Vaccines in the Post-Truth World

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am going to talk about vaccines. Put a pin in that for a moment.

We are living in a troubling chaotic time. 

And I am getting old. I’ve been blessed to not to have lived in such turbulent times as did my father and his father, but I ain’t dead yet, so I’ve still got a chance.

Yea me.

Anyway, I am writing about vaccines because I was scrolling through Facebook when I came upon some posts by some people whom I know to be intelligent who were posting about vaccines as if they were pure poison.

This disturbs me.

Let’s talk about vaccines. 

We like bright, straight lines in human knowledge but often the truth is fractal. The science of vaccines is one of the places where the truth is fractal.

Vaccines have saved a lot of lives. A lot. We don’t have smallpox anymore; we’ve almost whipped polio. Almost. My buddies in Rotary and I are working on it.

In the course of writing this article, I got out of my comfort zone in terms of scientific knowledge, so I contacted a couple of experts in the field.  They are smart people because I can tell that they are; that’s my superpower.  They are not in the pay of big pharma; I can tell because they don’t drive Mercedes-Benzes.

What I distill from them is the following:

Not all vaccines are the same, but each has a lot of scientific research behind it.  The research is complicated enough that most people simply won’t understand the details.   Regardless of their efficacy, vaccines do have side effects.  Some of them have more and/or worse side effects than others. Medical judgment has to be applied in their use.  For example, the rabies vaccine is very painful, as I understand, but if you are bitten by an infected animal and don’t take it you will die an incredibly painful death.  The side-effects of the treatment have to be weighed against the benefits and vice verse. This is true for every vaccine. Though not every vaccine is so extreme.

I can tell you from personal experience that the shingles vaccine has some unpleasant side effects.  I felt like I had the flu.  Every joint in my body ached.  However, everyone who has had the shingles said, “Yeah, I know, take the shot anyway.”

The devil lies in whose judgment do you trust? 

I trust the folks that I talked to for the reasons that I said. They also say the COVID vaccine did stall the pandemic; there is little doubt of this.  Is it possible that they have been misled by disinformation from those who seek to manipulate the system for their own benefit?  I will admit that is possible if those who are against vaccines will admit the same.

My father lived in a time when there was still smallpox in the world.  We vaccinated everyone for it, and now it is gone.  There was polio abroad in the world during their time as well, and now it is almost entirely gone. Those are two cases where vaccines were exceptionally effective.  By way of contrast, we still have to vaccinate for flu every year.  It will probably be with us forever.

We live in an age that has no memory of the past. If it didn’t happen to us, it’s gone.  We are not only ignorant, we are proud of being ignorant.

And we’ve been given the “gift” of social media so that now we are free to destroy truth at an unprecedented pace.  

My poor old brain is a whirlwind of country songs and bits of the Bible.

In the whirlwind turns this from the 3rd chapter of James’ Epistle: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

You always knew where you stood with James. What would he say about Facebook?

The point I want to draw from this is that once we say something out loud in front of the crowd our egos make us stand by it.  “I was wrong” is harder to say than “Honey, I’ve been kissing the superglue.”

And as we post and repost who is pulling on the bits in our mouths?

This argues for either developing the humility to admit when you are wrong or to developing the ability to just keep your mouth shut.

I’ll be sitting over here holding my breath while the people of the world do that.

I know two things. The first is that this column will not have changed anyone’s mind.  Those against vaccination will steadfastly remain against vaccination.  The second is that I will continue to be vaccinated when my doctor tells me I should.

Welcome to the post-truth world.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Seminole Wind

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was out on my walk today listening to music. John Anderson’s song “Seminole Wind” came up on my playlist.

So blow, blow Seminole wind,//

Blow like you're never gonna blow again.//

I'm calling to you like a long lost friend //

But I know who you are.

I wondered to myself whether this was cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation. I’ve learned a lot of new phrases.  Cultural appropriation; colonization; ethnic cleansing.

I hear these. I think about them. I try to do it with a fair mind.  I try to reflect.

That word reflect is a good one.  I try to mentally look in the mirror and see if any of that reflects back on me.

As many of you might know, I am from Oklahoma.  Oklahoma is a Choctaw word that means “red people.” It is one way the indigenous people referred to themselves.  The indigenous people were a part of our lives in that part of the country in the way they aren’t here in Kansas.

We (my brother and I) grew up learning about the “Civilized Tribes”--a label that is not necessarily embraced by those to whom it refers--like frogs learn about water. They were simply a part of the world we lived in.  We learned to name the tribes in this order: Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole.  The sports teams in the town of Seminole, Oklahoma, had a cheer that went: “Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Seminole can’t be beat.”

But, as I said, they don’t necessarily embrace the name “Civilized Tribes.”  One commonality they do have is they were removed forcibly from their land in the eastern part of the United States. They weren’t hurting anyone, they weren’t threatening anyone.  They were on land that could be used to raise cotton on; cotton prices were good; they were removed so others could take their land and--with the aid of slave-labor--grow cotton.

There was money to be made from the cotton, money to be made from the slaves. So they were moved to Oklahoma on what has come to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”  I am not quite sure that this necessarily meets the requirements to be called “Ethnic Cleansing,”  but it sure smells the same.

This was done by Andrew Jackson against the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Jackson is famously quoted as saying, “The Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it.”

They couldn’t; it wasn’t; an atrocity was committed.

They lost their homes in Mississippi, Alabama, and the Carolinas.  They had to go to Oklahoma. Whatever the merits of the Great State of Oklahoma, it would be traumatizing to be forcefully moved from anywhere to anywhere else. 

