher education over the last few years. As is my wont, I am approaching this through a series of disjointed observations and opinions.

Choice

I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.

Improving Education

Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.

The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.

Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.

Classism and an Inefficient Economy

I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.

First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.

Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.

Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.

Future of Education

The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.

I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.

Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.

Conclusion

Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.

animal maps

Today's post is just a couple of simple geographic observations I made as a kid that I never really heard anyone else make. I lived within a few hundred yards of Lake Superior between the years when I was five and when I was seven and I have always had a strong interest in maps. As a result, I have seen images of the Great Lakes quite frequently throughout my life. As long as I can remember I have seen some sort of cross between a shark with arms and a genii. I have heard people refer to Lake Superior as a wolf head, but it looks more like a genii/shark hybrid head to me.Just like the animal I have seen in the shape of the Great Lakes, I have always seen an elephant in the shape of the lower forty-eight states of the United States. New England is the trunk, Florida is a front leg, Texas is the back leg, and it is in the process of simultaneously sitting down and raising its trunk.So, what do you think? What do you see in these maps? Am I nuts for seeing what I see? Am I deaf for not ever hearing anyone make that observation before? Am I a nerd to get such a kick out of this?

to cure or not to cure

I have noted before that I have self-diagnosed protanopia color-blindness. Everything I have read or heard about colorblindness to this point has always emphasized that it is completely untreatable as well. I have never really seen (pun not intended but not avoided, either) this as a big deal. Since I have no clue what I am missing and there has been absolutely no possibility of my experiencing that which I have been missing, I haven't put a lot of thought into possible treatments. Apparently, through the wonders of medical science, I may actually have a possibility of experiencing real colors some time in the future.

I heard a story yesterday about a recently published study where researchers from the University of Washington were able to get two color-blind squirrel monkeys to differentiate reds and greens by injecting them with a virus containing the gene that is deficient in color-blind humans and all squirrel monkeys (story here and here). According to the reports the results took several weeks, but the are still able to see colors two years later.

At this point I am not sure how excited I should be. If this actually turns into a treatment, which I cannot imagine that it would not some time in the future, the question I would have is whether it is worth going through a procedure to fix my color-blindness. It probably would not be a horribly invasive procedure, but I would imagine it would at least initially be relatively expensive.

In college we had representatives of a deaf organization visit one of my classes and I was struck by what one of them noted about her condition. This is just a rough summary, but she said that if she had the choice she would still not choose to get her hearing back because being deaf was who she was. Obviously, deafness is far more impactful on a person's life than color-blindness, so that contrast in my mind does make getting my color-blindness addressed seem a bit more trite.

I can imagine a few valid reasons for having the procedure done. First, if I were ever in my life to consider a career change, it would open a lot more doors. Also, it would help to be able to differentiate colors when people use them to describe people or things (e.g. "Do you see that guy in the red jacket?"). Another consideration is that, since I already know what it is like to be color-blind, I think I would like to know what it is like to have normal vision. I am sure that there is some part of being able to see all of the visible spectrum that would add some unexpected value to my quality of life.

All of that said, I cannot imagine spending a large sum of money on something like this unless I could come up with a good rational reason why seeing a few extra colors is worth the expense. I would not hold back because due to some sense of self-identification with being color-blind, but I would hold back due to valuing other things for which I could use the money over the ability to differentiate a few extra colors. I might also have some concern about potential side effects for a procedure that impacts such an important area of the body.

So, some day in the years ahead I will probably get to decide whether I want to change the way I see the world. At that time I will have to determine if it is really worth it. It wouldn't be a surprise if I decided it wasn't.

a mind of violence

Just as a warning, this post is a relatively frank assessment of one specific part of the male mind as I see it. The content, other than possibly being blunt, is merely PG in nature. Also, since my mind is male, I feel that I am far more qualified to write on that than something on the female mind. While I am not explicitly requesting this from anyone, I would love to hear assessments from other people on how they believe the minds of people of their gender work.

A lot is made of the focus of sex in the male brain. Not nearly as much is made of the focus of violence. While it may be true that the male brain is more wired for sex than violence, I am not currently convinced that this is the case. I think the drive for violence is more easily masked and diverted than the drive for sex and that is why many diminish the important of violence in the male mind.

First is the most obvious type of mental violence which makes it the easiest to mask. My experience has been that I imagine out violent scenarios to situations quite frequently, and I believe this is something that is common to most or even all other men. This is something that has always been with me, meaning I did not learn it from watching TV and movies, and I do not believe I am alone in this given the content of most action films and comic books. Given how opposed I am to offensive physical violence, that I continue to experience this should carry some significance. This maskable violent imagery is only the most straightforward element of violence in the male mind, though. Just because I imagine violence doesn't mean that anyone has to know about it, but there are other telltale signs of violence in men's minds.

