Dr. Shiblon

Step by Step, Fun by Fun

2011-11-11T09:55:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading the book "Barefoot Running: Step by Step" by Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton, and heartily recommend it to anyone who runs. It's a light-hearted, accessible, and informative treatment of the subject of running mechanics and how, if you're interested, you can re-learn to run comfortably without shoes on. There's a lot in here for people who really don't want to go that far with it, too; after all, safe and proper running form applies to the shod and unshod alike.

Personally, I am now completely hooked on running barefoot. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had started doing a fraction of my runs barefoot just to help train my running form; it's really hard to run badly barefoot because it hurts (a lot), so my feet were my coaches. Since that post, I have worked up to running 5 miles barefoot on varied terrain (asphalt, concrete, gravel or dirt trails), and no longer feel the need to run in shoes at all. More importantly, I'm having a lot more fun doing it than I ever have before. There is something about this that is surprisingly, viscerally delightful; I can't help smiling just thinking about it.

Of course, this is no panacea, and I still have a lot to unlearn from years of running badly in shoes. After my most recent 5-miler, I had to put bandages on my feet and my arthritic hip was starting to hurt again. Frustrated, I bought the book, started reading, and immediately found a number of things that I needed to change in my running technique. Since employing those changes, I have started babying my feet more while running, stopping when they tell me to, and paying closer attention when other body parts hurt.

That may sound obvious, but it wasn't to me. In fact, most runners I know operate under the tacit assumption that running hurts, and that the only way to improve is to ignore the pain and press forward. Paying attention to pain and believing that it is unnecessary was, for me, totally revolutionary. Interestingly, had I been running barefoot all along, I never could have believed that pain is normal during running, because pain when running barefoot is impossible to ignore; either you fix it so it doesn't hurt, or you stop running.

Having changed a few things and adopted the "baby your body: fix what's wrong" mindset has definitely reduced my mileage temporarily, but I'm still running plenty (up to 3 miles again) and my joints and soles are finally healing faster than I can beat them up. It is amazing to finish a run feeling in all ways better than when I started, and that makes me itch to go out again.

There are some excerpts from the book online that capture some of the great advice found within. Armed with that advice, you can do a lot, but the book is far more than a list of running instructions. More important for me were the changes in mindset that it teaches. For example, when running in the past, I thought about running as a process of pushing against the ground to propel myself forward. When barefoot, however, that kind of thinking is a recipe for mind-bogglingly large and painful blisters: no matter how calloused our soles, we will eventually wear them out doing that, just like we wear out our running shoes. Instead, I now think of running as a process of continuously and gently catching myself as I fall forward, avoiding scraping or sliding my foot at all costs. This is just one example, but I've been amazed at how this shift in thinking has changed every aspect of my technique for the better.

Can you learn to run properly without the book, merely by losing your shoes? I personally believe that you can, but that there is great value in learning from an expert first. It would take a lot of play and experimentation to do it on your own. That can be fun, but can also be time-consuming, frustrating, and painful as you slowly experiment with changing old habits. For me, this book lit the way so that I knew which things to try; my feet told me something was wrong, and Ken Bob told me in a humorous and insightful way how to fix it. What he teaches really works, and most of it would not have occurred to me nearly as quickly on my own. For that, I would pay for the book again without thinking twice about it. In fact, I might just do that anyway because (annoyingly) I can't lend out my Kindle edition of the book. I guess that's yet another argument for going back to basics.

Whether you prefer digital or print format, this book has made running fun again for me, teaching me how to fix the issues I was starting to experience in my own foray into barefoot running. Now I look forward to every run, even in weather like this morning's: 34 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing. It felt wonderful, and my feet feel great. It's stimulating, it's enjoyable, it works, and I don't intend to stop.

I'm simply having too much fun.

Running Again, This Time Barefoot

2011-09-29T18:44:00.000-04:00

If you don't run, or would rather not listen to the ramblings of someone who's testing out the whole barefoot running thing, feel free to watch a video about kittens, instead. Actually, go watch that video anyway, because it's amazing. Then come back. I'll wait.

So, the whole barefoot running thing is starting to gain more and more attention. Most people who run have heard about it, and with books like "Born to Run" (which is great, by the way, even if you don't care about running at all), more and more people who don't run are hearing about it. Of course, "barefoot" often means "wearing minimal shoes", so it's not always as extreme as it sounds.

But, everyone has an opinion, usually strongly held and vigorously defended. Here, I'm adding mine: it's the real deal. After trying it out, my years of knee, hip, and ankle pain are completely gone. Running is fun again. But, you have to start out right or you get hurt. I did.

I didn't start out even thinking about barefoot running. I just started out hating how much my feet and ankles hurt all the time. My podiatrist said I overpronated. The experts at the running shoe store watched me on a treadmill and said I overpronated. Everyone suggested orthotics, but those only made it worse. So, in a fit of desperation, I hit Google and found a whole group of people who advocated the opposite approach: remove all support and let your feet do their job.

I figured that it was worth a little experimentation to see if that would help, so I bought some minimal shoes from the elves at Soft Star (they really call themselves that) and started walking in them everywhere. It was uncomfortable at first, but I quickly learned to walk differently so as to not hurt my heels. Then it got a lot better. Better than before, in fact. I figured there might be something to this. And I don't care what anyone else says: the shoes are cool.

Then I went on a canyoneering trip to Zion with some of my extended family, and decided that I was going to try this whole Vibram Five Fingers thing. I had found that trying to return to normal shoes made my feet hurt again, so I needed something rugged that was also flat. Looking stupid didn't matter for this excursion, so those fit the bill.

That trip ended up having some unsavory parts to it, like walking a lot longer and further on a lot more difficult terrain than any of us expected. After a long day of canyoneering. At night. With a large cat stalking us on the ridge above. Yeah, it was awesome. And I came out without any injury at all, my hypothesis being that the few times my foot slipped and could have twisted my ankle, the shoes let it naturally spread out, flex, and shift instead.

That's when the light bulb started to go on in my mind. I could never have done that much hiking before at all, let alone without injury. After reading "Born to Run", I began to wonder if I could run in those five-finger shoes, too. So, on a fine day on the outskirts of Zürich, I did just that. I figured I would test it out by running a mile. I ran three. It felt great.

But, this was the beginning of a somewhat ill-conceived idea. I continued running in the Vibrams, and eventually started feeling pain in the outside of my feet. It quickly got so bad that I could hardly walk. I had peroneal tendonitis. Apparently this is a common injury among runners just starting out in minimal shoes. They even have an acronym for what I did: TMTS. It means "too much, too soon". Well, that was definitely me. I went from 3 miles to 10 in the course of a week because I was having so much fun. I have never, in all my life, run 10 miles at a time before this, and I paid for it.

So, I did too much too soon with muscles that were not ready for it, and I was still running with form bad enough to injure myself. Great. I just rediscovered running, and now I couldn't walk again. Now what?

Surprisingly, going all the way was the answer. No shoes. No socks. Just feet, even on relatively rough surfaces. Some folks advocate starting on the gnarliest gravel you can find, but I'm not really masochistic enough to do that to myself. I started doing it on a treadmill, then graduated to pavement, then ran on gravel, no problems. Why? The theory is that when your feet are bare, it is impossible to run incorrectly - it hurts way too much. We have a lot of nerves down there, and the end result is that the intense and immediate feedback keeps us running comfortably.

What's sort of surprising is that it is possible to run comfortably with bare feet at all. I know I believed that we needed a lot of cushioning to run. Now I'm not so sure. Our feet are remarkably well-adapted for absorbing and returning impact force so that running is comfortable and can go on for a long time, even (especially, I'm finding) on very hard surfaces. Because they have to touch down lightly when they're bare, the impact is spread around among the network of muscles, ligaments, and tendons in the feet and legs, and the knees and hips don't get pounded to death. The ankles don't take a beating, either. Everything flexes just right to allow for a softer landing and a more springy takeoff. I would normally add a disclaimer here, but the proof of the pudding really is in the eating.

I can't run very far in bare feet, yet; I can only go just under a mile before my feet start telling me to lay off or they're going to give me a nice big blister. I listen to them, since that's the whole point of this exercise, and I put my Vibrams on and keep on running. Just doing the first part of the run barefoot seems to get me into the right running form, and then it's easier to stay in it for the remainder of the time. That, and every time I run, I go longer in bare feet, so they are definitely toughening up.

I am able to clock more miles than ever this way, and it's fun and comfortable. I've never enjoyed running so much in my life. Before, it was a necessary thing, something to get me more fit, or to help me lose weight. A chore. Now, I can't wait to get out and do it. Sure, the health benefits are part of the outcome, but the real point is that I'm having a blast.

I used to wear orthotics as a kid because of over pronation. For years, it hurt to walk. It hurt to move. Now, I walk all over the place (I have to get higher on the FitBit leader board, you know!). Now, I look down at my feet, and the ankles are standing up straighter than they ever have. My ankles feel fine. My hip feels fine. My knee feels fine.

The saddle feels fine, and I'm back in it.

Mom's Immortal Kitchen Knife

2011-08-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

Mom has had the same little kitchen knife for as long as I can remember, and her heartbreak when it first showed signs of dying more than 20 years ago was palpable. As a young kid, I decided I could do something unique that Christmas: I could fix her knife.

The only thing wrong with it was the rotting wooden handle, and I knew something about working with wood. So, I got out my coping saw and sandpaper and got cracking. After carefully removing the rivets from the old handle, I traced out a new one, cut it out, made it smooth, drilled some holes, and treated it to be as water-proof as possible. It looked great, and Christmas was really fun that year.

Fast forward 20 years and we were back in the same situation, but worse: what was once a sharp, serrated blade was now an incredibly dull, not-so-serrated piece of metal sticking out of an aging and rotting handle. What's more, one of the rivets was missing this time, so I couldn't just carefully restore it when I was done.

I also didn't really have any wood of the proper thickness, but 20 years can do a lot for a man's tool collection, so this was no problem. Belt sanders are, after all, pretty amazing at removing unwanted material.

I started with a block of wood cut out of some old kitchen cabinets that we had modified earlier in order to get our new range into the kitchen. I wasn't crazy about the stain on it, but it was nice oak underneath and the stain would get sanded away anyhow.

The next step was to remove the old handle. It was simplest just to cut it open to expose the rivets, then I was easily able to pop them off. You can really see the ugliness in there from 20 years of dishwasher use. Eventually the sealant I applied all those years ago stopped working and rot had settled in.

I got the blade off just fine and applied my Dremel tool to the task of removing rust and stains from it, then got out some needle files and a honing stone to see what I could do about restoring the serrated edge to something that could actually cut food. After a lot of patient filing and honing, I ended up with a blade that looked like it might actually be useful. It still isn't as sharp as the knives that I like to use, but considering that Mom has been using this in its dull state for a number of years that I hate to ask about, it's a whole lot better than it was.

I then traced out the old handle on the new wood and started cutting. I used my pull saw and a coping saw to get the curves basically correct, but wasn't too fussed about perfect accuracy at this point: the key was to not remove too much wood.

Next came the use of the rasp to get all of the curves right and to remove the extra wood I left behind on my initial sloppy cuts. This part took some patience, and even the picture below is not the last time I used the rasp. As I left it and came back to it from day to day, I noticed little flaws in it that I spent a few minutes here and there removing. The final product looked pretty reasonable, but was still too thick. About 3 minutes with the belt sander took care of that, and I had a basic handle.

The handle needed a blade groove in it, and this was the trickiest bit of cutting. When I made the first handle all those years ago, I just cut a slot all the way through the handle and relied entirely on rivets to hold everything in place. This time I decided to only cut a notch in the handle that did not go all the way through, which meant I needed to reach for the Dremel tool again. It made relatively short, if tedious, work of it, and the tough parts were finished. I then spent some time getting the handle sanded until I was happy with it. The biggest problem was the curvature near the blade, which was too much. The handle got to be more streamlined as time went on.

At this point, I had to decide what to do about the missing rivet. The old rivets were not complete, and they were in pretty bad shape anyway, so I needed to get new ones. After a couple of weeks of waiting, I got my rivets and special drill bit in from Jantz Supply, and I set to work getting the holes drilled just right.

I don't have enough space for a drill press, but I do have a $30 drill guide from Home Depot that made this process really easy. I just had to cut a block of wood for the base to drill against, and the holes came out perfectly straight. Sometimes the cheapest stuff works the best.

The picture shows the knife blade in the handle, but it wasn't in there when I did the drilling. I had carefully marked the holes previously (but not carefully enough - I had to do some adjustment after the drilling to get the blade to sit properly in the handle before the holes would line up). Because the rivets are counter-sunk, I had to drill from both sides. Getting everything lined up was critical, but made pretty easy by just drilling a small hole all the way through and using that as a guide after flipping the handle over.