Home is home.

We can’t even use the excuse we were Christianizing them.

One reason tribes of the Trail of Tears were referred to as “Civilized” is that they were already Christians, Baptists and Methodists for the most part. And I say Christian, but many of the missionaries marveled at how readily the indigenous peoples took to Christianity.  Read this as they were better Christians than the Christians the Europeans knew.  One can still see this in how they take care of their people using that casino money.

The Trail of Tears is one of our country’s sins.  Just one.

It’s a sin.  But it’s a sin that some of us (many of us; most of us?) have profited from.

How do we deal with this?  At church on a weekly basis, I stand with the rest of my church and confess to a litany of sins and the minister says, “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.”

Do we as a country need to confess to a litany of sins and beg forgiveness in this way?

Not this way. But in some way.

We need to study our history through a clear lens, not rosy, not dark.  We need to recognize where we erred, but we also need to recognize that sometimes all of the choices available are bad ones.

My way is to write about it. If some of you didn’t know about the Trail of Tears, you do now.  The United States--WE--broke our own laws.  Can we make up for it? I seriously doubt it. But we can remember it:

So blow, blow Seminole wind,

Blow like you're never gonna blow again.

I'm calling to you like a long lost friend

But I know who you are.

And blow, blow from the Okeechobee,

All the way up to Micanopy.

Blow across the home of the Seminole,

The alligators and the gar.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are times when I think I wasted my time getting a PhD when I may have been born to be a conspiracy theorist.  (I think a lot of people at universities have made that mistake, but let me struggle to stick to the topic.)

I am surrounded by people from both ends of the political spectrum and all colors in between.  I don’t like to waste time arguing. (And it is a waste most of the time because hardly anyone changes their mind; most don’t even modify their argument.  They just charge on mouthing the same talking points.)

One thing I’ve heard over and over, is the statement that Trump is stupid.  I am open-minded enough to periodically entertain the notion that might be true, but--speaking to those who say this--that is a very dangerous thing to think about your political enemy.  Perhaps they want you to think they are stupid; perhaps there are things they have to say to placate their base; perhaps they are operating with constraints you can’t see; perhaps their agenda is not what you think it is.

These are all possibilities that should at least be entertained. Entertain those from time to time, while I periodically think that maybe Trump is stupid.  Given what comes out of his mouth sometimes, it’s hard not to.  But let’s continue.

Among those many colors of the spectrum I’m surrounded by, there are two individuals who’ve said independently of each other: Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.

What follows is my analysis coming from doing just that.  There are people who pay far more attention to this than I do; there are people who are far smarter than I am; there are people who know more about politics than I do.  What follows is my analysis of what is happening, it’s not necessarily what I want to happen or what I think ought to happen.

In other words, don’t shoot the messenger, especially when he is admittedly a would-be conspiracy theorist.

In that which follows, I am going to use the word hegemon. The internet defines a hegemon as “a dominant leader, country, or group that exercises significant influence or authority over others.”  The United States is the current world hegemon, and we have been since WWII.  Before that it was Great Britain; before that it was the Netherlands; before that it was Spain; before that it was Portugal.

There are perks to being a hegemon.  It helps you make money.  Indeed, if you do it right, it helps everyone make money.  A world hegemon acts like a world policeman.  They take care of the international spaces that don’t belong to anyone--like the oceans, for example--and keep the malefactors from malefacting.  On the oceans, they keep the pirates from running wild. That is why in all of those old pirate movies, it was always the British who were coming after the pirates.

We are now the ones taking care of the pirates.  That’s us.  We have a magnificent navy that dominates the oceans.  I think it is probably the best that the world has ever seen, but I don’t have data to back that up.  Since I am just on a conspiracy theoretic rant, I shouldn’t worry about it, but there  you go.

We similarly maintain a strong military. 

This is very expensive.  It is a huge part of our budget every year, and maintaining it has added to our huge national debt.  I hate to name the number because it might be even bigger than that, but anyway it’s so big that even if I wrote it down, it would be difficult to understand in a meaningful way.

We are spending a lot of money on being the world’s hegemon.  At the same time, many of the countries we are protecting and whose trade we are protecting have used their money not on the military, but on healthcare and education for their people.

All of this said, the actions that are being taken look like they will ultimately take us out of the position of being the world’s hegemon.

I would like it if the citizens of the US were the healthiest, best educated people in the world.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Ah, but there’s the rub.  It’s like in a western when the old sheriff steps down.  Who is going to be the new sheriff?

China?

Ask India, Japan, and South Korea what they think about that.

There was a time between WWI--which basically gutted Great Britain--and WWII--after which the US took over--when the world effectively didn’t have a hegemon.  That period was marked by the rise of Fascism and Communism.  Hitler and Mussilini; Stalin and Mao.

Maybe my analysis is wrong.  I am just a conspiracy theorist could’ve been, after all.

But this is what I’ve been thinking about.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Sound of Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was walking down the Watco Rail Trail today near where it meets Broadway when the Youtube music algorithm brought me Disturbed's cover of “The Sound of Silence.”

It’s always been a haunting song. While there are some surface interpretations to it, I’ve always felt there was more there.  Just as Bob Dylan was prophetic in many of his songs, I think Paul Simon was playing that role when he wrote this one. 

Not long after hearing the lyric

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls//

And tenement halls

I was walking down Broadway and read the graffiti-style mural that read: “Your music is in you.”

This is an example of what Carl Jung called synchronicity.  I can’t actually define synchronicity. I’m not that smart, for sure. But I know an example of it when I see one.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about words and numbers.  There are folks--both English majors and Math majors--who like to draw a line, a very dark and thick line, between words and numbers.