Diverted violence is generally related to a focus or interest in warfare and the elements of warfare and dystopian survival. My observation has been that even many of the most pacifist men have interests of which the appeal is largely due to the similarity to some element of warfare. This can take the form of sports, video games, and business, among other things. For example, football is just a proxy for the actions on a battlefield. It is less obvious than gladiatorial fights were, but all of the symbolic stuff is there. Violence in video games is almost redundant, but even most games that are not violent involve vanquishing a foe. Games that do not involve this are usually designed as crossover games to appeal to women. Finally, the business world is almost entirely structured to be a battle zone. The strong and those supported by the strong (meaning government-supported entities) survive largely by ripping the competition to shreds (I just got a violent mental visualization about that).

Dystopian survival mentality is sort of related to warfare mentality in that my male mind is wired to accept that every once in a while society will destroy itself through warfare and a group of people will have to survive the wilds after it is gone. This is not without some truth. At any given point in time through history there are regions of the world where this is reality. I am not an outdoor sportsman and I do not even own a gun, but I can say that they have some appeal because they would come with the knowledge that I could hunt and fish to provide for my family and shoot to protect my family if society disintegrated.

Since God made most men this way I do not think there is anything naturally evil or wrong about the violence drive as I have described it in the same way that there is nothing naturally evil about the sex drive. The wrongness occurs when the drive for violence goes unchecked and manifests itself destructively. Where that point is where the drive is unchecked is for God to know. I just have to be sure not to reach that point.

what it's worth

A few months ago something that was popular with a lot of my Facebook friends was making a point that they would not use Facebook if they had to pay for the service. That's fine. It's their prerogative. It doesn't make much sense to me, though.

I am intrigued by how people value different products and services they buy and use. I have heard of studies (too lazy to look them up right now) that establish that people really have almost no means of independently valuing things, so most people use cues from the less rational areas of the brain to value them. That is why people can value two identical pieces of clothing very differently because they have different labels and why people really thought that hugely inflated house prices from a few years ago were reasonable. People used social cues to value things because the rational cues are lacking.

Going back to Facebook, I think that I would pay for the service so long as the people with whom I cared about keeping in touch also continued to use the service. My position on this should carry some weight because I definitely can be a bit stingy. Facebook certainly has a value to me, and actually much more than some of the other services that I already pay money for. For example, we still get the Kansas City Star on weekends, but I read Facebook much more than I read the Star (I know, I know, I can get news online for free for now, but that's an issue for another post).

My impression is that there are a lot of people who will spend $200 on a cell phone and $100 a month on a data plan to connect to Facebook, among other websites, but they expect that those sites will provide their services for free with minimal advertising and put up a stink at a mere unsubstantiated hint that things could go that way. For now I do not think that Facebook and most other websites can afford the loss of goodwill to make their services paid. Maybe that can last forever and maybe it cannot. Time will tell.

magnetism and stupidity

This summer I have been watching Warehouse 13 and old episodes of Sliders. Of the two Warehouse 13 is easily the more well-written but both have some serious plot-development and believability issues, even for science fiction. The problem is that I know that without some of those plot issues there really wouldn't be good storyline to follow. So, do I gripe about it or accept it for what it is? I am still working out what standard to use for what is sloppy storytelling and what is just me nitpicking.

As one example that I have seen repeated many times in TV and the movies, including the usually very well-written Lost last season, the last episode of Warehouse 13 had a scene where a character was wearing a magnetic coat and metallic objects slowly inched their way toward her before flying at her. Anyone who has played around with magnets for more than five minutes knows, though, that the region of space between where an object will not move toward a magnet and where it will move very quickly is small. Metallic objects do not visibly inch toward magnets. They either stay still or they move very quickly.

The magnet thing is just something that irritates my geeky side. I know that most people would not care. Something that is a bit less geeky that gets at me, though, is when characters behave in unrealistically stupid ways just to move the plot along. In Sliders the concept is that the main characters move from dimension to dimension seeing alternate worlds. No matter how many times they run into situations that are far different than they appear on the surface throughout the series at least one character will make serious assumptions based on the face value of a situation and do something stupid as a result in each episode. Somehow the characters have forgotten everything they learned in their experiences in the previous umpteen dimensions that they visited.

Since I generally life science fiction I should probably just buck it up to some extent. If I can accept the premise of a show that is about jumping dimensions or about collecting artifacts that have almost magical behavior, then I probably should not get too bothered if the magnets in that story don't behave like I expect them to.

monster

Cause we're all guilty of the same things
We think the thoughts whether or not we see them through
And I know that I have been forgiven
And I just hope you can forgive me too- Relient K ("Forgiven")

One of the strongest, most foundational themes in the Bible is forgiveness. This is in regard both to the fact that we don't deserve the forgiveness that we freely receive and that we should forgive others. It is important enough that it is nearly impossible for me to imagine someone genuinely being a Christian and harboring unforgiveness without an understanding that this is something that he or she needs to change in his or her life. This potentially represents the most dangerous spiritual obstacle that an otherwise upstanding Christian will face.

