Social Science – KNOMO CHOICIUS

The Daughters of the Land

This is my attempt to rewrite one of the most depressing and distressing parts of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 34. I wrote this back in 2012. Had it played out this way, a lot would be different today.

Note: Hebrew does not have capital letters. This piece mirrors that. My dad, who was rarely impressed with my fiction, told me I matched the rhythm of the translation that was supervised for the Conservative Jewish movement.

and jacob and esau renewed their bond of brotherhood
and bid each other peace
and they left each to go their own way, each with their own people
and lo a few days later jacob bought a parcel of ground outside of the city state of shechem for his family to dwell
and the people settled into their daily routines
and jacob was enjoying the chance to sit under the canopy of his tent and watch his young grandchildren play
and it was a joy to see the older children helping their mothers with the daily work

reuben and simeon and levi and judah and gad and asher and dan and naftali went out to practice sword fighting
for that of course is what young nomadic men did
but dinah their sister was lonely
and she bewailed her virginity
for back in haran before the party left laban
the father of leah her mother and rachel her aunt
she herself dinah had come into the way of women
and her loins burned
but the menfolk were too busy with their doings to pay attention to her

and that night a woman came to dinah in her dreams and spoke
oh dinah not for this
no not to see my great grandsons fighting
did I urge terach my husband to move to ur of the chaldees
to live amongst a civilized people
not for this did I urge terach my husband
to leave off from his wanderings
among people who thought that the women were only property
instead I urged him to live amongst the sumerians
among whom women had rights
no not for this

and in the dream dinah did ask is it really you chama
is it really you
and the spirit woman smiled and nodded
for chama was her great great grandmother
and tho the menfolk had not the wit to understand who she had been
yet some few of her adventures had passed down the chain of the generations
yes even by her male offspring
and now chama had a female descendent

and then chama spoke again in the dream saying
god is so funny
and then dream chama said
what a joker
waiting four generations to give the strong woman a daughter
and being in spirit chama now was truly able to see it was funny
and she laughed
and then she looked again at dinah and advised her saying
you go out in the morning and see the daughters of shechem
and get in the market their advice to make yourself sparkle
for it will not take much
because you are indeed very beautiful
and let your father and your brothers take notice of you
and chama smiled once again
and her image faded from the inner eyes of dinah the only daughter of jacob

and then indeed did the spirit of chama go unto jacob
her great grandson
who also lay sleeping
and she spoke to jacob saying
jacob pay attention
and jacob was surprised
for he had never had a woman speak in a dream before
and ordering him around no less
so chama his great grandmother said to him
you listen to me jacob
you listen well
you have a beautiful daughter
your grandfather abraham was wrong to lie to the foreigners about
his beautiful wife being his sister
and it credits you that you have not lied to protect dinah your daughter
but that is more because you are so obsessed with the muscles of your sons
than any sense of propriety
give it a rest and let your eyes behold the beauty of dinah your daughter

she has come into the way of women
and yet you have done nothing to find her a suitable husband
your sons simeon and levi are hot headed and dangerous with those swords
peace does not come easily
do not let this opportunity slip jacob
do not let it slip away

and jacob felt confused
and asked the dream image
who are you
and the dream chama said
I am chama your great grandmother
not for this did terach your great grandfather live with the sumerians
who understood that a people would be great
only as their sons
and daughters both
were great
jacob the spirit of chama repeated
jacob listen well
and then her image faded from the inner eyes of jacob
the second born of rebecca and issac

and in the morning dinah rose
and went to shechem to meet the daughters of the land
and freshen her look
and shechem the son of hamor the hivite
even the prince of this place
did lay eyes on her beauty as she was leaving the bath house
dressed in the finery of the craftswomen of his father’s town
and the kohl made her eyes sparkle
and his loins burned
and the loins of shechem the prince of shechem did burn very hot
and he asked his valet
who is this beautiful woman
and the valet did answer
oh shechem my lord this is the daughter of jacob who bought the piece of land outside the town walls last week for a hundred shekel weights of silver
and shechem said unto his valet
now leave me that I might approach the maiden

