THERMODYNAMICS

When there’s nothing else to write about, as a last resort you can fall back on the weather. I’ve observed weather ‘round the clock, everywhere I’ve been, all my life. But people do love to talk about it. With weather there is no controversy, no arguments other than maybe who got the most rain or whose tongue it was that froze to the pole. You are stuck with what you get. You can go somewhere else but then you’re stuck with the weather there. I like the way weather works. It’s just air and moisture and energy from the sun. I went to summer school in 1991, 4 week - 6 credit Geology/Meteorology program for science teachers. It was in the Missouri Ozarks where canoeing and fishing were great and we had weather every day. Most of what we did was hands-on field trips and laboratory exercises but the meteorology syllabus included 4 sessions in the classroom with an old, impatient, no nonsense professor who would bring us up to speed on thermodynamics. 

I saw a movie where the protagonist (John Travolta) had to get a Portuguese dictionary, drive 5 miles, studying as he drove and speak fluent Portuguese when he arrived; and he got it right the first try. His ability to do that was the heart of the plot but the idea is about as absurd as learning thermodynamics in 4 hours. Several of us went to Dr. Elifrits, the Program Director saying, “If our grade hangs on this test we might as well go home now.” He laughed, reassured us, “This is jumping through hoops to satisfy National Science Foundation grant requirements.” I got 30% on the exam. With the curve that came out an A-. If you want to be the weather man on TV, it usually requires a degree in meteorology. If a meteorology major washes out it’s usually thermodynamics that kicks him under the bus; some really serious math and physics. Afterward, eating at the local Cracker Barrel, Dr. Elifrits rationalized, “You couldn’t survive that thrashing and not learn something that will serve you well.” I did learn a lot of meteorology and I appreciate thermodynamics. I have the principle down pat but the math is still over my head and the physics is just an excuse to do more math. 

April, the month we usually get severe weather was pretty tame but you know Murphy’s 2nd Law: Pay me now or pay me later, but later costs more. The price for a warm, sunny day in January is two cold, stormy days in May. I expect plenty of flash and boom in May. Last nigh we dodged a bullet. A line of severe weather came shooting up through Oklahoma and Kansas with Kansas City in the crosshairs. I followed it on my cell phone, radar ap. From my front step, far off in the southwest I saw lightning flashes and felt delayed, rumbling thunder. The red band on the radar, rushing toward us made me think of the Tokyo Express. In WW2, during the battles for the Solomon Islands the Japanese sent supplies and reinforcements in by night on fast, heavily armed ships. American forces called it the Tokyo Express, with guns flashing and rumbling. Our fighters and bombers couldn’t fly at night so we were left with a meager array of submarines, torpedo boats and destroyers to get in their way. We won the war but never could stop the Tokyo Express. There were high winds last night and a few isolated funnels but I only got half an inch of rain. 

Today is a new day and down south, another line of storms is headed this way. In an hour or so we should get more flash and rumble but the daytime stuff isn’t so dramatic. The radar image is just as grim but power outage in daylight isn’t so disarming. My generator really does the job and I have a long extension cord. So we dodged one bullet. Today is still unfolding and the forecast is for another line,(Tokyo Express) on the way for later tonight and tomorrow. If it’s a test, I’m ready as I can be. The short answer is, PV = k “Thermodynamics.”

CASTING OUT

Fred Phelps: his name came up over the weekend, otherwise I would not have thought about him. But Fred and his family made lots of news and got more than their share of notoriety with their Gay bashing protests. A lawyer and Baptist minister, he founded the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. He and his congregation, made up largely of his extended family, traveled far and wide, protesting at LGBT and military funerals against Gays and D.O.D policy. I don’t think I need to elaborate on their hateful showboating. Before his passing in 2014, he could have been the most despised man in the United States.

When he died, his daughter, a lawyer as well, took over leadership and continues the Westboro crusade, if you will, as God’s agent against queers and fagots. There are two parts to this story. First, I was surprised at the time to learn that most of their income was from settlements and penalties from litigation against cities that violated their constitutional rights. That part of the story fleshed out years ago. Even if the government tried to follow the law, people, friends of the survivors, local organizations; they counter demonstrated against Fred’s faithful. Counter protesters physically kept them away from space they were entitled to and posed a physical threat to their safety. Phelps sued city after city for either denying their rights or for not protecting them from hostile counter demonstrators. The law practice of Phelps & Phelps got really good at provoking hostile reaction and profiting from the push back. In recent years the Phelps phenomenon has lost traction, notably, towns figured out what to expect and how to  circumvent law suits. But it was a money making machine for a long while. 