The rivets that I bought were a bit too long, so I cut them down with the Dremel tool and reshaped the male rivets to be pointed at the ends. Then I hammered them together and had myself a new-looking knife. One last treatment with sandpaper, and it was ready for polishing and a couple of coats of rub-on polyurethane. After drying, I snapped yet another terribly amateur picture with my phone and shipped it out to a happy mom.

The thing I like about this project is that really anyone could do it. Yes, I could have just bought her a new knife, but she likes this one a lot. It's also really hard to find something exactly like it, anymore: most serrated blades are on steak knives, which are a lot longer than this, and shorter knives are all paring-style knives with narrower blades. This combination is pretty unique, and it was surprisingly easy to preserve it. Here's to another 20 years!

Dear Delta

2011-08-18T16:47:00.000-04:00

I am not a person.

Of course, I have gone through life believing that I am a person. I mean, I have feelings, self-awareness, and generally look person-like and do person-like things. I walk like a person and I talk like a person, so I must be a person, right?

Apparently, that depends on whether I paid for a first-class ticket or not. Given that first-class tickets cost roughly the same amount as purchasing the country to which I was flying, it seemed rational to pass them over as unnecessary. I don't need to own a new country, I just want to visit. That's the kind of logical decision an actual person would make, isn't it?

Such thinking seems logical, but the cheaper choice is highly unnatural for a real person. In trying to follow a logical person-like thought process, I had stumbled into a trap. I was painfully exposed for what I really am.

I suppose that there were many little signs that I should have noticed early on, like non-refundable fares, or being unable to reprint a boarding pass after the first attempt failed. These may be small things, but paying closer attention to them might have led me more quickly to the inevitable conclusion. Another small sign of it was the cheese and butter served in the vegan meal. Again, it was a small and nearly inconsequential thing (it was ordered to avoid an egg allergy for my son, and fortunately it did not have eggs), but it should have alerted me to the truth sooner.

In the end, it was the bigger things that finally opened my eyes to just how disgusting and unworthy I am, things like being turned away from the first-class lavatory when all other lavatories were unavailable, not because "a dedicated toilet is a special first-class perk", but because "I want to keep it clean for my passengers." Whatever I am, I am unable to see the grime, slime, disease, and dirt that covers everything that I touch. Now that I know, I will have to be more careful.

Fortunately, I shared a cabin with a lot of other non-humans, so I was at least not alone. I could not originally see it in others because I could not see it in myself, but again the airline provided me with irrefutable evidence of our shared state.

I was the first to find out.

The plane was practically empty, but I was unable to move to an empty row because it had an extra inch of leg-room that I (6'4") didn't need (and hadn't noticed). In fact, none of the 4 completely empty rows with that characteristic were something that I needed: those seats "cost more", even when they're empty and doing nobody any good. They were, I surmised, reserved for real people, and that's not what I am.

Once I had this realization, I was a little bit surprised to find out that none of those around me had figured it out, yet. We had all been operating under the same delusion! This was clear from the reaction of others that, independent of myself, asked similar questions, or had the boldness to simply move to an empty row with the assumption that it was acceptable to do so; they were angry and completely mystified that the airline would rather have several empty rows than offer them the ability to use them. Such a gesture would generate good will at least, and cash at best. But no upgrade procedure was available to us, and no such gesture was offered. Once I knew the truth, this behavior was easy to predict: real people only care about good will that comes from other real people, not from us.

Now that I know, a lot of other things make sense. This attitude, for example, is not unique to Delta, although they are more honest about their disdain for non-people than many other airlines are, and I respect them for at least trying harder to get the message out. Delta made it clearest to me, but other airlines have tried in their own way to give me the same message. It's my fault for not hearing it sooner, really.

There is a notable and sometimes baffling exception, but I think I understand that, now, too. I consistently feel like a person when traveling via Southwest. Are they just being dishonest with me? The answer lies in what other airlines are saying: Southwest caters only to non-humans in the first place: they're like the dedicated veterinarians of the airline industry; the patients don't know that they aren't people because they are never treated like anything less. And, when Southwest does offer customers perks in exchange for cash, they are really perks, not merely means of putting all of the other passengers in their place: there are no "other passengers" here.

I have come to terms with not being a real person, but I certainly like it better where I'm treated as though I am. Don't get me wrong: I really appreciate what Delta did for me; they taught me the truth about myself, and knowing that truth, I can live life more confidently and appropriately as the non-person that I am.

But I won't be voluntarily giving them my money again.

Saving the Fun

2011-05-13T14:57:00.002-04:00

Sometimes things happen in life that suddenly explain a lot of previously mysterious things. These moments can be really neat because they make everything snap into place, and they remove uncertainty. What you learn, however, isn't always pleasant. But it's truth, and I love the truth because it gives me power.

For example, I recently found out that I have celiac disease [update 2011-06-03: - actually I have wheat and barley allergies, which produce very similar symptoms, but the dietary restrictions are essentially the same]. While that is a very inconvenient thing to have, it is also highly manageable and very empowering to know it. I just can't eat gluten. At all. But, for the first time since I can remember, I feel like I have some control over how I feel.

And that is exciting.

Excitement, however, was not what I expected from our kids as we went to take them to get their blood drawn for the celiac test this morning. After all, if I've got it, there's a really good chance they do, too, particularly when you correlate genetics with symptoms.

We have been telling the girls for a few days that there were needles in their future, and they were a little nervous. So, on the way in to the diagnostics lab, we asked them which one would like to go first. The youngest of our daughters said, with her trademark cheeky smile and supernatural wrinkly nose, "Not me, I'm saving the fun!"

Apparently she was completely at peace with it, and that proved to be true as she went through the process without any trouble at all, after her younger brother and older sister. They all did very well, and we were happy that, along with finding out the truth, we didn't have too much additional trauma to impose on them.

Now we have an adventure ahead of us. We get to learn to go without wheat-based pizza, bread, licorice, and pasta, as well as unexpected things like Lindt Truffles (they contain barley) and a simply enormous number of other surprises. As it turns out, gluten is extremely common in packaged food. There are many reasonable substitutes for most things, so it will also mean trying a lot of new and interesting foods, but I think I'll let the kids go first.

I'm saving the fun.

How Many Engineers Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

2011-04-02T18:03:00.003-04:00

Not pretty.

We have a high ceiling in one part of our house, and on it are two rows of track lights. These lights are wonderful, particularly when contrasted with the hideous and ineffective lights that they replaced. They are, however, a bit out of reach, and even a reasonably tall step ladder is not enough to safely change the GU-10 bulbs. In order to really get my hands up there, I have to lug out my 22-foot folding extension ladder. This ladder is heavy, awkward, and filthy, making it a very poor choice for the job.

Much better.

After three bulbs burned out and languished that way for weeks, I finally decided that I needed to do something about it. I poked around on Amazon.com trying to find light bulb changing poles, and I found several. None of them, however, can change bulbs with a face as small as a GU-10 bulb (56mm diameter). For those, Amazon.com, Home Depot, and several discussion groups online all agreed: I was out of luck, and it was time to haul the large ladder and drop cloth up our narrow spiral staircase and just get it over with.

But, I'm fundamentally pretty lazy about things like this, so I continued to not get around to it, and we got used to working in relative darkness until I realized that I could make a light bulb changer that would do what I needed. After all, the basic concept is very simple: I just needed a locking suction cup mechanism like those you see on GPS mounts and a way to actuate it from a distance. Easy, right?

As it happens, the mechanism wasn't terribly difficult once I figured it all out, but there were several interesting challenges in the design and implementation that are worth talking about. The first thing I did was purchase several kinds of locking suction cups available from Home Depot. They're scattered all over the store: some of them are in home storage, still others in the bath section, and the Power Lock hangers I ultimately ended up using were somewhat randomly located with the nuts and bolts. They looked perfect: they are very cheap, slightly smaller than the bulbs in diameter, and they are designed to lock onto bath tile for long periods of time. I have also seen them used in storefront windows to hold up signs, so their shear strength is adequate.

Now I had a problem. How would I get this suction cup onto the end of a pole while still being able to lock and unlock it? The principle behind these things is increased vacuum: you engage the suction cup with the surface, squeeze out the air, then rotate the hook to pull the suction cup into its shell, creating a weak vacuum. This greatly increases the force required to remove it, which is what makes it an effective method for attaching GPS units to windshields. Unfortunately, this multi-step process involves placing force on different parts of the device at different times and in different directions, and that's a recipe for problems when doing it at a distance.

What we have here is basically a monostable system: in one configuration it is solid and stays put (fully tightened), and in another, it is unstable and generally useless (fully loosened). This doesn't matter when using fingers to directly manipulate it, because fingers are pretty amazing at accurately applying force in multiple locations and directions. It matters a lot, however, when you want to actuate it from a distance. What I needed was a bistable mechanism, one that would allow me to set it into the push state and just leave it there, then set it into the pulled state and leave it there, all while "holding" only the shell. After all, I have only two hands, and one of them is going to be holding the pole and using it to twist the bulb in its socket. The suction has to be operated entirely with the other hand.

The answer ultimately came from late-night inspiration and relatively basic math. I designed a bistable lever that would replace the hook, and would be sandwiched between the suction cup shell and a solid surface, so that it could push against either one depending on the state it was in. The design spontaneously grew out of my needs: in one orientation I needed the suction cup out, and in another orientation I needed it in. The distances and necessary right angles dictate a couple of triangles, and those dictate where the arms can go. Presto - instant bistable lever design.

I drew an accurate side view on paper, cut it out, and discovered that I didn't have any wood of the right thickness to make the lever out of. No problem, I have glue and clamps, so I made one. I then traced out and cut the piece I needed. This was made very easy by my Japanese-style pull saw, a tool I should have bought years ago.

The lever, completely cut out.

I then drilled the axle hole, which required some accuracy, so I used my Dremel tool with the drill press accessory that my wife gave me for my birthday several years ago. It worked great, and the hole was perfectly straight. I then dug out the channel where the suction cup post goes with a Dremel tool. You'll note that I reach for the Dremel tool quite often; it's incredibly versatile. It was my first power tool purchase aside from a drill, and I didn't need any other power tools for quite a few years. I would recommend it as a first tool for anyone getting started on tight space or a tight budget. Go cordless if you can.

Channel cut for the suction cup post.

It was at this time that I realized that I had no idea what I would use as an axle for this setup. I rummaged through my stuff and found some nails that were the right size, and cut one short in the hopes that by the time I was done I would have some idea of how to make it stay put. After I got it cut, I realized I could notch the end of it and use a piece of bent paper clip to lock it in place. I cut the nail and made the notch using the Dremel tool, but a hack saw would have worked just as well. The axle lock worked great. I just had to drill out the old axle, remove the hook, and replace it with my bistable lever.

The lever, by the way, is not bistable by itself. Just sitting on the suction cup assembly, it is still monostable. To become bistable, it has to have something to press against so that it can force the suction cup away from its shell. So, I cut a round piece of wood, notched it for the lever arms, and fiddled with it a bit until I had something that allowed the lever to move while being stuck between the wood and the suction cup shell.

This particular piece was more complicated than it needed to be - I used the lip inside of a PVC coupling as a place to rest the lever back support, which involved carving the round piece with a lip of its own, as can be seen in the picture. It fits inside the coupling, and the suction cup lever assembly sits on top of it. The picture also shows windows cut into the side of the coupling. I did that so that the lever would be free to move without being cut too short, and so that I could see what was going on after it's all assembled. I am pretty sure they're unnecessary (I ended up shortening the lever arms anyway), but there they are. Again, they were cut with the Dremel tool. There are also some small holes showing in the picture. More on those later.

I drilled some holes, made some loops, and tied wire to the ends of the lever, then stuck it all together. Now I had my final real challenge: how to hook the suction cup shell onto the coupling? Glued PVC, particularly with this little surface area, does not have much shear strength at all. This is especially true with rotational shear like the stress I would put on it trying to get a bulb in and out of a socket. Also, "Screws better than glues" from the Owner's Manifesto was ringing in my head, and I felt the need to come up with something repairable; this will probably break in the future, and I'll want to have easy access for repairs.

Almost done!

Fortunately, these cups are designed with a channel all along the outside diameter, and I was able to drill holes through that into the coupling, using paper clips to fasten it down. It is very, very sturdy. I put the whole thing together, tied some twine onto the ends of the wires, wired the top down with paper clips, and the mechanism was done! The lever arm rocks back and forth nicely, and the suction cup obediently moves in and out as it does so. I could not have asked for a better outcome, particularly for a first attempt with so many unknowns along the way.

The finished core mechanism.

The finished product involved the addition of a PVC pipe for length (with the twine running through the pipe and out the end), and I was finally able to change all of the bulbs. It took less than ten minutes and I only had to stand on a (stable and sturdy) chair to do it. It is trivial to add more pipe to it if I need it longer in the future.