and dressed in the magnificent finery of a prince of the land
shechem did go to meet dinah the daughter of jacob
the prosperous wanderer
and dinah took heart from the dream of her ancestor
and let him approach
and she did not giggle or hide her face and
shechem was surprised at the composure of the beautiful woman
and he invited her back to the palace to meet hamor his father and
the hivite king of the city state of shechem

and she bowed her head and said to hamor
my lord is gracious to let my father dwell alongside your people
and hamor noted the beauty and refinement of this wanderer’s daughter
now sparkling in the fashions of his own people
and he did say unto dinah
you and your people are welcome to our place
your people clearly find favor with your god
who must be powerful to leave a wandering tribe so prosperous
may our people find favor with your people
and your people find favor with our people
and may we rise together as a new people
and dinah bowed
and said my lord
I will convey your greeting again to my father
and shechem and dinah
their loins burning
both took their leave
and dinah followed shechem to his rooms

and that evening dinah returned to her mother and her three aunts
and they were amazed at her appearance
for dinah shone like the full moon in her face
and her garments were simple
but of splendid fabric embroidered with gold
a sign of the love of shechem her lover
and dinah did tell her aunts what had happened
that she had been chosen as the mother of a new nation
to be born of the seed of shechem and the seed of jacob.

and jacob was exceedingly glad to be in the land
promised by god to his grandfather
and to have such a daughter as dinah
who had moved to enact the commandments
of his great grandmother
but simeon and levi were displeased

what oh father
is our sister a harlot
to be given up without your permission
and jacob sighed
for chama had warned him in the dream
of the warlike nature of his second and third sons
and jacob reminded them of his flight from this land over twenty years ago
and reminded them of his fears
of his brother esau having been so recently relieved
and reuben said
oh father but the menfolk of shechem are not circumcised
and do not worship our god
and jacob sighed and was silent for a moment
and then simeon said let us tell them that they must be circumcised
to honor our god
and jacob and reuben and levi all agreed to this plan
but levi and simeon were sure that hamor and shechem would refuse

and so reuben went to meet with hamor and shechem
and tell them how to make the covenant
and reuben was sure that they would not agree
but when he went unto the men
he was surprised at the love of shechem for his sister dinah
and they agreed at once that they would be circumcised
they agreed that all the menfolk of the city state of shechem would be circumcised
and so it was

and that night again the spirit of chama came to jacob in his dream
and this time abraham and sarah and terach were with her
and they spoke to jacob saying
jacob oh jacob
do you listen well
and jacob was surprised
for never before had he had such a dream
and the ancestors spoke as with one voice
saying your sons simeon and levi are planning a heinous crime
for they know of the pain and agony of the sons of the city state of shechem
and they plan to avenge themselves
for the quote dishonoring unquote of dinah your daughter
jacob oh jacob
do you hear us
and they fell silent
but looked at his soul

and jacob trembled with fear
and the four once again
said jacob oh jacob
do you hear
and this time he said
yes my parents I hear
and I will act
but jacob knew not what to do

and in the morning he went to the tent of zilpah
leah’s handmaid and dinah’s aunt
and told her to take dinah and go to shechem
and warn them to make preparations against an attack
for the second and third sons of jacob were indeed very hot headed
and jacob was not strong enough to prevail against them
and he could not bear to set brother against brother
and jacob went to sit in his tent
and took strong drink to dull the pain of his spirit

and dinah did warn her love soon to be her husband
and though the menfolk of shechem were in pain
they resolved to protect their city
and they took of the store of strong herbs prepared by their priests
against time of need
and they were ready
when simeon and levi appeared
they were ready with their swords
pointed as the wayward sons of jacob came toward their gates
and levi and simeon were surprised
and they stopped
and shechem did say
oh you sons of jacob do no credit to him
for I do love your sister dinah
and your father is pleased to join our people’s lots
so do you leave us
and go in peace
and levi seeing himself overwhelmed with force turned to do so
but simeon lunged to attack prince shechem
and that was a mistake

it was quickly over
and the next day
the wedding was celebrated
and a new people arose
from the loins of jacob through dinah his daughter

The Means Determine The Ends

People like to justify doing something they know is wrong to accomplish something that they think is right.

