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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
  This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| Linda and I just got back from Indoor Flying. I have this small foamy indoor flyer called an Ember. It flies well. Linda is a good sport and goes with me and reads her Kindle while I fly. Ron suggested that we get together on Wednesday evening for a “Build Session.” I didn’t really commit because two Wednesdays a month I have meetings where I'm the secretary. Still, I like the idea and might suggest we look for an alternative night. Today was mostly working on blocking and splitting wood. It was nice outside but the good weather isn’t going to last. All too soon the snows will come and I’ll be wishing I'd started earlier on my firewood mission. I see the President’s having to back-peddle on the Affordable Healthcare Act. What happened here is a great example of defining a solution rather than a problem. If you don’t know the difference between defining a problem and formulating courses of action you should take a moment, pause and note the distinction. In the problem solving process the problem is defined as finding (determining) the best way of doing something. Next the facts and assumptions are stated followed by formulating courses of action. When we skip the first two steps and immediately jump to the third we are defining a single solution rather than the problem. We wind up with a light switch outcome. “My way or the Highway.” This brings us back to the old definition of "Good" (Pre Greek) which was anything the Big Cahuna said it was. The problem in this case was to determine the best way to take care of uninsured citizens. The Affordable Health Care Act was one possible solution, which in retrospect is clearly a far cry from being the optimal one. If the Administration had taken the time to go through the process they could have saved themselves a whole lot of grief. Instead they decided to go with the first thing that entered their socialist inclined thinking and we wound up with Obama Care. Leadership is knowing “Best” and getting others to do it. It is an optimization process. Determining Best is the old problem solving process given to us by the Greeks. When we hip-shoot a course of action without first defining the problem, getting the facts and stating the assumptions we are setting ourselves up for a suboptimal solution which is what happened with the President's Flagship Legislation. Instead it has become the focus of derision and ridicule. There is a mechanism in the human psyche that elicits a hysterical reaction known as laughter when the delta between expectation and reality get too far apart. This approach has a fatal flaw. The younger workers are not going to want to pay for old people’s healthcare. DUH! Older aged workers are not going to want to pay for things like abortions, birth control and maternity leave. To avoid the penalty, all a taxpayer will have to do is make sure they do not pay enough income tax to qualify for a refund. The only way the government can currently fine someone who doesn’t play ball is to take it out of their income tax refund. Does that make you tremble in your boots or what? Those rushing to sign up for Obama-Care are those with expensive preexisting medical problems. Eventually the web site problem will be fixed and there will be an opportunity to check out the Exchanges. For the first year or two the Government will be investing big time in subsidies as it becomes evident that there are more takers than contributors. The currency press will be cranked up another notch, more bonds will be sold to the Chinese and more of our dwindling gold supply will be dumped on the world market. When these subsidies balloon to the point they can no longer be ignored, they will have to be curtailed. When that happens, insurance costs are going to skyrocket as the gulf between the givers and the takers reaches critical mass. Suggesting that anything the Government gets involved with is going to save money for the working class is wishful thinking. Soon there will be more people without health insurance than there were before government intervention. Obama-Care is flawed beyond fixing and if the administration had two marbles they would scrap this failed legislative attempt, and go back, redefine the real problem, face the facts, and make some intelligent assumptions regarding how the tax payers can be expected to behave in the future… then they could begin examining some possible solutions that make some sense. |
| Afterburner Aviation There are basically three ways to get people involved in a corporate enterprise. You can push the “Fear” button, the “Compensation” button, or the “Awe” button. Where is Percy going with this? I can almost hear the gears grinding as my “Army of Readers” brace for the onslaught of another tangent. The reason I bring it up is because I belong to two model airplane organizations and like any organization, membership is an important consideration. The individual human brain is too small, and the physical resources too limited to do everything alone. Mankind has crawled to the top of the food chain mainly because of a facility for networking and thereby accomplished many worthwhile social endeavors. The “Fear” button is one we should all be able to relate to. In an organization it is pushed if a member does something that does not conform to the formal or informal bylaws by which it operates. The idea is to inflict pain on the wayward member, causing them to modify their behavior. Since a Model Airplane Flying Club is voluntary, the fear button is not a very effective means of motivation. The “Compensation” button is also familiar. In this case the resources of the group are used to reward members for complying with the mandates. In work there are wages, in school, grades and at church, the promise of “Eternal Life.” Often we call the Compensation button the “Carrot” and the Fear button the “Stick.” Lastly there is the “Awe” button. This is subtle but perhaps the most powerful of social motivators. Mankind is motivated to achieve something often referred to as “Good.” Men and women have a passion for creating beautiful and worthwhile things. Thus without being compelled or bribed they are drawn into social enterprises that play on the “Awe” button. Since my RC flying clubs can’t threaten or bribe members into participating, they have to learn to play the “Awe” card in all of its marvelous and amazing forms. For example some of these forms are: 1. Building beautiful and functional models. 2. Acquiring the piloting skills to fly these models. 3. Enjoying the hobby without inflicting or suffering physical injury. 4. Socializing with others who share a passion for RC Flying. 5. Having fun and experiencing the joy the hobby offers. 6. Passing these skills onto posterity. Thus, it goes without saying, that the club should not become focused on forms 1 and 2 to the exclusion of numbers 3-6. Last night we had a meeting of one of the RC aviation clubs I belong to, Afterburner Aviation. It is newly founded and has some really neat and talented members. I am the one with the least amount of knowledge and skill and have been given the duty of Scribe. I’ll be talking about this experience in the days ahead as I try and reconcile my hobby, with the onset of old age, the chores in life and my commitment to becoming a better writer. |
