Knowing, Naming, and Binning

I've been thinking about two cognitive biases that I think everyone has:

1. Naming something is to know it
2. Things come in bins

While it is true that naming a thing, an idea, a concept, etc. is empowering and can be clarifying and is certainly helpful in thinking and communicating, it is not the same thing as knowing it.

By naming things, we are sorting the named objects/concepts into bins automatically:

Are you shy or outgoing?
Is the chemical bond ionic or covalent?
Is your friend dumb or smart?
Is that material a conductor or an insulator?
Are you tall or short?
Is that object paramagnetic, diamagnetic, or nonmagnetic?
Are you fast or slow?

But, and here's the key point, naming and its incumbent binning is only the first step in thinking:

The truth is atoms share electrons in a continuum of ways (whose endpoints look quite different, hence the bins).
The truth is every insulator can be made a conductor under a large enough voltage difference (consider one mile of atmosphere conducting a lightening bolt).
The truth is every object has magnetic attributes (the 'spin' itself of the electron is a magnetic property).

Naming is a great tool, but it can also provide false comfort.

"See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way." - Richard Feynman

The Power and Danger of Physics

Back in 2003(?), I was a new physics teacher at Swampscott High.  There was this cool kid in one of my physics classes with a big fro, a distracted demeanor, but always tuning in big time when I went off on a philosophical tangent in physics class.  I'm pretty sure his name was Alex Engelman* but I might have that wrong.  I was fairly new and naive to the teaching world, but I was definitely getting the feeling that I liked it and that forming bonds, temporary as they are, with teenagers was a big part of the joy.

One day, Alex stopped me just outside of the front of the building and said "Hey man - you're pretty smart and I have a problem that is physics related."

So of course I bite and say, "I don't know, but I'm willing to give it a shot.  Whatcha got?"

He said "Well, I've been working on my ninja back flips and can't seem to get it right."

I fight down the rising panic inside and, playing it cool, say: "Ninja back flips?"

He goes "You know, when you run straight up a wall and flip off of it and land on your feet."

Nervously, I go "Okay, yeah - I guess I've seen that in the movies.  You do that kind of thing?"

He said "Well, I think I can but I just don't seem to be able to land on my feet.  I run up the wall and push off but don't seem to be able to complete the flip."

Not sure I really want to help out in this dangerous activity but not able to resist, I say "Well, I do have an idea.  I think you gotta be careful on the push off from the wall."

Super interested, he leans in and says "What do you mean?"

I nervously explain, "I think you might be stopping your upward momentum by concentrating on the horizontal push off from the wall.  You need to keep your vertical velocity to give yourself more flight time.  So think of it more as a leap forward as you are running up the wall."

I haven't a clue what I'm saying and I'm imagining him trying this later in a gym somewhere with lots of matts and cushion to fall into when my advice fall flat, so to speak.  Alex is looking at me very intensely though; picturing it in his mind, I think.

He says very confidently, "That makes sense."

He then slips off his backpack and runs straight at the brick wall that is the front of the high school.  As my heart leaps into my throat and I imagine his cracked head hitting the concrete, he smoothly darts up the wall and does a back flip.

As my racing heart starts to slow down, Alex comes back for his backpack and gives me a nod and says "Thanks, man - you were right" and walks off like nothing happened.

As cool as he was, I felt pretty cool right then.  "I DO like this job" I said to myself as I walked back to my car...



-----
* I'm breaking my blog rule of only using initials because this 'cool kid' must be a grown man now and I'm hoping someone puts us back in touch to see if he remembers this event.

Steinback, Neuroscience, and Fish

My last year of grad school ('96,'97?), I started to check out before I made the decision to take a leave of absence (some things that are confusing at the time become clear in retrospect).  I had switched outside of the standard physics path and was trying to do some interdisciplinary research in computational neuroscience.  (Basically applying mathematical modeling to neuronal functionality.)  I still think it's a cool field, but at the same time that I was slipping into the cracks that interdisciplinary studies are fraught with, I was losing the fire in the belly that you need to carry your PhD to completion.

I had attached myself to an interschool research group that spanned CMU and U of Pittsburgh.  A mathematically inclined professor at Pitt was kind of adopting me and asked me to go to a big conference for him to take notes and generally get inspired.  It seemed like a good opportunity and he used some grant money to fly me out and pay the conference fees but I was on my own for the rest of the cost.  I remember being profoundly moved by the view out of the plane as it crossed the Grand Canyon.  I remember I was writing a letter at the time to a friend and I was so indignant at the other passengers for not even bothering to look out their windows that she made fun of me the next time I saw her.


