Matches

A couple of weeks ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I know nothing about anything. I stand by that position. However, I did just (maybe) learn the answer to one of my questions.

Yesterday, we took our son to the physics fair at UW. There I learned that it is EXTREMELY difficult for physics graduate students to explain anything about anything to civilians like me. One project that we looked at concerned plasma. I asked what plasma was, and got the response “ionized gas.” I asked what that was, and got another answer requiring a follow-up. I hope that university physics departments are teaching their students not only how to understand complicated concepts but also how to distill them so that the layman can at least get a sense. At times, I felt like I was having the following conversation with the student presenters:

Me: What’s that?

Them: A shmog.

Me: What’s a shmog?

Them: Two shmigs.

Me: What’s a shmig?

Them: Half a shmog.

But, I did learn one thing, getting back to my original point. I mentioned two weeks ago that I couldn’t start a fire without a match, and that I couldn’t make a match because I didn’t know what a match is. There was a project yesterday involving using radiant infrared heat (??) to light a match. I took the opportunity to ask a grad student what a match is. He wasn’t positive, but he thought it was a stick of wood that had sulfur and some iron on the end. The sulfur and iron for some reason burst into flame at a relatively low temperature, and the heat caused by the friction of striking the match is enough to set this process in motion.

I don’t know if that is right, and I still couldn’t make a match, but it is at least a description I can understand.

I know that I count among my vast readership one scientist and one former engineer. Gentleman, have I at least grasped one piece of the modern world correctly? Musicians, lawyers, weavers, please explain this world to me.

Incentivize Me

I hear a lot of talk about economic incentives, and I am puzzled. OK, I’m bothered. I think that bother comes from the same source as the irritation when people are referred to as “consumers.” Let me see if I can think this through.

Some economic incentives are clear and simple to understand. A supermarket runs a sale on canned tomatoes, and you go and buy 15 cans, or however many your pantry can hold (two cans, if you’re a New Yorker). The newspaper runs a special: 6 weeks subscription at half price. You take it – what the hell. It’s cheap. You find an electronic gizmo on special, and you buy it – those headphones usually cost $40, but they are on sale for $15, so you are really saving (and therefore sort of earning) $25.

In all these instances, you are, indeed, rightly called a “consumer.” No objection, no annoyance there. And while all three examples involve good prices, only one is really much of a deal, and that is the tomatoes. The supermarket knows this, and they take the hit on the price just to drag you into the store (it’s called a loss leader). Newspaper subscriptions usually are for the long haul, and a six-week reduction, averaged over the life of the paper, isn’t much to bear for the news company. Besides, once you get the paper, you are probably going to maintain your subscription. Who ever calls to cancel? Too much trouble. Again, they are trying to draw you in, to get you started so you will continue. And the headphones are the worst. You don’t need new headphones, and the thought of buying something because it is cheaper than it used to be is crazy. I am far from immune to the impulse, and it is lucky that I have moved houses a lot of late – moving gives you a great incentive to throw out all that junk.

I guess my point about all that is that these “incentives” don’t seem very incentivizing. They prey on our desire to accumulate stuff (more groceries! more news! more electronics!), and the incentive might be powerful, but the economic reality is something else. Buying an extra pair of headphones that you don’t need is not like saving (earning) $25, it is like burning 15 one-dollar bills on a cold day to keep warm.

I should perhaps point out, before going on, that I never took an economics course in my life. And it probably shows.

Even more baffling to me are large-scale incentives. Let me offer my favorite example: myself. I recently took a job as a college professor. I actually was making more money before, but the job I took seemed like it would make me happy (it has) and would make my life sane (ditto). I chose to live near my work, where property taxes are extremely high, rather than go just a few miles away, where they are lower and where property itself is much cheaper. With my imputed savings had I acted differently, I could easily have saved enough money to afford a really high-quality private school for my son, and still come out ahead. That seems a powerful incentive. Yet I chose to do what I did, partially because of my perceived quality of life (driving 20 minutes to work? Been there, done that, and more) and partially because I believe, yes I do, in public education. I am happy to pay my property taxes, and would happily pay more if I were convinced that it would really improve all our schools.

The point here (it’s hard to find, I know) is that there are many things I (we?) do that fly in the face of economic incentive. I am not primarily a “consumer” – I am a human being (just accept that temporarily; you can argue that point in the comments) who makes decisions based on a weighing of factors of which economics is a part but not a whole.