| Some came walking and some came lame And some of them bones are mine Some came hobbling on a hickory cane And some of them bones are mine. Bones… These are lyrics, stuck in my mind that I can no longer attribute. Most of what we write is attributable to something we saw, read or heard at one time or another. We ingest inputs from the world of life that gets stored by our brain. In the case of food it gets digested in our stomachs, converted into energy or stored as fat. (I won't go there today) With our experiences however, the data gets fed into some huge bio-storage memory bin. When we dream at night, I suppose, that’s why all those strange visions bubble up in the form of strangely familiar vignettes. Maybe our CPU is trying to give some order to all the clutter and catch up on the filing. Then again it might be a spirit or a muse that happens by and starts reading some of the e-mails of past experiences… you know, watching them on the video player of our imagination. Who knows? What I do know is that most of my dreams are not pleasant to watch and tend to cast me in a rather bad light. It's not that I’m a saint or anything but there have been moments in life when the dark side of my character was not in charge. If it were only at night that I have to contend with these vapor like visions (that take great liberties with the facts) and portray me as a bad person, well… that would be one thing. However, when they happen during the day, and my recollection gets presented with a vivid moment I’d rather forget… well that ‘s another matter entirely. “Shucks!” I mutter spontaneously, sometimes in a rather loud voice. When I do, Linda looks up and inquires..., “What is it?” “Only a Flashback,” I reply.” “I hate it when you do that.” |
| I awoke this morning to a light dusting of snow on the ground. I need to get up and get the stove going. Then I need to split some more wood. However, before I can do that, some of the logs need to be blocked. That means getting my big Steil Chainsaw gassed, oiled and sharpened. In church yesterday I talked to Bob and he said he could only cut a couple of gas tanks full at a time. “A Couple!” I can only do one tank-full a week. My shoulders get achy, my forearms numb and my fingers start to tingle. Our body is analogous to a motor vehicle. There are warning lights but instead of gages we feel twinges of pain. I try to take heed but don’t always use my head and get to pay the price later. I have to be careful who I cut with. If the guys are younger it turns into a game to see who the Alpha-Male is. Everything in Wisconsin seems to become a competition if you let it. Like the winner is going to get choice of the females when they come in heat. It sounds crazy but get real. Then, there's the case where you have a partner who wants to work but has a medical condition that could cause him to drop dead. I suppose there are worse ways to die then splitting wood but I try and avoid facing that outcome with my older buddies. Anyway, a dusting of snow will tell you what kinds of creatures are skulking around in the dead of night. There's a beauty to winter. The air is fresh and clean but there's also a down side. Below the surface of what we see, a lot of bad shit is going down. The animals begin to suffer from the cold as the available food supplies dwindle. It’s nature’s way but it sucks. Be glad you’re a human. A few days ago Linda remarked out of the blue… “I would hate to be a cow.” It was raining and the heifers from a nearby factory farm were sloshing around in the mud. We don’t usually suffer like the animals do. I think that suffering is an intended part of the human experience that many don’t come to know until later in life. Regardless of how affluent you become when the body starts to shut down, we get introduced to pain. Where men really get to know suffering is in war. War really sucks and makes a huge impression that a young man doesn’t soon forget. Nobody wants to endure such a terrible and dehumanizing experience but many are better for having had the experience. It makes you appreciate the good things in life we take for granted. Like being painless, warm clothes, shelter, a full stomach, the safety of a home and a warm woman next to you at night. Definitely, be glad you’re a person. For all the vicissitudes of life, being human beats the hell out of the other alternatives. |
| What do you get, when you kiss a girl You get enough germs to catch pneumonia After you do she’ll never phone you, I’ll never fall in love again, No, I’ll never fall in love again. The songwriter who rhymed “Pneumonia” and “Phone You” was one inspired poet. I love those lines and they often find their way into mind when I’m working on other things. I told Linda I thought the song was from a musical but she said it was a Burt Bacharach tune. Neither of us can pin it down but we both liked it. I used to write more poetry than I do now. There is nothing to compare with a poem that comes together and the lines start to resonate. In Shakespeare’s day some people bought tickets (cheap seats) to stand in the courtyard and listen to the actors. They couldn’t even see the stage. I suppose it’s analogous to tailgaters going to the stadium and doing to the game in the parking lot. If this is an analogy it's an imperfect one. Shakespeare wrote much of his theater in iambic pentameter. The lines in addition to being well written had a lyrical quality that has never been matched since. My brother introduced me to poetry. He had some black-market dirty literature that included nasty poems and material laden with sexual innuendo. It was really raw and raunchy stuff but we had a good time with it… Reading those poems filled with racial, homosexual, and outrageous excesses of heterosexual behavior was so shockingly bizarre that it evoked a hysterical... almost nervous sense of humor. Oh my goodness I often thought, if Mom caught me reading this stuff there would be hell to pay. Still my mind soaked it up like a sponge and I could (and still can) recite much of the material if I put my mind to it. Fortunately, what amused me as a young boy were not the same things I find humorous as an adult, but I still think back on those poems and purple literature and chuckle sometimes, recalling the effect it once had on my seedy young mind. As time went on my tastes moved on to more sophisticated and politically correct material… Rudyard Kipling and his Barrack Room Ballads were soon etched into my memory. Sometimes when I get in my cups, someone will ask me to recite some of those poems, Gunga-Din, Mandalay and Old Snarly-owe are some of my all time favorites. In the military I used to do The Night Before Christmas at our annual Christmas parties where the youngsters were present. There is magic in that poem and it isn’t just the kids whose eyes get wide, hearing it spoken. That was the magic of Shakespeare’s theater, when the spoken word eclipsed the eye and listeners listened in awestruck wonder. We shouldn’t be surprised that the ear is often capable of transcending the eye. After all, in the beginning was the word… |
| The relationship between reading and imagination is truly astonishing. Think about it. Twenty-Six abstract symbols are combined in a manner that describes something. The eyes scan the symbols, line by line just like a computer scans code. The eye, when dealing with reality provides graphic imagery but in reading acts more like a text reader. This text is converted into the imaginative imagery that has a smattering of the effect intended by the writer. Some writers achieve a higher quality effect and therein lies the talent and technical skills of the writer. I have said it before but it bears repeating. Golden prose might be enough for the poet but for a writer understanding the tactical, operational and strategic dimensions of the craft is imperative. In my class, the Exploratory Writing Workshop these aspects and their components are examined. Maybe I should give some attention to the auditory aspects of imagination. That would be an earful.  |