It’s true that there are higher truths and mundane truths.

Sometimes we might think it’s okay to break a law in order to live up to our moral ideals. We’re willing, in some circumstances, to pay the price of breaking the law.

Often, this comes up when people decide to use violence against their opponents.

Yet violence will beget violence.

In the Hebrew Bible, God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites. They refused. In my opinion, they did the right thing. Judaism has a history of encouraging argument with God, and disobedience.

For example, God teased Adam and Eve, using reverse psychology (Don’t eat that apple!!), to get them to “Eat THE Apple.” It wasn’t until Eve disobeyed that she became a human exercising choice. Free will is a different story. But without a real option to make some choices, we are like most other animals, usually acting out of our genetic programming. Wasn’t God sick of watching a play with everything predetermined? Giving humans a higher level of choice spiced things up.

Anyway, which was worse? Eve feeding the apple to Adam? Or Cain killing Abel?

Even if we don’t have a clear answer, the direct message of the Cain killing Abel story is that killing another person in anger is bad. Maybe the point of God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites was for us to realize that it would be better to make friends. Which happened at some point. Why else were the prophets always ranting about not marrying them?

The consequences of the descendants of the Biblical Israelites choosing to try to obey God after a 3000 year delay are plain to see, for anyone with a sense of the phrase “cause and effect.” It’s very sad. It’s very painful. It’s very shameful. It’s impossible to find words to adequately describe the growing horror.

Rene Girard, in his book “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” explains that the whole point of almost all of human culture, as hidden in many myths from around the world, is to contain the intermittent violence that inevitably erupts whenever humans live together. Girard points out that NO “SIDE” will ever acknowledge that “We started it.” Billy Joel riffed on this theme in his famous

“We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Maybe God changed “his” mind in the intervening series of eternities. There are multiple instructions in the Bible where humans are instructed to love their neighbors and enemies, and to be kind to the stranger.

The problem is that kindness requires contemplation. Because expressing kindness to one person may require different actions that would befit someone else. We need skill and desire to be kind. We need to be willing to put in the time.

Above clipart from https://clipart-library.com/clipart/cause-and-effect-clipart_34.html

Note that most complicated things in the world do not result from the “simple cause and effect” that kids are taught in school. The truth is closer to the Buddhist idea of “dependent arising.” The rain does not, by itself,” cause a rainbow. Other conditions are required to see a rainbow. MANY other conditions must be met.

I’d like to acknowledge Daniel Aliya for bringing up to me the idea that the means determine the ends. I see this as a great truth, probably greater than the other “great truth,” more commonly spoken, that the ends justify the means. See Aldous Huxley on this idea.

Ageing Part 4: Multi, Mono, or Semi-Tasking?

More Signs of Ageing

The latest on ageing from Phil Van Huffel. He’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment!

Shrinking

I hardly noticed. Since I traveled almost every week, I seldom had trouble hoisting my carry-on luggage into the overhead bin on airplanes. In 2019 I finally retired and quit traveling by air. Therefore, I drove my car to exotic places like Florida. At some prodding from my younger cousins, I began to write a book about the Van Huffel Family history, which was finished and published in 2021.