Humor in the other story is, if not dark then at least shaded, but humor none the less. I heard it just the other day. Several years before his demise, Fred’s mother I’m told, was exorcised by a satanic cult. There is nothing new about Pagan religion. From what I can gather, Satanic worship falls in that category with well defined dogma and practice. Several high ranking Satanic priests convened a council to create a new ritual, paralleling the Catholic tradition of  exorcism, casting out evil spirits from sinners who had been possessed. They also formalized a ceremony (Pink Mass) that would transform straight people into Gays and Lesbians. Then, on a moonlit night, when the astronomical alignment was really strong they took their pitchforks and went to the grave of Fred Phelps’ mother. There, they exorcised her heterosexual orientation. Then they performed the Pink Mass, propelling her back into the afterlife as a Lesbian. 

I heard the story last week while sharing food with some atheists I know. I don’t know if there’s any truth to the story, don’t know them well enough to call them my friends but I am comfortable in their company. They are pleasant folks, well educated, well behaved, spanning a couple of generations. I will probably hang with them again sometime. Understand: I don’t worship Satan so it’s not about me. There is probably a little “Satan” in everyone, not something I would deify. But it is a reoccurring source of smile and smirk; Fred on the other side with his mom. She’s wearing a rainbow banner and placard that reads, “God Loves Homos”. Then, in disbelief he asks her how she could do this and she tells him, “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.” I don’t know who would have been privy to that celestial conversation but I loved the story; didn’t laugh but my lip did move against my teeth.

BREAD CRUMBS

I can remember: I’ve noticed how many of my journal entries begin with, “I can remember”. I remember when my dad told stories he leaned on a disclaimer in the second sentence, “In those days. . .” But I don’t hear much reflection from youthful sources. I think for them, forward is more interesting than looking back and a short memory doesn’t have so far to go. The way story and memory work is more complicated than the models we grew up with, but we needed something simple. Instead of filing memories away like books on a shelf, imagine taking the book apart then dropping pages in different places, all over the place until you run out of pages. So when you want to recover that story it’s not just going to the right shelf and pulling the book. A particular memory doesn’t exist as a book-like construct. It exists as a network of sequenced synapses, like Hansel & Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. 

Imagine a loaf of bread: you want to recall the “Bread” story. Instead of going to the bakery you have to first find the flour, then the yeast, then the eggs, the milk, the salt, etc. then order them correctly and apply the heat;’Voila’ you have the Bread Story. Imagine a GPS that shows just the route from start to finish, all the twists and turns but no names, no numbers, dot to dot, town to town. When you get the dots connected correctly and see a familiar pattern, “Oh yea, that’s Chicago to St. Louis,” you have the story. Memory isn’t stored in one place as a story, rather it is a network of scattered data points that must be reconnected. My simple explanation has problems but then it’s just an old man’s model and you know, entropy never takes a break. If I’ve made any sense at all then I’ll take credit for that part.

I never thought much about how memory works until I stumbled across it on a TED Talk or in a book I was reading. I better get it while I can; no guarantees. Advancing age has a way of leaving one either extremely grateful or regrettably disappointed. I’m in the grateful column and it follows, I’m grateful for that. I have time to dabble with cool stuff now. If you write it down before you forget it’s like crib notes and there’s no rule against cheating. 

COMING BACK AROUND

A friend of mine, haven’t seen him in over a year; he called me the other day. He’s been in a long term, drug addiction rehab program. When addicts go off the tracks they take others with them and I was onboard that train wreck. A lot of the emotional, financial aftermath funneled through me and I’ve had to wrestle with it. I’ve loved him like one of my own children all along, from when they all were kids raiding my refrigerator. 

     Forgiveness is easy for me but it can be misunderstood. Biblical hyperbole would have it that forgiveness erases the fact and you go back to like it was before. Forgive and forget. But it doesn’t work like that. The forgiveness I understand is to jettison the negative baggage; you just let it go. It lets the offender off the hook. That's not why you forgive but that's alright. It's like letting go of a hot rock. But you don’t forget, you remember. With or without troubles and hard times, things change, people change and life neither slows nor looks back. Forgetting serves no purpose. The victim in that miscarriage lets go the burden, for the sake of self. If the damage cannot be repaired then all you can do is to let it go. Otherwise it's the hot rock in your hand and you are the one on fire. Once you let it go you can both start over. Reconciliation is about balance and new beginnings, make something new, something positive, Good Samaritan. 