| Yesterday, after the chores, Linda and I went up to Warren’s, (Pope’s Hobby Land) in Wausau. He’s closing out his store this month and it is sad to see a lifetime’s work coming to an end. He gave me a plane a customer never finished with an engine missing a muffler. It was a nice gesture. I’m a good customer but he didn’t have to do that. When we were leaving the wing was too large for the trunk and it had to go on the floor in the back seat. The dog stepped on it and cracked the balsa on one of the ailerons. I freaked out and Linda got on my case. “Remember when we were in Germany,” she asked? “What about it?” I replied. “The time we went to the auction and stayed all day because you just had to bid on that stain glass window?” “Seems I remember.” “How our daughters were really upset because they wanted to be home with their friends?” “Yeah, Leigh was really ticked off.” “How you told her to carry it out to the car and put it in the trunk?” “Don’t go there.” “How she threw it inside, slammed the lid and the glass shattered?” “I hate flashbacks!” How you lashed out..., “That window had class, once graced a fine English home, survived the Blitz, and was well over one hundred years old.” “I remember she started crying.” How you hollered, “… and in your hands it lasted less than two minutes before it was smashed to smitherines.” “Okay, Okay,” so what’s the point?” (As if I already didn’t know.) “The point is,” she answered back, “…who is more important, that damned airplane or our sweet and wonderful dog, cowering in the back seat?” “That damned dog,” I replied, trying to sound contrite. “Want to go to Olive Garden for lunch?” |
| Yesterday we had breakfast in Wisconsin Rapids and this tradition at the flying club is a good interlude for getting together and discussing the hobby. Wayne wanted to sell me some broken models feeling they were repairable. I looked at them and while anything is “Repairable” the investment in time would have required twenty hours at least on each one of the three. He seemed a little miffed that I passed up on them but there was an even bigger reason for passing. It is the same rationale I use for my antique cars. I don’t care how rare or valuable a car is, if it doesn’t excite my passion it isn’t worth fooling with. Life is too short to be devoting time to "passionless" projects. The same is true of writing. The story you are telling needs to elicit passion. It is that passion that sustains the effort over the weeks and months consumed in writing a novel. A friend of mine told me recently that using an outline kills the joy and spontaneity of writing a novel and that she doesn’t use them. In response I can only say that everybody doesn’t think the way I do (thank goodness) and some have bio processors that are much bigger and capable of keeping more balls in the air than I can. Yesterday evening it was back to the Rapids for our monthly club meeting. I was elected Secretary and will take over the duties immediately. Roger asked me if I was going to buy any of the models Wayne was trying to get rid of and I told him and Al that they were farther gone than I had anticipated from the promotion. After the meeting Wayne asked me again if I was sure I didn’t want one of the three models he had in the back of his SUV. I declined. (Perhaps my manner was more insensitive than it should have been.) Sometimes something like this happens in the Exploratory Writing Workshop. I will get a vignette that just doesn’t fly and I have to tell the writer how it could be improved. One of the things that help me is having a checklist with each lesson requiring things the lesson must include. These are usually “Strategic Considerations” that emphasize Character Development, Exposition (Showing and Telling) a Life Changing Event, or Dialog, as examples, and I can simply say that the component is there or it isn’t. Then, what remains, is to comment on three or more of the things I liked and didn’t. What I try and avoid is rewriting examples to make the point of what I’m getting at. I think this technique can be very demonstrative and I see it used effectively in other courses New Horizon’s Academy offers. I really appreciate it when a reviewer takes the time to show in an example of what they're trying to express. However, for some, this approach is hard to accept. Poets seem the most unwilling to deal with examples of how something might be more expressively written. I won’t tell you how many “How Dare You” replies I've gotten from a well-meaning attempt to show through example exactly what I’m getting at. I suppose the point is that you can’t please everyone. We should probably try and be sensitive and refrain from giving unsolicited advice in sensitive areas. Still if someone persists in trying to get you to walk into a room full of eggshells there is no way to avoid some “Crunching” noises. |
| Today I worked on Zoom-Zoom, my sixty-sized model airplane. I accomplished some major repairs in the past month and the forward portion, that sustained most of the damage was bare plywood. After smoothing things out I covered it with a plastic product called Monocoat. This is a sheet of thin colored plastic sort of like Saran-Wrap but heavier. Once a piece is cut the adhesive backing is peeled off and the material placed over the bare wood. Then it is “shrunk” with a small hand held iron. As I was working I thought about how craftsmen of old worked. At the present stage of my learning I would definitely be considered an apprentice. There are several good books that help explain all the myriad of tasks in the hobby. If I continue to improve I might promote myself to Journeyman. Who knows I might even reach the rank of “Master Craftsman” if I stick with it. It all goes back to the Standard Deviation (SD) idea. One SD is 68% mastery (Apprentice.) Two SDs is Journey Man which is 95% mastery. Master Craftsman is 99% Mastery. If someone really wants to stretch things they could compare this with the levels of writing, which are tactical, operational and strategic. Don’t worry… I don’t intend to beat that horse to death. At least not tonight. Yawn... |