Probably the scariest parable Jesus taught was that of the unmerciful servant (Matt 18:21-35). If it were not for the fact that the servant had already had a huge debt forgiven, it would not seem unreasonable to most people for him to take measures to right the financial wrong that his fellow servant committed against him. Maybe in today's modern world we would not condone the severe actions that he took, but we certainly would not fault his sense of justice. It is precisely because the unmerciful servant had required mercy earlier that he was handed over to be tortured until his unpayable debt was repaid. He was not being punished for his unforgiveness, per se, but rather his unforgiveness nullified the forgiveness he otherwise would have received and he was held accountable for his debt. He could not accept forgiveness if he could not give it.

One of the rarest qualities in the world a person can have is the willingness and ability to truly forgive wrongs. Forgiveness with an air of superiority is pride. Forgiveness as a show is vanity. Forgiveness with conditions is an attempt to bargain with God or someone else. True forgiveness is not even necessarily something that needs to be said. It is something that is done in the heart. For as rare as this quality of the heart is, it is something that God absolutely expects.

While there are many things that make forgiveness difficult, I believe that the problem generally boils down to an issue of pride. It is much easier to forgive the monstrous things others do if we really believe that we ourselves are forgiven monsters. I am not saying that this makes forgiveness easy, but it does make forgiveness more possible. I actually think that that the first step of viewing oneself as in as much need of mercy as the people one despises is the nearly impossible step, and forgiveness is a cakewalk in comparison (note that I am speaking relatively here).

For my part my first reaction is not one of forgiveness when someone wrongs me in even a minor way. I know how hard forgiveness is because it is hard for me. I would much rather dream about revenges that I would not ever commit than spend that same effort forgiving the slight. That is just one more thing for which this monster needs to be forgiven.

don't think

When I was in college I had to take a typing class to complete my Management minor. Most people were able to test out of the class, but not me. To that point I had not had a lot of typing experience, or at least experience typing in a manner other than the hunt-and-peck method, so I knew I would not be capable of testing out of the class.

Now, more than ten years later typing is not such a big deal. I type a lot every day like most modern office workers and people mildly addicted to being online. I was thinking recently about how typing is not something I think about. To think about typing is to slow down and mess up. The finger movements have to be automatic to the point where there is almost no conscious effort involved. This is not the sort of thing at which I excel.

I used to think that the elements of sports that I was weaker in had something to do with athletic ability. I don't think so any more. For example, in baseball I have always been a decent fielder but a horrible batter. This make sense because when I bat I want to stop and think about whether I am going to swing and where I am going to swing. By the time I have thought about it the ball is in the catcher's glove. There is no stopping and thinking about where the ball is going when I am fielding, so I don't have many problems with that.

This is the same with musical performances. If a musician has to think about where each finger has to be on the piano or guitar or whatever instrument, then that musician will have a natural limit to his or her ability to play his or her instrument. Really impressive performances generally come from people who are able, through practice, to make their fingers move to the right place almost without conscious thought.

This all is an epiphany that I had recently. The things that I excel at are those things where I am given the opportunity to ponder. Through unending repetition I can make myself perform automatically, like with typing, but it comes less naturally to me than some others and I have to really work at it if it is very important to me.

The follow-up epiphany was that all practice is is a process for allowing you to do something properly without too much thinking. The thinking is done in advance when the practice routine is designed so that as little brain power as possible will be needed when that practice is put to the test. In more areas of life than I would like to accept, it is all too easy to think too much.

this side of the fence

As the old adage, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," indicates, it is only natural to believe that other people have it better. I don't think things are quite so simple, though. I think that, while most people believe the grass is greener elsewhere consciously, they are so attached to their life that they wouldn't trade it for the apparently greener grass of someone else's life.

I started thinking about this because of fantasy football. In one of my leagues the rules are configured to encourage trading players before the season starts. Even though the rules are set this way so that a fair trade would benefit everyone involved, there are hardly ever more than two or three trades. This is because most people overvalue the players that they have and this causes them to be unable to set terms that someone else in the league is able to agree to.

I have been on both sides of the metaphorical fence at different times in my life. I have been the person who saw someone else who appeared fortunate in different areas of life and thought that it would be cool to be in that person's shoes. I am aware of a few situations where people were jealous of me due to something that they thought made my life better or easier. The obvious response to this jealousy is that the jealous person doesn't know what problems the person on the other side of the fence has to deal with. That response is not really the point of this post, though.