The whole project was a delightful adventure; it was especially fun to meet and deal with all of the little challenges along the way.

I tried very hard to use only cheap, simple, and highly available tools for this. I did reach for the Dremel tools several times, but I could have done all of the work with a coping and/or hack saw and some wood chisels quite easily. It's not an expensive or onerous project by any means. The PVC and hooks were the only things I bought, and those came in at under $10 all together.

So, how many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? One, but he might need to use some trigonometry, have some wood scraps laying around, and know his way around a Dremel tool.

Or he could just get out the ladder.

A Light Compulsion

2011-03-14T14:12:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I had a fascination with light. My first introduction to electronics was building a simple flashlight with my dad, and after that I was completely hooked on both light and electronics. My parents bought me an optics kit with a prism and some lenses in it that I used to play with for hours, and later they bankrolled all of my electronics projects, as well. When I got a little older, I built a helium-neon laser, complete with eyebrow-singeing circuitry and an HeNe tube that was far too costly to be as fragile as it was. My dad was really good-natured about replacing it when it died. Once.

My fascination with light and optics has lasted unabated to this day, to the point of a mild neurosis. I find myself buying flashlights when we don't need them (but who doesn't need more flashlights?), and picking up cheap laser pointers just because I can. It's like the silicon revolution, particularly where emitting light is concerned, has enabled and magnified this strange compulsion of mine, and it isn't always entirely healthy. At least it is cheap: the laser I built as a kid cost a couple hundred dollars. Now you can pick one up for a couple of bucks.

So, when I saw the Laser Projection Microscope project featured on Make, I just had to build one, too. The featured microscope is beautifully constructed, but I don't have a lot of time, I don't have a machine shop, and I don't have much patience. I clicked over to Amazon, spent about $15 for a bright green laser pointer, and whipped together a stand for it in about 20 minutes after it had arrived. As it happens, building stuff like this is not at all difficult.

The most difficult part of this particular project is setting it up to allow precise alignment of the drop of water from the syringe with the output of the laser. The water drop acts simultaneously as specimen and lens, so it has to be in just the right spot.

I elected to build a fixture that would hold the laser in a fixed position, and set things up so that the syringe could be easily moved, but also be held in one place if I wasn't fiddling with it.

To hold the laser in position, I cut a couple of pieces of PVC pipe and made them into clips, then screwed them into a piece of scrap wood for the base. This setup also allows me to hold the button down by simply twisting the laser pointer in its clips. For the syringe stand, I attached a mending plate to the wood and bent it. It already had holes in it, so I just positioned one of the large holes in front of the laser pointer.

I then had to figure out how to position the syringe. The easiest thing I came up with was to tape a couple of magnets to it. I added a few layers of tape to increase the distance from the magnets to the plate, thus weakening the force enough to make it easy to slide the syringe around without disturbing the water droplet.

After finding some standing water in our back yard, we switched off the lights and had a show. The kids thought it was great, but had to be constantly reminded not to try to look at the source of the laser. This one can damage your eyes.

I don't know exactly what we were looking at, so it is hard to say exactly how small the critters are that we were seeing, but we definitely saw living things. They were tiny, so they showed up as circles surrounded by concentric aberrations, but they moved in all kinds of directions and at varying speeds, independent of the more uniform and obvious motion of the surface of the liquid. It held my attention for quite a while, watching all the little things zip around and interact with each other. I suspect that the critters we can see will get more complex and active as the weather starts to warm up, too. Warm stagnant water is typically much more interesting than cold stagnant water.

The theoretical limit of resolution of this microscope is really small: about 1.1 μm (green lasers emit light at about 532 nm, and the Nyquist limit is twice that). To put that in perspective, a single e-coli bacterium is about 2 μm long, and the head of a human sperm cell is about 5 μm long. Healthy red blood cells are anywhere from 6 to 8 μm in diameter. So, theoretically, you should be able to see some pretty cool stuff with this extremely cheap setup. It makes me want to build a simple centrifuge so that I can separate blood. It shouldn't be too hard - I just need to make a harness to attach to my drill.

I feel another science project coming on.

The Sense in Stench

2011-03-09T09:24:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, we purchased a used dining room set. The table needed some polyurethane, so it lived in the garage with the chairs for a while. When we finally brought everything into the house, the warmth of familial bliss activated a previously unnoticed problem: the wood and the upholstery smelled of cigarette smoke. After a few hours, we banished the chairs to the garage until they could be reupholstered.

Switching out the seat fabric helped a lot, but the smell was still embedded in the wood finish, so further measures were needed to eliminate it. Google instantly directed us into the internet information cesspool, which was about as useful as you might expect: white vinegar is still everyone's favorite cleaning placebo, and you just can't mention that without tossing baking soda out there, too.

But, there were enough suggestions to get us started, and not being chemists, we tried them all on different chairs. Though far from perfect, we have found that Murphy Oil Soap had the best effect. After sitting overnight, the chair we used it on smelled faintly of soap and noticeably less smelly than before, while the chairs that got various combinations of vinegar, baking soda, or citrus cleaner were still as stinky as ever.

Enter Catherine. She came down to breakfast this morning, and I told her that we might have found something that worked. She sniffed a couple of chairs, and declared me incorrect: the one I liked smelled bad to her, and the worst offender seemed fine. I was skeptical, so I gave them another sniff. Sure enough, the chair Catherine declared "clean" was overpowering and deadly, and the chair she declared "smelly" gave off much less odor.

I asked her why she thought I was wrong after we had contrary evidence, and she said, "I know that this one smells fine: Mommy cleaned it yesterday!" This is called "confirmation bias" and is a common and often subtle pitfall. Since she really loves science, I sat her down on one of the less offensive chairs and we had a little chat about biases and observations. She is only 7, but she is very bright, and we had a nice talk. I explained that if she wanted to do science properly, she needed to learn to allow her observations to change her beliefs. She believed that "cleaned by mother" equals "successfully handled", and had not allowed herself to observe that the chair was still capable of killing small kittens from several feet away. To really understand the world, we have to allow it to tell us that we are wrong.

After our chat, she went back to smell the chairs again, and said of the best one, "Hey, this one smells like soap!" I laughed, and she ran off. She came back a few minutes later, very serious, saying, "Dad, you've also changed my mind about Mars."

She explained, after far more probing than should have been necessary, that she learned that Mars once had liquid water on its surface, but not anymore. She then said something like this: "I used to think that there was definitely water on Mars, but now I think that we aren't really sure. There might not have been." When asking her why, she said that people believed that there had been liquid water there, but they hadn't actually seen it. I was thrilled. The ability to differentiate between beliefs and observation is not common, but it is one of the keys to really understanding how things work.

Of course, the Mars water theory is backed up by some pretty good evidence, so it was easy for us to temper this new skepticism by talking about how evidence can increase our confidence in a theory without proving it completely true. For example, the Mars rovers that she has learned about have seen terrain and soil patterns that are consistent with flowing water. They have also apparently found ice on the surface.

I had a chance to explain that when we have a theory, we ask questions about what we expect that theory to mean, and then we test it. At that point, we usually have one of several outcomes: we learn nothing (bad experiment design), we find that our theory was at least somewhat wrong (because the observation contradicts all or part of it), or we get results consistent with the theory, which increases our confidence in it. What we almost never manage to do is prove it unambiguously true.

Newton, for example, came up with a theory of gravitation and celestial motion that is very good, completely (and correctly) revolutionizing our understanding at the time. But was it true? It does an amazing job of explaining planetary motion, but there were little nagging inaccuracies that scientists had trouble accounting for. Einstein later discovered General Relativity, which improved on Newton's theories and correctly predicted previously unobserved phenomena. So, was Newton wrong? No, he was right to think that his theory was consistent with observation, and he would be right to allow his confidence in that theory to be high. What would have been wrong would be to believe that his theory was absolutely true.

There always has to be room for more evidence to change our minds. That kind of academic honesty is the very heart and soul of scientific inquiry, and I got to teach that to my daughter today. I want her to learn that kind of critical thinking because it is a foundational skill in many aspects of life, including academic pursuits, relationships with others, and even spiritual growth. To me, the spontaneous lesson on the difference between beliefs and evidence was worth a whole house full of stinky chairs.

But we're still going to use Murphy to fix them.

Hot Dogs For Breakfast

2010-09-01T11:31:00.002-04:00

Many things in life are more fun with kids. Take Christmas, for example. It's a great holiday, with some very serious and important implications for us, and we enjoy celebrating it with friends and family. But throw some kids into the mix and it immediately makes the leap from "meaningful" to "magical". The excitement that children bring to that holiday is palpable and contagious. I frankly don't see the point of opening presents at Christmas anymore unless there is at least one small person there who appreciates the finer art of gleefully tearing off wrapping paper.

For me, camping is a lot like Christmas in this way. Sure, it can be nice to go hiking, smell some fresh air, and get out into a bit of nature. Depending on how you do it, you might even get out where there are fewer than 100 other people with the same idea. It's nice. Throw some kids into the mix, however, and it suddenly makes the leap from "enjoyable" to "enormously exciting". There are sticks to gather, marshmallows to roast, hot dogs to eat ("For breakfast?! Daddy, I love you."), rocks to skip, trails to find, and fires to play with. This is fun!

So, in the interest of getting in one last vacation before school started this week, I somewhat grudgingly took the girls camping at Deep Creek Lake State Park in Maryland. My expectations were not high, and the trip down did little to encourage me. We got off to a slightly later start than we wanted to, and just as I was getting onto the parkway I realized that I had left something really important at home. So, we spent 15 minutes getting to the next exit in rush-hour parkway traffic, backtracked to pick up our map, and took as many back roads as possible to avoid parkway traffic, only to get stuck in it again. And again. And again. It turned out that the "fast" route was under construction. Normally this is not a big deal because plenty of lanes are open, but on this particular day everyone slowed down to look. This could possibly be attributed to people being interested in the work being done, but more likely occurred because drivers were so surprised at the fact that there was actual construction happening in a "construction zone" that they forgot to push on the gas.

Usually, I am thrilled to see my children learn useful skills, but after several utterances of "Daddy, you said an hour, but that was an hour ago," I began to feel that the ability to tell time was a liability.

We arrived a good two hours late. Our wonderful friends had already built a campfire, so we pulled in, grabbed our food, and started roasting stuff. At that moment, all was forgotten. The campground and surrounding woods and lake are very pretty, and there were no loud or obnoxious campers; everyone appeared to appreciate the idea that sleep is a good thing to do when it gets dark. Add to that the fact that the weather was perfect and we were sharing a campfire with some very good friends, and you have a recipe for a great time. Throw some kids into the mix, and you have endless entertainment.

The children roamed through the woods picking up sticks to throw on the fire. They roasted marshmallows in their own special, extremely blackened, way. They cooked hot dogs, ate s'mores, and refused to hike down to the restrooms with me until they were dancing with pain. They enjoyed spitting out their toothpaste onto the dirt, sleeping in a tent with the fly off so the stars were visible overhead, and playing with flashlights long into the night. It was a fantastic time.

The next day, we went hiking out to the lake. On the way, they did anything but stay on the trail. There was too much to see and do. They climbed trees, jumped over ditches and rocks, did things by the lake shore that caused our fatherly hearts to stop from time to time, and were generally a very happy, unruly bunch. I taught my oldest how to skip rocks, and they went hunting around the lake shore for fun and interesting critters.

They were very, very tired when we did our last bit of marshmallow roasting before heading home, but they did not want to leave. Truthfully, I didn't, either. Suddenly, the home renovation that I was a bit grumpy about not having time to do that day didn't seem so compelling.

It still doesn't.

Oops, Let Me Fix That

2010-03-02T08:25:00.005-05:00

As I waited to get an allergy shot the other day (something that has had a dramatic impact on my quality of life), I happened to see President Obama and John McCain on C-SPAN exchanging barbs about the proposed health care plan(s). At one point in the conversation, President Obama cut off John McCain by saying, "We're not campaigning. The election is over," to which Mr. McCain replied, "I'm reminded of that every day!"

While disappointingly childish, it occurred to me that this exchange was symptomatic of a larger problem in politics, a pattern that is as insidious as it is pervasive: our leaders ultimately view the roles they occupy as belonging to them. This exchange was not about plans or the numerous people affected by them; it was about two animals baring their fangs to protect their turf. It was, in short, about the image and pride of the fighters in the arena.

An interesting symptom of this is found in the distinct lack of proactive apology in politics; you might live a well-connected lifetime without ever once hearing a powerful politician say, "I was wrong, and I will change." Sure, you will hear back-pedaling after the publication of an error, you will see tears of remorse about extramarital affairs (also known as "Hiking the Appallachian Trail"), and you may hear tales of mis-speaking, but have you ever seen true humility there? Even if we lay aside personal behavior and focus solely on public policy, have you ever heard a politician come out and say, "That plan of mine was a real bomb, and it is time to cut our losses and make it better"? At best you will hear "That plan of his was a real bomb, and I will do it better," which is not even close to the same thing.