I believe that is a mistake, a really, really big mistake.

Numbers are words.

This came to me when I was watching one of my grandsons learning to count.  He was laying out potato chips on the dining room table counting, “One, two, three, four,...” and continued to do so, saying a word every time he put down a potato chip.

It occurred to me that the only thing that would stop him was when he ran out of the names that he knew for the numbers. (Or ran out of potato chips, but it was a pretty big bag.)

In American English, at least the nontechnical part, we run out of names for numbers at about a trillion.  Well, let me make that more precise: most educated people start struggling to think of names for numbers at one trillion (1,000,000,000,000). There are names beyond that: quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion. And you can go a lot farther, but it gets complicated and the vast majority of humans aren’t going to know and don’t want to know.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the folks back in 2012 who were all worried that the world was going to come to an end because the Mayan Calendar ended in the year 2012.  My understanding--and the person I think I learned this from has an office next door to mine--the truth of the matter was the Mayans simply didn’t have words for the numbers in their calendar beyond that date.

But let me get on with my rant. 

Numbers are words. Since there are more numbers than we know how to pronounce, there are words we have no way to say. Words that are forever silent.

Truths that can never be uttered.

The poets, the prophets, and the mathematicians stretch themselves to try to pass on these silent truths, but the struggle is in vain so much of the time.

The math lecture is slept through.

The prophet is ignored.

The words of the poet go unsung.

They echo in the sound of silence, as it were.

That doesn’t mean that the truth dies. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get passed along.

It means the truth is not passed from mouth to ear. It must go from heart to heart.

The truth doesn’t die.

And while it can always be spoken, it can never be silenced. For certain, what can’t be spoken most certainly can’t be silenced.

Because your music is in you. It always was and always will be. It will echo in the sound of silence.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Jesus, God, the Bible, and all that

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher.  My style of teaching requires that I learn something myself first through experience and then I pass it on.  There are some things that I can’t pass on in the classroom because (a) I teach math and (b) I teach in a state institution. If you don’t want to learn about religion right now, I recommend our excellent sports page to you. Well, that might be a religion too, but you know what I mean.

Traditional Christian teaching understands God as the Mystic Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  We believe that Jesus was God.  In particular, we believe he was fully God and fully Human.

This has been a point of contention.  Blood has been shed; ink has been spilled; hot air has been expended.

It’s been a big deal.

All my life I have believed, and I still believe. It was the way I was raised, the way I was educated.  But now as I grow older, grow more dispassionate, I find that the nature of my belief has been odd.

What do I mean?  I mean that I’ve had no difficulty seeing Jesus as God.  My difficulty has been seeing him as a human being.  I think that is something that I need to correct.

We are told in the Gospel of John that no one has seen God.  One might assume that he’s talking about his readers because there are scriptural references to Adam walking with God in the Garden and to Moses seeing God however obscurely.  But it’s safe to assume none of John’s readers were among those selected few.  

John goes on to explain that we see God through Jesus: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

As I said, I am well aware that there is disagreement on this. There are whole religions of very fine people who disagree with my tradition on this. I am not here to argue about it.  I am a math teacher: I don’t argue, I just explain why you are wrong.  My purpose is to start with this line from John’s gospel and go from there.

Most of the people I’ve met have an idea of God.  And here I will add even the atheists, nay, especially the atheists.  

The atheists have an idea of God. They are definite.  It is clear to them. They have done more study on it than you or me or almost any clergyman that I know. They take their disbelief in God very seriously.

They disbelieve in God, and when I’ve listened to their idea of God, I find I don’t believe in that God either. This is a statement that is by no means unique to me.

But don’t let me wander too far. My point here is not to try to change an atheist’s mind. God forbid. (It’s a joke; lighten up.) My point is that even atheists have some idea of God, and I think most people do.

Whether or not God exists, there is a natural tendency for people to believe. I’ve read articles that have stated that there is a part of the brain that is wired for holy experiences.  I’ve seen that used in arguments for the non-existence of God.  The same people don’t use eyes in arguments for non-existence of the sun, but there I go again wandering off again; it is not my point.

We have a natural tendency to believe in God.  But we have competing notions of what God is.

In the Bible, we have a record of one tradition’s experience of wrestling with God and/or that tradition’s notion of Him. (I’m using the traditional pronouns here. Make a drinking game of it, and let it roll over you.)  

Those in my tradition, use Jesus as a lens on the Bible (“the writings” as the authors of the New Testament referred to their scripture).  Through Jesus, the Human, his life and deeds, they came to an understanding of God.

Through that lens, those who knew him, those who were closest to him, wrote such things as “God is Love.”

We see God in the acts of Jesus: Acts of healing; acts of teaching; acts of expelling demons; acts of feeding the multitude.

Acts of loving kindness. 

Jesus is a lens that magnifies the picture of God that was given in the Old Testament.

So there you go.  There will be those who disagree. 

That’s okay.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 What Do You Know?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been told in the past, and I pass it along from time to time, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

We can only learn something, we can only know something, when we are ready.

What do I know now?  One thing.

I am happy.

Given all that is wrong in the world at this point, that might be a surprising or even a disappointing statement. Be either surprised or disappointed as it gives you pleasure.

But I am happy.

There is scientific research that says--much to the surprise, or perhaps, disappointment of some--older people are happier.  So it could just be that my happiness is a consequence of statistics. I am open to that. 

But I’ve got my own reasons.