Like a person who is unwilling to trade a mediocre fantasy football player away because he or she overvalues that player, I think that most people would choose the hardships of their own lives rather than those of others if they were really actually given a choice. I am not saying that someone who has lost a child or a spouse wouldn't want them back. There are certainly exceptions and this is not a hard and fast rule. I am saying, though, that most people take ownership of the things in their lives and that causes those things to become a part of who they are. For example, if I were to trade my hardships for someone else's that would be the equivalent of giving up a large part of who I am.

One of my Facebook friends a while back lamented about how hard it is to be a nice guy. I agree. Life is seriously stacked against the nice guys and in favor of the inconsiderate jerks, but the reason that he is a nice guy is that at least on some level because he gets value in it. Not to negate the spiritual reasoning for being nice but, at a minimum, a significant part of what keeps him from being a selfish jerk is that it would be denying part of what his true self is, and that would be more painful than dealing with the drawbacks of being nice.

So, if you look at someone else's burden green with envy about how easy they have it, you have to ask would you really lose what identifies you as you to make your life a little easier if you actually had the choice. Could you really toss your hardships for someone else's? Even though I am not fond of the troubles I have had in my life, I don't think that I would.

nine

Today, well technically yesterday now, is (was) Golden's and my ninth anniversary. Most years I come up with something mildly sappy to post here, but this year it is just going to be an observation.

I think that most people in a couple, and even those who are poorly matched with their mate to start out, slowly become the perfect person for their significant other if only through familiarity. Golden is special because she started out perfect for me and has only become more so as the years have passed.

I love you, Golden.

what's that smell

The following is something I wrote for the summer edition of my church's quarterly magazine. My purpose was to write something that would encourage spiritual growth without being too cerebral or boring.

Something that I always look forward to in the summer is taking in the smells of the season. Everything from freshly cut grass to charcoal burning in a grill to chlorine from a pool is a reminder of the carefree freedom that summer represents. I have heard that the area of the brain that is focused on smell is very near the area of the brain that is used to recall memories, so I may just like summer smells because they remind me of summers past. Regardless of the cause, a nice summer smell can brighten an afternoon or evening if I am feeling a bit blasé.

What I find the most noteworthy about smells is how paradoxically subtle and pervasive they are. For example, if someone in our society has not showered for multiple days it is likely that no one will mention this to him or her. This person’s lack of personal hygiene will not be a secret to anyone, though. The perception of everyone who comes into contact with this man or woman will be affected by his or her smell. Even if this hypothetical smelly person has something of real worth to say, many people will ignore it due to the smell.

I think that the fruit of the Spirit is meant to work in much the same way that smells work in everyday life. As God changes me into the type of person that He wants me to be I will start to show love in situations where I may not have before. I will start to have joy in areas of my life where I would otherwise be bitter. I will have peace about things that would otherwise bother me. If God is really working in my life my disposition should be noticeably better because I am no longer projecting so much selfishness, bitterness, annoyance, and other undesirable traits that stink to those who have to be around me. People who spend time around me should notice that my temperament smells nice.

One thing that I can attempt is to try to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit more than comes natural to me. I can be good when I do not feel like being good and self-controlled when I do not feel like being self-controlled. This can have pitfalls as well, though. Giving the appearance of the fruit of the Spirit is not the same as having the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is supposed to be the evidence of the work that God is doing in me rather than being an end goal. In Jesus’ time the Pharisees mastered the appearance of goodness and self-control without actually having that fruit in their lives. Furthermore, everyone knows at least one person who acts kind but who is obviously disingenuous. If lacking any hint of the fruit of the Spirit is like a person who has not showered for days, a person who falsely portrays the fruit of the Spirit is like someone who is using far too much cologne.

If I should not fake the fruit of the Spirit, the only solution has to be an openness to allow God to change me so that I slowly become the embodiment of the fruit of the Spirit. The writer of Hebrews saw things this way as he wrote in verse 12:10, “God disciplines us for our good that we may share in His holiness.” In order for me to become holy I have to allow God to change me through the things that happen in my life. The fruit of the Spirit will then slowly start to appear as I give over areas of myself to Him.

If really want to grow in the fruit of the Spirit there are a couple of questions that I need to ask myself daily. When I interact with others in my everyday life does my disposition reek of stench or of too much cologne? What are the areas of my life that I still need to release to God so that He can change me? If I can answer these honestly and allow God to do His work I will smell good in no time.

decaded out

This Monday I turn thirty. I'm not completely sure how that happened. Somehow, the last five years just blurred by. It was not that long ago that I looked forward to turning a year older, but I am starting to hit the age where I want to put on the breaks a bit. Not too much, but a bit.

When people are in their twenties, even in their late twenties, there is not really much expectation for maturity. I am very comfortable with that low bar. While this birthday is not that huge of a deal for me it does mean that I feel I will be held to a higher standard than I have been.