I think there is a real opportunity here for someone to reach into politics and make a difference. I am just guessing, because I don't have solid research to back it up, but I believe that someone could campaign and win on a platform based on

having lots of ideas,
acknowledging that not all of them will be good ones, and
admitting error quickly and fixing it proactively.

I call it the "Oops, Let Me Fix That" platform, and I would love to see someone run on it.

Why is this a good idea? Because it is the right kind of behavior for someone who is ostensibly in charge of some portion of the population's life, be it taxes or health care or prison sentences; we are all imperfect people, and imperfect people with authority are bound to mess up life for those that they lead; sometimes frequently. In those cases, there is only one thing to do: step up, own up, and put up.

Once upon a time as an undergraduate, I took a course on child development. I learned many things in this incredibly helpful class, but one of them sticks out in this context: heavily paraphrased, the professor said, "As a parent, you are going to screw up at least two-thirds of the time. Your kids already know when this has happened, so the best thing you can do is apologize, explain to them that messing up is an inevitable part of everyone's life, repair what you can, and try to do better next time."

This may seem like a really bad idea on the surface: do we really let our kids know that we screwed up? Will that not erode our authority in their eyes? After all, we have to teach them obedience, right? Well, yes, but we also have to teach them what it means to be a functional adult, and that (ideally) means being honest, humble, and courageously facing life's difficulties, especially those caused by our own errors.

Covering up is easy. Change is hard. Only one actually works.

Children are extremely good at sensing sincerity in their parents. Humble and sincere apology in the face of error is a powerful way of building trust, and I believe that this holds true for politics, as well. Hence, my optimism that a sincere "Oops, Let Me Fix That" campaign could win. How refreshing it would be to hear a candidate say, "As your leader, I will have lots of ideas, and I will screw up. A lot. But I will listen to smart, honest people so that I can learn. I will tell you when I find that I am wrong, and I will work hard to fix it." I would vote for that guy.

But would he survive in the political arena? That depends on how far gone our incumbents really are. There are, after all, two basic ways to respond to a person who has the power of constant introspection, determination to change, and the strength to admit and correct errors: you can hate him, or you can try to emulate him. I suspect that both attitudes would be in evidence in politics, but that alone gives me hope: if even a few take notice in a positive way, that can be enough to begin to affect real change.

Perhaps this is all a bunch of dreaming. It is quite possible that I am overly optimistic, dead wrong, or both. I hope that neither is true. I would love to be right, to see a truly honest and humble person succeed in getting to and holding a high office in this country. I would love to see us as a people make it clear that we really do want human beings in charge of us, that we want to be leveled with, and that we want to see honest and well-placed back-pedaling once in a while.

I may hope for too much. But I don't intend to fix that.

Attack of the Grass-Eating Cat Terrorist

2009-12-02T11:43:00.020-05:00

We love our cat. She was given to us by my wife's family, who rescued her from certain death in the freezing rain outside their house. She was only a tiny kitten then. Now she's a very sweet-tempered full-grown kitten. We took her in because we had a mouse problem, and we wanted to put her to work. We're allergic to cats, but mousers do their best work outdoors anyway, so she lives on a high perch in the garage, up by the heating ducts. She loves it up there.

We had rodent-free bliss for about 6 months. She caught stuff and ate it in the garage, sometimes leaving partial presents for us as a token of her feline appreciation, and we kept her fed and watered and generally pampered. After I epoxied the garage floor so that it was easier to wipe up the gore, things got even better.

Then one day, everything changed.

I went into the garage that morning and discovered that her food and water bowls had fallen to the ground, a stack of buckets had been knocked over, her normally inaccessible bag of cat food was on the floor and empty, and a bag of grass seed had been slashed open, partially eaten, and generally scattered around. Was she sick? Was she trying to help fill in some of the dead spots on my lawn? What was going on?

She had already dramatically increased her food intake a couple of weeks earlier, so I thought perhaps she was getting desperate for food; she couldn't be pregnant, so maybe it was worms, or maybe she was trying to feed all nine of her lives at once, every day. But then I saw her wake up and come out from under one of our cars as I went to work that morning, and realized that she had been sleeping on the cold, hard ground outside instead of curled up in her warm bed inside. That is definitely not normal cat behavior, no matter how many bugs are breaking bread inside her.

I told my wife all this, and she almost immediately said, "I bet it was a raccoon." That had never occurred to me, because I'm not accustomed to living in neat forested places with ninja critters running around, but it turned out to be right on the money. We not only had a raccoon coming in at night, we also had a large neighborhood cat coming around for a midday snack in our garage.

Of the two, the raccoon was both the bigger animal (I stayed up late one night and saw it lumbering around our yard) and the bigger problem. Raccoons are clever, determined, strong, and mean, and I didn't want Vanilla facing one down on a nightly basis. She was clearly no longer sleeping in the garage, a serious problem with the imminent advent of Winter. Locking her in at night was not our favorite solution, either, because she did her best hunting then. Also, we like to travel; having her continue her normal routine when we are away is much more palatable than an extended lock-down, no matter how often the cat-sitter comes by to cover the necessities.

So, I thought long and hard about this, exploring a number of unworkable solutions, most of which involved bulky and easy-to-lose collars, facial recognition, or teaching the cat to use doorknobs and electronic keypads. I felt defeated, and started dialing the nice people at Critter Control.

Then it occurred to me that we could just make the opening smaller. She's a small, wiry cat, and her unwelcome visitors are both rather large. I fired up the air compressor and quickly slapped together a box that sat on the inside of the door, but still allowed her flap to work inside of it. This was easy, and it worked great...for about a week.

I was dismayed to find after a few days that not only had the raccoon arrived, eaten the entire bag of cat food again, and gone, it had also broken the cat door completely off as if to dare me to try keeping it out again. There were the remains of the door, sitting forlorn, lonely, and broken on the driveway when I went to work that morning. I promptly ordered a new cat door to replace the existing one and vowed to figure out what to do next.

We were now at war.

While my PetPorte Smart Flap was en route from the UK (they don't sell anything that cool in the United States, presumably because we don't use words like "en route" enough here), I installed the new replacement flap and made the opening of the box even smaller by screwing a piece of wood across the top half of it, effectively reducing the vertical opening. I figured that the raccoon probably turned itself sideways to get its shoulders through the opening, and hoped that this solution would keep it at bay until the longer-term high-tech solution arrived.

It turned out that reducing the vertical space did the trick. It kept the raccoon out. But, it did not keep the raccoon from breaking my brand new cat flap. Again. Into little pieces. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, because I had a new high-tech implanted-chip-reading flap on its way. The problem is that the old flap was at least as strong as the new door, physically. It reminded me of the scene in "Sneakers" when Robert Redford's character, confronted with an electronic lock, simply kicks in the door. Clearly, the high-tech solution was not going to do it for us.

I'm handy with tools, and can browse the aisles of Home Depot with the best of them, so I went to my local hardware store and bought some strong polycarbonate Lexan, some steel hinges, and a rivet tool. I then built a completely new cat door, one that I can't break even when I'm standing on it or hitting it with a sledgehammer. It cost me about $20 in materials and 1 hour of time to do it.

The PetPorte is en route back to its mother country, the raccoon is permanently banished from the garage, and Vanilla is happy. She sleeps in her own bed, I feed her once a day, if that, and she is using her litter box again, at least when she isn't using the neighbor's sandbox.

If only I could recover my shipping costs from the UK, things would be perfect.

Sharing Fries

2009-06-25T14:57:00.003-04:00

This is a real exchange with my daughter yesterday as she ate her Wendy's meal.

"If you have two boxes of fries, and three people need to eat from them, how do you divide them up?"

"I would split them all in half and everyone gets half."

"How many people will that feed?"

"Well, you get one, [my sister] gets one, I get one, and ... we can save one for Mommy!"

So, it wasn't a great math moment, but she did realize that there was a leftover half sitting around. And it made me laugh.

Nescio Ergo Perceptum

2009-06-23T09:41:00.004-04:00

Latin was never my strong suit. In fact, I never studied it. I remember many high-school lunchtimes when some of my more academically-inclined friends would complain about how hard Latin was, while I smugly coasted through my farcical German classes. In high school, coasting was its own reward; learning was secondary because I was completely and overwhelmingly engaged in other activities, like busywork, music, and electronics.

Fast forward 25 years or so, and learning is a highly prized luxury. Between work, home renovation, church duties, and trying (often failing) to be of help with homeschooling and the daily struggles of bath and bedtime, my learning budget is pretty well tapped. I have a large electronics book under my bedside table that has been sitting there, unopened and unloved, for months. I have a stack of research papers on my desk at work that I plan to read as soon as I can get to them, someday. I have a list of interesting questions that beg to be answered with a little bit of programming and experimentation, and that list grows longer every month.

In many ways, I envy my children. They have great opportunities to learn and grow every day, to pick up new ideas and skills, and to patiently spend time discovering and rediscovering the world around them. I sometimes daydream about sitting down with a good challenge and just learning about it, taking as long as it takes to figure it out. But life does not allow that, and a part of me knows that what I wish for is really quite selfish. I had my time, I used it relatively well, and now it is time to give to others.

It is therefore quite exciting to me to discover that I can have it both ways. During the Summer break (our children get one, too), my wife and I have been trying to figure out how best to approach mathematics with our daughter. This has been a perplexing question, not least of which because it felt strange to be worried about teaching something that I know and love.

But I was.

I could not put my finger on it, but all of the math curricula that I had seen bothered me in a deep and nagging way. They seemed innocent enough, focusing on the traditional ladder approach, starting with small concepts and building on them over time. I could not find anything obviously wrong with any of it, because it was all so familiar.

Imagine my delight when a friend, quite out of the blue, sent me a link to Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament". This weighty 25-page gold nugget managed to articulate precisely what has been bothering me for so long, and gave me some wonderful new ideas about how to approach mathematics education in the home. It is an easy read, and well worth the effort for any parent with children learning math, whether they are doing it at home or in a public school setting. It is a real treasure.

I cannot begin to do justice to Lockhart's well-written masterpiece, so I will not attempt to summarize it. There are, however, some principles from the document that are powerful and transformative, even in their poorly summarized form:

Mathematics is old, and has a rich and vibrant history that puts it into context,
It is an adventure of discovery, an art form, and a creative process, and
Teaching it is really a task of learning about it and subsequently inspiring the pupil.

The obvious question of "where do we go from here" was readily answered by filling our online shopping cart with books about math history. People like Archimedes, Hippocrates, Plato, Euclid, Descartes, Newton, Liebniz, Euler, Tesla, Turing, and many others like them all have fascinating histories that put their discoveries into the context of the problems they were trying to solve. The mathematics that we know and enjoy today does not exist in a vacuum, and learning about the puzzles of the past not only increases the enjoyment of the learning experience, it also provides good material for teaching. In short, it is time for us as parents to get the math education that we never had ourselves. It is time for us to learn.

And that's exciting.

A Pound of Cure

2009-06-12T10:58:00.017-04:00

We have one house, but it often feels like two: the beautiful original 1940s house, and the abstract cubist 1970s house bolted onto the back of it.

The 1940s house is red brick with hardwood floors, has a living room with a fireplace, cute bedrooms with sloped ceiling corners, and a bathroom with awful but strangely appropriate yellow and black tiles all over the walls. The 1970s house is sided with stained and blackened cedar shakes, has spacious rooms, bay-style windows, oddly sharp corners, and a spiral staircase. The 1940s house is rock solid and well-built, and the 1970s house is falling apart.

The addition was built by someone who was obviously in a hurry. The foundation has a different footprint from the walls, causing water issues. The windows were installed poorly, causing more water issues. The roof has the wrong kind of shingles and flashing for its slope, causing still more water issues. Finally, when we moved in, part of the house had a bunch of dirt held up against it with a retaining wall, causing the biggest water issues of all.

Opening this can of worms was my task last weekend, and I wasn't looking forward to it. I knew, judging by the damage near the surface of the dirt, that it was not going to be pretty below.

What I found was not the kind of thing you like to see in the side of a house: a large hole where the siding, sheeting, and studs had once been. Several years of accumulated rodent storage were stuck in what was left of the otherwise indestructible fiberglass insulation, termite damage was evident everywhere, and four of the corner support studs did not quite reach all the way to the foundation anymore. The silver lining in all of it is that because this is where the addition meets the old house, these studs aren't terribly critical for overall structural integrity. The other silver lining is that the former owners regularly treated the place for termites, so the free lunch didn't last more than a couple of feet.

I was able to fix it myself, using various manly power tools, some accumulated knowhow, a little luck, and a lot less money that it would have cost to have someone else do it.