Perhaps this is why those on the left and those on the right can’t seem to talk to each other. If you assume behavior is governed by economics, you view the world one way, and if you assume it is governed by other considerations, the whole picture looks different. Companies are merging, growing larger and more powerful – is this a good thing (cheaper goods for all, and therefore better living) or a bad one (McDonald’s and Walmart for all, and therefore indigestion, zits, and stuff that breaks pretty quickly)? Our quality of life is way up from 100 years ago. Believe me, I have no interest in taking my laundry down to the river to beat it against the rocks. But are we, as a society, living lives of greater human meaning and worth, or is that becoming harder and harder? I guess only the consumers of tomorrow can answer that question.

 

Facebook

This has been bugging me for a while, but I don’t know that much about it. Perhaps some of my readers could edify me in the comments section.

If I am not mistaken, Facebook looks at the information we post on their site and sells it to advertisers. I do not know whether they look at the contents of the messages we send to each other, but my guess would be that anything that uses the site is fair game.

This raises a question, namely: why on earth are we all using Facebook so much? Let’s go back to email, which I think (but am not sure) is not monitored by anyone. I think I can email my brother and write, “Wow, those Kleenex (TM) brand facial tissues sure did help me when I had a cold” without then having my love of Kleenex sent off to Proctor and Gamble (or whoever makes Kleenex) along with my email address.

I find Facebook extremely limited in its usefulness. I have around 800 Facebook friends, most of whom I do not know. When I put a picture of myself holding my French horn up as a profile picture, I picked up about 100 horn playing “friends” from all over the world, which is kind of cool in theory, but really all it means is that there are a bunch of horn players all over the world. I knew that already.

I have never responded to a Facebook event invitation. I have never put my birthday on anyone’s birthday calendar. I don’t do any of the special things that Facebook allows me to do, and I’m not really aware of what those special things might be.

In all fairness, there are a few excellent videos on FB of my group the Meridian Arts Ensemble performing live, but really, those could be on Youtube just as easily.

Facebook is now becoming a publicly held corporation, valued at nine gagillion dollars. Somebody thinks Facebook is worth a ton of money, and that somebody is advertisers. So why are we voluntarily giving them a tidy list of our likes and dislikes?

Know-nothing Do-nothing

I don’t know anything and can do nothing. I know what you are thinking: Grabois went to fancy college, he plays the French horn, he knows a lot of stuff, he teaches, he performs, etc. Digging down to the basement of this, however, you get this:

I play the French horn. It is made out of metal. I think at least some of that metal is brass. I do not know what brass is. I don’t know how you get metal out of the earth (you mine it, whatever that means) or how you turn that metal ore into the kind of metal someone (not me) can work with. I think brass is an alloy, which is a combination of metals, but I have zero idea how you combine metals. Then, you somehow shape them into this shape. Don’t ask how, because I can’t answer.

There are, of course, machine made horns. Machines bend the metal, I guess. They get powered by petroleum, which has something to do with ancient sea creatures buried in the ground. How they turn into oil I don’t know. That oil is extracted (somehow) and piped, I guess, somewhere. It is purified through some process unknown to me. It then powers the machines. I don’t know what that means. I push a button and my reading lamp goes on, but there are a million steps involved that I can’t see and don’t know. It might have something to do with the part of New Jersey just out from the Lincoln Tunnel. It must have something to do with lighting oil on fire, but if I lit oil on fire, I’d just get an oil fire. And forget about the machines that turn metal into a horn: no idea at all how that works.

Of course, there is much more to life than the manufacture of metal objects. Thankfully, I have a job. I go to work every weekday (by the way, someone has to figure out the calendar we use, and it is much more complicated than having a leap year ever four years, but I don’t understand how it’s done). I have a studio in a building. No idea what my building is made of, but it is so ugly it is probably concrete, whatever that is. Why it stands up is anyone’s guess, but it seems to have something to do with rebar. Back to the problem of what metal is and how you make it.

Occasionally I drive to work. Forgetting the mysteries of the internal combustion engine (not a clue), or even its much simpler predecessor the Wankel rotary engine (great name, but still impenetrable to me), let’s go basic: I drive on a road. I don’t really know what that is. I think it is made of asphalt, or maybe tar – I don’t know what either of those is, but I know that cement mixers (oy vey) carry the stuff, and you have to melt tar, which means making it hot, which means again burning something, probably oil, which leads us back to paragraph three.