Monterey has a tiny airport and I could see the entire town nestled between the airport and the ocean.  I could see the Aquarium and the attached hotel where the conference was being held and so I just grabbed my bag and walked.  I felt inspired and free.  Of course looks were deceiving and it took me a couple of hours and a few wrong turns (no map and no phone in those days) to actual get there.  I remember feeling very cool for doing that.  Who walks from the airport?

The entire conference was a blur of me keeping to myself, attending a lot of talks given by people filled with purpose and gusto.  I felt smaller and smaller with every talk.  I don't think I talked to a single person the entire trip.  One night there was a big reception at the aquarium and I remember they had sushi stations set up all over the place and we had the run of that world famous aquarium.  I thought more about Cannery Row and Steinback than I did about science.  I recall being delighted that I was eating fish while looking at fish.  I remember jabbing with my chopsticks at a fish that had swum up to check me out through the glass.  Gleefully, I ate some sushi and said "I'm eating you!"

Feminism

Last fall, JW asked me if I was a feminist.  I paused for an embarrassing long moment before responding "yes".  The thing is, not only had no one ever asked me that before, but I realized in that moment that I have never even posed the question to myself.  Male privilege, anyone?

Today, I hit the entry on Mary Wollstonecraft in my Philosophy Digest Book.  I have long held what I thought were some pretty perceptive opinions about women and internalized beauty standards and feminism.  But, as almost always in life, when you have a thought - if you look long enough, you can find someone who has already said it better:

Speaking of women trapping themselves in superficiality, she wrote "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797

Telling Yourself a Story

I once heard that new car ads are mostly for buyers of new cars to not feel buyer's remorse.  I don't know if it's true, but I really like that idea.  So much of what we think we remember is about telling ourselves a story.

When we bought our house, we found, both during and after the process, that there were all these indicators that it was "meant to be."  Of course, there's no such thing but it is a useful mental trick to make yourself feel good about major decisions or events in your life.

One of my favorites about the house was this hammock which we received at our wedding as a gift many years before we even started looking for a place of our own:9

Our previous place didn't have two trees the right distance apart and the hammock stayed in storage until shortly after we moved in.  One day it occurred to me that these two trees in the backyard were the about the right distance apart so I took the hammock to hold it up and see if I was right.

When I got there, I discovered two hooks already embedded in the trees, waiting for me to sling the hammock between them (no adjustments needed).

Today, after spending the afternoon outside engaged in some spring clean up, I broke out the hammock.  As I lay there, I thought of how meant to be the house was in our lives.  I thought on other pleasant thoughts and just generally enjoyed my hammock moment.

The view up from the hammock this afternoon

Update 16-May-2020

Update 31-May-2020

Update 17-June 2020

Update 22-Aug 2020

7-Nov-20

Sailing, Trapeze Artists, and Nearly Drowning

When I was growing up, we would always go camping and sailing.  Mostly on lakes in northern Alabama, but occasionally we'd go over to northern Georgia.  We set up our tent on the side of the lake and my Dad and I would sail his sixteen foot Coronado.  We would almost always be the only sailboat of any kind on these small lakes.


When I was about 16 or so, my Dad wanted to spice things up a bit and outfitted the boat with a trapeze even though we hardly ever encountered winds strong enough to warrant it.

image from By flickr user "sailorbill" Bill Blevins from Fairport, NY, USA - flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6292608

On the drive to Lake Wilson (?), one of the trapeze wires fell out of the boat and was dragged along the road until it disintegrated and we lost the lower part of the wire.  Not to be deterred from his fun, my Dad fixed it with some rope so we could "hike out" in true style.

Of course my Dad went first on the trapeze and of course the windward side was the broken side and of course the boat was taking on some water unbeknownst to us and of course the boat capsized as he was hiking out.  I remember clearly that I was eating a sandwich and I somehow calmly finished the sandwich as I scrambled over the side and onto the bottom of the hull which was now floating on the surface.  Unlike most capsizing (picture below), the boat actually pulled a complete 180 and the mast was pointed straight down (must have been because of the water inside the hull?).  As I stood on the bottom of the boat, waiting for my Dad to surface and tell me what to do, I realized he was trapped in the trapeze harness.  I then realized the trapeze line is slightly shorter than the length of the mast.  I then realized he was effectively trapped underwater.  I started to get nervous.  To my relief, I felt the entire boat start to list to one side as my Dad fought his way to the surface on the other side.  When his head surfaced, I could tell he was fighting the line attached to the mast and I said "Hey, are you okay?"

He responded "No" and was pulled back under.

from https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/capsized-sailboat.html

I'm not clear what happened next: if I hiked out on the opposite side to help him or if he managed to untie himself while underwater, but he did make it and we righted the boat with difficulty and paddled our half sunk boat to shore to fix it up.