His rehab program was Christian centered and the brain washing seems to have worked. He talks about God and prayer with the conviction of a Big B Believer, something he never did before. I’m glad for his sake, otherwise I’m afraid it would be,‘Second verse same as the first.’ Better a slave to Jesus than to alcohol and heroin. After all, a religious addict has traded one drug for another but the latter is neither deadly nor illegal.

When I sat down to write this piece I didn’t know it would bring me here but, here we are. I am reminded how thoroughly religion is hard wired into our culture; you can't escape it. Even doubters, pushing back, it’s like swimming with dolphins: you don’t turn into a dolphin but certainly you experience buoyancy and you get all wet. I've been swimming with Christians all my life. I am comfortable with religious language I think, because everybody embraces one fiction or another and mine can accommodate the born again rhetoric. I can talk the talk; "God" and being blessed and allude to the sacred or being spiritual because it's all metaphor and I don't concede to an omnipotent, omniscient, super-dude. If you need religion you should have it; no different than antibiotics or chemotherapy. 
     When I need guidance or insight I look to the written word, but not the self serving schemes of 4th century War Lords who gave us the bible; canonized to consolidate power in the Holy Roman Empire. I prefer Joseph Campbell or Khalil Gibran. Campbell - ”God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.” Simply said, we attribute what we can’t understand to something mysterious and call it God. Gibran - “Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty and obey only love.” I get to make that distinction and am no longer bound by religion's Obedience clause. 

I don’t want to sound preachy but at the same time, I want some say in how I am perceived and remembered. I was never done wrong by my parent's church and I have no axe to grind. Loved ones pray for me and that's good, that kind of energy doesn't have a down side. Sometimes I lift one up, high hopes at best, unaddressed; but I am off the leash. My spirit yearns to know more about this journey but human nature and Western Religion's myth-fiction fall way-short. Mark Twain cut straight to the chase, “Faith is fine but give me a map and compass.” Seeking a safe, comfortable niche for my psyche, I default to Bertrand Russell. When he was challenged to declare either as an Agnostic or Atheist he answered, “That depends.” His logic was, if you want a theoretical position, the absence of evidence cannot prove anything. So, lacking tangible evidence to disprove the existence of a God, he would stand with agnostics. In a practical sense, he had no reason to believe in a God thus, he behaves/lives as an atheist. 

I like the concept of Karma. How we live creates an energy that reciprocates; what goes around, comes back around. We create for ourselves our own heaven and our own hell, here in the present. I take comfort in Campbell’s; “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live joyfully.” So when Grace (metaphor) lifts me up, I concede to it. When I see the chance to be its instrument, I pray (metaphor) I will rise to the occasion: God’s Grace-Good Karma, coming back around. 

GAMES

When you leapfrog backward in time and come face to face with people you haven’t seen for so long you can’t recognize their faces; it’s more like a blind date than a reunion. Memory is fickle. It can be crisp and it can be fuzzy. It can dry up and go away. In 1968 I was a senior in college. That year our baseball team won the NAIA College National Championship. I played on that team in 1966 & ’67 only to drop out of school to work a job in the spring of ’68 and return to complete my studies that summer. Yesterday the college had a 50 year reunion for that team, celebrated between games of a double header with one of our old rivals. Amazingly, our coach and all 21 members of that team were there to be honored. 

By coincidence and events over which I had little control, I was not on that team. It was the right thing for me to do and I have no regrets but sometimes, between melancholy and bittersweet, I’ve brooded over not playing ball my senior year, not being part of that team. The college put on a great celebration. Sitting up high in the seats behind home plate I watched as each player was introduced, their accomplishments and stats from the championship series were detailed. Great plays, and there were great plays, were rehashed and retold. Seeing overweight old men with bad knees retell sliding head first into 3rd, stretching a double into a triple; nostalgia isn’t all bad. But 50 years takes its toll and they had been on their own journeys, as had I. Then, you can only squeeze so much honey from the jug and memories pale; you can’t slide into 3rd any more. Kids are playing our game now. 