| Yesterday was working on the firewood and my model airplanes. Linda called me for the Monday Night Football game. Green Bay lost to their arch rivals the Bears. Darn! We unloaded a trailer in the wood shed and I split half a trailer load out on the landing. I also cleaned up along the property line where there was plenty of debris from splitting in previous years. They did a survey in selling the land to the north of me and to my surprise I picked up 35 feet more than I thought I had. That was a pleasant surprise, not that it really changes anything. I worked on Zoom-Zoom. That repair was major and took a lot of effort. Like anything else I do for the first time the initial iteration is time consuming learning how to solve a myriad of problems and acquire new skills. It’s like learning to write a novel. Since this is a writing site, I need to write more about writing. I have mentioned in the past that in the military I learned there were three levels of war and it dawned on me several years ago that the same analogy holds through for writing. There is tactical writing that is the ability to simply write a chapter-sized piece of between 1000 and 3000 words. How well you do this is a measure of your mastery of an important aspect of the craft and shows both a writer’s talent and mastery of technical skills. Then there is the next level which is the stringing together of chapter sized chunks. At this level a writer’s mind is too saturated by the scope of the endeavor to suspend all those balls in the working memory of their CPU. This requires an outline so the task can be managed in bite sized chunks. Finally these chapters bring us to the third or what I call the Strategic Level. This is where the writer goes into each chapter in the outline and insures that all the components of good writing are included and distributed in some sort of a reasonable manner. Components include Backstory, a Life Changing Event, foreshadowing, dialog, momentum, character development and a host of others that are discussed in my on line class at New Horizon’s Academy at WDC called The Exploratory Writing Workshop. This class is an attempt to get writers to think consciously about what these three levels require, how to get a story idea into an outline and making sure the outline has all the good stuff that has historically worked for writers. Perhaps I am trying to do too much in a class of only eight weeks and the pace is often too fast for the students to manage. Most don’t complete the workshop and those that do often take it two or more times. Now that we are between terms I want to rework some of the material to bring the Workshop up to date with the lessons learned. Wish me luck. |
| Yesterday Roger and I went to Manitowoc, which is over by the Great Lakes. There was a swap meet being held there and some great RC Model Airplane buys were to be had. It’s a buyers market these days and some great stuff was going for fire-sale prices. I bought a nice looking sixty-sized model for $35, three sixty-sized engines for about thirty dollars each, and a wing for $1. There were also some mystery boxes full of old components I bought for $5 dollars each. My friend Roger tried to sell his plane and didn’t even bother to approach the auction table as the day came to a close. Nobody was bidding and he wanted a couple hundred for his model. However, it was the $1 wing that fascinated me. It must have come off something that crashed and it is beautiful. It was designed to attach to a mid wing fuselage. It had flaps as well as ailerons and an expensive coating. I have no idea what it came off of except it was BIG. Each half were close to 3 feet in length and with the space for the fuselage it must have been on an airplane that had a wingspan of 100 inches. A tree trunk cut to cord size is a hundred inches in length, so you can imagine how big the airplane must have been. It looks to me almost like a drone wing, but it might have been one off a crop-duster (CD) model. It had the struts like a CD so that might be what it came off of. It took three hours each way so I was glad we had the Prius. The cost of gas was just over ten dollar each. It’s hard to imagine what a 50 mpg car translates to at the gas pump. The same trip in my truck, hauling the trailer, would have cost us over $30 dollars apiece. Plus, in the back of the Toyota was room for 3 airplanes. Well, the Exploratory Writing Workshop is over and I will need to get started updating all the lessons learned and revising the course plans (pages). When I designed the course I took it as a “Shadow Student” the first time through to get a first hand feel for how it would flow. I never showed the material to the students but perhaps I should have because it shows examples of what I was looking for. I think I’ll find ways to integrate that file into the syllabus. One student I showed it to really found it useful. If anybody wants to check out the file it is at...
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| My shoulders ache from all the wood I split, transported and stacked yesterday. It was too much. I need to learn to pace myself better. Linda came out and helped and the shed is starting to fill up. My readers might not realize all the steps that go into processing a piece of firewood from the one-hundred inch logs delivered on a semi-truck... to having it neatly piled in the wood shed. First the truck shows up with the logs and dumps them in the backyard. Then I have to pull the piles apart with a tractor and chain so I can get to the logs. Now the logs require blocking into chunks that are suitable for splitting. If the log has a big diameter the chunks are cut to shorter lengths to make them more manageable. The chain saws have to be serviced with a gas/oil mixture and the chains sharpened with a hand file. This is an art onto itself. Each cutting edge has to be filed to a precise angle and the “Rakers” maintained at the proper height. If the chain is dull the vibration that naturally occurs is multiplied and the energy required to cut through a log increases. This translates into shoulder pain in old men doing work their bodies are no longer well suited to perform. If, in the process of cutting a block, the chain on the cutting bar inadvertently touches the ground it immediately goes dull and has to be resharpened. On top of all this, if the log is big, the sheer weight can pinch the bar as the kerf closes from the sagging downward pull of the cut. Often, if the operator is not careful, the saw kicks back into the lower extremities of the woodcutter. (Ouch! Nothing quite describes a blowback into the crotch) There is much more to the blocking function than most people realize. Once the logs are blocked and laying helter-skelter on the landing I take my tractor with a big bucket and roll the blocks in. These I transport as close to the splitter as I can get. Now the splitter must be started. Mine won’t start if there is any pressure backed up onto the hydraulic levers. So I give them all a little shake. Then the starting chord has to be pulled and on a twelve HP motor that can be a pain. (Like it was the day the low oil switch cut off the electrical circuit... duh!) Once running the blocks are rolled onto a hydraulic platform that lifts them up onto the I-beam that the Ram attaches to. The right splitting head has to be in place and they weigh about twenty lbs. I have a four way and a six way head. At the end of my splitter is a platform for the split wood and it fills up quickly. As it does new blocks being processed push the old ones onto the ground. This is bad because one has to bend low to pick the overflow and spillage is something to be avoided. When the platform is full of split pieces they are heaved into a prepositioned trailer. This is where the shoulders really suffer. Next the trailer has to be moved to the shed and backed into the unloading dock. Backing a short trailer requires another unique set of skills. Last the blocks are taken from the trailer and stacked in the shed. This is where Linda helped me yesterday. It’s plenty of work and the old body lets you know the next day. Still, it’s satisfying to do that sort of work. My father loved to do the wood and would often pull a chair up near a big finished pile and sit there with a look of profound satisfaction. If you drive around Wisconsin you see plenty of families that have wood stoves, some indoor and some out. Many are so compulsive that each split piece is a uniform size and the stacks are built into almost perfect squares. For myself, I’m reminded of my graduate school professor’s sage comment, “All things worth doing are not worth doing well.” This is a great example of what its taken me the last five blogs to explain. |