I am back in the classroom full time after an absence of many years.  Okay, truth be told, I never quit teaching, but teaching one or two classes a semester is not the same as teaching four classes and the teaching thereof being your raison d’etre. 

It’s not so much the teaching per se as being back at my calling.  I am doing what I was put on this earth to do.

The happiness comes from a combination of that and having become old enough to realize that.

Perhaps at a more basic level happiness comes from wanting to do what you are doing, not doing what you want.  Feel free to go back into that sentence with a compass, a sextant, and a notepad and explore it a while.

As I look back at previous times, I see myself as doing something, but resenting that I wasn’t doing something else. I wasn’t trying to find the joy in the task at hand, but simply wishing it would be over.

I will admit that there are some activities that are objectively unpleasant.  What I am talking about is, lecturing in class, but wishing I was preparing a lesson; preparing a lesson, but wishing I was doing research; doing research but wishing I was spending time with my family; spending time with my family, but wishing I was reading.

And so on.

With the passage of time comes, perhaps, an appreciation of activities for being themselves.

Okay, I don’t like to grade papers.  If I said I did, they would stick me in a straight-jacket and drag me away by my heels.

And rightly so.

But I’ve learned the art of owning the grading of papers as part of my chosen profession.

I think that is part of the happiness that comes with aging: the knowing of oneself.

There are certain mysteries that we are presented with in the course of our lives.  At least there have been for me.  These are things I think about in the night, both as I lay awake, but also in my dreams.

These are mysteries which I am at the boundaries of my intelligence even to think about.  They are mysteries that stretch me.

Recently, I’ve been waking up during the night, and saying, “That’s it. I understand now.  I could explain it to someone.”

The thing to do would be to get up, go to my computer, and write those thoughts down.  Share my pearls with you.

Instead, I roll back over and drift off again.

The answers--and even the questions that evoked the answers--are gone by the morning.  The only thing left is the feeling that I’ve encountered the Transcendent in the night and it has escaped.

An artifact of my happiness, and perhaps the cause of it, is that I am okay with that. I’ve mapped the Abyss; I’ve plumbed its depths; I’ve witnessed the battle of Gog and Magog; and I have let it go.

And I’m okay with having let it go, because I am happy.

Or am I happy because I am now able to let it go.

Perhaps the solution that can only be grasped in the darkness of the wee hours is best left in the darkness of the wee hours.

Knowledge comes to us when we are ready to receive it.  That is something I know from my calling as a teacher.  

The knowledge that has come to be now is that I am happy.

I suppose I was ready for that.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Turning Bois D'arc

 Turning Bois D’Arc

By Bobby Neal Winters

My people call it Bois D’Arc.  Folks around here tend to call it Hedge.  There are some refined educated folks who call it Osage Orange, and they are welcome to do so.  

It is a free country.

But my people call it Bois D’Arc and pronounce it bow dark.  That is an example of a genuine folk etymology which is to say that knowing what something is influences the way you pronounce it.  You see, my people know that Indians (Native Americans, Indigenous people; pick one that makes you happy and push on) made bows from the wonderful wood of this tree.  

The French knew it too.  That’s why they called it bois d’arc.  But the bois is pronounced bwah and means “wood” and the d’arc means “of the bow.”  So it all makes sense and the folk who I call my people just don’t want anyone to forget that connection.  

It’s about history; it’s about reality.

I got a piece of bois d’arc from my brother some time back.  I want to say a year ago Thanksgiving. It might’ve been longer than that, but if so not too much.

I used some of it to make some woodworking mallets, but I still had some left.  I’d cut it from one of my brother’s trees. It’s about 3 or 4 inches through and it still has the bark on it.  

The Bois D’Arc is not a pretty tree.  Indeed, one might say without too much fear of contradiction that it’s ugly.  It’s got thorns on its limbs.  

It bears a fruit that not many animals find attractive, no matter how hungry they might be. The internet tells me that only the seeds are really edible and that the latex that permeates the fruit can irritate your skin.

But it is tough.  

It will grow in poor soil, in inhospitable places.

It is defiant. 

Yesterday, I took a piece of what my brother gave me and turned it on the lathe.

It is hard.

Very hard.

I had my doubts that I would be able to do much with it until I got past the bark, past the dry part of the wood.  When I got down to the wet part, the part that was still “green,” it turned easier.

I called it green, of course, just because it hadn’t dried out yet.  The wood beneath the bark was actually yellow, a beautiful, beautiful yellow.

I am just starting with the lathe, so I don’t know how to make much.  So far what I’ve done is make squarish objects into cylinders. Those things and a lot of saw dust.

But I’d seen a Russian guy on Youtube making whistles.

And I thought, “Hmm, whistles.”

That’s what grandpas do.

I made a couple from other wood: one from cedar and one from pine.

I thought to make one from bois d’arc.  The wood of my people.  The wood that exemplifies my people.

I turned it between centers to knock the bark off and to make it round.  I then stuck one end in a chuck while still having the other end held secure.  

I began taking off wood to take it down to the size of a whistle.

The yellow just got deeper and more beautiful.  But it’s still as hard as iron inside.

I was able to drill a hole down the axis without too much trouble, but cutting a wedge from the side with a chisel to make the whistle was just about as much as I could do.

With all the bark removed, it is revealed to be beautiful on the inside, but it’s still hard, still unrelenting, still something you don’t really want to mess with if you don’t have to.

The wood of my people.  

It is right.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

What is the Right Word?

 What is the Right Word?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am trying to find the right word for something.  

It would be a word that would describe a situation or a mindset.  It strikes me as something that is basic to dealing effectively in and/or happily with the world.  Because of this, there must be some word in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew for what I am talking about.  Likely as not, I’ve heard it, but I didn’t recognize its importance.