Surprise! When I went for my physical in 2020, my height had changed from 5’ 11-1/2” to 5’ 9”. I had shrunk by 2-1/2”. I could still reach the top shelf in my kitchen cabinets but not all the way to the back. My spine had compressed that much. Sitting in a car and at computer most of the time, not walking, not stretching, not exercising would be a root cause (so to speak). With all the falls this past year, I have lost another inch in height. I am now 5’ 8” tall. I can no longer reach the top shelf in the kitchen cabinets. My spine is bent out of shape. If I put a pillow over one shoulder I could be Quasimodo. My ship is listing to Port. My trousers now bag over my shoes. I’m not going to have them shortened.

But I can still reach the light switch.

Dexterity

I was a good typist. I took typing in Highschool. I used a portable typewriter all through college. When electric typewriters became affordable I bought one which I still have. I have several font balls for it. I could type 60 words a minute.

When computer keyboards became available, I could type even faster. Now my fingers have slowed down to such an extent that I type between 5 to 10 words a minute. The fingers don’t find the right keys that my brain is directing them to. It’s as if they were a young child defying a parental directive on purpose.

Because of my lack of depth perception I can no longer thread a needle. I use a jeweler’s eyepiece, and it still takes me several minutes to succeed. This manifests itself when I am eating. My hand-eye coordination is vanishing. If I eat soup the spoon and my mouth don’t always meet exactly, or the soup spoon tips to one side or the other spilling some of the contents.

The strength in my hands has ebbed. The tide has gone out. Things like opening a jar which I could do with relative ease have become a chore requiring inventive devices to replace my younger hands.

Buttoning a shirt now takes minutes because I no longer feel the opening in the buttonhole with the button in my other hand. The fabric under the button somehow gets in the way.

Shuffling cards is another changing activity. I used to be able to intersperse cards on a one-to-one ratio. I play Bridge twice per week. When my partner is dealing the next hand, I am supposed to be mixing up the cards from the previous hand. Often times I miss completely because of my lack of depth perception, and my fingers don’t have the strength to bend the cards so I can get a one-to-one interspersion like I use to. The cards now don’t get mixed as well.

On the other hand, the reduced dexterity gets me out of many tasks that others might have asked me to do.

Cognition

Concentration. I used to be able to spell any and all words without looking at a reference book. Spell check has now become my constant companion.

Sometimes my train of thought runs off the tracks. I am thinking through a problem and suddenly it’s gone. Or someone pulled the switch, and I am now pondering a completely different idea. Scenarios change like in a movie. I now have to retrace my steps to get to the spot where everything changed and move on with my thoughts with the original problem. Sometimes it may be hours later.

The same thing happens when I set out to perform a task. I start but interrupt with a different action. Then I recall what I started to do and seek to finish it no matter what I am doing at that time.

If I set out to perform an action, I now must consider every move in sequence. There is nothing automatic anymore. For instance, if I am climbing or descending stairs I have to decide which foot to use, the right for descending and the left for ascending, one step at a time.

I used to multitask. Now I monotask. Sometimes it’s semi-tasking.

Verbal

I am having a conversation with someone and the words come out wrong. My brain gets ahead of my ability to speak what I am thinking. Sometimes it’s a slurred word or the word that has skipped two spaces like a Monopoly game where I have landed on CHANCE.

Or a name I know but can’t find in my random-access memory until two hours later when it pops into my head while I am thinking or talking about something entirely unrelated.

Or someone asks a question, and three different answers appear to me out of nowhere. I have to consider which answer to give. If that person is expecting a quick response I may say something that is not accurate or to the point. It can be frustrating.

Nonetheless, I am curious to see what develops next. Maybe my upcoming birthday at 92 will be better.

The Room Begins to Move

Here is Part 3 of Phil’s journey into the challenges of aging. For most of my life, most of my friends were older than I was. This, I felt, gave me a heads up on what was coming my way. At 67, I now have a few friends who are younger, but Phil is filling the role to leading the way!

It all started when I was walking on the factory floor during an audit around 2011. Suddenly the room began to move. It was spinning at about 60 rpm. I told the person who was escorting me that I needed to find an empty office and sit down, explaining that I was having a dizzy spell. Fortunately, we were close to some shop floor offices and I sat down in a conference room. The spell lasted about 15 minutes. I continued with the audit.

