Perfection Does Not Exist

In the past, I've posted about my delight at discovering hidden gems inside of common words like turkey, December, or quarantine and now I have just stumbled across another: Utopia.

Turns out that "utopia" is portmanteau (nod to ED) created in 1516 by Sir Thomas More of two Greek words:

Ou ("not") and Topos("place").

In other words, utopias do not exist by definition!  No wonder all utopian novels are so depressing.
Begs the question for the need for the 'dystopian' (Bad Place) sub-genre of science fiction, doesn't it?

To add more irony to the tale, apparently More's Utopia was a place where decisions are made by reason and logic:  Clearly never going to happen as we are simply electing leaders from reality TV shows 500 years later.

If humans can't get to that "not place" because we don't make decisions based on logic and reason, maybe we should just have computers run the world.  Oh, wait - that takes us to the "bad place"...

Utopia = Dystopia

Viscometers, Korea, and Sea Urchins

Here's an oldie but a goodie (even Irene admits it's a funny story "the first dozen times you hear it"!)

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In the mid 90's, I worked for a small mom & pop tech company called "Viscotek" in Houston.  As part of that job, they would fly me around the world to install their patented viscometer and train their technicians at the customer's factory.  It was pretty cool for a while to travel the world on someone else's dime but (like all things) it became tiresome after a while and I quit after two years or so.  Along the way though, I had plenty of adventures.

I was scheduled to do a job in Korea and a colleague of mine had a very specific warning for me: "Our distributer there, K-Y, is going to take you to this 'very special place' and order some super-nasty stuff to eat - you must eat it in order to save face, but I warn you it will be difficult - so gear up!"

I'm thinking, how bad can it be?  After all he's from Texas and I have a broad and sophisticated palate, right?  So, I ask him "what do you mean, 'nasty'?

"Nasty as in chop the tentacles off of a baby octopus and eat them while they are still moving around.  You can feel the suckers in your mouth as you chew, man!"

Oh.

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Sure enough, during my trip to Korea, one day K-Y says to me "Kenneth, tonight I take you to very special place!"

Oh no, here it comes.  But I'm ready - I'm mentally prepared, I love seafood - I got this.  Some drinks, get my game face on and bring out the tentacles!

However, shortly after getting seated, the maitre d' comes and whispers in K-Y's ear.  At first K-Y's face falls into disappointment.  My heart soars - no octopi tonight!  Then, the he keeps talking and K-Y's face lights up with joy.  My heart sinks - something nasty this way comes and I have no idea; I am unprepared.

With great fanfare, some freshly halved sea urchins are brought out on a platter, and, while they are still moving around a bit on my plate by moving their spines, I surprise everyone by diving right in and scooping up their delicious eggs with the tiny spoon provided.

Ha - little did they know this is an old favorite of ours in Corsica!  Check out these pictures from Corsica (Roger pretty much single-handedly caught these in the ocean and then cleaned them all for us):

Brussels, Subway Platforms, and the Darkness Within

Some moments are seared into your brain and reside in your memory just below your everyday thoughts, easily accessible.  Why certain memories get laid down and why they last and lurk is a mystery to me. Most of mine are memories where I was a victim of injustice or I inadvertently behaved as a jerk.  It’s no small discomfort to have such negative thoughts at my fingertips, but luckily my nature is not to dwell on such things. Today, however, I replayed one such memory on my interior television-of-Rideout-memories and had a bit of a new insight.

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The year is 1986, my buddy Erec and I are spending a day in Brussels on our way from Alabama to Corsica. Maybe we had a daytime’s worth of layover or maybe we were catching a train for the next leg of the trip – it is a bit troubling to me that I don’t recall those details.  What I do remember is every second of a brief encounter with a band of Romani  (we would have called them gypsies back then) kids on our way out of the airport.