Since I don’t have the One Word, let me now use a lot of them.

When I tell students how to study their math, I tell them to pick a spot and prepare it.  Get their paper, their calculator, their pen, their pencil, their protract, that is to say get everything that they are going to need and gather it around them.  Turn OFF the flipping TV (and I don’t mean flipping), music, social media. Urinate--maybe on the social media. Take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly, and then get started, doing what they are going to do.  To those who’ve had jobs, I tell them to go at it like a job.

This is one example of the situation/mindset I am talking about.

This was my only example for many, many years.  As I’ve gotten into woodworking, I’ve noticed that you need the same mindset to do good woodworking.

Consider how you cut dovetails. Get your workbench cleared off.  That means you need to actually have a workbench.  Have your chisels, saws, marking implements, squares, and dovetail jigs close at hand.  Make sure that your wood is square and properly sized.  Make sure you have a clamp at your workbench so that you can clamp your board to the bench when it comes time to chisel out your dovetails.  Maybe I should have begun with the notion that you should have thought the entire process through from beginning to end before you sat down to cut the dovetails, but it (almost) goes without saying.  That might mean it should be said more often.

I am now learning how to use a lathe.  As with every other powertool I’ve learned about, a lathe is kind of scary.  I think that fear is left over from childhood.  Our parents didn’t want us to get hurt, so that created a general fear in us.

The cure to that fear is knowledge.  You can hurt yourself with a lathe. You can kill yourself with a lathe.  But you gain knowledge of how to deal with a lathe so as to minimize that possibility.  

You could say to just stay away from the lathe and you won’t get hurt.  The same philosophy will keep you safe from cars, dogs, cats, and the opposite sex.

While there are things that we leave alone because the learning curve of dealing with them safely overrides any benefit from dealing with them, we try to keep that set small.  I’ve got bungee jumping and skydiving in that set, but I know others who’ve crossed that line.

Somewhere within this notion is the idea that we become the despots of a small piece of spacetime.  We set aside a place where we are the absolute rulers of our environment for a carefully prescribed interval of time. For that time, in that space, whatever we say goes.

Many, many years ago--more than twenty--I had a class where one of the students thought he was smarter than me.  That doesn’t bother me. It happens all the time, and I enjoy it.  His thinking he was smarter wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that one day he tried to take over.  I came to class, and my desk at the front of the room was covered with boxes of donuts, a jug of milk, a jug of orange juice etc.  

He’d decided that we were going to have a party.

I didn’t say a word.

I sat down my books and began removing the accoutrements from the desk. After they were gone, I began to teach as if nothing had happened.

When you are the teacher, you are in charge. You decide what will be done that day.  Good teachers will read the room and take input from the students.  But if you let them take charge, why exactly are you getting a paycheck?

The student didn’t like me after that.

However agreeable you are, you must learn to draw the line, to be in charge, to take control:

“Hey, Eve, God told us not to eat that, and I won’t.”

“No, taking bribes is wrong, and I won’t do it.”

“No, I don’t think main-lining cocaine is a good idea, and I won’t do it.”

So, anyway, I’m trying to come up with the right word to describe this.  I know I will feel stupid when someone tells me, but I would like to know.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Invisible Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making a frame for a cedar chest.  My intention was to segue off that and talk about frameworks in a more abstract way, but I got sucked into a vortex of writing about woodwork and ran out of space.

I could just leave it lay, but the topic won’t let me go. Frameworks just keep popping into my head.  My preference as a teacher is to put a good solid example in the student’s mind before going off on an abstraction, so if you didn’t read that article, you might want to get on the web and find it.

We’ve got frameworks everywhere around us.  Let’s start with math.  Say you are going to add 5 to 7.  You could just remember that 5 plus 7 is 12, but you don’t have to, because we’ve got a framework.  As you learn to count, you learn to count by fives. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, etc.  You are familiar enough with numbers to know that 7 is 5 plus 2.  So 5 plus 7 is 5 plus 5 plus 2.  Five plus five is ten, so 5 plus 5 plus 2 is 10 plus 2 which is 12.

That’s some trouble, and it’s easier to memorize it, but it will help you get by until you do.

You can do this sort of thing with bigger numbers.  Say you want to multiply 27 by 8.  Well, 25 times 8 is 200; that’s not so hard.  Now 27 is 2 more than 25 and 2 times 8 is 16, so 27 times 8 will be 216.  Here you are using a framework of multiples of 25.

You get your framework in place and you work from that.

For me teaching became a lot easier, when I learned how to use the calendar as my framework.  I sit down before the beginning of the semester and look at the university calendar.  I note where the breaks are; I note the times that I will have to be off campus; I pick the test days at roughly equal intervals.

After I have those test days picked, the rest of the time is just talking to intelligent young people and grading tests. I keep track of what I’ve done; I keep track of what has worked and what hasn’t; I refine my teaching.

The value of a calendar as a framework can’t be overstated.

As is my predilection, let’s go back to the first chapter of Genesis. In verse 14 it says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’”

People have wasted a lot of time arguing about Genesis, what I will say is that when I read this, I can see that the author of Genesis knew that that constellations were connected to the seasons of the year. Even now, you can tell when winter is coming or summer is coming by where Orion the Hunter is in the night sky.

Put that together with the phases of the moon, and you’ve got the start of a calendar.

I’ve pointed out one way I use the calendar, but it’s everywhere. We schedule everything.  Everything from 7th grade B-teams playing basketball in Frontenac to the Superbowl is on the calendar.  