Everything is now clean, structurally sound, and enclosed. Furthermore, my girls got the unusual chance to shove their hands through the wall and get a picture taken from the outside.

Our cat got in on the action, too, and used this temporary opening to finally satisfy her curiosity about what the inside of the house looks like and whether she would get in trouble for finding out. She did.

One wonders why dirt was piled up against wood siding in the first place. It was clearly not an accident, as it was held there by the retaining wall. My first clue was the big pipe I uncovered while digging the dirt away. Several years ago, according to the disclosure document and the stains on the basement walls, there was some trouble with a downspout. The former owners paid someone to reroute the downspout to the backyard, and this was the result: a botched job covered with dirt.

Speaking of botched jobs, we are also in the process of replacing all of the windows in this same addition, because the original installation was done wrong. They were improperly flashed, and water has been pooling in the bottom of the wood frames for years, causing them to literally rot right out of the house.

Every story has a moral, and this one starts with "An ounce of prevention...." That old adage applies to various aspects of our house, to irresponsible procreation, to the current economic crisis, and a number of other serious and not-so-serious things. In my case, it also applies to acquiring power tools, and I'll gladly focus on that interpretation for now.

I think I need a nail gun.

The Inner Smartypants

2009-04-01T11:21:00.005-04:00

This morning I woke up ready to go to work, have lunch, and get my corneas burned with a chemical laser. My afternoon LASIK appointment was something that I had spent weeks working up to; I had been using various kinds of eye drops, seeing various doctors, and was ready to throw away my various pairs of glasses. It was very exciting.

But something wasn't right.

Sure, I felt nervous. Many people do before such a procedure. After all, these are my eyes, and they don't grow back. Then again, neither does the tissue in my nose, but I had no problem at all last year with getting a highly invasive sinus procedure done where the complications can include a loss of pituitary function, no sense of smell, brain damage, and death. Technically, that was an elective procedure, too (but I sure sleep better now!).

Contrast that with the feelings I had as today's surgery appointment approached, feelings that went far beyond normal pre-operative jitters. I had a sinking pit in my stomach, spent a very sleepless night with nightmares about the procedure, and was absolutely and completely terrified as the hours ticked by and the time to drive to the appointment approached. I don't scare easily, and that gave me pause.

I believe in divine inspiration, so I'm in the habit of paying attention to feelings like this. But, even if you believe that something much more mundane is at work, this kind of violent emotional response almost certainly warrants some kind of reflection; after all, our subconscious mind is extremely good at pattern recognition, and it often manifests its findings through emotion. Psychologists have known this since at least Freud's time.

So I stopped, stepped back, took a deep breath, and did some reflecting. The result was a disturbing revelation: I had been ignoring some great big wavy red flags throughout this process. One of the biggest was that every single scientific inquiry put to my doctors was met not with answers, but reassurance. That doesn't cut it for me. So, still believing I would be going through with the procedure, I dusted off some skills I acquired in graduate school and started reading some research publications. I just wanted some more information.

What I found was that the little worries that kept me up last night were not small, low-probability issues to be brushed off or glossed over, but real causes for concern that warranted deep consideration. I won't bore anyone with exactly what it was that I discovered, nor with the details of the many ways in which my eyes are not in the middle of every pertinent statistical distribution, but I will say that I am sufficiently different from the ideal candidate that this procedure is a very, very bad idea for me. I promptly canceled the surgery and converted my post-op appointment into a fitting for new glasses.

Regardless of what other influences may have been at work here, our brains are pretty amazing. All of the issues that research uncovered were things that I already knew at some level, but hadn't really managed to bring to the fore. What I did know was that my level of discomfort was increasing as things progressed, and that was enough to prompt a deeper inquiry. Thank goodness for that.

Only after I finally decided to call and cancel the appointment did I realize something else that should have been obvious the whole time: there's no hurry. It is always possible to make a future appointment and go through with this later should I choose to do so. Somehow the fact that I had decided to do it in the first place kept me from focusing on the very logical and sound conclusion that I might as well wait and collect more data first. Thankfully, my subconscious emotional response did what my conscious mind would not.

Whatever else you may believe, that's pretty amazing.

Laps of Attention

2009-03-06T10:16:00.013-05:00

Exercise and proper diet are like motherhood and apple pie: not only are they hard to disagree with (although traditional motherhood is under attack lately), motherhood really is a lot like exercise, and apple pie is the very definition of a proper diet.

It is therefore hard to argue with a study that shows how exercise does magical things for learning capacity and attention; it's practically common knowledge by now. It is also consistent with my observations as I watch my daughter in her gymnastics class, or attempt to get her to stay on task by interspersing stages of it with jumping jacks; moving around clearly helps her to stay focused. I'm the same way: I would never have made it through my Ph.D. program without my daily jog. Some of my best ideas come during periods of exercise.

As a standalone principle, this one seems golden: get exercise and reap the physical and mental benefits. So, it was initially with some enthusiasm that I listened to a program on NPR called "Deskercise: Staying Jazzed and Focused at School" (I recommend the audio version). The idea is simple: when class attention slumps, get the kids out of their chairs and moving around.

After hearing the full story, my enthusiasm turned to concern. The trouble is this: while the technique provides a useful jolt for children who are struggling to stay awake and attentive, it represents a jarring interruption for the children who are otherwise doing fine. This is given a passing nod in the article, where a teacher admits that "...three or four of my gentlemen would rather have me just stand at that board and show them what I'm talking about."

The young gentlemen that prefer to just sit and learn are probably not having trouble remembering what a "refrain" is when someone tells them. But, after hearing and understanding the definition the first time, they still have to endure getting up and walking laps around the classroom while chanting "I believe I can fly."

All they need now is pixie dust.

A good idea for an individual can become a bad idea when institutionalized. Sure, it helps the majority of the class in this particular school to behave better and to retain information better. It probably gives many of the children more exercise than they would otherwise get, too. Unfortunately, it simultaneously keeps the more focused children from experiencing an important state of learning and creativity called "flow".

When working on and trying to gain a deep understanding of a difficult problem, I need a chunk of uninterrupted time, where I can get into the "zone". This is a state of concentration that leaves the world completely behind, where the only thing on my mind is the task at hand. Fortunately for my marriage, I don't get into this state very often at home anymore, but it is critical that I get into it routinely at work in order to succeed at my job. It's relatively easy as an adult because I was fortunate enough to get a lot of practice doing it when I was young.

That's the part about this institutionalized "deskercise" that worries me: individual timing is everything for something like this, so while it improves behavior and rote retention for children who are at the time struggling with attention and focus, it simultaneously interrupts students who are getting into their mental flow. By institutionalizing this practice, we again leave the engaged students behind. That can be very jarring for someone who is learning, which is why engineers routinely ignore fire drills.

This would be a very different story if it were tailored to the individual, but the classroom setting precludes that. Chalk up another victory for homeschool, where we can have one child get up and run around while leaving the other engrossed in her book. It is, as usual, all about choice: at home we can apply solutions individually when problems arise; at school the solution is institutionally applied to everyone whether there is a problem or not, and then it becomes a problem.

We should institutionalize apple pie, though. I could get behind that.

Floor Removal Fail

2009-03-02T11:35:00.008-05:00

Pittsburgh, to a good approximation, has three universally accepted sports: drinking, Steelers football, and home renovation. We aren't really a bandwagon family, so it will come as no surprise that we don't see the appeal in the first two activities. We seem to be bucking trends in other ways, as well: we homeschool, we rented when others were buying, bought when everyone was selling, and tend to favor beans over burgers. To each his own.

When it comes to home renovation, however, we jumped right on the wagon and started hollering along with everyone else: we bought a house, a beautiful house with the potential to be much more beautiful with a little money, a little love and a lot of labor, and we're providing all three in greater quantities than I had originally anticipated.

Renovation is fun, though; every project is unique, every task instructive, and it's always nice to see the finished product. The work can be dull or challenging, simple or complex, therapeutic or anger-inducing, but I always end up with more tools when it's over, and that's a good thing.

We're currently working on the kitchen, where the original owners thought that beautiful hardwood cabinets would go well with ugly asbestos-backed linoleum from the 70s. It had to go. So, we attempted to remove it.

We failed.

Because the linoleum has asbestos in it, I figured I would just remove the subfloor along with it, avoiding all of the tedious scraping that makes nasty particles become airborn. What I discovered was another complete installation of linoleum underneath. The sad part is that the old linoleum, hideous as it is, actually matches the house better, proving that everyone was smoking something during the 70s. In the 40s, things matched.

The good news is that we succeeded in removing one of the kitchen floors, and that it brought us down to the floor that is under the cabinets. As much as I like to do things right, taking out all of the kitchen cabinets is not a project on my current list, so we're going to leave that floor in place and just lay some lick-n-stick vinyl over the top of it. That should do us for another 5 years, during which time we'll be tearing down siding, renovating bathrooms, repainting, and replacing HVAC systems.

At least the Steelers won.

Hit and Run

2009-01-23T09:14:00.007-05:00

Life is full of ironies, especially when you live next to two bars. Sometimes the irony is small, like the times when the girls are (finally) sleeping soundly, but a late Steelers victory gets people outside shouting and banging pots. On quiet nights, of course, the girls are scared and need us up with them.

Sometimes, however, the irony is a little less harmless and a lot more annoying. Take, for example, the fact that we have been living in the same place for more than two years without a single incident to a parked car, but on the week before we start moving to our new house, my front fender gets smashed by a hit-and-run.

Although the road was slick and there was something going on at the local bars every other day that week, on the day that the car was hit, there was nothing going on at the bars, the sun was shining, and the roads were clear and dry, and it happened when nobody else was around.

Irony.

It's also ironic that, had the offending party left us so much as a note, we would not be paying for this at all, but because they were dishonest, we are paying our somewhat substantial deductible to get it repaired. It's just one of the many examples in life where the victim pays for the error (like with the bailout, or constant lowering of interest rates: responsible people, the ones who are saving instead of going into ever-increasing debt, are the ones that get hurt).

I suppose it's unavoidable, and I'm not really feeling bitter about it, but it does give me pause. After all, even the police are going to send me a bill, just for filling out a report. There won't be any corresponding attempt to find the guilty party, because the city is just too large for that to bear any fruit.

There is a silver lining, though. This gave me an opportunity to teach a little bit of science to Catherine. The astute observer will notice that the car above is a Saturn. When looking at Saturns, the first thing that the salesman will do for the prospective buyer is go up to a car and kick the door really hard. It gives a nice, satisfying "bump" sound, and refuses to scratch or change shape; it just pops in and out and sits there grinning at you afterward. It's pretty cool, and I've benefited from this highly resilient paneling in the past.

But, when it's 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and has been for several days, the panels are quite a bit more fragile, and they shatter instead of bumping in and out. They don't grin afterward, either. It's all about states of matter, and it was fun to talk about that with Catherine.

This reflection on science also brought out yet another irony: the person who hit the car clearly just grazed it. Had it not been a Saturn, the car might have been scratched and very slightly dented, and I wouldn't worry about it at all, since this is my commuter vehicle and looks are not at all important. Since the fender shattered, though, it really needs to be replaced. Resiliency under normal conditions comes with an unexpected cost under extreme conditions.

Next time, we'll move sooner.

Occam's Baseball Bat

2009-01-05T09:01:00.000-05:00

We are in the process of purchasing a house. We've never done this before, being rather fiscally conservative folks, so this has been an interesting learning experience.

The most obvious lesson is this: taxes are not the only way to spend half your income. But, there have been other eye-openers, as well. For example, I had no idea that home inspectors are like wild animal trackers and archeologists all rolled into one: they can see the telltale signs of a swept-up basement flood, or make a compelling story out of a poorly-wired junction box. Using only what they can see here and now, they infer surprisingly detailed things about the past.

Of course, sometimes they get it wrong, but then again, so do archeologists. At least the latter make for entertaining movies; I don't think anyone would pay to see "Illinois James and the Gas Pipes of Doom". I, unfortunately, will be paying to see something very much like that in real life.

As part of the purchase process, the municipality requires that the sellers do a "dye test" on the home's downspouts. The city's sewers, apparently, are too good for clean rainwater, requiring more meaty daily fare. Therefore, if a home's downspouts are connected to sanitary, they have to be rerouted. This involves cutting them, sticking a hose onto the end of them, and dumping them into the neighbor's sewer lines.

Our home-to-be recently had one of these tests performed, and let me tell you, I was sweating. The real fix for a bad downspout in our case would involve tearing up a driveway, and while I would love to do that at some point, right before moving in is not the time I had in mind.

The plumber hired to do the test was great. He was intelligent, interesting, and capable. I always play dumb with these guys to see how they react, asking a lot of questions to which I already know the answers. He not only said exactly what I would have said, he was also very respectful and engaging.

Then the city sewer guy came.