In looking back over the last ten years I do see how I have significantly changed in that time, but it does not feel like I have ten years of experiences to account for that ten years. I think I viewed the decade as a catch up decade to address the challenges I faced at the beginning of it. Different people take different approaches to what they will do in early adulthood and mine was probably a bit less exciting than most. As long as the economy doesn't destroy my plans, I actually want to find a way to make the next decade more of a fun decade than I planned for the last decade. I apparently reversed the order on how that is supposed to work, but that is just the way situations dictated that it had to go.

For someone who plans a lot, I really do not have a clue what direction life will take in the next decade. Given that, I think it is appropriate to end this post without a real conclusion.

a silent living room

I am currently typing this on my laptop from a silent and dark living room. This is because a few months ago NJ decided that he wanted to sleep in the living room. At first we resisted this, but we decided that it was better to let him sleep on the couch than have him wake up crying in the middle of the night and waking up CD. It was a question of picking our battles.

As a consequence of NJ being on the couch throughout the evening, this is the first time in my life that I have watched more television on my a computer than on the TV. Golden and I had one guilty pleasure show for the summer, Here Come the Newlyweds, which just so happened to be posted online on a weekly basis. Golden has one or two other shows she catches online, and I have been watching episodes of the old series Sliders online since I didn't catch it when it was actually broadcast.

Since television has always had a significant role in my routine, it is a little odd for the TV to be off so much. It doesn't feel instinctive to turn on the television any more. It even feels a bit like a special occasion as of late to turn on the TV and flip the channel to something that is not produced for preschoolers.

Like everything, this is just a phase and before long I expect to be back to watching the television regularly again. I expect that the meantime will continue to feel surreal as I sit in the dark, however.

the pendulum

I keep up with politics, but I honestly do try not to get bogged down in it. For anyone who has an interest in the ebbs and flows throughout society, even for the completely apolitical, observing trends in politics can be incredibly instructive as to how society works. It actually probably helps if a person is apolitical because learning about the mechanics of politics is probably more difficult for a partisan for a variety of reasons which I will not address here.

Many years back I determined that politics at the national level essentially operates like a pendulum whose inevitable swings will make it appear that society moves to the right and to the left at irrational speeds. No one can really change the political swings within a truly representative government because the things that most effectively hinder political change are the things that dilute representation such as gerrymandering. People and political parties can influence the rate of the swing, but most of the major political parties' natural tendencies to try to make things more liberal or more conservative only strengthen the pendulum's swing to the other side of the political spectrum.

The two strongest and most obvious examples of this tendency were the 1994 and the 2008 elections. In both situations I heard pundits talk as if there was a fundamental shift in how people believed. While there are certainly constant shifts in societal positions for every issue, I do not believe that vast philosophical shifts are responsible for most swings in power, and my impression is that they are much rarer and typically much slower than is purported.

The biggest reason for such dramatic political shifts, I believe, is that voters exist at all points along a continuum rather than concentrated on one side or the other. In fact, it is more complicated than even that because a continuum is two-dimensional and varying political positions are not two-dimensional, but I'll stick with describing it as a continuum for now. When a political party comes into power it finds that it is next to impossible to pacify a majority of people because most issues have vast intricacies that guarantee disappointing large numbers of people along the continuum who voted for the people in power.

As a simple example of the problems the party in power faces, if you are a conservative how do you balance the desire for a small government with the desire for a strong military? This is at the root of a lot of conservative's distaste for Bush policies. If you are a liberal how do you balance support for green initiatives with support for union jobs (a very large percentage of which are in carbon-emitting or polluting industries)? This will be a very relevant issue in the next election, and moreso than most people realize. One issue may not cause a huge loss of voters, but at some point a critical mass of voters will become disillusioned and the pendulum will swing the other way. Neither remaining moderate nor trending toward the extremes is safe because voters can be lost from all points in the continuum.

Really, the only thing that I can think of that can slow the pendulum is the ability to blame the other side for the way things are, but to also maintain enough power to take credit for whatever goes well. Reagan was fortunate to come into power immediately after an unpopular president in the middle of an economic morass (he was in a very similar situation to Obama, really), but I think the biggest key to his enduring popularity among those trending to the right and his ability to get overwhelmingly reelected in 1984 was that Congress was dominated by the Democrats while he was in the White House. The same can be said of Clinton. Few would count his years with a Democratic Congress between 1992 and 1994 as his best in the White House, but he maintained popularity after 1994 in spite of some of the other things that happened in his administration, I believe largely because he had a Republican Congress.