I very much like to eat chicken, which grows under cellophane wrap at the supermarket. Seriously, I know there are chickens, and I guess you have to kill them and get the feathers off. I could probably do that, but it would take an hour or two. I’m sure there’s a machine that does it, but there’s that machine issue again (paragraph three!). Then, maybe a machine cuts them up, but maybe it’s a human that does it. Well, I can in fact cut up a chicken, though I don’t know how to take the guts out. I also don’t know how to make a knife. Part of it is metal and part wood. I guess the wood must come from a tree, right? Then it is somehow turned into a knife handle and somehow attached to the knife.

If all everybody in the world disappeared except me and my friends and family, we would have to find food. I guess that would mean hunting, which I don’t know how to do. There are probably enough guns around to provide the necessary weaponry for hunting (assuming they didn’t disappear with all the people). No idea how they work. A hammer hits gunpowder? Whatever that is? And a bullet is fired. It is made of lead, probably because lead is soft (why?), which makes the bullet more destructive (why?), or maybe because lead is cheap (why? is there a lot of it?) or easy to extract (but not easy for me).  Maybe it is better to hunt with a bow and arrow. A bow is made of wood, and probably sometimes of some composite material (??). The wood is polished in some way – perhaps sand paper. Then it is painted. No idea what paint is. Maybe there’s some polyurethane on the outside, or shellac or something. Help. There is also a string that you pull, and when you come right down to it, I have no idea what string is.

Here are some things I could not make from scratch: cloth, any garment, a shoe, any piece of machinery, a candle (wax! What is that again?), a match (red stuff on the end, probably sulfur, which I think is an element, and I guess you find it in the hot springs at Yosemite, but that doesn’t have the ring of truth to it), a fire (if I didn’t have a match), a dwelling of any kind, a blanket, any vehicle (maybe a sled), anything made of metal, practically anything made of wood, anything made of plastic (including just making the plastic itself), anything made out of anything really (except maybe roast chicken out of raw chicken, assuming a fire miraculously appeared). I have no idea how to gather food. I guess you go to a farm, but in the woods everything looks remarkably inedible. I can sing but I’d be hard pressed to make an instrument. I can’t paint because I can’t make paint, paper, canvas, a paint brush, nothing. I can’t cut anything because I can’t make a knife.

You get the point.

For a guy with an expensive education and a good job, I am remarkably useless. I guess it is lucky that we have civilization and technology, for my sake.

Swimming

Having a job on the faculty at a Big 10 school is great in many ways, one of which is the unparalleled athletic facilities. As soon as the academic year began, I joined the gym, resolving to get in shape by swimming. Swimming is a great sport for wind players – it encourages great breathing habits, which is crucial for those who blow air for a living. The breathing is done in a horizontal position, which (in my opinion at least) is the best way to learn to breathe well.

For those of you who are interested in a little experiment, try standing up and taking the richest breath you can. Let it out. Now, take a bow, and stay down, just letting go of everything. Take the richest breath you can in that position. You will feel a much greater expansion, a much fuller experience of breathing, and, to speak plain English, a better breath. My own theory about this is that we use our abdominal muscles to hold us upright as well as to breathe. As long as we are standing up, there is a slight tightness in those muscles which limits free breathing. When you bow down, you release those muscles. Now, this may be a total fantasy on my part, and I am having an anatomist speak with my horn students about breathing this coming semester, so there may be a follow-up blog, but whatever the mechanism, you get the point.

I have always been a poor swimmer, in contrast to my brother, who swam a mile when he was something like 12 years old. I am decent at the breast stroke, but have always been a flailer (or an avoider) at the crawl. This year was going to be my chance to learn it, to develop a spectacular triangular-shaped torso, to lose lots of pounds, and to do a triathlon.

So I got in the pool. It was really big. Not big like a giant water park – big as in long. Specifically, 50 meters, which is a long way to swim. In my first swim, back in September, I went a length of the pool doing the breast stroke, and swam back doing the “crawl” (the quotes indicate that this was my version of the crawl, which was not a pretty sight). I made it about half way back before I was breathing like a maniac, and finished up breast stroking it back. That whole swim then stayed with breast stroke.