Fast forward about 3 years. I was conducting a three-day audit at a factory in Minnesota. The first day uneventful. I had dinner at a restaurant within walking distance of my hotel. After I had made some notes of the day’s activities, and watched some TV, I went to bed. When I awoke early the next morning, I felt like I was in the center of a carousel watching the horses spin around but no music and I had no break. Now I was concerned. I went back to bed to see if the dizziness would abate. After a half-hour it slowed down a bit so I could maneuver. I washed, got dressed and went down to the breakfast room. I ate something and drank a cup of coffee. The vertigo did not leave. I returned to my room to consider my next action.

I decided to see if I could drive. I hefted my backpack onto my shoulders and caught the elevator to the garage area all the while still experiencing dizziness. I managed to get to my car, store the backpack in the trunk, and back out of my parking space. I traveled about 100 yards down the ramp and decided this was a bad idea. My vision was blurred and the car felt like a boat on rippling water. There was a turnaround just in front of me, so I took it and returned to my old parking space. In the process, I managed to scrape some paint off the driver’s side fender of my rental car. (That cost me my deductible on my insurance policy.)

I returned to my room and contacted the client, explaining my circumstances. We settled on a plan that someone from their company would pick me up at 1:00 pm and I would resume the audit. By noon time, the effects had subsided to the degree that I was able to walk without holding on to something. I was still unsteady but moving. The client picked me up on schedule. The afternoon went without incident, but I stayed at the prescribed table and did what is called a “desk” audit. By evening all evidence of dizziness had disappeared. The next day went off without a hitch.

When I returned to Grand Rapids, I called my primary physician and explained what had happened. He immediately made an appointment with a neurologist. (It helped that we played golf once a week.) I met the neurologist who conducted a series of physical tests. There were no anomalies. She then scheduled a PET scan of my brain. They found nothing.

I have not experienced a similar incident since. But something caused it.

I celebrated my Ninetieth birthday in November 2023.

The Van Huffel First Cousins planned a family reunion for June of 2023 to be held at Geneva on the Lake in Ohio. The Tuesday before that weekend I was hurrying to complete some chores before I left on Thursday. On the way into the garage at my house there are two concrete steps, one about a 10-inch drop and the other about half that. The sill plate in the door opening is an aluminum plate that extends about ½ inch beyond the frame of the house. As I was going into the garage to get to my car, the left heel of my shoe caught on the sill plate. I lurched face forward past both steps and landed on the concrete floor of the garage. My left arm was lacerated in my attempt to shield my fall. My face looked I had just gone ten rounds with Muhammed Ali. It was bloody and puffed up like a cream-filled pastry. That event led to subsequent incidents that cause me now to use a cane and a mobile walker.

No further incidents. But winter was less forgiving. I persuaded my son, Paul, to get me a walker. He obliged with an aluminum tubular device with three “U” shaped tubes that folded flat. It was good for trekking down my driveway to get the mail. None of the four posts had wheels. When the snow melted, the walker became a hindrance. It was like the old joke, “hit the ball, drag George”, place the walker one pace forward and drag Phil. A remedy came to mind. If I put casters in each of the four posts, I could mobilize it. Off to the hardware store to obtain a wood dowel, from which I cut four shorter pieces, which would just fit inside the tubes, and four casters to fit into the dowels. It all worked.

Then I decided to get a cane because I was experiencing some minor vertigo. Off to Meijers to see what they had. I found an aluminum foldup cane with the brand name, “Hurrycane”. It was supposed to stand on its own, but the design was inadequate. So, I modified it by taking the 4” lid from a plastic jar of nuts turned upside down and forcing it into the base of the cane. Then I drilled and screwed it into the cane base to secure it. Problem solved.