| Sometimes I get a hundred readers on my blog. Hmmmmm, I think, What's it with this? What makes this blog different from the ones that get less than ten (10) looks?. Most of the readers are non-members and it’s a mystery who they are and where they come from. Maybe they’re aliens, or government agents or spirits from the past… Only kidding, I’m slipping but not far gone enough to consider these serious possibilities. I would however, like to know who some of you are and if you have a moment, drop me a line at yalcrabr@mwwb.net. The things I write about in this blog are things that connect in my mind that help me explain to myself what swirls about that small point in space and time that I occupy. I make no claim to any science that backs up the structures I create to explain things to myself. Nor do I think that I have a corner or even a small nitch when it comes to grasping the momentous and diverse forces that drive this Universe. What you read here is the world seen through the lens of Percy Goodfellow and while I base my views on observations they are a blend of fact and fancy, realizing that all wisdom is not reposed inside my mind. What I think is the result of a connectional CPU churning constantly, trying to link together ideas that are possibly not as related as I might be suggesting. In the past few blogs I’ve been talking about Standard Deviation. I could have just as well been talking about PI, which is another one of those marvelous discoveries of a universal truth. At the present time I am on a diet and this morning I woke up to seeing on the scale an unanticipated weight gain. Darn! I said to myself. Food is a good thing and a bad thing. It gives us the energy to animate our bio organism and at the same time it poisons it. Is that irony or what? What would seem to be a good thing also turns out to be a bad thing. Like in the SD construct, “minus.” When we act to make the world a better place there is a bill payer. For every gain we make something else suffers. It's a world of conflicting forces that propel us forward on the one hand and on the other plot to return us to the dust from whence we came. If we save up our money to buy a house a bunch of trees get cut down in the rain forest in Brazil. If we establish a food stamp program for those who need it, those who don’t, get on the bandwagon and ruin it. If this isn’t bad enough there is the law of “Diminishing Returns,” that I talked about in the last several blogs. As we strive to get closer to perfection, the costs double for each increment and it is all but impossible to get to that last percentage point of excellence. Still we keep trying. In the United States we had the best healthcare system in the world. Sure, there were imperfections as there are in anything. To squeeze that one last drop of blood out of the turnip the President kept doubling down on his political capital until it was all spent. Is anyone listening to him anymore? In my RC model airplane hobby a 68% effort isn’t good enough. It has become clear in my convoluted mind that I'll have to invest more to keep from crashing. So I make the investment to get to the 95% level which means I have to double down. On the other hand I could go sit at the field and watch the others fly, or I could fly on the “Simulator.” (I do great on the simulator.) In conclusion “Good” is striving to make the world a better place than it otherwise would be. “Neutral is the Natural mean which is what will happen if we do nothing. “Bad” are all those unintended consequence that lurk below the “Average” of doing nothing. So, what we have is not an absolute “Good” or “Bad but a range that falls above and below the average. “Greed,” which the Greeks blamed as behind the downfall of man’s efforts to excel is blindly striving for that last percentage point of excellence which could well be the exclusive domain of God. The cost of such a venture is unaffordable and the downfall of many worthwhile things. The struggle is not between conservatives and liberals; it is between old money and new. It is the same struggle that got the aristocrats in France guillotined during the “Great Revolution.” In this country the old money has aligned with the socialists to get the votes they need to exercise power that will destroy the middle class. Old money in this country is hidden in trusts, charities and nonprofits. If you want to hear the liberals scream, just threaten to withdraw “Tax exempt” status from these sacred cows. The result of these struggles is that the standard of living enjoyed by the middle class will not be a benefit passed on to the next generation. What will come is an even greater polarization until the system becomes so top heavy with the disenfranchised that the ship of state will capsize as a consequence of the skewed distribution of wealth. |
| Yesterday I rambled a bit and some of you are no doubt wondering where all those disjointed threads are leading. Allow me to begin by saying that there are many demands placed on the time of our lives. There are twenty-four hours in the day and assume you spend eight hours sleeping. That leaves sixteen. Now, there are the basic functions like the toilet, eating and taking care of basic physiological needs. Then, for those employed, there is getting to work and doing the job. Then, once home, there are basic parenting and maintenance chores. I could go on ticking off the tasks but the point is that the amount of available time is different for everybody. What is more certain is that the amount of disposable or “free” time is short and at a premium. This brings us to the question, are all things worth doing, worth doing well? My father believed emphatically that anything worth doing should be done to the highest of standards. My graduate school professor contended that this wasn’t true. In my RC model airplane hobby I would have to side with my father. There is another adage that is popular and it goes to the effect that “If you don’t do something right you better get used to doing it over again.” On the other hand, if you spend all your time reaching out for perfection you aren’t going to get much done. While the statistical technique, Standard Deviation, (SD) cannot be directly applied to the expenditure of resources (Time is a resource) there’s a connection. If you look at it, one SD gets you to a 68% confidence interval. Sixty-Eight percent would be considered a minimal level of “Mastery” in most educational systems. Not great but it gets a person into the ballpark. The important point is that a relatively small amount of effort (expenditure of time) gets a person to the opera. One might have to accept standing outdoors, sitting in the far bleachers or taking a back row seat but it gets you to where the fat lady sings. More importantly it allows us to pursue an area of interest without spending all our capital on a single interest. For example, think of what President Obama might have accomplished if he hadn’t spent all his political capital on Health Care. What SD tells me is that someone can get to 68% mastery rather quickly but to go to the next level requires twice as much expenditure. In other words to go from one SD to two SDs requires doubling down. Using the example in an earlier blog the average was 96 and one SD was plus or minus three. Two SDs, increased the range to plus or minus six, but only got to the 95 percent level of confidence. For the price of one SD the 68% level was attained but it took 2 SDs to acquire an additional 27 percentage points. In other words going from one level to the next yielded a diminishing return. However, if you think that's a bad deal, look at what getting to 99% requires. To pick up a measly four additional percentage points required a third again more than what it took to get to 95% at the 2 SD level. Now I realize this is something of an abuse of the mathematical construct but the principal still applies. What it takes to accomplish something is one thing, what it takes to do it well requires doubling down and what it takes to get close to perfection demands a third more, on top of everything else. The question we all must answer comes down to, “Is the outcome worth the price?” |