I spent a lot of the afternoon with Fred Merrill, an old friend, another baseball/football alum who graduated several years before me. He called me in 1989 to see if I would coach 9th graders for him at Shawnee Mission South High School where he was head football coach. I did that for 3 seasons, without a doubt the best, most rewarding coaching experience of my career. He called me out of the blue: Wow, life changer. Sitting there, I was comfortable in my own skin. This was where I was supposed to be, not on the field with the ’68 team. My baseball experience with those guys was before we were world beaters, preparing for one game at a time and then for the next biology exam. I don’t know how their championship season changed their lives but I don’t think it could have improved mine. Had I stayed and played, who knows where or how I would have turned out. I wouldn’t change anything, my life has been that good.

I’m reminded, it doesn’t take much to deflect the path of an object in motion. I can put my finger on seemingly insignificant, random events that changed my course, sent me off in a new direction. Watching a particular movie after getting fired from my job in 1958 resulted in my transferring from the Navy Reserve to the Regular Army. Wow: that was a life changer. In 1973 I was driving a tour jeep in Colorado. A last minute change of driving assignment sent me on a route I seldom drove. One of my passengers asked about my real job. After a long conversation he offered me a job that moved my family to Michigan. Wow: a life changer. Is there a way to anticipate little twists of fate that alter what seemed to be a foregone conclusion: I don’t think so. 

Fred and I enjoyed the program and a wonderful conversation from the bleachers. We paid attention to the kudos on the field but there was plenty of time to rework a long standing friendship. In our coaching relationship I realized even then, his trust and high expectations brought out the best in me. My take-away for the day was much more about what we shared than my connection to a championship team that neither of us played for. We had crystal clear reflections on our mentors, back when we were student athletes. Long dead now, their names adorn the fields and stadiums where we used to play. What we learned from them was: It’s not about winning, it’s about preparation, it’s about the struggle. I don’t know if they teach that today. 

SOMEBODY WATCHING

Does it make you weird if you do little, pattern behaviors in certain situations? I count things; can’t remember when it started but in the classroom, before I took attendance I counted heads. How many kids in their seats! I count birds on a wire and people in a room.  When I was an usher at church and they needed a head count, I was the guy. I count steps on stairs, up or down, either way. It seems odd numbered steps on flights of stairs outnumber the evens. I catch myself counting hammer strokes while driving nails. I wonder if it’s anything like animal instinct, like dogs turning in a circle before they lie down. Some of it does require thought. In the army, OMG, that long ago: a fellow ‘Grunt’, I remember his name, George Hicks from rural South Carolina. Not that I go out of my way to malign Southerners or even poke fun but George processed information, one synapse at a time. I suspect that would be true no matter his home state. I do have a thing about Southern culture and southerners but that bias doesn’t belong in this story.  Leading up to Christmas, the library at the service club did a promotion where they conducted video interviews with soldiers and sent them to the subject’s local television station as a holiday, public service. George did that but they rejected his interview and he got in trouble with the 1st Sergeant for it.  When asked about his role in the company’s mission he told the host that his job was to be the first one over the hill, the first one killed in action. He would not change his story and they sent him on his away.  His version was probably an unvarnished truth but certainly not acceptable for a Christmas greeting.  George once told me that right handed people always put their socks and boots on, the right one first and left last, that they can’t help it. From that day on, I put on anything and everything that had a left and a right, left first and right last.  At first (1960) I did it on purpose but it didn’t take long before it was patterned. Since then if the first glove out of my pocket doesn’t work on my left hand, I tuck it under my arm without a thought and fish out the other one. If I pick up the right shoe first, I put it back and start over. Now, I find it both funny and depressing that George Hicks is still pushing my buttons. I cross my t’s from right to left. I’m told that is weird, against all the rules of ergonomics and left to right penmanship but there you go. It doesn’t stop there. I am a spitter. Must be a recessive gene and I would have to reconstruct my childhood to find the root but spitting is as much a part of me as the spit itself. The first thing I do when I step outside, day or night, hot or cold is to look for an unobstructed avenue to purge a salivary surplus. Civilized as I am, that pattern behavior is divided into several sequenced elements and the volley can be suppressed if caught in time. It’s a boy thing I suspect, like picking your nose. My mom was like a hawk, redirecting my fingers away from the middle of my face.  You learn over time; when you notice the hand moving that way it’s easy to change course and stroke your chin or smooth an eyebrow. I often pinch my nose and readjust my glasses but sometimes you are just too late. As a little kid I had a great role model for nose blowing.  When I get caught now I blame it all on him. Thumb and index finger pinch off the nostrils and a blowgun shot under a raised elbow was skillful as Derek Jeter turning a double play. The old master never blew into his handkerchief.  That was for tidying up.  You didn’t want to be a bugger face and if you use your fingers, you would have to wipe them off on something else.  So you did maintenance with the handkerchief, folded it up and wadded it into a back pocket. I can still make the under the elbow shot but I do look first to see if someone’s watching.  