The plumber doing the test was sure he had the wrong manhole cover, and rather than waste a lot of time shooting in the dark, he figured he'd just call the city and ask where to find the right one. After hanging up, he said they were sending a guy over. I imagined that someone would pull up with some blueprints, show us where the lines went, and be on his way. The plumber gave me a different prediction: the city guy would show up, see the manhole cover right in front of the house, and say unflattering things about our intelligence.

This was prophetic. After explaining to the city guy that water does not flow uphill, the plumber went with him for a little drive down the road and watched him break a manhole cover while trying to get it off.

I went inside to take some pictures and measurements. When I came out, there was the city sewer guy, standing on the lawn with a couple of fluorescent flags in his hands. He triumphantly declared that "I found where your downspouts go. They drain into the backyard, so you're fine."

Seeing the flags in his hand, I assumed that the underground drain pipes had been somehow marked and we had somehow missed them earlier. No. That would have been the Occam's Razor assumption, the simplest explanation that had the highest probability of being true. Instead, he was using the flags as dowsing rods.

For this, we pay taxes.

Apparently, if you hold these things in front of you and walk toward a water line, they'll align with the water in the pipes. Never mind that there was no rain, no toilets flushing in the deserted house, and no water flowing anywhere in the yard. Never mind that the closest water to the rods was in his body, not 10 feet beneath the surface in a broken-up clay-iron pipe. Never mind that it had recently rained and the ground itself was saturated with water. Never mind anything that actually makes sense; "The metal detects the water," he knowingly affirmed.

It was like standing on the lawn with Fox Mulder, wanting to believe.

I'm an educator at heart, which is one of the main reasons I got a Ph.D. I love to teach. One of the most fun things to teach, especially to bright-eyed freshmen, is the skills of critical thinking. The scientific method, for all of its limitations, actually does what it claims to do: it eliminates bad hypotheses. I desperately wanted to ask several questions, to which I already knew the answers, just to see what this guy would say:

What happens if you don't walk when using the rods?
What happens if you start with the rods pointing behind you instead?
What happens if you start walking where you know there is no water?

I didn't ask any of those questions. I just sat there with my mouth open, listening to him say, "The old guys down at the office taught me this. They used to use hickory sticks, and they'd shake when they got close to water." I then realized that the real winners here were those old guys down at the office. They were either having a good laugh at their willing protege, or thrilled that they had passed on some valuable information.

The plumber joined us, discovered what was going on, and looked aside at me with the same stupid grin that I was sure I had on my face.

This is why higher education is so vital to our society. Attendance does not guarantee that one will have a fine-tuned BS-meter, but it does dramatically increase the odds. Without critical thinking skills, however obtained, people are doomed to fall into selection bias and other logical traps all the time. Without a little exposure to science of some kind, it's easy to assume that Einstein or Maxwell must have overlooked some special water-hickory or water-brass interaction that we just don't understand today, overlooking the obvious fact that the act of walking was exerting the greatest force on the rods, spreading them apart near where the city guy already assumed the lines were buried.

I've picked on the poor sewer guy a lot, here, and that is perhaps unfair. There is, it turns out, another equally plausible explanation for all of this: he was pulling my leg. Would-be homeowners are nervous people, and they like to be reassured that "the experts" have looked into things and all is well. He probably deals with people like that all the time. He might whip out these things every time there's a downspout doubt, just to make people comfortable.

I am not your usual nervous would-be homeowner, however. I have worked as a handyman, and know my way around plumbing, electrical work, finishing basements, putting on additions, and general relativity; I don't feel at all comfortable with dowsing as a reliable way to circumvent a standard dye test. At least the real test, the one the plumber finally did, came back negative. The driveway project can wait for a more convenient year.

Then again, maybe the municipal sewer dowser really believes it. I think I'll go with that one. Given the information I have, Occam's Razor demands it.

A Cosmic Joke

2009-01-02T21:54:00.020-05:00

Now children, lend your hearing
To tales of frightful fearing
Of engineers entrusted with a chore.

At first they thought it silly,
Thought, "It's too simple, really!
"Why, anyone can do it; what a bore!"

This attitude pervasive,
Their updates e'er evasive,
They spent their days in reading Twitter feeds.

Like any long-term student
Caught snoring when imprudent,
They'd claim, "My thoughts have quiet, resting needs."

As one might well consider,
Their task was not a kidder;
It was for real: a doozy, something tough.

Good planning was required,
And elegance desired:
An outcome perfect, nothing crude nor rough.

The deadline was approaching,
Fast looming and encroaching,
While merciless the time kept ticking on.

Our heros (or offenders),
Good wasters, not good spenders,
Woke up one day to find the time was gone.

Still, brilliant and resourceful,
With one another forceful,
They rushed and nearly made the job complete.

All done with one thing missing
A trifle! Worth dismissing!
Important, but achieved with just a cheat.

And thus with hackish straining,
Their larger goals obtaining,
The engineers breathed easy, rested well.

In retrospect, however,
Though brilliant, yes, and clever,
They realized their solution had a smell.

And now it's we who suffer,
With theories ever tougher,
Of how to mix and mingle mathy terms.

Still trying to discover,
Assuming we'll uncover,
A theory that leaves closed a can of worms.

But really it's past mending,
The unifying, blending,
Of gravity and quanta in one place.

The physics should be easy,
And Einstein thought it cheesy,
That Unifying Fields end in disgrace!

Nice Nature, Nice Nurture, Nice Nipper

2008-12-25T22:00:00.004-05:00

Without respect, decency, etiquette, self-control, consideration of others, and other similar traits of goodness, it is hard to have a society where people live and function together effectively. In fact, such traits are so universally held to be good that they are often mentioned as one of the benefits and reasons for existence of the public school system: children who are placed into situations with rigid structure, rules, and loads of other children daily are going to learn the basics of classroom etiquette. In other words, they learn to be good.

Obviously, therefore, they must be placed in that situation or they will not learn those things.

Fortunately for homeschoolers like us, while the premise is not wholly false, the conclusion is a logical fallacy. This particular brand of fallacy is called "affirming the consequent", and is a very common error; children certainly can learn the basics of goodness in the public school classroom, and many do, but it would be silly to say that this fact precludes them from learning those basics in the home. But, I've already expounded enough on that topic in the past.

So long as we're talking about logical fallacies and homeschooling, allow me to engage in some blatant "cherry picking" to make a point based on personal experience with my own children: teaching them basic goodness is no more difficult than teaching them anything else, because they want to learn it.

Yes, I'm talking about those chaotic midgets who throw tantrums when they find hair on a lollipop, who lie through their teeth when they fear retribution, who can be distressingly lazy when it comes to finding a toilet, and who occasionally bite and hit and tear at each other like feral kittens until separated by their bedraggled parents. They want to be good.

In fact, they are naturally good.

This last statement sometimes raises eyebrows. If children are naturally good, why is it so much work to teach them empathy? Why is it so hard to teach them honesty? What about obedience, or at the very least, respect? Why is it a constant struggle for parents everywhere to get their children to do things that are best for themselves and others? Are we not fighting a tendency to be bad in this ongoing parent-child battle, not working with a tendency to be good? Perhaps we are, and perhaps we're not. I like to think that we're helping them find the really good stuff that's already there.

To understand why I think children are naturally good, it is important to make clear the subtle but critical distinctions between having a desire for goodness, having the raw capacity for goodness, and having the skills of goodness. I believe that children have the first two, but need help with the last one. They want goodness, they have it in them, but they do not know the craft.

Goodness is something that children want, because goodness, the kind that knows no cultural boundaries, the kind that is often associated with pictures of stable families and smiling youngsters, is essential for their happiness. When, in children's semi-random explorations, they do something nice for someone else, they feel happy. The experience motivates them; happiness is something that they want. But, as adults, we (hopefully) know a lot about goodness that they don't, yet. We know some of the tricks of the trade. We are well-equipped to extract principles like "helping others makes us happy" from isolated experiences, but children are not. They have the raw capacity for goodness, but someone has to teach them the craft.

That's why it can seem like a losing battle, why it often feels like children want to thwart their parents' or teachers' every effort to convey anything of worth to them; they're exploring every corner of behavior because exploration is all they know, even (perhaps especially) when it includes dark corners where they're likely to get bitten. Without some guidance, they may need to explore the same dark corner multiple times before they realize that there is a deterministic relationship between pain and bad behavior. Likewise, they may need to brush up against the good bits many times before they get it. This reinforcement learning approach is a long process, and when it's all based on random exploration, it's very unlikely to be fruitful. That's where mentoring comes in.

In spite of the uphill nature of the mentoring job, at least it's only mentoring. We can't provide them with raw capacity; they come with that. We don't even have to convince them that they want to be good. We do, however, have to expose them to repeated and sometimes contrived opportunities to be good so that they can feel the resulting happiness, and then we must draw their attention to the connections between cause and effect. We have to do this over and over and over again; they have to practice, just like they would with the acquisition of any skill worth having.

Of course, this requires a lot of patience and consistency on the part of the parents, which is why it often feels like an uphill battle: natural goodness does not make practice easy. Children aren't always going to listen, and when they do, they often keep that fact to themselves. I have frequently been pleasantly surprised, however, at how much my children do hear and absorb without my knowledge, only to see them make good use of it later. I have also been unpleasantly surprised to find that they were listening when I emphatically did not want them to listen, with humorous or disturbing results.

The point is that there is hope for us, the overwhelmed teachers of good behavior: kids love to learn, and we can exploit that by focusing on what we can teach and letting them be responsible for what we cannot: it has worked with math, it has worked with reading and history and biology and art, and it appears to be working well with principles of goodness, too. It's slow and often painful and frustrating, but it works, and it works because the children want it to, at least where it doesn't involve bedtime. You're on your own there.

The critical thing is not to kill the motivation. Sure, we parents make a lot of mistakes, sometimes providing bad examples while trying to teach goodness (note to self: yelling about being kind to one's sister is not an effective parenting technique). This damages our credibility, but so far I've found timely apologies and constant expressions of love to be more than sufficient to make up for those errors. After all, part of being good is saying "sorry" when you're wrong.

Parenting is overwhelming for many reasons, but one of the biggest sources is the fact that we are expected to raise decent human beings. At least it is nice to know that children really want to be on our side in this struggle. They have the desire and they have the capacity, but they do not yet know the craft.

That, at least, we can teach.

No Peace at Release

2008-12-25T07:02:00.006-05:00

There once was a man at the toilet
Whose daughter was anxious to spoil it
She laid on the floor
Peeked under the door
And said, "Daddy, don't miss or you'll soil it!"

We need a bigger house.

Christmas Poem 2008

2008-12-20T10:23:00.002-05:00

Ironically, we forgot to put this into our Christmas cards. So, here it is.

The children keep growing, but don't like their beds;
They'd rather be standing upon their small heads,
Or dancing or running or fighting or playing,
Or making us giggle with what they are saying.

They're constantly busy, and rarely they're quiet,
And when they see anything, they want to buy it.
But as they get older they find greater pleasure
In learning and looking in books for their treasure.

Our Catherine is often now found with her reading,
And Grace her example is always found heeding.
The one is for real and the other's a fake,
But both of them make us all laugh 'til we ache.

Aside from the steady and normal clan's growing,
There isn't much else for the telling or showing.
The year has left none of us cause for complaint,
So brevity here does not come from restraint.

We leave you with this, our quite short Christmas missive,
In hopes that the feelings evoked aren't derisive.
There's always the blog for our tidings most recent,
Just follow the links: guaranteed to be decent!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

cecilotta.blogspot.com
drshiblon.blogspot.com

The Struggle

2008-12-10T21:25:00.013-05:00

A few years ago, NPR resurrected an ages-old program called "This I Believe". Without Edward R. Murrow's quintessential deep-throated radio announcer enunciation it isn't quite as compelling to listen to these days, but I still felt rather intrigued by the concept when I first heard about it. My interest stemmed not so much from a desire to hear what others believed as it did from what introspection on the matter revealed: I believe far too many deep and impactful things to fit into a single essay. Perhaps it's because I'm a Mormon. After all, one of our 13 short Articles of Faith makes the astonishing statement that "We believe all things...."

That makes for a long list.

Occasionally, however, one belief in particular is cast into sharp relief by life circumstances. One belief comes to the fore and, when recognized, changes everything. In these moments, the short essay format of "This I Believe" suddenly makes a lot of sense. One such moment occurred recently, and it reminded me of something that I believe. Something important.

I believe in The Struggle.

Life is hard. Nobody is happy all of the time, nobody is healthy all of the time, nobody is successful, smart, excited, engaged, alert, capable, or satisfied all of the time. It is the human condition. The struggle against human unhappiness and inconvenience is universal. But, what interests me more is a different kind of struggle, one that everyone has the opportunity to fight, but that is really entirely optional: with One notable exception, nobody lives up to his potential all of the time; nobody is completely free of mistakes or imperfections, and because of that, everybody is faced with a choice of what to do about them.