Funny thing, we never really tried that trapeze line out again!

Time, Loneliness, and Being Alone

I turned 27 all by myself in a hotel room In Bombay, India.  It was, quite possibly, the lowest point in my life.

I was travelling a lot for my job back then (Viscotek days).  I was on the road so much, both domestic and international, that I felt I was losing my sense of identity.  I was newly single after my third, long term, failed relationship.  I had lost touch with my friends.  I hadn’t seen my own family in some time.  In those days, I travelled with only two items of personal value to me:  a wind-up traveling alarm clock that my American grandfather had used when he used to travel a lot on the road for his own job in the 1950’s and 60’s and a wind-up Swiss watch (see below) that was an engagement gift from my French grandmother to my French grandfather.  I remember writing a poem that night about time, my dead grandfathers with whom I felt connected, and those time pieces.  Alas, this was before the blog, so I cannot lay my hands upon that poem these days.  

Earlier that day, I had tried my usual trick of walking around the area near my hotel, looking to enjoy the local culture and to take some fun risks in eating out.  I’ve always been proud of my fearlessness in this regard.  This time, though, I failed.  I remember feeling assaulted by the press of street urchins who mobbed me, trying to sell me trinkets.  I don’t mean physically assaulted, but psychically assaulted.  I simply couldn’t take the press of people: the numbers and the intensity of it all.  My whiteness marked me as a tourist and I, at first, smiled and engaged in banter over the price of a hand carved elephant that one street kid was trying to sell me.  

I, maybe, had made it two blocks when I fled back to the hotel and ate there in solitude, feeling inept and incapable.  The mass of people othering me so hard made me feel so alone; to this day I can tap into that feeling.  

To celebrate my birthday, I went to the hotel bar and met a British ex-pat.  As the only two white, single men there, we struck up a conversation.  I contemplated telling him it was my birthday but I worried it would seem a ploy for him to pay for my drinks so I said nothing.  I don’t remember much, but I do remembered when I tried to steer the conversation in a serious direction, he said “The West has the concept of happiness all wrong – look at the street people here: they have nothing, yet they are the happiest people I have ever met.”  Rather than continue to make a real connection to a thoughtful person, I ran away again – back to my hotel room.

There, in the room, I stared at the two time pieces from my grandfathers, both of whom has passed away by then, and I thought “If I died right now, no one would miss me for weeks  - maybe months”.  

As I lay there, my mind flashed back to my arrival in India a few days earlier.  Not in modern Bombay but the ancient city of New Delhi.  During a life-altering taxicab ride from the airport to a throwback hotel from the days of British occupation (during which I learned that the horn of a car can be used as an actual navigational tool), a street beggar (a boy of maybe 12 years?  Who knows?) banged on my window while the taxi has trapped in traffic (I had been eagerly looking outward at the exotic sites).  He casually held out one hand for money as his other hand held his distended hernia out for my inspection and my pity.  I was so shocked, I shrank back into my seat and felt that my whole world had been turned upside down.  The kid laughed and the taxi cab driver used the horn to make a hole and darted forward, two wheels up on the sidewalk...

With that thought, I fell asleep, ending my 26th year on this planet.

Introverts, Extraverts, and Social Distancing

"We've been practicing for this our whole lives!" is something introverts have been saying about our current social distancing paradigm.

The Rideouts are, of course, not missing the world much as we mostly see the world as a giant intrusion in our lives.  In an over-scheduled world, we were proud of our under-scheduling - now everyone else is catching up with us!

I've been thinking about this a lot in light of my recent post on how society and those around us shape us.

I'm always surprised by how much of my mood can be affected by external stimuli:

dark and dreary day?  I feel sluggish and down.

someone slights me or ignores me?  I feel like a loser.

someone compliments me or explicitly values me?  Happy!

bright, sunny day?  Happy!

Who is this guy?  Some introvert I am!  Intellectually, I identify with the classic Simon and Garfunkel song or the, slightly less classic, the The musing on Buddhism.  The thing is, I may intellectually want to be an island, self-sufficient, and emotionally detached but that is not how we are hard-wired, it is?


I think a lot of teachers (myself included?) are actually ambiverts and have both extraverted and introverted tendencies: I miss the engagement of school.  I miss my students (well, most of them).  I even miss a couple of my colleagues (not really - I just threw that in there in case one of them happens upon this entry)!

But I enjoy sitting by myself, downstairs, reading on my kindle, watching videos with my earbuds in, playing solitary video games, checking on the lack of online assignments not getting done by my students, and having an excuse to not leave the house.

Can I have both, please?