Now that the Democrats have a supermajority in the U.S. Senate I know that some version of this pendulum effect is in the minds of strategists in both parties already. It is not a mistake that Democrats more than Republicans have talked up the fact that the supermajority is more symbolic than practical, because it makes them more easy to blame for anything that people do not like coming out of Washington. The paradox is that, like with Clinton, the thing that would most add to Obama's longevity in office and benefit his legacy would be for Republicans to win big in the 2010 elections. The complexity of working around these sorts of conundrums is why good political strategists make the big bucks.

pop-ups

Something that has perplexed me is what the point of pop-up advertisements are. I know that I am at least more put off by them than anything else, so I cannot imagine that many legitimate companies would be successful in using pop-ups. Also, most browsers block a large percentage of pop-ups, so even if they would have been successful many of those advertisements are not seen by most users. My assessments about this must somehow be wrong because pop-ups still exist in large quantities.

I can understand that some websites that do not have to maintain a highly professional reputation might be able to use pop-ups because they do not have an image to tarnish with the type of advertising that they accept. Websites that bank on professionalism of some sort or on reputation have too much to lose, in my opinion, to play that game.

One website that confounds me in its use of pop-up advertising is Snopes. Psychologically, if I get a pop-up when I go to a website, my trust of what I find on that website takes a hit. Since Snopes is founded on its audience's trust and since it probably has a more technically experienced audience that is less likely to click on a pop-up, I don't know for the life of me why the website has so many pop-ups. Do they really get more advertising dollars by popping up a couple of windows every time someone visits the site than they would by avoiding the practice? If it were not for the fact that the website has very compelling content that I cannot reliably get elsewhere I probably would have decided to stop going to the site long ago. I know at least one person who has sworn off the site for the same reason.

So, if you happen to be reading this and you are considering building a website and making money on advertising, please consider forgoing the pop-ups and pop-under ads.

wedding

Golden's brother got married last weekend. It was quite an involved event, actually, as there were seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen as well as five ushers. That is a lot of people, and was indicative of the effort put into the wedding. The ceremony was only twenty minutes long, however, which is the perfect length as far as I am concerned.

There is so much that I do not understand about weddings. I know that most girls grow up planning every minute detail of their wedding for fun, and I know that the appeal of a wedding is supposed to be that this is a ceremony that focuses on the bride and makes her feel special. I, in my male mind, do not understand much more than this about weddings, though. I think this is epitomized in the fact that every chick flick seems to involve a wedding at some point and every time a wedding shows up in an action movie it is because a character somehow ruins the wedding event by being chased through the area where the ceremony is being held.

Something that I noted on Facebook was that I am very thankful that my parents agreed to fly here to help take care of the kids while everything was going on. There are a lot of things that people involved with a wedding are supposed to do and dealing with two kids under the age of three while doing them would be a monumental if not impossible task. Add to this that no almost-three-year-old boy does not want to sit around a church in a tux for hours on end doing nothing.

Golden's brother went to Greece for his honeymoon and I have to say that it sounds like a great place to visit. I'm interested in hearing how it went. Since we did not officially have jobs at the time and had to pay for most everything with plastic or cash from family when we were married, our honeymoon was to St. Louis rather than somewhere more exotic. It was a much nicer vacation than it sounds, far better than any vacation we have taken since, but I feel that we need to make up for the apparent lameness of our honeymoon destination next year on our tenth anniversary if possible.

So, that's pretty much it on weddings. That is, until the next one I attend.

two is different than one

When we decided to have NJ I was pretty intimidated about the whole thing. Since I have never been a kid person I had many questions as to whether I had the stuff to be a father. When we decided to have CD I had gotten past most of those concerns. We had our challenges with NJ, but very little of the problems were challenges that I felt incapable of handling. CD couldn't be too much different.

While both kids have their similarities, it is amazing how different the challenges are that we are facing with CD compared to what we saw with NJ. She has far different sleeping patterns, has different eating patterns, and even seems to move around differently than NJ (she hasn't really attempted to crawl yet because she can get across the room easier by rolling).

The sleeping habits are the ones that are causing the most effort for Golden right now, so that is what we are working on. Tonight is the first night of using the Ferber method to get CD to sleep. This means that we will probably be hearing some crying over the next few nights. If it means less effort in getting CD to sleep going forward, though, putting up with a little crying is worth it.

At least we can console ourselves that CD will be easier to potty train than NJ. Right?

self-diagnosis

I have mentioned on several occasions that I am OCD. Golden and I even joke that together we complete most of the OCD symptoms. It turns out that neither of these is completely true. While I have some mild quirks, such as preferring things in fours and preferring to not step on cracks in the sidewalk, those quirks do not come anywhere near causing me the disability that true OCD would cause. My mild tendencies do not really mess with my actual life on any level deeper than determining the number of chips I will pull out of a bag.

I think that I am like a lot of people, or at least a lot of Americans, in that I figure that everything that seems different from the norm about me must be a condition of some sort. I sometimes misread things so I have questioned whether I have dyslexia. I cannot go to sleep many nights, so that must be some sort of medically-caused insomnia. At one point I figured I had a good chance of having COPD because I was easily winded.