Erec was walking ahead of me as I noticed a group of small children approaching us aggressively. Even I could see Erec’s big wallet almost sticking out of the pockets of his shorts.  Like a magnet, it called to these children and, as a couple of them distracted him by lightly pushing a piece of cardboard into his chest and begging, a different kid quickly lifted his wallet.  Eric felt it but, by the time he turned around, the kid had melted back into the crowd of his peers.  In retrospect, I don’t think the kids thought he and I were travelling together. Luckily, I saw the entire operation and pointed out the kid that had his wallet.  Why they didn’t just run at that moment, I’ll never know.  Instead they threw the wallet from one kid to the next. The thing is, between the two of us, we could easily step up to whichever kid happened to have the wallet. At this point, I remember feeling a bit angry.  The kids were getting nervous the longer it lasted and one of them threw the wallet to a little old grandma who was probably in charge.  She was just as short as the kids and I hadn’t even noticed her until then.  Without thinking, I took two big steps to close the distance to her and I grabbed her wrist, hard.  

As I stared down at her, face to face,  and squeezed tightly, I realized how tiny and frail she was.  Her eyes widen slightly in fear and she simply, silently dropped the wallet to the ground.  In that moment, I felt a profound reversal in which I went from victim to aggressor.  I imagined her lack of status with law enforcement contrasting with my own favored status as an American tourist.  Being so close to this stranger and sensing the profound life experience chasm between us; the moment was so surreal, I felt right then that I would remember this exact moment for the rest of my life. 

We scooped up the wallet and went on into town for some sightseeing.

Manneken Pis - I remember 'discovering' this Brussels classic later that day

Usually, I think about this encounter as having poignancy for me because of that moment of reversal. Occasionally I have explored some weird kind of associated guilt:  Was that wallet worth the threat of violence that was implicit in my own actions? 

Today, however, I peeled back another onion layer of my messy subconscious and am worrying about another interpretation.  Was there some dark part of me that felt empowered and righteous in that moment with its hint of violence? 

 

This, in turn, reminds me of a moment in New York City when a friend and I were discussing the fear associated with standing too close to the edge of a subway platform.  “Why do we all have that irrational fear of getting pushed into the tracks by some stranger?  It’s not gonna happen!” she said.  When I responded with, “We have such a fear because we ourselves harbor thoughts of pushing others into the track”, her eyes widen slightly in surprise.  Surprise at me or surprise at herself? 

Some Teenager Complaints are Legit

I don't usually give much weight to student complaints.  Most of their woes are self-inflicted via poor decision-making, inadequate planning, inattentiveness, or just general myopia.  However, you always have to listen, because sometime there's something legit in there.

For example, the other day I pushed out (via email) some minor change in the syllabus that I had neglected to mention in class.  The next time they saw me, they were teasing me about how unorganized I was and how they really didn't appreciate my changing things on-the-fly, outside of class.  While they were mostly just joking around with me about this particular incident, it came out that they frequently will receive entirely new assignments outside of class from their teachers.  With all of the technology at their fingertips, teachers make use of it in order to maximize their in-class time and keep their unit plans flowing smoothly.  Although each individual case of pushing out a new reading, updating a problem set, moving a check-in deadline on a project, etc. may make sense within confines of one teacher's class and does contribute to healthy open-lines-of-communication between student and teacher, I do think it is a bad practice and we, as educators, need to examine it critically:

1.  Student deserve to organize their time and then be able to stick to their plan.  Although many do not do a great job of this, they should know at the close of the school day everything they need to have completed before the next time their class meets.

2. Assignments dropping in from the digital sky contributes to the current climate of anxiety.  Checking for assignments and updates outside-of-class encourages the always-on, always-connected hyper-pacing of modern life about which we have so many concerns.

In short, I think this is a practice that does more harm than good.  The intent is great; the impact not so much.

The Impossible!

A picture taken of an invisible object in an obscured corner of a distant galaxy with light we cannot see by a telescope that doesn't exist:



And it looks.... exactly as predicted by a 1916 theory by some dude from Switzerland.

Best explainer video by my celebrity squish, Dr. Derek Muller:

Plants and Color

Ms. M just installed some high efficiency LED grow lights on her hydroponic plants.  I am fascinated by the fact that the green leaves appear white under their reds & blues.  At first I thought this made sense because the plants obviously are not using green light so much (hence their reflection of it under white light) and the red and blue is being absorbed for their photosynthetic operations...

But then I thought, hmmmm - if there's no green and the reds and blues are being absorbed, shouldn't the leave appear black?  So now I'm thinking, there's so much extra red and blue that a significant amount is being reflected and that, along with the bit of usual green being reflected by some of the white light coming in, leads to the uniform RGB combo that we process as "white"...