The days, months, and years are all framed out, and we can put our events on them.

There was a time when we paid more attention to the week.  We recalled that the story in Genesis set aside one day a week to rest. Don’t work; don’t let your servant work; don’t let your wife work. Don’t work.  Restaurants would be closed; stores would be closed.

But someone came along and said, “Don’t let those religious fanatics tell you what to do. You can work every day. That’ll show ‘em.”

So we now get to work everyday if we want to.  And sometimes even if we don’t want to because if we don’t someone else will.

We showed ‘em, all right.

But I digress.

To return to my point, we’ve got these invisible frameworks around us that work like the frame I made for my cedar chest.  You can attach other things to them and they will hold it together. They make our lives easier but are invisible.

Since the 1960s, there has been a reexamination of some of the frameworks that keep our society together.  We don’t trust institutions any more.  Membership has gone down in service clubs and churches.

These invisible structures, invisible frameworks of civilization are being lost, and it’s not clear what is replacing them. 

If anything.

I suppose time will tell. It might be quite a show.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

By Bobby Neal Winters

The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Therein he sympathizes with a mouse whose nest he has turned up while plowing.  However, at the end of the poem he reflects:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!//

The present only toucheth thee://

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,//

          On prospects drear!//

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,//

          I guess an’ fear!//

One might say he’s being a bit disingenuous by saying we can’t see forward. Maybe we can’t in specific terms, but we can in general terms.

As the engineer in the movie Titanic shared, the ship can and will sink, “It’s a mathematical certainty.”  As Jim Morrison from the Doors sang, “No one here gets out alive.”

That’s not very cheerful, is it? We are bothered by it.  It’s hard for us to think about, and I suppose that’s why some of the preachers when I grew up preached on the Rapture so much. Somehow the prospect of flying out of your car while you are raptured is easier to think about than the mundane--and certain--fact of your inevitable demise.

Thoughtful people throughout the ages wondered about this and discussed what the best pay to spend these finite hours of our lives.  They came up with a rainbow of solutions from grabbing as much pleasure on one end to serving others on the other.

Many of those who seek to live a good life, to make the best use of those too-small number of days we are given, gather with other like-minded individuals. Such were those who became the Disciples of Jesus.

They were looking for someone who knew something, someone to teach them. Many (most, all?) of them had been associated with John the Baptist as his students, disciples, and John directed them to Jesus as a better option.

Jesus didn’t knock on their door; he didn’t put out flyers; he didn’t have a huge building.

He had something they wanted.  

For some, it was something they wanted to learn. Others transferred their own hopes and desires onto him and were disappointed when he didn’t live up to them.  (I am thinking specifically about Judas here.)

For any of these people, he wasn’t hard-sell.  He just said, “Come and see.”

No doubt many came, saw, and then went again. And we know what Judas did.

But some remained.

It’s still the same. People who think about...life...still wonder what is the best way to spend the time we have? What are the best things to do?

The same range of answers are still out there that always were. For all the passage of time, the basic choices have remained the same.

We are living in a time when we are born into institutions, into churches, into synagogues. Most people don’t really think about “it” much.  

But thoughtful people will continue to think and continue to seek answers.

These thoughtful people are of all stripes. Some are scholars, sure. Not as many as you would think. It’s just that scholars are the ones who write and writing tends to get around.

Thoughtful people can be artists and artisans; waiters and waitresses; bartenders and baristas; beekeepers and bookkeepers.

Fishermen, tax collectors, and tent-makers.

They come to the Teacher because they want to be taught. How do I live a good life? What do I need to do with my shrinking number of days?  I don’t want to bury my gold coin, where should I invest it?

You will have to find someone who can help you.  He might just say, “Come and see.”

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

A Discourse on Joinery

 A Discourse on Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am making a cedar chest for one of my daughters.  I think I’ve mentioned this before. My plan is to make it 2 feet long, one foot wide, and one foot deep. 

Or thereabouts.

I find that I don’t use my tape measure as much as I thought I would.  I cut the certain boards to the size I need them and those boards provide my standard from that point on.

And I don’t use plans. That is to say, I don’t use a plan that anyone has put on paper. I’ve got an idea of what I want to make; I’ve got a small set of things I know how to do; and I’ve got the time to figure it out.  I am doing it just to please myself after all.

So far what I’ve done is to make a frame.  I’ve made a pair of identical rectangles using dovetails. (And might I say, these might be the finest dovetails I’ve ever done.)  One of these rectangles will sit on the bottom of the chest and the other will be at the top. I’ve cut some boards, let’s call them stretchers, to keep the top and the bottom separated.

This is a frame.

I am going to make the top, bottom, and sides of the chest from panels of cedar boards that have been glued together.  I will glue these to the frame.

Currently my plan is to cut a space in the bottom panel about an eighth of an inch deep for the bottom rectangle to fit in.  This will keep the frame from sliding out of square with the bottom panel.

This is key.  This is the point of doing it this way.  The cutting I am getting good at. The gluing--a skill we learn in kindergarten--is hard.

While glue does hold pieces of wood together, before it starts to dry it can be kind of a lubricant.  I’ve clamped up something to glue overnight and when I came out to inspect it the next morning, I’ve occasionally discovered that some of the pieces have slipped out of square.  

Sometimes rather badly.

The answer is more clamps.

For small projects, while you can never have too many clamps, I am close to having enough. 

Close.  Not there. Close.

For larger projects this isn’t the case.  But large projects require large clamps, and large clamps call for large amounts of cash.

There are other toys on which that cash can be spent.

And I do have another solution.

I build frames. 