The truth of the matter is that I would guess that most people have little quirks that, if they analyzed them, would appear to point to some medical condition. I just happen to be the type of person to analyze my quirks. I wonder what condition could cause me to be that type of person?

anthropomorphic fun

I am sure that I am not the only one who has noticed that the ratio of adults to kids in a movie theater is inversely proportional to the ratio of animals to humans in the movie. In short, saying that kids movies have a lot of animals in them would be an understatement. I have to wonder why this is.

While I did have a few pets when I was a kid I have never been an animal person. I don't mind pets but I simply don't establish relationships with animals, which I think is an important prerequisite to being an animal person. I still liked a lot of kids movies with animals in them when I was a kid (and some while I am an adult), but the fact that a movie has animals in it has never made a movie more appealing at any age. I would have been just as entertained if Fievel from An American Tail were a human, though it would have made the movie title a bit less descriptively accurate. It's the same with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and all of the rest of the incredibly well-known anthropomorphic fictional characters I watched in my childhood.

Why is it that movies for kids focus on animals so much comparatively to movies for adults? Is it because kids spend more time around the family pet than adults do? Is it because a story with talking animals lends itself to being more fantastical, which is more appealing to kids? Is it because kids are more likely to have empathy for animals than adults are? My theory is that it is a combination of the things that I just mentioned, plus the fact that this is just the way it has always been done so this is the way we're going to continue to make kids movies.

writer's block

I have not been posting lately because I have been kind of working on an article for a magazine produced at my church. I say kind of working because all that I have really been doing is fighting writer's block. This typically happens to me when I do not have a precise set of parameters in my mind as far as what the final result should really look like.

This past semester I poured hours and hours of work into a paper for one of my classes, far more than I should have, because I was not convinced that I was following the construct that the professor wanted. In that class everyone got to see everyone else's paper, so when I looked through everyone else's work I noticed that I had written more than one thousand words more than the next largest paper, and I did not accomplish that by filling the paper with fluff. There was no maximum page limit on the papers and so I overcompensated to be sure I was doing the right thing. Looking through some of the other papers, it appears that most other people had a different approach.

With this article I am not completely certain how casual or spiritual it is supposed to be. My natural inclination is to type a step-by-step lesson, but that does not feel exactly right for this magazine. At the very least, this is not something that I expect to be obsessing about too much longer. My article is due on the third, and I think I have actually settled on a topic. Finally.

typhoid baby

This weekend we are getting a good reminder of the value of taking steps to not spread germs. Golden and NJ both caught colds last week from an event that we went to and those have spread to CD and me. I have long believed that a cold was one of the worst things I can catch because I don't really get sick enough to skip things but I do get sick enough to be moderately miserable. The past few days this has been aggravated by NJ having a hard time getting to and staying asleep at night, and now CD going through the same thing.

I think everyone with kids has several stories about the impact of illnesses. It always seems to be a real gamble to take either of the kids anywhere because a significant percentage of the time the kids are in a situation where there might be germs (church nursery, carts at a store, restaurant booster seat, etc) they catch something that works through the family for the next two weeks. This is compounded by the fact that different people have different standards for how sick they or their kids have to be before they don't go to church, or the store, or a restaurant.

So, if we tend to skip a lot of things it is not because we are avoiding everyone. It's because we are trying to avoid everyone's germs.

past performance

As part of the process of setting up my laptop I have reorganized many of the documents on our main computer so that I can properly copy what I need onto the laptop. While I was going through the documents I came across some folders containing homework and various papers that I wrote for some of my undergrad courses. Looking back on that work now, it is amazing to me how much time I spent on such a small amount of work and how mediocre my writing was.

I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.

The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?

the case for television

I was asked recently what Golden and I do together, or what we have done together, as a couple. I hesitated before answering because some people appear to look down on this, but we have always watched TV and gone to movies together. We do other things as well, but our "us" time has always been largely comprised of TV and movies. My question is why should we feel bad about our television habits? I have heard a few arguments which I will detail below.

It's unhealthy

While I agree that excessive TV watching can be unhealthy because it is associated with a lack of activity, so can excessive book reading. I don't feel that the health argument applies to me because if I watched less television I would not be replacing that time with exercise. I would be replacing it with Internet, gaming, and reading time, none of which is active.

It rots the brain

There are shows that I believe have to decrease the intelligence of the audience, but I think those very rare. Actually, if we are to believe that books, theater, and music make people more intelligent, it seems counter-intuitive to believe that entertainment built from these things (even the mass-market kind) would do the opposite. Someone I used to work with once compared Shakespeare's writings to soap operas in a less than positive way, and I wonder if more people wouldn't agree if the Bard were to write today.