I, like many, am sometimes overwhelmed by my weaknesses. I am tempted to just call them "part of who I am" and let them be. It's easy to say that I was born this way, that some people are athletes, others scholars, and still others none of the above, and that they really had no say in the matter. It was mostly decided by a couple of tiny cells that just happened to be compatible, that met at the right place and the right time to give me my unique capacities and my unique faults. Besides, my private flaws aren't really hurting anyone else. They're personal.

But every time I start thinking this way, something inside of me becomes revolted. Then it revolts. My personal struggles do impact others, even when they are deep and private. The fact that I struggle against things that I don't do well or things that I really shouldn't be doing at all is something that defines who I really am. My struggle against the invisible issues in my life, though the struggle itself is also invisible, affects the way that I see the world, the way that I think about life, my attitude toward myself and my own potential, and over time, my habitual interactions with others. The very idea of private struggles being decoupled from public behavior is laughable: there is an undeniable long-term causal relationship between personal morality and social behavior.

From this concept stems the word "integrity", the root of which is "integral", meaning "whole". Even in today's relativistic society it is generally considered to be a good trait. In many ways, however, it is an unavoidable trait: nobody can escape his or her own self, no matter the context. For this reason, I worry about any public figures who attempt to rationalize inappropriate private behavior on the grounds that it does not affect their choices on behalf of (or merely in front of) the public. It does because it must. While nations do not normally rise or fall on the basis of a handful of cigar or cocktail dress incidents, over time they certainly can. We all have private problems. We all have weaknesses. Without resistance, they become public problems in one form or another. As we struggle and resist these weaknesses, however, we change. We grow. We learn. And eventually, we win. Without a struggle, we allow ourselves to be controlled by our environment and manipulated by our whims. We allow ourselves to be defined by our weaknesses.

There is nothing wrong with being human. There is nothing wrong with being weak. There is nothing wrong with enjoying or even grieving over what we have and what we are. We are children, after all, every one of us. What matters is not that we are good or great or perfect or whole all the time; what matters is that we struggle against it when we are not. We won't always win. We won't always like it. But, we'll be far better and happier for it.

This, I believe.

Classroom Etiquette Without the Classroom

2008-12-07T21:26:00.005-05:00

It is not uncommon for people to imagine the homeschooling environment as fundamentally chaotic and disorganized, mitigated only by the small number of children receiving instruction. In such an environment, one might envision a setting where anything goes: questions can be asked out of turn, snacks are always available, lectures are highly interruptible, and clothing is as optional as homework.

Depending on the home, some or all of the above may be true. Homeschooling can be as formal or informal as desired, and it all depends on the philosophy of the parents and the needs of the children. In our home, for example, a complete lack of structure and formality simply does not work: our children thrive on and even demand structure and consistency, so we have created an environment where that is the rule; it isn't the One True Way, but it works for us. Others make very successful education environments with less structure. Even the most formal home education, however, is usually less formal than public education.

This tends to raise concerns of all kinds: thought-provoking concerns, ill-informed concerns, shot-from-the-hip concerns, and what-was-that-about-clothing concerns. The thought-provoking questions are naturally my favorite, and I heard a one just the other day. It goes something like this: "If my children never set foot in a classroom, how will they learn classroom etiquette?"

While this may seem completely irrelevant for home-schooled children, since there is perhaps little point in getting practice at something you will never do (e.g., it's fine by me if I would look stupid in a pub: I don't intend to ever visit one), this question has far broader ramifications than first appearances would dictate.

What is this "classroom etiquette"? In a nutshell, it is the ability to sit attentively while the teacher speaks, raise your hand to ask questions, take turns at the drinking fountain, comply with homework deadlines, show sensitivity to the needs of those around you, take tests without cheating, and refrain from kicking boys under the table. In short, it is the ability to learn the rules of appropriate behavior for a given setting and to abide by them.

By this last definition, we encounter "classroom" situations all the time in life: in the theater, at the ballet, in the grocery store, or on the road. In all of these situations and more, when people act in consistent, predictable, and considerate ways, things work smoothly for everyone. When someone violates the rules of etiquette (sometimes codified into law), it is not at all uncommon for several people to be inconvenienced, annoyed, or dead. Phrased like this, classroom etiquette is a basic life skill, something that sets the sociopaths apart from those that keep their private concerns to themselves during the movie.

In this light it becomes obvious how to prepare children, even when educated at home, to succeed not only in a true classroom setting, but in any social situation in which they may find themselves. Public school is not the only source of practice for this basic life skill, since life in society is rife with opportunity for such practice. Children are also great at mirroring their parents' behavior, which is probably why we won't have weeded out people who don't understand 4-way stops for at least several generations.

Even though children are naturally adept at observation, society still manages to produce sociopaths, many of whom share practical experiences with those who do not take three grocery carts at a time through the express lane. Experience, it would seem, is not enough. So, we go back to the original not-kicking-people definition of classroom etiquette and discover a deeper pattern: classroom etiquette belies honesty, respect for others, and commitment to the task at hand, all of which might be described as part of the motivation for reasonable behavior.

They're also described as moral principles, and those are best taught in the home. It is not only increasingly uncommon for public educators to overtly teach moral principles (other than tolerance, which these days seems to mean "ignore people until they bug you, then let them have it"), it is devastatingly unfair to expect it of them.

I went to public school, and there are individuals there representing every part of the classroom etiquette spectrum. There are students who do it so well that you hardly notice them, but there are also fights and cheating and noise-making and bullying and stealing and goading and disrupting and urinating on bathroom mirrors and all manner of other issues; the fact that public school provides a setting where classroom etiquette can be practiced does not mean that it is an environment in which it can be effectively conveyed. Pick any sample of kids that are causing problems there and watch them as they grow up, and you'll typically find that they're still having trouble as adults. You also find that their home environment is a highly significant predictor of that behavior and their success in school.

Why? Because no amount of 6-hours-per-day schooling, where the time is already filled to bursting with educational concerns and behavioral overhead, can dream of comparing to constant parental guidance and nurture for teaching things like honesty, integrity, commitment, caring, respect, decency, love, and many other unpopular and politically incorrect words that form the basis for a smoothly-functioning society.

Whether educated at home or in a public institution, the basic life skills that make one most likely to achieve success really need to be taught by parents, not foisted upon overburdened public educators. They don't have the time or energy to add it to their already insane workload, and even if they did they could never be as effective as involved parents teaching the fundamentals of human decency one-on-one with their own offspring. Therefore, if it is not taught in the home, it is simply punished at school; there isn't time for much else.

These principles are critical to the success of any child, whether educated at home or in a public building down the street. They are applicable in both situations, but can really only be acquired in one: at home. Kids who have constant exposure at home to principles of goodness, of hard work, and of respect will have no trouble with classroom etiquette in all of its various forms, since proper behavior around other people is a natural outgrowth of those principles. They might need a time or two to practice it in very specific situations, but the motivation and practice of basic goodness in their lives will always carry the day.

For that, no classroom is required.

The Spectre of Socialization

2008-11-22T20:43:00.032-05:00

When the topic of homeschooling comes up, it is almost inevitable that a variation on the "child socialization" question is asked. Assuming that this really means "healthy social development", and not something more nefarious like "running for your life through a crowded hallway" or "desperately drying your hair before class after a bully episode in the bathroom", then the importance of socialization is not on trial here; you would be hard-pressed to find a parent who did not want their child to have healthy social development. Why, then, does the question come up, and why is it always aimed at home education?

At least one reason might be that homeschooling is viewed as deficient by default: the questioner believes that his or her personal experience in public school is the gold standard for social development, and that therefore public school is the only way to obtain it. It is, after all, hard for parents to imagine growing up differently than they did, and for educators, it can be hard to imagine a healthy educational environment different from the one in which they work.

Fortunately for home educators, this default thinking is suspect for at least two reasons. First, public school fails the gold standard test: it has neither been around for a very long time nor is it universally viewed as a categorical success. Second, the implicit accusation of homeschooling as an isolationist methodology is at best an unfair generalization; "home education" does not demand nor imply that the educated never leave the home. Many, if not most, home-educated children get out quite a lot. It is true that some parents educate at home in order to more effectively isolate their children from society; I disagree with this philosophy, but until my evil plan for world domination succeeds, I will respect their freedom to choose what they think is best for their children.

In fact, freedom of choice is really the whole point of home education. I value having the freedom to adapt quickly to the needs of my children, to select an educational philosophy and methodology that works for the family, to teach decidedly unpopular traditional morals and values like "don't respond to peaceful democracy with unethical or criminal acts" as an integral part of education, and to both enable and monitor healthy social development.

We make that development a priority in our family, but we don't have to work very hard at it; between sibling interactions, trips to the park, church, gymnastics, swimming lessons, and other activities, our children get a great deal of practice in social situations. What's more, they get it in doses small enough to digest and ponder. They can walk away if they are overwhelmed, and we as parents can monitor and learn from their interactions; it is empowering for everyone. As they get older, it gets easier for them to participate independently in other outside groups for extracurricular and educational activities as desired.

The idea of social interaction in small doses has been particularly important for our oldest child. She has been very clingy since birth, and we decided early on that the best way to encourage her to be independent was, perhaps surprisingly, not to require independence. If she wanted Mommy, she got Mommy. If she wanted to be picked up, she got picked up. If she wanted to nurse (and boy, did she ever), she got to nurse. Our philosophy for her was "you can't spoil someone with love". That, and "lifting babies builds muscle". As she got a little older and into playing with other children, we didn't worry too much when she was feeling shy and wanting to snuggle instead of jumping in and running around with her peers; we just let her take things at her own pace, with small helpings of encouragement and large helpings of affection.

We never shield her from social opportunities, but we do try to let her know that she need not feel pressured to take advantage of every one of them; we allow her to view us as her safe haven when needed. The result is that she is now a happy and precocious little girl with a lot of big ideas, a lot to say, and a lot less dependence on us than before. She makes friends very easily, has no problem playing with other children for hours at a time while being supervised by non-parent adults, and does not seem at all worried about whether she has value or whether she is loved. She has, in other words, developed a remarkably healthy sense of self, and is therefore able to socialize effectively.

I say this not because I want to point out what great parents we are; we are as imperfect as anyone else. The point is that as she was going through her very difficult and clingy toddler years, we deeply valued our ability as parents to make non-obvious choices and to control her social environment so that she could develop in as healthy and pleasant a manner as possible. Through home education, we simply wish to extend that, continuing to provide her with what we believe is the best context for her further development, including social development.

Is there a risk that we will mess something up? Yes. Does that extend to her social development? Absolutely. But, there is also a risk that she could suffer a serious setback if we sent her to public school right now. Every decision carries risk; there is no safe default. Our job as parents is to make a choice, and we like our chances better at home.

Little People, Not Little Things

2008-11-12T22:37:00.007-05:00

I spend a great deal of my time explaining things in excruciating detail to a very, very dumb audience. In large numbers, this audience is capable of astonishing things, and even a single member of it can reward my efforts enough to make it worth it, but we're still talking about the bottom of the barrel. Its members are literalistic, incapable of making intuitive leaps, and can be maddeningly ignorant; but they compensate with impressive feats of memory and speed.

They are computers.

It takes years of practice and quite a lot of effort and pizza to become really proficient at making these machines do useful work. The complexity of making them do things reliably is high and ever-growing, and most of us in this industry spend years in school to learn how to tell them to do a mere handful of things. The only reason we can accomplish so much with them is that each of us knows a different handful.

I think that this is how many parents view teaching their children. The word teaching evokes feelings of awe, making any who have not done it themselves wonder how anyone ever really could. It must, they think, take an army of people with years of education and practice to do it well, and not just anyone is or can become qualified. This is certainly the attitude of our government, who will let me teach university-level calculus without thinking twice, but won't let me teach your child how to count pennies unless I have a certificate.

It is true that teaching a large number of children all at once is difficult. Just getting one or two of them to sit still for more than five minutes is a challenge, so imagine what it must be like handling 20 or 40 of them. But, the difficulties faced in a public education setting are in no way related to the difficulties of education itself. Take the discipline and group psychology away, and teaching children is one of the easiest things in the world.

And so we come back to homeschooling. There are parents out there who would love nothing better than to bring their children home from the influences that are beyond their control at school, give them a better learning environment, and watch them thrive. Many of these parents, however, feel that home education would be too overwhelming, take too much time, and require far more skill and knowledge than they currently have.

This is a shame, because all of it is crippling and none of it is true. Teaching your own children in the comfort of your own home is not terribly stressful, takes a surprisingly small amount of time, and requires the same basic skills that you will be focusing on teaching first: reading, writing, and arithmetic. And patience. But, as a parent, you have lots of experience practicing that already.