The frame is skeletal by nature and because of this it can be clamped with small clamps. You then use small clamps to clamp panels to this as the glue dries. I’ve used frames to make night stands, a shelf for the garage, a number of cabinets of varying sizes for the garage, a shelf for the pantry, and now a smallish cedar chest.

I am getting better at making frames.  My joinery skills are getting better.  I am better at cutting dovetails than I used to be.

And I am getting more patient.

I glue the top of the frame together; then I glue the bottom of the frame together; then I join the top to the bottom.

I could join the sides to the frame with glue and just leave it at that, with no physical joinery between the sides, but what fun would that be.

I’ve got two ideas:  The first is to join the lateral sides with dovetails; the second is to use rabbets and dadoes. (This would be making a tongue on one board and a groove on the other, and then sliding them together.)  I’ve been thinking about this in the small hours of the morning before men who want to stay married get out of bed.

Like I said, I am getting more patient.

I think my next step is to prepare the bottom of the box to be joined to the frame.  Maybe I will start gluing up the panels for the sides as well.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Carrots, Sticks, Students, and Cedar

By Bobby Neal Winters

I go back to teaching full-time next Tuesday, as I write this. I am looking forward to it, but I’m a little nervous.  I’ve held it out in front of myself like a carrot on a stick. 

Think about that metaphor for a moment. The idea is that you hang a carrot on a stick and dangle it out in front of your horse to keep him moving.

He never gets the carrot. 

But I do believe that teaching is what God put me on this Earth to do, so I believe I will keep on moving even when I get the carrot.

I’ve been told that the students have changed.  I’ve been told that they are harder to teach in these post-Covid days.

We shall see because we have to work with what we have.

This is Biblical.  You can read this in Genesis. God approaches those who would do his work and he works with the talents they have: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. He takes their strengths and works with them.

I am working on a new project.  I’ve set out on it, and I am determined to do it.  I’ve got a bunch of cedar wood and I am making a chest from it. I’ve made a lot of boxes.  A LOT of boxes.  But a chest is a bit different.

It’s bigger.

On one hand, the geometry is the same. It’s just a big box. On the other hand, the physics and biology are different.  By that I mean that the box exists in the real world and I have to make it out of real wood. When boards get bigger, they...well...get bigger. Sometimes they can be awkward for an old man to handle. After a certain point, I don’t have clamps that are big enough to hold it all together at one time. This will affect how I do my joinery.

The biology comes in with the cedar.

Cedar is a beautiful wood. The color is, no, the colors are amazing. There is more to it than just the reddish brown.

I came into a windfall of cedar. A friend of mine and I got a couple of pickup loads of it from one of the good men north of Arma. It’s beautiful and fragrant, but cedar has issues.

At this point whenever I am telling this to someone in person, they will chime in and talk about the knots.

Yes, cedar has knots.  The knots are not my main problem.  My problem is with the cracks. Cedar is brittle and it likes to crack. As I take the rough cut cedar and mill it into boards myself, I’ve had difficulty cutting pieces long enough. They get to a certain length and have a crack in them.

In the first couple of rough-cut planks I processed, I had difficulty getting any piece much more than 16 inches long.

But this is my project, and this is the wood that I have, so I’ve got to work with it.

What I am doing is taking two pieces of wood and gluing them end-to-end to extend them.  There are many different ways to do this, some of them really bad.  (For those of you who know about this stuff and want to know, I am cutting half-laps on the ends of the board and gluing them together along the rabbets. If there is a better way, catch me over coffee and let me know.) 

After the glue dries, I run them through a planer, and it’s beautiful. You can see the break, but if you work at it, you can do it in such a way so as to make it pretty.

It’s going to take me a while to do this. Every board in the chest is going to be its own individual creation.

I will make the boards; I will glue them together into panels for the top, bottom, and sides; I will attach them to a frame.  The last part is because of the constraints of my shop. I don’t have a vise big enough to cut the dovetails.  I don’t have clamps big enough to glue it all at one time, so I will need to attach it to a frame.

But--potentially, depending on my skill--this could be beautiful.

We work with what we have, and if we care, if we take our time, if we have patience, something beautiful can happen.

Post-Covid students are different.  They did lose something from going online. We knew they would, but we did what we had to do. Now we work with that.

Given patience and skill, we can make something beautiful.  

I think I just heard the school bell ring. I need to go try to catch that carrot.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Percy, Tyson, and Pepe La Pew

By Bobby Neal Winters

Many years ago I put forth my theories of “Cat Physics” and “Cat Chemistry.”  Every home has a cat number attached to it. The cat number of my house is three and the universe conspires in ruthless ways to maintain that number.  If a cat died, a new one appeared, and, by doing so, preserved the cat number. If a new cat turned up, then one of the old ones (or perhaps even the new one) would meet some sort of--sometimes grisly--end. 

You don’t mess with physics.

But time rolls on, and all sorts of things have happened. We are down to two cats (Tyson and Tubby) and one dog (Percy). This has been the case for so long a time now that I thought I would have to scrap the theory. However, events have transpired that have given me cause to believe the theory of conservation of cat number can be saved. 

Percy is a cocker spaniel, a black cocker spaniel with bits of white thrown in.  Percy is not the most aggressive of animals. This is a polite way of saying he is an absolute wuss. He’s scared of me; he’s scared of other dogs; he’s scared of children.

He is not, by way of contrast, scared of cats.

No.

Much the reverse.

Indeed, he is very much enamored of Tyson. Very much.  Very much and not in appropriate ways. At any opportunity, Percy will attempt to share with Tyson that “special hug” reserved for mommies and daddies in private.