It thwarts creativity

One of the arguments go that, while with books you have to visualize everything that is happening yourself, with television your experience is more passive. This could be true, but my experience tells me that my experience is only passive for slowly-paced shows, and this mimics my experience with slowly-paced books as well. As an example, when I read Captain's Courageous in high school I really had to fight to stay engaged in the story. My brain was not becoming more creative for the experience.

I think that watching shows and movies that pose scenarios that cause us to ask what we would do in a specific situation or perhaps speculate some unknowns about a story (Lost comes to mind) can actually make people more creative because the creative parts of their brains are forced to become engaged.

It negatively impacts culture

The negative influences of television probably outweigh the positives, but I hold to the belief that this is because many of the people who could make a positive impact through television have directed their efforts to other things. One possible solution to this would be to support shows that positively impact culture and to encourage others to do the same.

There are other arguments against television as well, and some are probably valid. My main point is, though, that television is not any more a vast cultural wasteland than a lot of things that are seen as culturally redeeming. Is going to the play Legally Blonde (or Grease, or Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, et al) really culturally superior to catching it as a weekend TV movie special?

Now that I have staked out one position, perhaps someone reading this has some thoughts to counter mine. If you do, you know how to air them.

what's in a word

I thought I had posted on this topic earlier but I cannot find any posts on the topic in my searches of the blog, so here it is (possibly again).

One of my friends in high school frequented the youth events for a church that neither of us attended. As a result I sometimes went along as well, but not very frequently. One night we were riding in the church van on the way back from an event, I think it was bowling, when the guy sitting next to me mentioned that he wanted to kill himself. I don't remember how we got on that topic, but my impression of the little that I knew about him led me to believe that he was partially serious, but that the main point was to find a reason not to do something so permanent. It could be that he was just pulling everyone's leg, but I have to say that he did not seem the joking type.

There is something weird that happens when you are around someone who you believe might actually be intending to kill himself or herself. Everything all of a sudden becomes about that one person and there is an edginess that everyone gets because they don't want to say or do something they would regret and be responsible for someone doing something so drastic. As would be expected, at least a few of the people in the bus felt that it was important to quickly convince him that life is worth living. This is when two of the girls in the bus started telling him that God loved him. Honestly, it sounded cliche and I think (and I thought at the time) that that was the last thing that he wanted to hear and that it was the last thing that would stop him from doing anything rash. I can't remember what specifically I said to him and I don't know that it was any better, but I remember his disappointed expression at people resorting to, "God loves you," as if he had never heard it before.

I don't know what happened with that guy. As I said, I didn't attend that church and he apparently rarely did either. I knew his name at the time, but I forgot it soon afterwards as I am apt to do. I have often thought back to that conversation, though. Had I been given the chance to do it over again I probably would have gotten his contact information and tried to give him more opportunity to describe what was so crappy about his life. I also have thought about how much a shame it is that, "God loves you," and the similar phrase, "God is love," are so cliched that when I hear it I don't think about what that really truly means.

There is probably no more important truth, as far as Christianity is concerned at least, than, "God is love." I think that so many people misunderstand the word love, though, that we interpret the phrase with a more superficial meaning or a just plain different meaning. I think that love in this context means a willingness to selflessly sacrifice. I think that it would be just as accurate to say, "God is sacrifice. He gave it and He demands it." This is backed up in Paul's letter to the Romans.

"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."- Romans 5:7-8

John wrote the following on our responsibilities.

"This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome..."- 1 John 5:3

I can only speak for myself, but if I were cynical about how cliched the phrase, "God is love," is I would take it as a breath of fresh air for someone to tell me that God is sacrifice. It's specific. It's stark. It forces a decision as to whether I am going to accept that sort of a God or not. Most importantly, that God is sacrifice is more difficult to say with the pretense that what the listener is going through isn't such a big deal.

The reason I have been thinking about the topic of cliched words lately is that I have noticed, especially in my more recent classes, that a lot of the concepts behind the overused business buzzwords are actually quite good. I know this is a step down from talking about love and God, but it is still what got me thinking. Synergies are the abilities of groups within a company to work together in ways that their output is greater than the output of the groups individually, and they are vital for most mergers to make any rational sense. Paradigms are the mental constraints under which we think and they often disallow us from understanding the value of finding other better ways of doing what we do, and ignoring paradigm shifts usually results in the company in question going out of business. There are other cliched words that represent important concepts as well, but my point is already made. A few people at some point thought that using the buzzwords without giving the associated concepts the required respect to be effective and all we ultimately ended up with were Dilbert strips mocking synergies.

Since I don't think that anyone who reads this abuses religious or business buzzwords and cliches, this is probably written to the wrong audience. Perhaps this could be a word of warning lest anyone consider starting to use them without paying proper respect to the underlying concepts. Just say no.