DOTTING THE i

The difference between study and reading, as I see it, is the bar is set much higher for study than for reading. All you need to read successfully is to understand. Study implies the need to not only understand but also remember and correlate what you  just read with something else. Often that requires re-reading, even some writing of your own to streamline and imprint the process. This week I studied two ideas, two different sources. 

I once told my boss that if my simplistic rationale appeared to be me talking down to him, it was not. That’s just me, taking care of me. I need very simple logic for me to connect the dots. Combine that with my dependence on metaphors, sometimes it takes longer for me to dot the “ i ” than to pen the phrase. Imagine two photographs, one of a happy person standing soaked in the rain; the other of the same, smiling person in the rain except under an umbrella. Add the umbrella and the context changes, not about people in the rain but about possibility. That’s how my study went; sort of like connecting distant 3rd cousins in the same pedigree. 

“Graves’ Values Systems” came out of research done back in the 1950’s. Similar to personality inventories, it created personality categories and predicted how different types of individuals perceived each other, in different kinds of situations. GVS was revisited in the 1990’s where its ultimate application was for how organizations function and optimizing resources. The article was compelling enough for me to re-read and take notes. 

Then I watched a moderated discussion between historian, Yuval Harari and journalist, Thomas Friedman. Wonderful juxtapose with Harari spanning human history over millennia, making cause-effect observations from foot prints left behind. Friedman on the other hand was stuck in the present, plunging ahead into an impending future that is yet to unfold. One references civilization from primordial to the present and the other from one election cycle to the next. Every idea expressed, from either perspective, took an immediate left turn and spiraled like water down the drain, to the central problems humans face. They didn’t agree on everything but they did concur on the most pressing issues, avoiding nuclear war, being proactive with climate change and coping with unavoidable risks that come with an explosion in technological advance. Three problems, if you will, are ripe with potential to upset if not wreck a civilization that we take for granted.

Graves’ Values point out natural pitfalls that could be minimized but fall between the cracks. The segue between Graves’ and Harari/Friedman was; Graves’ worked at the individual & small group level while the latter expanded the same mechanics to a global scale. Extrapolated out from individuals to cultures you get an appreciation for how short sighted and unprepared humans are for change. On the other hand, futuristic forecasts suggest - more than suggest Humanity’s longer range, uphill challenge. My thumb nail sketch of that scenario would be of distraught parents from the 1960’s whose run-amok, tie dye kids ran off to San Francisco to become flower children. If you have no control over your own creation then you become a spectator within your own journey. Clearly, the future of our species will unfold. Western religion requires a deity that controls everything but I kicked that habit. I’m inclined to trust Dalai Lama’s observation; “No one is in control.” Destiny can manifest itself in any of many possibilities. Then, after the fact, once it becomes history, it would seem to have been inevitable. Still, nothing happens in the past or in the future. Things only happen in the present and that’s where Friedman has leverage that Harari does not. 

Controlling artificial intelligence isn’t going to be the problem.  Competing with it is. When monster, external algorithms (artificial intelligence and machine learning) meet our needs better and faster than our minds are able, the Matrix model becomes a real concern. Would you like the red or the blue pill? I know this makes me sound like a conspiracy geek and I’m not really. In 1903, kids who could read about the 120 ft. flight of the Wright brother’s contraption would be senior citizens, watching Neil Armstrong step down onto the moon, all in less than a human lifetime. 

Today, the very best polo ponies in the world are cloned, born ready for polo. It takes 6 to 7 years to train a natural polo pony but only half that time to ready the clone. In a string of 8 clone ponies there is no diversity, genetically they are all the same pony. If that’s not a monster, external algorithm at work I need some clarification. Harari isn’t saying, this or that will happen, only that things will change rapidly and people are preoccupied with nostalgia and old world stuff. E.O. Wilson’s comment seems more relevant with every passing. “The problem with Homo sapiens is that we have Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions and God like technology.” When the gap between humans and technology becomes so great that only a tiny elite (corporations, government, military) control the data and how it is employed, people risk becoming biological gadgets. My generation is over the hill, the next may make it through but my grandkids are certainly in the cross hairs. If I’m just and old man pissing in the wind, studying Harari & Friedman is still better than watching the news.