Like many happy tales, this one has a middle section with progress. After a few swims, I was able to go a length of the pool swimming the crawl. A colleague’s wife offered me some tips, I got a little better, and so on. By the beginning of Kwanzaa vacation, I was swimming 8 lengths of crawl alternating with 8 lengths of breast stroke, which isn’t bad considering we’re talking about a 50 meter pool. But I needed the interspersed breast stroke because I was breathing so hard after each length of crawl I though I was going to explode. This, by the way, was not the kind of breathing I was aiming to practice in my swimming.

We spent a week in San Francisco during our break, and one evening I put my son to bed while my wife was out, and decided it was the perfect time to watch some videos about better swimming. There was a series of lectures by a guy named Terry Laughlin on a method he developed called Total Immersion which had me glued to the computer. He basically described my type of flailing, and gave the solution, using simple concepts and lots of video examples. What I particularly liked about his ideas were that he challenged the orthodoxy at every turn. I won’t get into particulars, but the whole thing made sense.

The co-director of Total Immersion is a guy named Shinji Takeuchi, and there was a link to a video of him swimming in a pool. If you want to watch it (I recommend it, and it is short), here it is (I also recommend turning off the sound on your computer…). It was one of the most amazing sports videos I had ever seen – effortless motion. The guy cuts through the water like butter. So, I ordered the self-coaching videos and eagerly await them. Meanwhile, we are back home, and I had a swim today. Tried to apply what I had learned. Swam 20 minutes straight, crawl the whole way, and was barely breathing hard.

I enjoy thinking about how we learn, and have blogged already about it. I am fascinated that a few videos and a few lectures online were enough to cause such improvement in my swimming without my spending one second in the pool. It goes to confirm that we learn physical activities by modeling: we develop a concept of what we need to do, and then we do it. It’s all about image and metaphor, and about visualization and imagination. Interestingly, after my night of Total Immersion computer immersion, I called my brother, a professional cellist, to tell him about it. “Are you interested in this for the swimming, or for horn teaching?” he asked immediately. Indeed, O perceptive one. I reckon there is a lot of thinking ahead of me as I sort through Total Horn Immersion. Meanwhile, I can’t wait to get back in the pool.

Island

As everybody knows, John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” Actually, not everybody knows that. For instance, though I knew the quote, I had no idea who had written it, a problem handily solved by Google. Though no man is an island, many have lived on an island. Again, to use myself as an example, I have lived on two of them, one called Manhattan and one called Long. Some people, usually the wealthier sort, own an island, often one in warmer climes than what we experience here in Wisconsin.

The island I wish to write about here, however, is of the sort that many own, to wit, a kitchen island. My previous house, in Croton on Hudson, NY, had a lovely island with a granite top, and my current house has a nice island with a wooden surface. My issue with the island has nothing to do with its utility. An island is a great kitchen feature. No, my issue with the island concerns its upkeep, specifically keeping the damn thing clean.

Now, I am not a clean freak, and you would confirm that if you dropped in on my house. Indeed, if you prearranged a visit with me, there would still be no doubt that I am comfortable living with clutter and its concomitant dirt and dust (though I hate breathing dust). I have an old cat, and his sense of personal hygiene is sadly in a state of decline, so the normal blanket of cat fur in the house is accompanied by the occasional turd nestling therein, like a sky blue robin’s egg in its nest (except that this is a dark brown turd in a dust-colored pile of dust).

But we eat most of our meals on the island, which is equipped with three tall chair-stool-thingies. We also put on the island: the newspapers (two now: the good old New York Times, and the absolutely worthless State Journal), the mail, a fruit bowl or fruit not in a bowl and often oozing the gross stuff fruit starts to ooze after about 23 seconds at room temperature, a cork trivet with the usual stuff on it (salt, pepper, napkins, a bottle of children’s vitamins).

So the island tends to be a cluttered mess, in spite of our agreement that it should not be (our son has not signed onto this agreement, however). But beyond that, there is always, and I mean always, some smear or blemish of foul food waste to be found on the wooden  surface of the island. I wipe it every time I pass by, which is about a million times a day. Two minutes later, there is more wiping to be done. I have taken to bleaching the thing with Comet and a rough sponge every weekend. After the process is done, the wood is as soft as a baby’s behind (to quote the 80s era ad), but 10 minutes later, lo and behold (what does “lo” mean, by the way?), there it is: a trail of grape juice, some lemon residue, some trails of salt.