| When I see a book title and look at the cover I try and imagine what the story is going to be about. It never fails that in little more than an instant a story springs to mind and I pretend that is what the book is about. Then I go on to the next title and cover that attracts my attention. This was the case last week at Barnes and Noble when I saw the title “Why A students work for C students.” I still haven’t seen the book again much less read it but the title keeps creeping into my mind and I think, If I were to write the book here is what I would have to say.” This is a fun exercise and when I get around to actually reading the book it is even more fun to see how my thesis compares to the authors’. As I have explained in the past I have a hobby, which is RC Airplane Models. In this hobby you can scratch build one from a plan (600 hours labor), build one from a kit (400 hours labor), build one Almost Ready to Fly (ARF, 24 hours labor) build one Ready to Fly, (One hour set up time). You can see how labor intensive building an RC Airplane is and today most people buy ARFs which are made in Chinese factory sweatshops and are so affordable that making one the old fashioned way (In a garage workshop) is becoming a thing of the past. An ARF costs between S150 and $300 dollars and does not usually include the electronics, such as the transmitter, receiver and servos and some items that do not package easily like landing gear and the vertical and horizontal stabilizer must be acquired or assembled separately. Now allow me to digress for just a minute and make a point. When I was growing up my Father used to get upset with me because of this attention deficit problem I had. Sometimes he got so bent out of shape he hit me, thinking I had an attitude problem. As you can imagine my Dad and I were not all that close and I tried to stay out of his way. This was not hard to do because I was not his favorite son. My older brother was big, athletic, handsome and a real chick magnet. (What father wouldn’t love a son like that?)He was also somewhat of a bully and liked to sit on top of me pinning my arms while he spit on my forehead. I really hated it when he did that. Anyway my Dad had some favorite sayings he used to use all the time and one was, “If you aren’t going to it right then don’t do it at all.” I was often of the receiving end of this admonition and I have to admit that I didn’t always follow through on the things I started. One of these was doing my homework, which followed me throughout my academic career and made me dread going to class. I hated school for as far back as I can remember. I got terrible grades and soon became an expert at learning just enough to get by. My wife (We married the end of our sophomore year) on the other hand was a brilliant student and can leaf through a textbook, seldom spending more than ten seconds on a page before she has a strong command of the material. Then she turns her attention to those girly things that women enjoy doing. She and her twin sister floated through grammar, high shool and college with straight As. Sorry for the sidetrack but you have to know a little backstory to appreciate what happened one day while I was in Graduate School. Yes, I actually made it through graduate school using my 3.0 and go, academic model. One day the Professor was giving his lecture and he said something that left me dumbfounded. He said, “All things worth doing are not worth doing well.” I immediately took note and for the first time in a long time began paying attention. Basically he was saying that life is too short to reach one hundred percent mastery in everything you take an honest or required interest in. I swear, this boring little bespectacled man, who put everybody to sleep, made my jaw drop open in awe. It was like hearing Moses, down off Mount Sinai commenting on the Ten Commandments. Here was a professor who actually got it… who gave academic credibility to something I had known for years. It was in this same graduate program that I was forced to take a statistics course and I managed to “Plug and Chug” good enough to get a B grade and pass the course. In graduate school, if you are not aware, the minimum standard is a B grade. Tomorrow I will pick up on this thread. Don’t miss it because I’m definitely onto something. |
| I saw a book title at Barnes and Noble, which was titled something like, “Why A students work for C students.” I should have bought it and think I’ll have Linda order it for me. When I was in school the range of acceptable grades went from D to A. The grade D was set somewhere in the 60% bracket. The grade C was somewhere in the 70% bracket, the B grade in the 80% bracket and A in the 90% bracket. I suppose this is the case in education systems throughout the world but I am hardly an expert on systems used in other countries. The question that comes to mind is “Where did these arbritary cutoffs come from?" Again I'm not sure but it seems to me that in a mass education system there had to be some sort of value assigned to students that would indicate their mastery of the subject matter. So, a grade below 60% mastery of the material became an unacceptable outcome. (FAILURE) A grade in the 70% range was barely acceptable. A grade in the 80% bracket was OK and a grade above the 90% threshold was considered good. Thus below a D grade showed unmastery and a grade of A showed a strong mastery. I assume that there was a statistical model that formed the underpinning of this construct and that Standard Deviation (SD) was at the root of it. So, HOW DOES SD WORK? you might ask and I encourage you to Google the term in order to refresh your memory or learn from scratch what that statistic measures. I was first introduced to SD in a statistics course in graduate school. I must shamefully admit that at the time I never fully grasped what it meant. Sure, I memorized the formulas and learned to plug in the values and got a B in the course but the truth is that the real meaning didn’t sink in for about a year, until one morning I woke up and realized I suddenly understood what the math was trying to tell me. What follows is a brief explanation of SD through the lens of Percy Goodfellow. We often hear the term “Average” batted around when somebody tries to make a point. They might say something like, “The Average frog lives twenty years.” Hmmm, you might think, Twenty years seems a long time for a frog to live but who am I to question? Obviously some academic took the time to calculate an average life span taken from all the species of frogs and hence he/she must know what they are talking about. Unless of course it’s something they made up to fill out their master’s thesis. Assuming the person making the statement is not telling