I celebrated year 91 in 2024 with a weekend of parties with my son and daughter and grandchildren. On Monday morning while I was in my kitchen at the sink, I started to move back and lost my balance. This resulted in a gash on my left arm from a drawer pull. I landed on my spine. It was an excruciating pain. But the blood gushing from my arm was where my attention was directed. I arose with some difficulty and put my arm under the cold water faucet. The bleeding did not stop so I wrapped a towel around my arm and proceeded to get dressed. I subsequently drove myself to the nearest hospital emergency room. After some delays, they stitched the gash together with 8 stitches. I drove myself home and began to feel the pain from my spine. I spent the rest of the day lying on the bed.

I fell in my bedroom three more times, injuring my back each time and damaging a chair that is positioned beside the end of my bed. Now I am psychologically conditioned to take very small steps. I have developed the “Van Huffel shuffle” which I had observed in my older brother and my grandfather. I now wear an electronic button which brings to mind a TV ad from the past. “I have fallen, and I can’t get up”. The device works. Press the button and it calls 911. I now have two canes, one for the house and one for the car. I have also purchased a fancy walker with a seat, fabric storage box, big wheels, and breaks. I use it every day now to maneuver between rooms.

I employed a chiropractor to see if he could straighten my spine. In several months of procedures there was some improvement but two days after a session things would return to the way they were. I could feel the disks in my neck and spine slip back. So, I gave up on this solution. I am now trying a posture correcting prothesis which I can wear under my shirt. It forces my shoulders into an attention position and supports my back with a Velcro belt with vertical stays. Maybe I can walk upright again instead of bent over.

We’ll see.

Stream of Consciousness: Enough Hate

In 1973, I had a difficult experience with two teachers. I was outraged at accusations they made against me. I felt angry. I felt hatred. I was nauseated for a week. Note that these are my memories from a long time ago, so the exact details are fuzzy. But I realized that the hatred was making me sick. I renounced hatred then and there. I can still dislike, take actions against things I don’t like. But hatred is not beneficial in any way that I have ever been able to determine. Not that I have gone out of my way to try to find benefits of hatred. Although one book on critical thinking I read some years ago suggested that if you have to hate, hating ignorance and hatreds, for example, could be an intermediate step to moving beyond hate.

It is very depressing these days to be part of the American public. Having lived overseas in the 1970’s and 1980’s for a total of a little more than two years, I found out what people from other countries thought about American leaders. We interfered in many countries beyond the ones that were in the news due to the Vietnam war, and we took other actions to protect our comforts, even when they went against our stated values of democracy and freedom.

Recently, every day, the events happening in our country seem worse and worse. It’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get. The arrest of the extensively vetted green card holder, former UK Government employee, who just finished his masters degree at Columbia University, by all fact based accounts, someone who worked for peace and justice, is a much bigger problem than any of the news sources are saying. This goes far beyond free speech issues.

My neighbor, during the presidential campaign, insisted that “nobody is taking anybody away.” Well, he hadn’t read about Project 2025.

Read for yourself at the link below. My response: The members of any legitimate universal religion who promote sectarianism are betraying the higher teachings of their culture. The ADL used to promote tolerance, knowing that hatred is viral, and the targets never remain isolated. Now, they seem to have lost that most basic foundation of working for justice for all. The rise of far right Jewish groups goes to demonstrate what my wise friend Reverend Dan told me years ago. We do, in general, as we were done to, not as we would like to have done to ourselves. The competition among religious groups to out reproduce each other is a factor underlying the rise of the right, and the take-over by the intolerant, of national governments around the world. All of this getting us to focus on hating each other, instead of getting us to focus on what the powerful are doing to end humanity as a flowering of unique individuals, each of us doing our own thing to enrich the experience that humanity as a whole “uploads” to The Universal Consciousness, is a problem. Since the previous sentence is long winded, who knows who will try to understand it? Bottom line: Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist. His whole life speaks to his efforts at building a just peace. Why isn’t the UK speaking up louder about this?