Tyson (who is an outdoor cat) will for his part endure these attentions when the weather is cold. Whenever the door is open, he will rush into the house and put up with being pestered until he can find his special hiding place about the heating vent.

The interactions between these two bring to mind the old Merrie Melodies series of Pepe LaPew cartoons. (These are still available on Youtube, by the way.)

My younger readers may not have been exposed to these because they are far from being politically correct, so let me describe them directly.

Pepe La Pew was a skunk.  He was a French skunk, hence the name. In each of the cartoons, he fell in love with an American cat and would pursue her.  The pursuit was in spite of her--at best--indifference to him.  No, it was not indifference. The cat was always repulsed by and terrified of Pepe. He stank and was of a different species. She always ran in a complete panic.

The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons were ran over and over when I was a child, but now not so much. It is not difficult to see why they stopped being run. One can easily interpret Pepe La Pew as being a sexual predator and ignoring the “no means no” ethic of today.

Alternatively, one could regret that we've been robbed of a teaching metaphor.  Pepe was completely oblivious that his attentions were unwanted by the female in question. We’ve shelved a resource that we could refer to when a man is pursuing a woman who does not want to be pursued. 

Perhaps it’s just as well. I suppose that no man would want to admit to himself that he’s the human equivalent of a skunk.  The fact that Pepe continues in his pursuit because he believes the cat is just playing hard to get could be considered problematic as well.

With this background now established, let me now say that Pepe La Pew is being played out in my out in my house on a regular basis. 

It’s uncanny sometimes because we have hardwood floors. They don’t provide much friction for a fast start. Because of this, Tyson and Percy run in place for a while before their feet catch the floor, just like in the cartoons.

We try to keep Tyson outside, but he is black and blends in well with the shadows. When a door opens during cold weather, he is ready and makes the dash into the warmth, knowing that he will have to endure the unwanted affection from Percy.

Patience with this behavior is wearing thin. At some point, our dear Percy might make a trip for “elective” surgery that will put an end to this, once and for all.

In the meantime, I am living in a politically incorrect cartoon.

I suppose we all are.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Three-Body Problem

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve just finished going through the audiobook version of The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen).  If you like hard science-fiction, I recommend it, but the word “hard” there carries multiple meanings. It is not an easy book.

It’s made me think.

There is a line from The Lord of the Rings that comes into my head periodically: “Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.”

We are in danger of forgetting that we are animals. We are, in fact, quite dangerous animals.  The error of forgetting that we are dangerous animals is self-correcting. When we forget, we are often reminded of it again in very concrete ways: the French Revolution; the Holocaust; the Cultural Revolution.

I mention the Cultural Revolution because it comes up in The Three-Body Problem. This is something most Americans are at best vaguely aware of. It is enough for us to keep track of our own atrocities. The TBP contains an account of a professor of theoretical physics who is beaten to death by a group of 15-year-old girls, who had been stirred into a frenzy of revolutionary zeal. 

I almost mis-used the word “righteousness” for zeal because this type of zeal is often associated with religion. While far too much blood has been shed in religious causes, religion does not have a monopoly here.

Part of forgetting that we are animals is the self-hatred that comes with it.  By self-hatred, I don’t mean to refer to a person hating himself, but to a person developing a hatred of the whole human race.

This is something that arises in the novel in connection with the Cultural Revolution but also in connection with the environmental movement.

I want to tread lightly here because I believe in taking care of the environment. In my personal interpretation of the scripture, I believe that Man was created to take care of the Earth--the plants, the animals, everything--for God, and that we are accountable to God for the job we do.   Even if we all agreed on that--and I truly doubt that we do--there is enough room for interpreting the details to keep us arguing for a long, long time.

Liu allows us to see that there are some among the environmental movement who hate the human race.  While they weep gallons at the extinction of a species of bird, they would not shed a tear if the human race disappeared forever. 

There are not many environmentalists like this, but they are there.

He also allows us to see that those who are too narrowly focused on the immediate needs of humans in the short-term can do needless, long-lasting damage to the environment. The thoughtless (read that word) exploitation of resources can be ultimately harmful to the human race.

There is a definite current in the TBP about the dangers of un-restrained zeal, whether that be in communism or environmentalism. We could no doubt add capitalism to that as well. 

For me, it took a while to figure out who the hero of this book actually is. 

The hero in a science fiction book is usually the first scientist who appears. Not so here.  It is a police detective named Da Shi who appears quite late. He’s crude; he’s obnoxious; but he saves the day and provides a ray of hope at the end.

There is not a shortage of villains.

The author has a warmth for the people in the country-side that shows through clearly, though he recognizes their foibles. He also recognizes the foibles and the fragility of intellectuals.

The title of the book, the Three-Body Problem, refers to an “unsolvable” mathematical problem. I put the quotes there because the solution requires a broadening of the idea of what a solution means.

The mathematical three-body problem is about the movement of celestial bodies. The two-body problem is solved: a planet circles its sun in an ellipse. It can be figured out with a formula. The general three-body problem cannot be solved in that way. It requires broadening one’s definition of what a solution is. One can know the truth, but that truth is no longer so specific as to be particularly useful.

Liu treats this part of the science in the book accurately. I was pleased as mathematics is not often dealt with in science fiction. In the tradition of all good science fiction, he science is accurate to the limit of current theories, though he does--in the tradition of the field--extrapolate to the point where the “science” is more like magic.

I’ll close as I opened.  I recommend this to science-fiction readers with the warning that it is challenging.

I understand that there is a series on Netflix...

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.