In short, I am sick of cleaning the thing, and it is a Sisyphean task. Islands appear to have a mind of their own, and that mind is on grunge and filth. Actually, that sounds a lot like people. Perhaps, while no man is an island, every island is actually a man in disguise, perpetually sullying itself through the vagaries of everyday life, getting a little help in the clean-up process, and then digging back into the muck of real life.

As a coda to this post, I will note that I did once see a man who was, in fact, an island. The  setting for the tale is Times Square in the summertime. I used to work quite often in Times Square, and I especially hated the crowds when it was hot out and I was seeking the blessed air conditioning of a Broadway theater. On this occasion, the ped-lock was a solid mass of humanity. But, all of a sudden, a large space opened up, and I rushed into the beautiful emptiness. It turned out to be not quite empty, however: there was a man with an enormous yellow snake wrapped about thirty times around his body standing in the center of an otherwise bare patch of sidewalk. That man knew how to put some space around him. That man was an island.

Bullies

My cousin Amy writes an excellent blog, and her most recent entry was about the use of the word “retard,” which, she argues (correctly), should be considered as offensive as other appellations used not to describe but to hurt people. This made me think about the bullying I was subjected to as a public school student. I was short, relatively smart, and Jewish, and in my hometown, these were all unacceptable. I was in high school in the 80s, and it was quite fashionable to toss around the epithet “fag.” I walked through the corridors of my high school to a chorus of “Fag. Jew. HeBREWWWWW” (the latter I think arising from a history unit on “the Hebrews”). One time I got “A-rab” (the kind with a long A), which actually made me smile with appreciation at a new achievement in the realm of ignorance. With me, it never extended to physical violence (though there were regular fights among students, some drawing blood, all arousing great delight in the student body), I’m guessing because I was so small that the bullies knew they would get in serious trouble for causing me actual bodily harm, which would have been exceedingly easy to do. I’ll add that I was once called “fag” while I was holding hands with a girlfriend, which shows that that word was used only as an attempt to cause emotional distress, not as an actual description of sexual behavior. Incidentally: total number of out homosexuals in my grade at the time: 0. Total number of African American students in my grade: 0. Total number of Jews: 6 (out of 182). And, in case it is relevant, total number of Arabs: 0.

This made me think about something. I’ve met plenty of people who say that they were a total nerd as a kid (that’s me, by the way, and it persists to this day), or that they never did any work, or that they were kind of a jerk, or that they felt lost. But I’ve never heard anyone say, “I was a bully in high school.” I guess there are three possibilities, the first being that I never come across people who were bullies in high school. Second possibility: that nobody wants to admit to having been a bully (or didn’t consider their behavior to be bullying).

The third, possibly related to the first, is that those bullies still are bullies, and we continue to encounter them today. Perhaps these are the people who infuriate us on telephone help lines (when we finally get to a human), the people who deny our claims at the health insurance company, the people who insist that the sudden non-functioning of our faucet has nothing to do with the fact that they were just in our bathroom unclogging our drain and will cost $150 in labor. In the book The Kite Runner (spoiler alert), the character who is a bully in high school becomes a Taliban executioner, and finds great fulfillment in his career.

I don’t know how universal it is for some adolescents (and younger kids, too) to try to wound their peers with injurious words and fists. Does this happen in New Guinea? Norway? Peru? Tanzania? Canada? And then, is it something we outgrow? Maybe social sectors are carved out early in life, and that somehow helps the species to thrive. But perhaps our modern society has come up with a brilliant defense against the thriving of the biggest jerks, since,  at least in my experience, the bullies from way back when have not exactly risen to the top of society’s rungs, but maybe that’s just because I come from a small town.

I am not sure if bullying is a way to get attention (the negative attention it ends up garnering could hardly be much of a payoff, but maybe it is better than no attention), a way to feel superior to one’s peers, or if we are just innately a nasty species. And I’m sure that there are many examples of adult bullying that become so subtle that they begin to be called “business acumen” rather than bullying (would Gordon Gekko have been a bully in 11th grade?). Perhaps bullies learn extremely valuable skills that make them millions in the end. In that case, it would be fascinating to hear from these former bullies. Did the CEO of Morgan Stanley used to walk down the halls in high school yelling “faggot” at the pimply kids? I can’t imagine that Bill Gates ever yelled “HeBREWWWWWWWWWW” at anyone, but maybe the prevalence of bullies leads to the existence of Gatesian nerds who create great wealth for the world thanks to their having been bullied, and so society finds its balance in the end.