I have been interested in and intrigued by the idea of homeschooling for a long time, but when it came time to start, I began feeling some trepidation. Would we be able to provide enough information to our child? Would we be able to help her assemble and assimilate that information in a way that would be useful? Would we have to invent songs and cutesy techniques for helping her remember stuff? How on earth were we to start, and how would we proceed? It all seemed downright frightening.

Fortunately, our daughter is not a computer. She is an engaging, interested, energetic, precocious little person that is constantly exploring her world. In short, she is a child.

As a child, she wants to know everything. This, it turns out, plays right into a home educator's hands. At 4 years old, she was asking us what all these symbols were around her. She had noticed that many of them have the same shape. So, we started teaching her letter sounds. We weren't sure how to go about teaching her to read, so we picked up an old second-hand dog-eared copy of "The Writing Road to Reading" and started doing a little reading of our own. At this stage she had about ten minutes of attention to give to it on a good day, so we did what we could for her in that time. Then she ran off to play.

After a while, she started pointing at her favorite letter everywhere she saw it ("B"), and telling us what sound it made. These little successes got her very excited; she was learning, and she knew it! She began demanding that we teach her more. Soon, the ten minutes became twenty. Over the course of the year, it gradually grew into two or more hours each day, with a range of topics covered during the week.

She wanted to know more about her body. A trip to the library sorted that out quickly, as did a trip to the Carnegie Science Center where they happened to have an exhibition on the human body. She loved it. She wanted to know more about the earth. Again, a trip to the library, some clicking at Amazon.com, and a couple of changes in her Netflix queue got her going.

There are several principles at work here, and all of them should serve to dispel fear in anyone interested in starting this process:

Start small
Respond to the child's needs
Supplement when required

None of these are hard, and not one of them requires any significant monetary investment. All of them allow the child to direct much of the process, and amazingly enough, the child does. Children want to learn. Indeed, my children demand it. Even our youngest is getting into it, and she's only 2. What she can do is very limited, but she wants to be big, and she demands that we give her "assignments" (translation: "coloring during school time").

Teaching is easy because it is filling a basic need. We don't have to convince our children to eat when they are hungry, and we don't have to convince them to snuggle when they're sad; they just know that they need something and they go for it. The key is to help them fill their needs appropriately: we don't let them live on candy, we don't encourage tantrums as a response to negative emotion, and we teach them things that will have the greatest impact on them when they want to learn. We provide, encourage, inspire, and direct.

But that's just parenting.

Children are not computers. They don't just sit there awaiting commands and information, they demand to learn, and they give great feedback about what and how they learn. If you are a parent, you are already a teacher every time you answer a question about how the world works. Sometimes you don't know the answer; homeschooling starts when you switch from saying "I don't know" to "Let's find out."

After that, the sky's the limit.

No Child Left Behind at Home

2008-11-09T15:07:00.010-05:00

When the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in January of 2002, it was accompanied by a flurry of news stories, opinion pieces, and annoyed educators. What the teachers may have felt, however, was nothing compared to those who would be parents of school-aged children when the 2012 deadline arrived for which "every public school child reads at or above grade level by third grade." In further enlightening comments, this was described by lawmakers and media folks alike as "every child at or above average."

Why is this frightening? The reasons are many. Some expressed concern that struggling children were going to have to receive a lot more attention to make this work, others worried over resultant tax increases, and a few spotted a math error in the reported mission statement.

This last reaction was mine. In order for every child to be at or above average, it is easy to prove mathematically that every child must be precisely average, meaning that the only way to declare success is to have the public school meat grinder crank out a race of clones by the third grade.

Of course, criticizing a single piece of language in a lengthy and opaque government document, more especially in the reporting of that document, is fraught with peril. My justification in this case is simple, if a bit weakly supported: the reporting and scientific studies over the years since its inception, as well as my personal observations of various cases close to me, have led me to believe that far from No Child Left Behind, we have a case of Every Child Equally Behind. But, as we will see, some are more equally behind than others.

If you were an educator or an education policy maker, and had a good sense for the fact that some kids are just plain not as smart as others in the core competencies, what would be the best way to ensure that all students were performing at or above grade level? Simple! Either change the standards for that level to accommodate the lowest common denominator, or teach to the tests. Note that affecting such change is possible because, as sweeping as the language of the act sounds, it still leaves the definition of standards up to the individual states.

Therefore, the standards simply erode.

Once the definition of success has changed and the teaching style is set up to accommodate high-stakes testing, there is no motivation to do anything for the kids that are doing well, since it is the others that will cause punitive federal action for the school. On the other hand, some schools are forcing the struggling kids out. In a very real sense, the above-average and below-average kids are the ones being left behind. Before the act, it was only the below-average kids.

Although we homeschool, and are therefore not directly impacted by this, we care deeply about education. That's why our children are homeschooled. When this fact comes up, usually as a result of someone talking to or observing my 5-year-old girl, the awe quickly changes to concern. The worried parties do not express concern about education, mind you, but about socialization. This while they watch my daughter running around shrieking happily with their kids.

The problem here is not that my daughter is not socialized, it's that public education is. Sure, some schools are great, some teachers are wonderful, and some public education is more than adequate. Mine was. Like any socialized program, however, this is due more to luck than choice. Roll the dice and get an education, but watch out for bad numbers. In this case, look out for really bad math.

The fact is that nobody knows our children better than we do. In a healthy family environment, no child is left behind, but there it actually means something: every child is loved, gets personalized attention, and feels that he or she belongs somewhere and has something to offer. Education in the home is an expression of the mission of education in general: to enhance and empower individuals. Nobody knows the individual children better than their parents, and therefore nobody can tailor the experience better to their needs. Classrooms are smaller, too.

So we know our children and are positioned to help them, but are we qualified to teach them? I am always surprised by this question. My wife and I are both college graduates. What, exactly, do children need to know that we don't already know? If we don't know it already, what books would we be incapable of reading first? We aren't talking about nuclear physics here, and when the time comes for that, they can attend a university. They may even have me as a teacher in one of their classes (not nuclear physics, though).

Another concern is whether our girls are going to get a fully well-rounded education at home. Can we teach them music? Yes. Can we handle history, geography, biology, math, physics, chemistry, and physical education? Yes, but forget about physical education: they'll get that running around outside in their unstructured free time. Will they have the same exact experience that they would at public school?

Yes, people ask this. No, of course they won't. Depending on what school you have in mind, your kids won't, either. Every school is different, every teacher unique. Some are wonderfully inspiring, others horribly damaging, and most are somewhere in between with all kinds of different interests and backgrounds. No two experiences will be the same in public school, and our homeschooled kids will receive a biased education, too. As parents and educators we will do our best to fill our own gaps with outside curricula and activities, but our children's education will differ from that of their peers, and their peers' education will differ from that of their peers. We aren't too worried about it. What matters is that in the home, we can truly guarantee that no child is left behind.

We can't, however, guarantee that they'll all be above average. That just doesn't work.

O Hai! I Can Haz Family Picturez?

2008-11-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

We have a long-standing tradition of being cheap in my family. We have two kids, a highly reasonable income, and an 800-square-foot 2.5-bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh. It has exactly one bathroom, and it's across the street from two noisy bars. It's cheap, and we love it. We could do without the incredibly bad Irish band on Saturday nights, or the concerned shouting of drunk people at 2 in the morning who can't see well enough to find their cars before getting in and driving away, but it's cheap! That, and we have a garage.

Frugality served us well as we struggled through graduate school, and we never quite managed to break free of it. In many ways I consider that an asset: we have savings, we have food storage, and we are debt-free. We might actually be able to retire in 40 years.

Sometimes, however, we need to spend a little more money. Honestly.

Never has this been more obvious to me than with our recent family pictures. Several of them are very cute, and we're happy with how they turned out. Others, however, just lack that certain something. It's an intangible quality.

Actually, it's just quality.

CC and I have been married for nearly 8 years, and we've been through a lot in that time. We have two incredibly precocious children, and have gotten to know one another fairly well. Sure, there are many who have been married longer, but I think 8 years is enough to say that we've graduated from complete and utter naivety. But we're also still pretty young.

This pose suggests that we are either on a first date and uncertain about the rules of touching, or too creaky to lean toward one another without falling over. Some things can't be bought, but I bet that good photography can.

Then again, the caption potential was priceless.

From a Fellow Child

2008-11-06T19:59:00.001-05:00

We're taught that we are supposed to become like little children in order to get where we really want to be. Having now watched my own children for a few years, I'm beginning to realize some things about this goal:

It can't possibly mean to become like a child in every imaginable way, and
Most adults are really children already but can't admit it.

We took our girls with us to vote on Tuesday. We had been teaching Catherine about voting, and we didn't really feel like traveling and waiting in line twice, so we all just packed up and walked down to our friendly neighborhood Senior Citizen's Center to get it over with. On the way out, after an encounter with a surprisingly Stalinist ballot (many entries had only one name), the elderly exit poll lady asked our children whether they had voted for "a government". Without hesitating, I replied, "They sure did! They voted for chaos and anarchy!"

The truth comes easily in moments like these.

While chaos and anarchy are definitely the purview of children, I'm tolerably certain that they aren't part of any idealistic post-mortal future. I'm also relatively certain that the intent of the statement "become like a little child" does not include voiding ourselves anywhere we please, revealing embarrassing family secrets in front of our parents' friends, or running around with nothing on but a dish-towel cape and shouting, "I naked!"

It does sound fun, though, and there is a definite charm to children. They are, for one thing, completely and energetically sincere; if they get the oatmeal that they wanted for breakfast, it's something to sing about. On the other hand, bath and bed times are not inconvenient, they're a violation of the Geneva Conventions!

This sort of stunning extremism is all in a day's work for my kids. It can be awe-inspiring and beautiful, but is usually best admired from a distance. Still, there is something there. Children are transparent, often forgiving, always learning, and capable of astonishingly astute acts of kindness or brutality. They are, in short, raw beings who are always busy making the most of the time they have with their bodies, their environment, and their ice cream.

They are also ignorant little critters, making it easier to forgive their errors because of their lack of experience and intellectual maturity. This brings me back to what I said earlier about adults; we are already more like children than we care to admit, and a great deal less than we ought to become.

When I went to vote on Tuesday, even though I considered myself to be reasonably well prepared and something more than an ignorant clod, still I had to fight down a surge of bewilderment and awe as I stood at the voting booth. There I was, a child in a very big world, saying my piece about whether I want bailouts or torture, copyright litigation or deregulation, oatmeal or pancakes. I coudn't help but think that somewhere someone was smiling benevolently while watching me express my little opinions, while in truth I have no idea what I'm doing or how my choices really affect the consequences that I and others will face.

We who consider ourselves adults really are still children. We're bigger, and we have more information in our heads, but we still like to be naked when possible, we still like kissing and hugging and cuddling, we still tend to feel like the world is a much larger place than we care to think about, and we still don't really know a whole lot about much of anything. Why encourage us to become more like children, then? Because real children, the little people that like blankets and bunnies, are never hesitant to admit that they are what they are. Life just is, and so are they.

Why aren't we?

Why Shiblon?

2008-11-05T19:31:00.000-05:00

Q: Why is your user name always "shiblon"?
A: Because "gadianton" was already taken.

That, and Gadianton is perhaps the most nefarious villain of all time. I don't know why I ever considered his name as a candidate. I had to think of something, though, because "chris" is a popular name and I arrived a bit late to the instant messaging scene.

My excuse? I had recently finished serving a Mormon mission in Chile, where I was often grateful for warm water and access to a telephone, let alone a computer; bullion cubes in my soup were a flavorful luxury, as were shoes that were only one size too small. The whole World Wide Web thing happened while I was gone.

In spite of its attendant difficulties, I dearly loved Chile. The people there are wonderful, straight shooters, and they take as well as they give. This worked well for a passionately expressive person like me, but even the good people of Chile had limits, and I tried to keep that passion in check.

This was hard. It still is, as a matter of fact, though I have been tempered by years of marriage, parenthood, and graduate school. It is especially difficult because it involves trying not to do things, like not thinking about cross-dressing Sarah Palin look-alikes in a high-heeled foot race in DC.

See?

So, when I read the following advice from Alma the Younger to his son Shiblon buried amidst praise for his unwavering committment, my struggle to improve became a little less lonely:

Use boldness, but not overbearance; and also see that ye bridle all your passions, that ye may be filled with love; ... (Alma 38:12)

Shiblon and I seemed to be cut from the same cloth: both very passionate, both dedicated to whatever cause we were attending to, and both a bit over the top. The rest follows; my given name is boringly popular, and boringly popular names get taken first online. So, "shiblon" it was.

At least the new name is unique.

As a side note, some people have asked me if "shiblon" is a name motivated by economics. It isn't, but this rare question always makes me laugh.

I dare you to find out why.