an outright lie, an astute listener should have a red flag go up whenever they hear the word “Average.” This is because some averages are good indicators of central tendency and some absolutely SUCK! For example suppose there were three students in a special needs class. One had an IQ of 35, another one of 95 and the third one of 450. If you add those up and divide by three the “average” doesn’t tell you a damn thing. On the other hand if there are 10 special needs students with IQs of 95, 96, 98, 94, 92, 101, 97, 95, 93 and 100, this set of data is going to give you a pretty good average. A teacher could take this average and have a pretty good idea of what the IQ of the next student coming through the door would be. Get it? I’m sure you do. Some averages are good predictors and some aren’t worth a “Doo-Doo.” So what the SD statistic is saying is how good an Average is. The calculation is not that complicated and the result shows a number useful in determining a confidence interval. Supposed the SD for a data set is 3, where the average is 96. If you plus and minus the 3 you have a range of from 93 to 99. If you were a gambler you could be 68% confident that the next number in the data set would be between 93 and 99. However, it gets even better. If you double that 3 to a 6 you get a range of from 90 to 102. Here you can be 95% confident that the next number will be somewhere between the two. Finally, if you add three more and make it 9, this is called 3 SDs and here you can be 99% confident that the next number will be between 87 and 105. I hope you get the idea. Now, I know I’m boring many of my readers and many more don’t have a clue of what I’m talking about. The reason I'm doing this is because tomorrow I plan to tackle the “So What” question. |
| If you go to the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News Virginia, you’ll see a collection of plank on frame ship models built by a craftsman named, Crabtree. I haven’t seen the display in years but it knocked my socks off. It made such an impression that I bought a set of plans and started scratch building my own frigate. For a year, while stationed in Washington DC, I'd retreat every evening to work on my model. Perhaps this is why, to this day, when I see a beautifully rendered model, a passion inside me ignites and if within my means I buy it. Yesterday I went to an RC Model Swap-meet in Wausau. I found two old models from the early fifties and sixties that were in need of repair or completion. I picked them both up for $40 and it was a steal. I felt the same way walking away with them as I did purchasing a Meissen Figurine once for "chump-change." In the first case I was told that the builder died before being able to complete it.(Too bad so sad) In the second the owner said “Get it out of my sight!” If this wasn’t enough a fellow club member bought two sixty-sized models with crash damage, salvaged the engines and servos and gave me the two fuselages, one still having the wings. Repairing a model with minor damage is a much easier task than building one from a kit or plan. I should have both flyable in about twenty hours. My fellow flyers criticize me for restoring “Old Junk” but here is the rationale for why I do. I find it enjoyable; it’s relatively inexpensive and my skill as an RC Aviator makes the service life of my models, short. So, I reason, don’t waste hours making models look good until acquiring the flying skill to make them last. Those are my guiding principles and they don't sit well with my fellow aviators. It has reached the point where they have resurrected this arcane rule, long in disuse, that all new models have to be inspected before being allowed to fly at the club field. I don’t mind the rule because I want my model to be airworthy, even though I don’t particularly care what it looks like at this stage of my developing piloting skills. As a consequence, when I show up, well meaning members come over, while the safety officer is doing his inspection, to throw in their two cents worth. At first I found this irritating but now I find it fascinating to watch as the process unfolds. It is a veritable tutorial on an aspect of human behavior known as the "Feeding Frenzy." So what does this have to do with what I promised to touch on yesterday? Well it reminded me of the words of one of my instructors in graduate school who once said, “All things worth doing are not worth doing “well.” The second has to do with a statistical technique known as Standard Deviation. Sorry to keep kicking the can down the road but these are both ideas that deserve more than a “Lick and a Promise” and I'll try expanding on them more tomorrow. |
| In the power equations for electricity, hydraulics, air, mechanical and nuclear, energy is expressed as a variable counterbalanced by two other variables multiplied by one another. If we know two of the three we can find the missing value through the mathematics of Algebra. Our earliest ancestors (at some point) realized the importance of Power. Power gave man dominion over the natural environment. This was not just power in a physical sense but corporate power as it relates to influencing the actions of other people. In a physical sense youth, strength, agility and cunning led to tribal leadership. We see this in the animal kingdom where the dominant male has not only first choice of mates but also has the final say in social decision making. This was historically true and until the Greeks came along the male with the biggest biceps and strongest will was leader of the pack. The Greeks provided an alternative to this model. In corporate decision making they were the first to say that “Good” should be the determining criteria in decision-making. They saw this good as an action that made the world a better place. So better was defined as two goods with one being superior, even though both made the world a better place. However, there could be more than two good courses of action and best was the optimal choice between three or more possibilities. The Greeks realized that the dominant male with the biggest muscles could not always conceive a full and viable range of options. Worse, they could often not pick the best one from a field of three or more. So the Greeks chose to have social decision-making ruled by the optimization of choice rather than the first idea that popped into the mind of whoever happened to be in charge. This construct has propelled the West into a position of dominance in the world at large. Much of the world is still “Old School” where everyone stands around and wait for the Sultan, King or whatever they’re called, to tell the “Unwashed Masses” how things are going to be. These rulers are seen with a sense of awe and the people fear offending them for the retribution that is sure to follow. In a Democracy, another Greek invention, the people had a better opportunity to select someone they deemed to be the optimal leader plus the ability to change things if it turned out they were gulled into selecting the wrong person. A charismatic leader does not always have the vision and problem solving skills that underlies a glib tongue. Still, if a Democracy elects an idiot with no real depth beyond a penchant for golden oratory, the society is going to have to suffer through a period where they give him/her the benefit of the doubt, and events a fair opportunity to demonstrate whether or not their choice was a good one. I’ll leave that thread hanging for now. In the realm of statistics a discovery was made in the past century that showed a relationship between observation and chance. It was based upon a mathematical process called “The Average.” We know that if we take a series of related occurrences and add them up and divide by the number of observations we get this thing called an “Average.” However, there were some problems with averages I'll go into tomorrow. |