We are now doing even worse things than what we’ve been doing to the Afghans who helped us during out twenty year military effort in their homeland.

As a person who tends toward gloomy outlooks, I have found, over the years, that taking a longterm view of the world helps me to stay centered and balanced. There was actually research done that demonstrated that while many people do better by staying in the NOW, depressed blood chemistry people often do better focusing on the past, present and future. That is how, after years of studying wisdom traditions from around the world, including science fiction, the Mythology of the Future, I am less gloomy than I was, despite the global turmoil being created by multiple organizations claiming to represent me, or “people like me”. Hint: I am unique and there is nobody else like me. Even my mother used to say that God broke the mold.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

But Nothing Knew Not Fear

And in the beginning, there was nothing.
And in the nothing, was the potential for everything.

And then suddenly the nothing became Everything,
which included the memory of nothing.

And so Everything knew Nothing.
And Everything feared Nothing.
But Nothing knew not fear.

And Everything knew not what to do
about its fear of Nothing.

But then Everything had an idea.
The idea was to forget about Nothing,

This should not have been difficult.
Everything was a veritable kaleidoscope
of moving matter and energy.
And so, Everything forgot Nothing,
by experiencing every thing.
And tried to know itself.

But Nothing never stayed away for long.
And so Everything understood Time,
as the recurrent memory of Nothing,
and how it became Everything.
And how everything changes.

In its attempts to forget Nothing,
Everything tried many diversions.
Metamorphosis into more and more
complicated forms, spread further and further apart.

And Every Thing became lonely.
And sought other Things.
And so part of Everything became Gravity.

And so things gathered together.
And eventually, particles became stars
and stars attracted planets
and planets sprouted life forms
and it was very interesting.
Everything was surprised.

And Everything almost forgot the
mystery of how nothing became Everything.

Watching the life forms emerge and diverge
was very surprising. Even delightful.
But then again, the sparkle dulled.
It was routine. A beautiful routine, but a routine.

And so Everything decided to renew exploration.
The frog was experiment 1.0.
It was a good experiment.

And dinosaurs and birds and shrews
and mice and wolves and elephants
walked the earth.

And Time passed. And things settled down.
And Everything noticed that nothing new was happening.
And was reminded of Nothing.
And decided to spice things up.

The photo at the top is of the ball joint that lets a bumblebee move its antenna around. Image obtained using a scanning electron microscope.

You Should Talk With Your Elementary School Kids This Holiday Season About…MATH!

Why is life such a struggle for what is left of the middle class, and the working class today, compared to 40 years ago?

Because the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else, from being stolen from. Legally. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Last night, at a holiday gathering, I met a charming gentleman wearing a mint green suit jacket. The gentleman shared that he was retired from accounting work, and was now working in the public schools, among other duties, helping tutor kids in math and reading. He must be a mature and patient man! From what I have recently read, half of Americans ages 16 – 65, are unable to read above 8th grade level. Their math skills are similarly weak.

WHO CARES?

Who cares? he told me one of his descendents asked.

Well, I said, they, the youth, the adults, everyone should care, because how else can you follow the work of the investigative journalists who are trying to help us see how the rich are stealing from the poor? If you can’t read, and you don’t know what a percent is, you will not be able to understand why our society has arrived at this point of oligarchy.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Give your kids the gift of math awareness.

Kahn Academy has free math, basic literacy for all ages, and financial literacy for older kids.

I made my employee look at a couple of the geometry lessons, because he was disinterested in geometry when he was in school. Yet to do the work in my lab, he had to understand the properties of circles in a little more detailed way than he did. The lessons are very good. And oh, did I mention? They are free.

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be disadvantaged….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on this planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin, at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my ex’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

Spiritually Attached to India

“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”

“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”

My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”

sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)

Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.

Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.

If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.

So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.

Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”

Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.

Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.

I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.