Tilting light to the right

Tilting light to the left

Listening to the "Radio"

In yet another exemplar of the inadequacies of language, the fact that the device that decodes radio frequency communication into sound waves is also called a "radio" leads to a common misunderstanding.  Every year I walk students through this, but I've made a graphic (assembled from various pics gathered from the internet in full disclosure) to show what is going on.

Two different types of waves here, people!

My Top Ten Nick Cave Songs

Nick Cave is a long time fav of mine.  I set myself the task to get it down to a personal top ten.  It wasn't easy!  I could make this list tomorrow and at least half of these would get swapped out.

Here goes (with links to youtube clips embedded):

1.  My first Nick Cave experience (when watching Wings of Desire in 1988)

“From Her to Eternity”

"This desire to possess her is a wound/ And it's naggin' at me like a shrew"

2. Off of the first cassette tape I bought of his: “The Weeping Song”

Good thing you couldn’t do auto repeat, my roommate would have kicked me out!  Weeping is not crying - thanks for education, Nick.

3. The most covered and famous Nick Cave song: “The Mercy Seat”

“In a way I’m yearning to be done with this measuring of truth…”

4. The evil within: “Red Right Hand”

“Rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy”

5. “Slowly Goes the Night” This one did get stuck on repeat (no roommate that year!)  

“How goes it?  It goes lonely.  It goes slowly.”

6. “People ain’t no Good”

“It ain't that in their hearts they’re bad/ They can comfort you, some even try…”

7. “Into My Arms”: First Nick Cave song I shared with Irene. I still recall getting knocked out by that first line...

8.“There She Goes my Beautiful World” Nick Cave does gospel?

 “…you weren't much of a muse But then I weren't much of a poet”

  

9. “I Need You” Just crank it up, surround yourself with the sound and nothing else.  This isn’t a song, it’s an ocean.

10.  “Abattoir Blues”  Everyone has the blues, but Nick Cave takes his to the slaughterhouse! 

“I wanted to be your superman but I turned out such a jerk”

Origin Story

Here is a picture of my paternal grandfather standing in front of his father's hardware store in Somerville, MA.  I'm thinking the picture was taken in the early 1930's when my grandfather was a teenager...

He was the oldest of eight children and, as such, was expected to take over the family business.  He had other plans though and went off to the University of Michigan (to study chemistry) against his father's wishes - the first in his family to do so.  He had to pay his own way through school by taking on odd jobs.  I remember him telling me things like "I'd ask the lab instructors if I could stay and clean off the lab benches for a modest fee"  "If there was a movie I wanted to see, I would usher the movie so I could get paid to watch it".  For room and board, he helped to organize and legitimize the Co-op housing council . In fact, he is considered to be their first president (1939).  In 1986 or so, they had a 50th year celebration and he was invited to be a guest speaker.  He spoke of how they didn't bring the "bearded fellas" to a meeting the University President because he was worried the ICC might be thought of as a communist organization!  Every month, despite his difficult situation, he would send a check home to Somerville to help the family out and was considered a hero by his siblings.

Of his younger years, he really didn't share much with me but one funny story was about how his mother used to tie him to a tree in the front yard while she was taking care of the younger kids so he could play outside but not wander off.  One day, some older kids in the neighborhood took pity on him and untied him.  Distressed, he ran back in to ask his mother to tie him back up!

An often repeated story was how, upon graduation, he and my grandmother got married in the Boston area and took a practical honeymoon by driving through Canada to get to Pittsburgh, PA where he had already landed his first job and picked out a tiny apartment with a Murphy bed that my grandmother complained about with great regularity throughout her life.  Upon receiving his first paycheck, he remembers gratefully telling his employer that he really needed that check because he only had $5 to his name at that point in time.  Soon my father was born and my grandmother would recall having to use a Q-tip to wipe the black residue from the dirty Pittsburg air out of little baby Allan's nose.  They would move many times through the years (including stints in Needham and Marshfield), have two more children, and eventually five grandchildren, travel the world, retire and come to the end of their journey in Georgia.  Frank Allan Rideout, Sr passed away in 1998.

To think that, after all my random travels, I wound up raising my own family just a few miles away from those three Boston locations where he spent so much of his life!  The world is so big and yet so small at the same time...