| I found out on my weekly trip to Wausau that Warren is closing his hobby shop. It’s another tombstone on these bleak economic times. I really liked my visit on Thursdays and eating at the Olive Garden and visiting Barnes and Noble. Most of my friends do their shopping for RC stuff on line and it’s beginning to look like the sun is setting on many small business as it has with this little corner hobby shop. I shook my head in dismay one morning last week. Commentators from one of the media outlets went out onto the street and asked people which they liked better, Obama-Care or the Affordable Health Care Act? It was a sad commentary that nobody seemed to know they were the same thing. Yesterday I learned, while listening to Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, something that I didn’t fully realize. This is that while there’ll be a penalty for not acquiring individual healthcare, the IRS will not be allowed to use the full toolbox they use for delinquent taxpayers. The only tool they’ll have to collect the noncompliance fines will be to take it out of a person’s income tax refund. Is that a joke or what? Anybody who is semi-intelligent structures their taxes in such a way that they don’t get a refund. The goal of a prudent tax strategy is to pay just enough quarterly and no more. So the young people who are healthy and want no part of the huge premiums they’re going to be required to pay, can avoid the fine by simply making sure they don’t pay into the system any more than qualifies for a token refund. Right now there is much hoopla about the individual mandate that will require every individual citizen (not businesses) to comply with the law. Since most individual citizens don’t pay taxes they see the law as giving them something for nothing. It’s another government handout that somebody else is going to pay for. What the government eventually wants is a single payer system that cuts the insurance companies out of the loop. Such a system would bankrupt these huge insurance companies and they have quailed before the liberal democrats begging for some sort of intermediate compromise. Well they got it with Obama-Care. Thinking that such a compromise between the status quo and a single payer system would keep them out front, the Insurance companies have enabled the current administration to advance its agenda by supporting the compromise law. Half a bone is better than nothing they must have reasoned. The Tea Party Republicans have been the only force that has stood up to the onslaught of socialist reformers and done the heavy lifting for both the Insurance Companies and working middle class. The lynchpin to Obama care is the “Individual Mandate’” which is getting younger voters to pay the bill for the extravagance of the new law. Once the working middle class realizes in the next two or three years, how much this is going to cost they are not going to be happy campers. Right now the computer foul up/glitch is making it impossible for those wanting a free ride to sign up. However, it is also making it impossible for young taxpayers to assess the full scope of the tax increases they are about to be served. Eventually the bugs will be worked out and the machinery will begin to grind forward. However the damage has already been done. The voters realize now that government is totally over its head with the healthcare issue. With the elections coming up there’ll be a growing disenchantment with the whole idea of giving government an ever-expanding role. It would make political sense to delay implementation until after the elections and that was what the Republicans were calling for. They were assailed with all manner of name calling until the Liberals began to realize how toxic implementation is going to be. Now the Democrats are beginning to agree that this is not such a bad idea. This leaves the President with another delay to launching the flagship accomplishment of his administration. What he fails to realize is that when his “Flagship” comes off the slip it’s going to sink in a cold river of reality. The bill payers don’t want Socialized Medicine in this country. It’s a bitter pill for the Democrats to swallow but the sooner they do the better. The insurance companies will soon awaken to the fact that their very survival is in jeopardy and get serious about opposing the socialization of the Nation’s healthcare system. If the Affordable Healthcare Act sinks the only alternative for the Democrats will be a single payer system, which is what the hard-core liberals have wanted all along. To sell this emerging new program the Democrats will be blaming the insurance companies, the hospitals, the doctors and pharmaceutical industry. The Irony is that the Republicans, who have been outspoken from the beginning, will also be blamed by an administration that can do nothing but spend recklessly and find reasons to point the finger at others… I know, I know… it’s all George Bush’s fault. |
| The thing that amazes me most about this bio-organism I inhabit, is my imagination. I will hazard a guess that imagination makes a human unique among the animal kingdom. It is easy to see how with the aid of imagination, mankind has become the most successful species. The question that comes to mind is how did this capacity propel us to such heights? Most of us see imagination as a relaxing form of entertainment but it offers a real survival advantage. Imagination allows a human to game play courses of action without having to experience them first hand. A man can imagine a scenario and his computer will see the fantasy as reality. Whether an experience is real or imaginary our bio-processor can’t see the difference. Thus, like flying on a simulator, a person can crash all they want “Imaginatively” and no harm is done. An animal only gets to crash once because they only learn through first hand experience. Through imagination we can embrace the full range of emotions and experience the physiological consequences. When we listen to a story we can live vicariously the words that we hear. When we read a novel the alpha characters come to life eliciting images, recorded in a book. When we look at an attractive “Significant Other” our imaginations can make our hearts go pitter-patter and if we think hard enough our body will respond to its full design potential. It is said we have created computers based upon the model of our minds. I believe that. A computer is dumb as a box of rocks and can’t imagine anything. If the code doesn’t spell out exactly what the machine is expected to do it can’t do it. Computers follow their programming and don’t do a very good job managing the unexpected. Most animals are environmentally reactive but people can conjure up an environment in their minds and their CPU doesn’t know the difference. As a consequence we can trick ourselves into believing anything and while that has some survival benefits there is a down side to living in a dream world. This is evident when a person can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. I could give some political examples but won’t bother. |
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Love it! Especially the safety measures for us homo sapiens...
